Local Church Councils: Under Metamorphosis

Local councils of churches in many major cities are sick and dying. For example:

Both the Berkeley Area Council and the Oakland Council in northern California have voted themselves out of business. The Oklahoma City Council has been phased out. Councils in Kansas City, Missouri, Nashville, Tulsa, and Columbus have been replaced. And while executives ponder its future, the pulse of the St. Petersburg, Florida, council grows feebler.

The old council of churches of the Pittsburgh area (comprising 600 Protestant congregations with 400,000 members) recently vanished like magic.

But although area councils seem to be faltering, many state councils appear to be alive and well,Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Texas already have joint Protestant-Catholic councils of churches, and eight other states are contemplating combined councils. and the emergence of more informal “coalitions for metropolitan mission” may be a trend for getting things done in the seventies.

After the fade-out of the Pittsburgh council, to cite one case, the way was cleared for the creation of Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania, an agency with full Catholic and Orthodox participation. Unlike the old agency, Christian Associates puts major stress on social problems—housing, poverty, youth, the aged, and race.

An expert in church councils sees the job of the new task-force-coalition approach as “raising the right issues and helping churches do something about them.” Observes the Reverend David J. Bowman, S. J., the first Catholic priest to become a full-time staff member of the National Council of Churches: “Local initiative is being taken,” but not necessarily through a formal structure of churches.

Bowman, a personal deputy of NCC general secretary Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, has been devoting much of his time to facilitating Catholic membership in local and in state councils of churches.

Why are local councils in trouble? Two chief reasons are lack of funds, part of a syndrome affecting most of the American church scene, and a poor image.

After the Berkeley and Oakland councils folded, the Reverend Raymond Jennings, pastor of Berkeley’s First Baptist Church, noted that the demise of local councils is a national problem.

“Councils of churches have tried to follow the middle of the road,” he said. They have tried to give the image they are socially oriented, and it hasn’t worked. The conservatives are disenchanted with the councils’ social-action stand, and the social-action groups are turned off because they’re tired of getting nothing but resolutions and no real action.”

Jennings added that “this business of not making a commitment in either direction has resulted in both segments seeking other alignments.”

Another reason for the decline of area councils, according to Bowman, is the development of more inclusive neighborhood parish councils that include Catholics and Jews. He said Catholic parishes are now members of at least forty city and local church councils, a development since Vatican II.

Financial problems were cited as the chief factor for the firing of the executive director of the St. Petersburg council, and more conservative churches have backed off on support since the council’s involvement in school and youth problems and the garbage strike last year.

The city government developed adverse feelings toward the St. Petersburg council for its attempts to act as a “conscience” for the government, a board member said.

Bowman and others see the emerging pattern as implementing on the regional level what Espy proposed at the stormy December triennial of the NCC in Detroit (see December 19 issue, page 30). That plan calls for an inclusive general ecumenical council, a national umbrella organization with near-autonomous program units to bring like-minded people together for specific tasks. Most, presumably, would center on social issues.

Plans for an interdenominational social-service agency that would provide an option for meeting community needs without involving Baptist, Roman Catholic, and other churches in a council of churches are in the works in Oklahoma City. Catholic Bishop Victor Reed and former Southern Baptist Convention president Herschel H. Hobbs have been on the steering committee.

The object, as that of Christian Associates in Pennsylvania, is to tool up for social action on the community level, enabling churches not wanting to affiliate with a council of churches to have a piece of the action.

Hobbs said the Agency for Christian Cooperative Ministry is organized on a “project method” and will include some evangelism efforts. Twenty-five denominations are involved. Billy Graham is to speak at a kick-off rally February 3.

Christian Associates director W. Lee Hicks, an American Baptist minister, gives a glowing account of the nine-county coalition in southwest Pennsylvania that includes 2,200 congregations: “We no longer are at the stage where we’re suspicious of one another.… I think the feeling was that we [Catholics and Protestants] were working together now in so many different areas unofficially, it was time to think about the possibility of developing a formal working relationship.”

Straws suggesting the new shift in cooperative church action are also in the wind in Seattle, Houston, Columbus, and Kansas City. Metropolitan inter-church associations have sprung up in place of the old councils in Columbus and Kansas City, and a new constitution for the Greater Seattle Council would provide a strong role for bishops and other denominational executives in a new structure open to para-church groups and specialized ministries.

In Houston, the style is getting things done through coalitions, or “being ecumenical without really trying to do more than solve a simple problem.”

“We have discovered that there is little purpose in attempting to get broad ecumenical consensus for general goals,” writes Richard Siciliano in last December’s issue of Church in Mission, a Southern Presbyterian Board of National Ministries publication.

