New Statistics Confirm Downturn

Churches are hurting. Indications of a downturn embracing a large part of the American religious establishment are becoming ever more obvious.

The latest report confirming the trend downward comes from the 1970 Yearbook of American Churches released this month. Though church membership shows a 1.6 per cent gain, it failed to keep up with the population increase in the United States for the second consecutive year.

The tally, which is for 1968, gives total church membership as 128,469,636. The previous year’s figure was 126,445,110, but the percentage of the American people belonging to churches dipped slightly from 63.2 per cent to 63.1 per cent.

Church building construction also was off a bit, from fiscal 1967’s $1.09 billion to 1968’s $1.04 billion. The decline was the second in a row, off from the record $1.17 billion of the 1966 fiscal year.

The Yearbook is published by the National Council of Churches, which collects the data it contains. The information is drawn from all possible sources, including most denominations that are not NCC members. Lauris B. Whitman is the editor.

One seemingly encouraging note, not immediately explained, was a rise in Sunday-school enrollment. It jumped from 37,370,435 in 1967 to 40,508,568 in 1968. Sunday-school enrollment had been falling off for a number of years; there was no indication whether this sudden increase came as a result of some change in reporting procedures or truly represents a contrasting trend.

Most of the signs point in the other direction. The United Methodist Church, the two biggest Presbyterian denominations, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the National Council of Churches all stated publicly that they had been forced to cut their budgets in 1969.

Catholics also are feeling the pinch, more so than Protestants because of the spiraling costs of their big parochial school system. The Archdiocese of New York showed a deficit of $1.2 million dollars last year. Baltimore was down $1.5 million. Detroit apparently had the biggest problem; sixty-nine parishes there had to borrow $3.9 million to meet expenses.

In membership, losses are being recorded by a number of leading denominations. The 1970 annual of the Episcopal Church shows a drop of 1.46 per cent, the first decrease in that denomination since it began recording figures.

Training and recruitment also are becoming more of a problem, probably as a result of membership and revenue losses. Eighty leaders from eight major Protestant denominations met in a special conference at Yale Divinity School this month to discuss why men are leaving the parish ministry. Typical is the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), whose latest yearbook shows that there were 7,306 ministers in the denomination last year, compared to 7,428 in 1968. The number of clergy serving local congregations dropped while the number in teaching assignments increased. As part of a belt-tightening process, an agency of the Episcopal Church is recommending that the denomination’s 1970 convention reduce its seminaries from eleven to five.

A number of theologically conservative bodies are successfully bucking the downturn—or at least have not yet begun to feel it. Congregations of the 372,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod contributed $5,351,000 to the synod in 1969, a 45.3 per cent increase over 1968. Officials attributed the boost to an intensive stewardship-education program begun in the fall of 1968. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which had been lagging slightly behind on its 1969 budget, got record December giving to boost it over its $5,760,000 goal.

Relief-oriented organizations seem not appreciably affected by the current squeeze. The Mennonite Central Committee, for example (this year marks its fiftieth anniversary), has approved a 1970 budget of $2,794,700, a 12 per cent increase over 1969.

In most of the big denominations, however, cutbacks are the order of the day. Missionary enterprise seems to be the area most singled out for reduction in force. (There is reason to speculate that some church executives who are cool to overseas missions priorities are using the present situation to curtail some support.)

Why the decline? The reason invariably put forth is that laymen are reacting to social-action programs and pulling out of their congregations or withholding offerings. This has not been persuasively demonstrated, however, and may even be misleading. For one thing, the reaction to activism is not as acute today as it was in the early sixties.

It may be that laymen are finding what they regard as better ways of spending their religious dollars. Independent Christian organizations are having a great financial impact through direct-mail appeals, the mass media, and representatives traveling among local congregations.

Other possible reasons for the decline: Young people are not replacing old members at a sufficient rate, nor is their giving; a growing number of distractions—like the appeal of weekend travel—that keep people and their money out of the churches; people are moving more often and tend to lose interest in churches in the process.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Eyeing Dollar Power

A new agency to coordinate recruitment of Christian professional men for overseas missionary service is being created this month by International Students. It will absorb an 18-month-old organization known as Help for a Hungry World, which has sought to use missionary expertise in the investment of U. S. capital abroad.

