News Briefs from October 10, 1969

Giver$ Revolt

A “givers’ revolt” appears to have been all but cut off at the pass by bishops of the Episcopal Church, who quickly issued pastoral letters of “clarification.” Fear that a $200,000 grant would go to the Black Economic Development Conference, sponsor of the Black Manifesto, touched off the backlash last month (see September 26 issue, pages 37 and 42).

On September 25, the Episcopal Executive Council approved the National Committee of Black Churchmen, which many consider a pipeline to the BEDC, to receive the grant “with no strings attached.”

One collection-plate rebellion (St. Dunstan’s in Seattle) was squelched by Bishop Ivol Ira Curtis, who told dissidents their concern that the money would be used irresponsibly was unfounded. The vestry (along with others in Virginia) had vowed to withhold funds from the diocesan budget. St. Dunstan’s reconsidered. Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and House of Deputies president John B. Coburn sought to smooth ruffled feathers over the issue. They, and other bishops, made these points:

(1) The money will be from extradiocesan sources and voluntarily raised. (2) No group advocating violence can qualify. (3) The church is responding “in trust” to blacks, not to reparation demands.

Meanwhile, a five-man committee was set up to raise the $200,000 plus another $100,000 for Indians and Eskimos. By midmonth, $83,000 had been pledged. But grass-roots rumblings persisted, and white critics contended the Episcopal Church, by appearing to give in to threats, had undermined the position of responsible Negro organizations and created the impression that violent, disruptive tactics are the best way to obtain racial justice.

‘Holy Emptiness’ At Expo ’70

History’s largest world fair will be held in Osaka, Japan, next year—and already its major Christian pavilion is sparking unusual displays of both unity and controversy.

The unity shows up in the fact that Japan’s Roman Catholics and Protestants are uniting to build a $278,000 structure called simply “The Christian Pavilion.” “It marks the first time,” said a Vatican spokesman, “that the Holy See has participated in an event of such ecumenical significance.”

The controversy centers among Japan’s liberal young pastors and seminarians, especially those in the United Church of Christ of Japan. For several months they have been protesting to church leaders that large sums should not be spent on Expo ’70 while national problems of poverty, housing, and health care still exist. They also have assailed the fair as a government ruse to divert attention from the controversial U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, up for review next year.

UCCJ moderator Kiyoshi Ii has pledged that he will call an assembly of the church to reconsider participation, but so far officials have replied that the pavilion will give the 30 million fair-goers a chance to see an ecumenical interpretation of “the progress and harmony of mankind.” They note too that the Socialist party also is participating in the fair, even though it violently opposes the treaty.

Protests, thus, have not slowed work on the modern all-wood pavilion, which will house the Raphael Tapestries from the Vatican, as well as pictures of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The structure will attempt to create a feeling of “holy emptiness” by means of a photographic montage. It was designed by Akira Inatomi, one of Japan’s leading architects. A proposed film of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima was vetoed by the Japanese government.

The only other Christian group planning a display at this world fair, the first ever held in Asia, is the Japan Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Their pavilion, to cost $200,000, will present the theme “Man’s Search for Happiness.” Two movie theaters as well as frescoes and statuettes from Salt Lake City will explain church doctrines.

Japan’s evangelicals have made no special plans for the fair, though several groups expect to distribute tracts. The Moody Institute of Science and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, both of which had displays at Expo ‘67 in Montreal, will forgo similar efforts in Osaka. Costs and time involved, they explain, would be too great in Asia.

Cross And The Switchblade: Boon For The Cinema

“Go to New York and help those boys,” a voice seemed to be telling country preacher David Wilkerson as he pored over a Life magazine story telling about members of the notorious Dragon gang in trouble.

He did, and what followed resulted in Teen Challenge and the best-selling book (five million copies) The Cross and the Switchblade. On September 25, cameras began grinding to turn the story of one man’s vision for the asphalt jungle into a full-length color movie starring Pat Boone.

The two-hour film—to start a five-month road show in 200 major metropolitan areas next February—is being produced by Dick Ross Associates. Film star Don Murray (the “hoodlum priest” in The Outlaw) is directing the shooting on location in inner New York City.

Ross was founder and president of Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures for fifteen years before leaving four years ago to prepare a “broader base of operations with a more commercial approach to reach the outsider.” He intends to release two pictures a year, beginning with The Cross and the Switchblade. Next will be The Late Liz, based on the book by Gertrude Behanna, to be ready by the fall of 1970.

Ross also has acquired—or is acquiring—film rights to Through the Valley of the Kwai, by Princeton University’s chapel dean Ernest Gordon, and Devil at My Heels, the story of Olympic track star Louis Zamperini.

The Cross and the Switchblade will be shown in commercial theaters through advance ticket sales promoted by church, civic, and service organizations; later, it will be moved through normal theatrical channels, according to Ross. The film’s budget is $500,000, and Ross said he acquired the film rights from Wilkerson, John and Elizabeth Sherrill (co-authors of the book), and publisher Bernard Geis for a “per cent of the box-office income.” He did not elaborate.

