Ulster: ‘The Gospel as a Club Raised’

Northern Ireland tottered nearer the brink of civil war last month. The uprising of April 19–20 followed a familiar pattern: a largely Catholic civil-rights demonstration in Londonderry, a counter-demonstration by followers of Ian Paisley resisting the one-man one-vote principle, and an inadequate police force caught in the middle. The situation was further aggravated by deep division in the ruling Parliamentary Unionist Party, the moral backing if not the physical presence of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, and the Communist penchant for fishing in troubled waters.

The relatively new factor in Ulster has been the emergence of a civil-rights movement of articulate militants representing the Catholic minority. This was climaxed in the astonishing election of Bernadette Devlin to the Parliament in London. She took her seat on her twenty-second birthday to become Britain’s youngest MP in 60 years, and within an hour she was on her feet delivering an electrifying speech. The five-foot miniskirted dynamo impartially lambasted Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and the Tories of Northern Ireland as well as Britain’s Harold Wilson and his socialist administration, Eire’s Prime Minister John Lynch, and the Paisleyites. She said she had been in Londonderry the previous weekend and had organized Catholic demonstrators after the news of her election. She said she wanted to insure that “they wasted not one solitary stone in anger.”

That evening in Belfast trouble erupted when Protestant thugs threatened to burn down three Catholic homes in a largely Protestant area. From prison Paisley reportedly instructed his men to take to the streets, and his wife led a demonstration of six thousand through Miss Devlin’s home town.

Miss Devlin was a psychology student at Queen’s University, Belfast, but dropped out to run for Commons. She said she represented oppressed Protestants and Catholics alike, although she herself is a Catholic. She has had to move from relative to relative as a precaution against night attacks by Protestant-extremists. The New York Times quoted her as saying that her courage “comes from my Christianity. I do it because I believe it is my Christian duty. If there were less bigoted religion in Ulster and more Christianity, there would be far less problems.”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked three well-known churchmen for comments on the situation. The Rev. A. J. Weir, clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly, spoke of “immense hardening of attitudes,” and said too much publicity had been given to civil rights and not enough to responsible non-Paisley Protestants. The Catholic Bishop of Londonderry, Dr. Neil Farren, felt that the present serious situation has come about because young people are now “becoming aware of their rights and acting on them.” He mentioned that two-thirds of the Derry population is Catholic, “yet Protestants run the council.”

The Rev. Herbert Carson, Baptist minister in Bangor, attributed the trouble partly to Protestant acceptance of “the doctrine of equating the state and the Gospel. They feel they are fighting for both at the same time.” Carson said another reason was evangelical weakness toward condemning the ecumenical movement. Nevertheless he felt that Paisleyism was sadly misled. Carson saw the answer in preaching the Gospel to change people and concluded, “The great tragedy in Northern Ireland is that Catholics see the Gospel as a club raised.”

‘It Was Beautiful To Be In Nairobi …’

From a tiny office overlooking the beautiful and busy center of Kenya’s capital city Nairobi, which is rapidly becoming the crossroads for eastern Africa, a group of lay preachers and ministers have been conducting the largest and most extensive evangelistic mission ever attempted in an African city. The United Christian Mission to Nairobi began last October and expects to close its office this month. It was planned and executed by the united churches of the city in cooperation with African Enterprise, an interdenominational, interracial, and international team founded particularly to present Jesus Christ to the great urban areas of the continent.

“Only 6 per cent of the continent’s population live in its cities,” observes Michael Cassidy, the founder and leader of African Enterprise. “Yet this is the strategic 6 per cent of opinion-makers, whose spiritual and ideological commitments are shaping the destiny of the entire continent.” The purposes of the Nairobi mission were to win people to personal faith in Christ, to instruct them in Christian living, and to encourage them to see clearly their responsibility in the new nation of Kenya.

While the mission used the mass meetings as its main emotional focus, it adopted a multi-faceted thrust, geared to the multi-faceted community of Nairobi. It conducted home Bible studies and house-to-house visitations, a mission to the university and evangelistic meetings in the high schools, church-centered evangelistic meetings and training for laymen in personal evangelism, and television, film, and radio presentations of the Gospel.

The mission got under way at a time of great spiritual crisis. A crime wave was sweeping the city. People were becoming a bit restless about corruption and bribery in high places. Students at the nation’s single university had gotten on bad terms with the government and had been sent home for three weeks. Even traffic deaths were on the increase, culminating in the death of Kenya’s foreign minister a week before the start of the mission’s large rallies at the city square. For a city that was founded in part by missionaries, Nairobi’s spiritual life was at a very low ebb. But by the close of the mission it became clear that God had profoundly honored the faithful and outspoken manner with which his word had been proclaimed.