The Reverend Paris W. Reidhead, founder and director of Help for a Hungry World, will head the newly-created division of ISI called Development Assistance Services. Both organizations have their offices in Washington, D. C. Reidhead is a former missionary to Africa and Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor.

Reidhead’s goal is to strengthen mission churches by enabling national Christians to capitalize on private enterprise. He now proposes to do this mainly by encouraging American professional men to invest their time, talent, and resources in the effort.

Meanwhile, the World Council of Churches decided to set up a World Development Fund to be financed mainly by its more than 200 member churches, probably at an annual figure of $50–$100 million.

The decision ended a five-day world consultation on ecumenical assistance to development projects sponsored by the WCC, attended by about one hundred delegates from fifty countries. All member churches will be asked to contribute at least 2 per cent of their regular church budgets to the new fund, beginning next year.

Religion In Transit

If the Consultation on Church Union becomes the Church of Christ Uniting (see February 13 issue, page 46), its first presiding officer, or bishop, must be black, a COCU committee head disclosed early this month. Also written into the plan of union, said United Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews of Boston, are places for women, youth, and minority groups on every level.

Billy Graham will return to New York City for a five-day crusade this June, one year after his ten-day campaign at 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden. This year’s crusade will be in 60,000-seat Shea Stadium, with the major emphasis on students. Graham said the 1969 New York effort led to 10,852 decisions for Christ.

At this month’s annual meeting of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., general secretary Dr. C. Thomas Spitz, Jr., indicated that forty-six area Lutheran councils have been formed in twenty-six states and forty more are in process in twenty-two states.

A new national preacher’s magazine, edited by Dr. Theodore Gill, dean of the Detroit Center for Christian Studies, has been sent to 5,000 subscribers. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry and Dr. Eugene Carson Blake are among those providing sermons in the first issue of MSS.

A.D. 1970 will replace the 105-year-old Ave Maria magazine next month. The new journal will be lay edited, news oriented, and ecumenical.… Big-name theologians and churchmen contribute free answers to a new weekly column wedding theology and journalism in the Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times. Dr. James Blevins, religion professor at Mars Hill College, is adviser for “What Did the Bible Mean?”

The Reverend Theodore Epp conducted his first daily gospel broadcast in Lincoln, Nebraska, nearly thirty-one years ago; March 5 the “Back to the Bible Broadcast” will release its 10,000th program, heard on 555 stations world-wide.

Project America claims more than one million supporters in a drive for five million citizens who desire to: “retain ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto; return the right to pray to the classroom; and return the Bible to school curriculums.” Letters and petitions will be presented to the U. S. Congress, according to chairman William Mansdoerfer of San Francisco.

Insurance-company executive W. Clement Stone of Chicago pledged to give $500,000 to the National Presbyterian Church and Center in Washington, D. C., if the balance of a $3 million capital-funds drive there can be raised by the end of the year … $10,000 was given to California Baptist College of Riverside (Southern Baptist) because the school does not accept federal aid.

After twenty years of annual conferences, the 1970 Liturgical Week will not be held this August as scheduled. Attendance and finances for the controversial, leftist, National Liturgical Conference have fallen off in recent years.

The Florida Times-Union and the Jacksonville Journal no longer accept advertising for “X” rated motion pictures. “We do not want to be in a position of daily contributing to a nationwide trend we deplore,” editorialized the Times-Union in announcing the ban.

The United Church of Christ’s Board of Homeland Ministries has named the Reverend John Moyer of New York City to a new office in charge of ecology.

The United Church of Christ’s Council for Christian Social Action accepted custody of the draft card of resister Stephen Larson, 22, of Milwaukee and mailed it to the Department of Justice. United States attorney David J. Cannon said the action probably violated federal statutes.