Most of the cast are off-Broadway minority persons (blacks and Latins) from the New York ghettos. Besides Boone, who plays Wilkerson, another major character will be a young Latin “with a striking resemblance to Nicky Cruz” who plays the part of Cruz, the converted gang leader of Run, Baby, Run fame.

Teen Challenge spokesmen said the film will focus on the first part of The Cross and the Switchblade, climaxing with Wilkerson’s breakthrough at a citywide youth rally in St. Nicholas Arena in the summer of 1958.

Ross believes Boone will have considerable pull at the box office, and he says the velvet-voiced singer has “tremendous faith in the product” (the Wilkerson approach) and “Christian experience” to back it up. Boone, the author of a book on teen-agers, Twixt Twelve and Twenty, tried to acquire screen rights to The Cross and the Switchblade but was unable to, according to Ross.

Christian Faith And Beauty: Congenial Terms

Congeniality is a gift from the Lord.

So believes Jane Briggeman, 21-year-old Miss Nebraska, who received the title “Miss Congeniality” at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City last month. Miss Briggeman, a senior music major at the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s Seward-Concordia College near Lincoln, Nebraska, frankly acknowledged the part God played in her attainment of the honor during brief testimony on coast-to-coast television September 6.

“What an ideal time to give credit to the right Person—I did want to give that credit to my Lord,” the vivacious beauty declared in an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Miss Briggeman is a resident of Iuka, Kansas, and a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in nearby Preston.

Her close friend and fellow music major at the four-year teacher-training college, Lois Koth, 19, also competed in the pageant, as Miss Iowa. And Dulcie Scripture, 20, a music major at Judson College in Elgin, is Miss Illinois. Her father is pastor of First Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ohio.

Miss Briggeman said the Miss America pageant had been “the most unique opportunity to communicate the love of God with some very precious people. I realize that I cannot do this by myself, but I must allow God’s Spirit to really use me. This is what is so beautiful in living and working with God.

“Actually, it’s not enough to give a pious profession, but I must touch him in faith and continually keep in touch. I know that Christ has redeemed me; I just want to express this love toward others and bring Christ to my neighbors and friends. This is done in loving, forgiving, and accepting—just sharing Christ as a whole and total personality.”

Boone’s Christian witness has at times disappointed evangelicals, but he may indeed have found new spiritual power recently from daily Bible study, as Ross and others claim.

For whatever reason, the star has undertaken a project (Pat Boone-Dan Hansen Productions) that will film the whole Bible “without embellishment” in animation. Filming will take three years, produce twenty hours of original music and require 800 speaking parts.

Don Hansen told United Press Internation: “We are not rewriting the Bible; we are going to tell it like it is, but we will have to put the Old and New Testament into script before art can be applied.… Any enhancement of the prose, and poetry of this best-seller will be done by … art and animation.

Religion In Transit

Delegates of the United and Southern Presbyterian Churches met quietly late last month in an Atlanta airport motel to hammer out reunification plans, the third such attempt this century. Barring snags, voting on merger could come as early as 1972, although those present suggested it wouldn’t be before 1974.

The Netcong, New Jersey, board of education resourcefully got around (at least for the moment) the Supreme Court ban on organized public-school prayers by using prayers from the Congressional Record each morning before classes last month. The first “reading” was originally recited by U. S. Senate chaplain Edward L. R. Elson August 8. School-board president Palmer Stracco said he could see no difference in the right of Congress to say a prayer and the right of school children to do the same. State American Civil Liberties Union director Stephen Nagler called it “simply a dodge” and said the ACLU would sue.

Some thirty state governors and their wives attended a J. C. Penney Company-sponsored prayer breakfast early last month during the National Governors’ Conference in Colorado Springs.

Lutheran Church in America secretary George F. Harkins told a conference of American Lutheran Church pastors in Lakeside, Ohio, that the nation’s Lutherans should begin “talking openly, candidly, energetically, and optimistically” about a single united Lutheran Church. He also said LCA participation in state councils of churches was “unmatched” among all U. S. denominations, with twenty-eight of the LCA’s thirty synods belonging.

A Louisville police-court judge ruled that Kentucky’s Sunday-closing law was unconstitutional and dismissed 142 citations against local merchants for Sunday sales. Judge William G. Colson asked: “Is it a reasonable and natural distinction to say that a tavern can sell beer on Sunday, but that a dairy cannot sell milk?… We think not.”

The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization has accepted two new members: the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, and the Indian Task Force. A regional office will be opened in Detroit, and a national training base is slated for New York City.

Sophomore students at Wheaton College no longer are required to take ROTC courses. First-year students still must take the training, instituted at the school seventeen years ago. The student government had asked that ROTC be voluntary for all four years.

Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Ridgecrest, California, and pastor Paul C. Neipp severed ties with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod “because of the false doctrine being tolerated.…”

The Church of the Crossroads in Honolulu declared a moratorium on giving sanctuary to AWOL servicemen there after a military police raid took eight of them into custody.