“Nor is it possible now to create any ecumenical joint-action-for-mission vehicle which has room on board for everyone, and can take everybody everywhere to do everything—but which will not move until everybody says, ‘let’s go.’ ”

The NCC’s Bowman thinks the word “council” may not be in the future of these groups; “conferences” (more acceptable to Catholics) may become more common.

Whatever the diversity of names and structures that may attach themselves to these burgeoning alliances, fund-raising will continue to be a problem.

And it seems clear that the ecumenical imperative won’t allow most participants the luxury of discussing what they believe before jumping into action.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Evangelism In Africa: Not In A Vacuum

East African Christian-education leaders are revising courses and programs to make them more compatible with crucial questions posed by their change-wracked continent. In most government schools and colleges, religion has been retained and even fostered as an official course.

A new syllabus of religious instruction has been published in Kenya, for example. It instructs schools to assume partial responsibility to prepare pupils through religious education for their place in the family and the new national community.

“Christian religious education,” the syllabus notes in its introduction, “teaches the relationship of the pupil to God and his fellow-men through Jesus Christ. Salvation in Christ is seen as the fulfillment of the nature of man.”

A recent annual meeting of the Christian Churches’ Educational Association of East Africa also stressed the churches’ responsibility for imparting the Christian faith in schools.

“Christian education in Africa has come to people who in their traditional ways are notoriously religious,” said Dr. John Mbiti, the poet who heads the religious-studies department at Makerere University (Uganda), in a keynote address. “The dissemination of Christian education is, therefore, taking place, not in a vacuum, but in an intensely religious environment which colors much of how the people understand the Christian message.

Mbiti noted that Christianity has yet to penetrate deeply into African soil: “Many individuals have been converted in the heart only, but their mind, emotions, and the social-cultural context in which they live, have hardly been touched by the Christian message.”

Therefore, he added, Christian educators should present biblical truth as the fulfillment for which Africa’s religiosity has groped. They should assimilate and incorporate Africans’ traditional religious perception and sensitivity into their teaching, Mbiti feels.

Although Mbiti’s paper has received wide support in East Africa, many evangelicals are studying it cautiously. Some basic features of all African religions are clearly irreconcilable with Christianity: a world view that all is divine, ancestor worship, the notion that spirits of the dead are “personalities” who exert tremendous influence on the living, a super-abundance of ritualism, and the belief that events can be controlled through magic.

Another point in Mbiti’s paper that evangelical Christians may reject is the implication that Africa’s traditional religiosity ought to be uncritically regarded as a pre-evangelistic condition. Fully recognizing the need to communicate the Gospel in Africa’s peculiar cultural context, native evangelicals will most likely insist on retaining the uniqueness of the Christ-revelation in human history.

ODHIAMBO OKITE

Clergy Protest, But Pageant Comes Up Roses

The New Year’s Day Tournament of Roses Parade delivered its annual floral goodwill message to the world in Pasadena, California, despite the protests of about thirty local clergymen. The ministers, led by United Church of Christ campus chaplain Albert G. Cohen, said the time and money involved in the pageant “might be better spent feeding and housing the poor and needy.”

The clerics demanded, among other things, that participants in the parade match their expenditures with funds for the poor, volunteer laborers donate equal time to urban problems, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference mule team be included in the parade, and the theme for 1971 be “Good Neighbors Come in All Colors.”

Tournament of Roses manager Max Colwell sympathized with the protest but affirmed that the parade “for eighty years has delivered … joy, peace, happiness and beauty to 98 million people.”

The eighty-first parade continued the long tradition of Christian witness; floats included the Salvation Army’s “Christmas Is Forever” and the Lutheran Laymen’s League entry, “He Lives.” The latter offered a beautiful floral proclamation of the central fact of the Gospel; three empty crosses represented the resurrection of Christ.

Poland’S Protestants

In Poland today there are 800,000 Protestants and thirty religious organizations to serve them. The largest is the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession. The bishop of this church, Dr. Andrzej Wantula, who is also a vice-president of the Lutheran World Federation, says Poland “guarantees under constitutional law complete freedom for all beliefs and the government helps to build new churches.”

The Evangelical Church has 100,000 members in six dioceses, two seminaries, and 150 churches with 200 pastors. Eleven thousand children take instruction at 120 Sunday schools.

The Reformed Church has 5,000 members organized into ten parishes. It, like the Evangelical Church, belongs to the World Council of Churches, and it is a member of the International Alliance of Reformed Churches.