City ministers now report greatly increased church attendance, but they are happiest about the transformation within the churches. The ordinary Christian, on whom the major burden of the undertaking rested, has had the opportunity to test his capacity for personal evangelism. “I had never tried to preach before,” said a man who is chauffeur for an important government official. “But now I find that preaching is an exciting, vital part of a Christian’s life.” The mission also changed the outlook of the churches. “Without compromising the essence of the faith,” said a happy African minister who watched his congregation double in three months, “we are going to be more flexible and experimental in regard to forms of worship and evangelism. Literature, radio, and TV will feature prominently in our future planning and work.”

The mission has given the city a new conscience and a new mood. At the height of the mission, a “march of witness” was organized. It was a march with a difference. No cars were overturned, no embassies stoned, no documents or effigies burnt, no leaders denounced. Motorists politely pulled off the street to let marchers pass. It was beautiful to be in Nairobi on that day.

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

New Scriptures For Soviets?

Wycliffe Bible Translators say they have won the consent of Soviet officials to begin linguistics work in the U.S.S.R. Wycliffe founder Cameron Townsend recently returned from the Soviet Union and reported that his organization will set up a new effort there through a Latin American liaison. It would be the first in a Communist land.

THREE JAILED CHURCHMEN FEARED DEAD IN UKRAINE

A pair of Ukrainian evangelical leaders and a Catholic bishop are reported to have died in Soviet prisons in recent months.

The two Protestants were identified as H. P. Wins and Joseph Bondarenko, who were prominent in a breakaway group and were presumably jailed for unauthorized religious activities. They died at the end of 1968, according to the Messenger of Truth, published by Ukrainian-American Baptists. Bondarenko reportedly was viewed by some as “the Ukrainian Billy Graham.”

Sources at the Vatican said that Bishop Basil Welychkowsky, who with a number of priests was arrested January 27 in the Western Ukrainian city of Lvov, died in a prison at Leopoli, also in the Ukraine. Welychkowsky had been consecrated secretly and is understood to have been part of a religious “underground.” It was reported that he had been apprehended while on his way to hear the confession of a sick person.

The Ukrainian Evangelical Alliance of North America says it has also received reports that on December 29 a court in Lvov handed out three-year prison terms to pastor Gregory Lukianchuk and brothers Basil Petlekha and Mykola Dacko. It was not clear what the charges were.

The prison deaths raised fears that Soviet authorities are cracking down hard on believers associated with groups not recognized by the government. Causes of the prison deaths were not immediately known, but observers fear that maltreatment may have well been involved. Dissident religious groups appear to be a growing problem for authorities in the Ukraine and other Soviet republics. There are signs that more and more converts are being won among young people. The Ukraine is the most Protestant of all the Slav countries.

Bishops Respond To Change: Is It Fast Enough?

The times, they are a-changin’ in the Roman Catholic Church, noted newly elevated Cardinal John F. Dearden of Detroit in a major speech to 216 brother bishops in Houston. “It is one of the basic realities of our time that in the church … if authority is to retain its credibility, it must function in a manner different than in the past,” said Dearden, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. And the brethren all said “amen.”

But a suspicion lurking in many minds at the semi-annual meeting of the hierarchy last month was that the church isn’t moving fast enough. Mounting pressure for change was evident:

Candidates for the priesthood have declined more than one-fourth in number during the past three years; Catholic parochial schools face a financial and “confidence” crisis; the nation’s 167 Negro priests demanded (and got approval for) a separate national office for black Catholicism; and groups like the National Federation of Priests’ Councils (said to represent 38,000 of the country’s 60,000 priests) clamored for enforceable ways to settle the shrill crescendo of disputes between priests and their bishops—and got little satisfaction.

Mostly, the hierarchy reacted to problems predictably. Some long-range and somewhat sweeping changes are in the offing; traditionalist forces clearly won short-term victories.

With one hand, the prelates approved a national center to spark interest in religious vocations. With the other, they staunchly reaffirmed opposition to optional celibacy—despite a survey of ninety-five Roman seminaries in the United States that linked the celibacy issue to seminary dropouts and found that half the students frown on the no-marriage policy.

As one answer to the paucity of priests, the bishops stoked the fires of a new deacon-training program. These men—many will be only part-time church workers, and they may be married—will be able to do everything a priest can except hear confessions and say mass.

A long-term updating of seminary curricula was given impetus. Designed to give the priest-in-training a “vital integration of theological understanding and his life in Christ,” the new program will provide for theological centers in tandem with other disciplines, and for professional programs for the ministry distinct from those for teachers and theologians.