“Irreconcilable differences” between representatives of Our Sunday Visitor, the nation’s largest Roman Catholic weekly newspaper, and Twin Circle, of the National Catholic Press, caused merger negotiations between the publications to fail, according to the publisher of Twin Circle.

The progressive branch of the embattled Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters is accepting “affiliated members,” including former IHM nuns who have gone secular. The order fears the Vatican may remove its canonical status because of its experimental renewal programs.

There are 596 Protestant credit unions, including 492 in the United States, 52 in Canada, and 52 elsewhere, according to statistics recently published in the 1969 International Credit Union Yearbook.

Ninety New Jersey clergymen have formed a committee to work on drug abuse in the state.… In Camden, two American Baptist leaders charged people “are being physically and spiritually hurt” in connection with an alleged police raid and $15,000 in estimated damages to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Christian Center. Police said weapons and narcotics were found at the ABC settlement house.

Deaths

JOSEF NORDENHAUG, 66, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance; one-time editor of the Commission, a Southern Baptist mission publication; in Arlington, Virginia.

BERNARD J. SHEIL, 81, founder of the Catholic Youth Organization, known as the “fighting priest” of Chicago and the “apostle of youth”; in Tucson, Arizona.

GIOVANNI CARDINAL URBANI, 69, Patriarch of Venice, president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference; in Venice, Italy.

Personalia

Black Methodists for Church Renewal president James M. Lawson, pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, has been admitted to Vanderbilt University Divinity School for graduate study nine years after he was expelled there for his civil-rights activities, according to the Nashville Tennessean.

Roman Catholic priest Damien Boulogne, the longest-surviving recipient of a heart transplant, will give “spiritual advice” on a Radio Luxembourg program.

Pope Paul VI has contributed $10,000 to further the work of Southern Baptist medical doctor Robert A. Hingson and his “Operation Brother’s Brother” drive to inoculate the masses in underdeveloped countries against disease.

George Christian Anderson has retired as president of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health.

Dr. Richard T. Sutcliffe left his post as associate director of the Lutheran Church in America’s Commission on Press, Radio and Television to become director of university relations for Southern Methodist University.

The president and general secretary of the worldwide Christian Endeavor Union, the Rev. Clyde W. Meadows, who recently retired as a bishop of the United Brethren in Christ Church, has joined the staff of the Pennsylvania Sabbath School Association in Harrisburg.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s head of voter education and registration, the Rev. Hosea Williams (he was city manager of Resurrection City in Washington, D. C., in 1968), was arrested in Decatur, Georgia, last month on charges of drunken driving. He is listed as getting $12,000 yearly salary plus $1,000 pension from the United Presbyterian Board of National Missions.

The Chicago Presbytery cleared controversial United Presbyterian minister John R. Fry of ten sensational charges (ranging from condoning sex and marijuana parties in church to relaying a street gang’s murder order) after a year-long investigation. A 1968 U. S. Senate inquiry probed his association with the militant Blackstone Rangers (see July 19, 1968, issue, page 54).

Ingo Braecklein, a member of the Council of the Evangelical Church of Thuringia, was named president of the newly formed Federation of Protestant Churches in the German Democratic Republic.

The Pentecostal Holiness Church elected the Rev. J. Floyd Williams of Franklin Springs, Georgia, as its top officer, ending the nineteen-year tenure of Bishop J. A. Synan.

World Scene

Three missionaries of the Gospel Missionary Union have been denied permanent residence visas in Morocco, thus becoming the first GMU personnel to be expelled from that country.

In an unprecedented suit, an organization long opposing the plan of union between the British Methodist conference and the Church of England has challenged the Methodist Conference’s authority to approve the union plan. First steps toward merger of the two bodies were defeated by the Anglicans, who failed to give the needed 75 per cent vote of support last July.

More than 3,000 persons registered decisions for Christ at a series of evangelistic meetings led by Hermano Pablo in the Dominican Republic last month.

A plan to convert eleven redundant churches in one small area of northern England into hotels, restaurants, and other profit-making ventures to augment tourist trade was rejected by the York Church Commission. The centuries-old churches will be restored and remain open but will seldom be used for services. They are typical of hundreds of little-used churches throughout England’s dwindling rural centers of population.

More than 4,000 persons attended a two-day rally led by Overseas Crusades and set up by Central American Mission radio station TGNA to celebrate its anniversary.

A Norwegian law passed last summer now permits religious groups to claim regular financial support from Norwegian state and municipal governments in order to provide religious education to children exempted from religion courses in public elementary schools.

Because of volatile Protestant-Catholic tensions, the Baptist Union of Ireland has postponed visits of evangelistic teams to fairs and markets in the predominantly Catholic province of Connaught this year, according to a Baptist spokesman. Most of Ireland’s 7,000 Baptists live in the north; Baptist Union headquarters are in Belfast.

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