An overhaul of the bylaws and statutes of Catholic University in Washington, D. C., has loosened the papally chartered school’s ties with the Vatican and the nation’s cardinals. Catholic U. trustees now control all its schools except theology, philosophy, and canon law.

Laymen without formal theological training will be ordained to a part-time ministry in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America in an attempt to ease the church’s priest shortage.

Deaths

DANIEL BURKE, 96, former president of the American Bible Society, lawyer; in Summit, New Jersey.

BISHOP ODD HAGEN, 64, President of the World Methodist Council; one-time president of the Methodist School of Theology in Gotenborg, Sweden; in Stockholm.

HELEN KIM, 71, noted Christian educator; in Seoul, Korea.

Personalia

Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, now in his fifteenth year as speaker on the “Lutheran Hour,” was named president of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. this month. The Missouri Synod Lutheran clergyman succeeds Dr. Malvin H. Lundeen, who headed the council in the first three years of its life.

The first Negro minister to conduct a White House worship service, the Reverend Manny Lee Wilson of the Convent Avenue Baptist Church in New York, preached there this month, followed the next Sunday by the Reverend Henry Edward Russell, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis and brother of Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia.

Two clergymen may run for congressional seats this fall. Lutheran activist Richard J. Neuhaus said he will challenge a fourteen-term incumbent, Democrat John F. Rooney, 66, on a peace ticket. Dean Robert F. Drinan of Boston College’s School of Law, a Roman Catholic priest, said he is considering running for the seat now held by Representative Philip J. Philbin, 71, who has served since 1942. Drinan is a liberal Democrat.

Dr. Gene E. Bartlett of Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall, Dr. Orville McKay of Garrett Theological Seminary, and Dr. Arland F. Christ-Janer of Boston University have resigned as presidents of their schools, effective this June. Bartlett is an American Baptist; McKay and Christ-Janer are United Methodists.

Catholic University chaplain Christopher Philip Grimley, 39, a Roman priest, left his post this month to become assistant pastor of a Lutheran church in nearby McLean, Virginia, after a year’s internship.

Mrs. Robert W. Webb, wife of a New York Protestant welfare agency executive, is the new chairman of Church World Service.

Atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair is now “bishop,” and her husband, Richard, a “prophet,” of Poor Richard’s Universal Life Church, chartered through a California mail-away scheme. The new “convert” said her church will be tax exempt and that alleged atheist Mark Twain would be its “patron saint of human laughter.”

At his installation as president of the United Church of Christ this month in Milwaukee, Dr. Robert V. Moss urged the church to ally itself with youth and take “an unequivocal stand against war as an instrument of national policy.…”

Mrs. Rita Warren, a 42-year-old mother leading a campaign for the return of prayer and Bible readings in public schools, was arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts, after she threatened a sit-in in the school superintendent’s office.

Warren W. Schwed, director of the Communications Department for the U. S. Catholic Conference, resigned after one year. Robert B. Beusse of RKO General radio and television took Schwed’s place this month.

Bennet Bolton, former Vatican correspondent and Associated Press national religious-affairs writer, has been named managing editor of the National Catholic News Service. Bolton will receive $18,000 a year in the newly created post.

World Scene

Nine projects in Africa, nine in Latin America, and five in Asia—expected to cost $3,575,000—were approved by the Community Development and Validation Service of the Lutheran World Federation.

An international Spanish-language radio program under the auspices of the “Back to the Bible Broadcast” began on a daily basis throughout Latin America this month … Albania radio has reported that Albanian Communists have stepped up a program against “old customs and religious prejudices” throughout the country, designed to “eliminate completely all religious beliefs among the citizens.” There are about equal numbers of Muslims, Catholics, and Greek Orthodox in the country.

Reforestation of a barren section of hills in Israel is being assisted by a Baptist forest project. A tract of land near Nazareth has been designated for the project; each tree will cost $2.50.… The first pine in the 10,000-tree forest dedicated to the late Bishop James A. Pike was planted last month by his widow near Yatir, in the northern Negev. The forest will become part of a woodland of 15 million trees stretching along the former border between Israel and Judea.

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