Chicago’s Catholic-education head Bishop William E. McManus, outlined the school crisis for newsmen poolside at Houston’s new Astroworld Motel. In his opinion, well-heeled Catholics could pay for their schools if they had a mind to. Instead, they’re plunking down money for trips to Europe, color TV, and other “necessities,” he said. Federal aid to education can help plug the gap, the amiable, leather-faced prelate added.

New Cardinal John J. Wright, acknowledged golden throat of the hierarchy—soon to be transferred to the Vatican Curia—related the church’s response to the urban crisis and scored social actioneers who neglect gospel preaching. “The church itself,” he averred, “is not a competitor with or substitute for the health and welfare departments.…”

The bishops also sent off to Rome for ratification a set of twenty-six new norms that would speed and ease marriage annulment procedures.

There were signs that the long and closely guarded church financial secrecy may be cracking under lay pressure.Two Protestant groups that do not divulge financial data are the Christian Scientists and the Mormons. Cardinal Terence J. Cooke has headed a committee on “financial accountability” for at least six months, he revealed offhandedly, and some dioceses now publish financial statements. So far, the Cooke committee’s major work appears to be an “education program” stressing public benefits of church tax exemptions.

For the first time, outsiders could attend morning addresses to the bishops. But blue-uniformed security guards monitored doors to the Astroworld Sun Room, where closed business sessions were held, and combed the interior for bugs.” No policy change is in sight, Dearden said.

“Even our determination to move fast is thwarted by … circumstances that are complex,” he remarked in a summary of conference accomplishments.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Georgia Court Again Backs Congregations

Georgia’s Supreme Court has laid the groundwork for still more church property litigation in its response to the U. S. Supreme Court decision in the landmark Savannah cases.

The Georgia justices decided unanimously that since the nation’s top tribunal threw out the doctrinal element of the state’s implied-trust theory, it left them no choice but to disregard the entire theory. Thus, the court ruled, the Presbyterian Church U. S. has no interest in the property of Hull Memorial and Eastern Heights Presbyterian churches. The decision concluded that the deeds clearly vest titles with the congregations. New appeals are planned.

Key sentence in the latest decision: “Since Georgia chose to adopt the implied trust theory with this element as a condition, this court must assume that it would not have adopted the theory without this mode of protecting the local churches.”

Both congregations left the church in April, 1966, charging that the General Assembly and some of its agencies had violated its constitution. A county-court jury agreed that there had been “substantial departure” from the church’s original tenets. In January, 1968, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the county decision, ruling that the congregations had a right to take their property since the denomination had broken its trust.

Then the case was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the doctrinal dispute could not be decided by the civil judiciary. It ordered Georgia to decide the matter on the basis of neutral principles of law.

Officials of several denominations have kept a close eye on the litigation because of the possibility that it may set precedents affecting their churches.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

GRAPE WORKERS’ ABOUT FACE

Cesar Chavez doesn’t want his grape workers to be covered by the National Labor Relations Act after all. The National Council of Churches and the U.S. Catholic bishops have been trying to help Chavez by urging legislation to bring his union under the NLRA. But Chavez told newsmen in April that 1947 and 1959 amendments to the Wagner Act of 1935 would impede his union and help the growers.

Presbytery Mergers Win Key Vote

Commissioners gathering in Mobile for the Presbyterian U. S. General Assembly found they had to face questions that most of them thought had been settled before they arrived.

Just nine days before the denomination’s top court convened, two presbyteries reversed their earlier votes on a proposed constitutional amendment allowing presbyteries to unite with counterparts in the United Presbyterian Church U. S. A. Until North Alabama and Mobile presbyteries switched their votes, the issue had been lost by a vote of 38 to 39. With the reversals, the tally stood at 40–37.

Opponents of the union-judicatory provisions immediately readied challenges, questioning procedures used to get the votes switched.

The amendment was one of two permitting closer relations with United Presbyterians that were voted on in the presbyteries during the past year. The other would have permitted synods of the two denominations to merge. It lost by a wider margin, however, so advocates of union judicatories pressed only for reversal of the presbytery provision.

Similar amendments have already been enacted in the United Presbyterian Church, but they are not effective until parallel action is taken in another denomination.

In the Presbyterian Church U. S. amendments to the constitution must be approved by the General Assembly, then by the presbyteries, and finally by another General Assembly. Consideration of these proposals has been confused by disagreement over the required majority in the second step. Proponents of union judicatories have contended that only a simple majority of the presbyteries must approve. Opponents of the amendments (including some leaders who favor merger of the two denominations but not “piecemeal” synod-by-synod or presbytery-by-presbytery merger) contend that a three-fourths majority is necessary. The disagreement stems from the fact that the constitution requires a greater majority for the approval of unions.

The procedural question ceased to be an issue when the proposal failed to gain a simple majority. But with the votes now switched, commissioners were faced with both questions again.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

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