The United Evangelical Church was organized in 1947 and has 7,000 members with 150 pastors. The Methodist Church, which was recognized after World War II by socialist Poland, has 4,700 members in fifty-three parishes with forty pastors. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, also recognized after the war, has 6,000 members and sixty-five clergy.

All the Protestant churches belong to the Polish Ecumenical Council, which publishes a special bulletin in Polish, German, and English. Also part of the religious scene are a very active Greek Orthodox Church and the Polish National Catholic Church, whose mother church is in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Polish government finances higher education for Protestant clergy, conducted at the Academy of Christian Theology in Warsaw.

Recently a Communist daily newspaper in Warsaw seconded a call by Poland’s Roman Catholic bishops for an ecclesiastical stabilization of the country’s western and northern territories through appointments of permanent bishops by Pope Paul VI. The editorial said the move would make the country’s church administration coincide with its frontiers.

Appointment of permanent Polish bishops is strongly opposed by West Germany, which maintains that these territories are still German until their status is clarified by an international agreement.

ANTONI GRONOWICZ

The Attraction Of Adventism

On a rainy Sunday evening forty years ago this month, a young evangelist stood before a small congregation in southern California. “I believe God wants me to go on radio to preach the Gospel,” he said. “I want you to prove I know what God wants. At the close of this meeting, I’ll be standing at the door. If you believe God wants me on radio, drop an offering into the left pocket of my coat when you leave.”

Into the pocket that night, during the first year of the depression, went wrist watches, rings, gold teeth—and money. They bought thirteen half-hour programs on a Long Beach station and launched a memorable ministry for Seventh-day Adventists. The ministry has expanded; today there are 1,791 weekly broadcasts on 1,424 stations in forty-five languages around the world. Although the programs have a very ordinary format, they attract an average of 11,000 letters each week.

The pleasant-pitched voice of the “Voice of Prophecy,” as it is known in English, is that of H. M. S. Richards, whose name suggests a British ship more than the world’s best-known Adventist. He probably has made more converts and friends for the Adventist cause than any other person, and at 76 he is still going strong. Richards’s low-key approach is typical of Adventist diligence and efficiency. It keeps paying off. When he started broadcasting in 1930 there were 300,000 Adventists around the world. Latest statistics show the total approaching two million (including 400,000 in the United States), and anyone familiar with Adventist discipline knows that these are hard, minimal figures exclusive of mere adherents and hangers-on.

Adventists also influence outsiders favorably through their extensive medical work and emphasis on health. Their most popular current service is five-day stop-smoking clinics. Latest figures show two million participants a year. Their vegetarian campaign is less effective, but Adventist food companies are prospering reasonably well with a wide variety of meatless dishes such as Wham, a substitute for ham. Adventists also frown upon tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages.

On the ecclesiastical front, the Adventists are also being heard, but seldom do they get pushy. They send observers to many key religious meetings and are conscientious cooperators in a number of religious professional groups.Adventist educators occasionally exhibit a surprising measure of openness, too, as when they brought Paul Tillich and Joseph Fletcher to one of their campuses for lectures.

Regular conversational meetings with the World Council of Churches have resulted in the appointment of an Adventist to the WCC’s Faith and Order Commission, though the denomination itself is not a formal member. Since 1968, Adventists have also been actively represented at the annual meeting of the secretaries of the world confessional families. Adventist spokesmen insist, however, that there is no thought of joining any part of the conciliar movement.

As for relations with orthodox evangelicals, there is no sign of a thaw. Adventists make it clear they would be happy to cooperate, but in most evangelical circles they are still regarded as an unwelcome sect. Many anti-Adventist evangelicals think their legalistic requirements add up to a works salvation. Adventists contend that doctrines drawn up by founder Ellen White more than one hundred years ago share the evangelical view of Christ’s atonement. Adventist eschatology, which includes some views distinctive to their own movement, also has been a roadblock to rapprochement.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Nude Power

Two irked youth delegates at a Methodist conference in Kansas City this month decided the only thing that would speed up a vote on establishing a black youth task force would be the threat of nudity.

As forty young people (half of them girls) and thirty-three bishops watched, Thomas Hyde and James Conn began disrobing—an item of clothing at a time—for each additional person who spoke on the issue. Conn was wearing a shirt, pants, and undershorts.

After two more people spoke, according to a story in the National Catholic Reporter, somebody shouted, “Let’s vote!” They did. The black task force was approved—barely.

Mission 70: Change Now

Four thousand five hundred Southern Baptist young people met in Atlanta between Christmas and New Year’s and agreed on one thing: They demand change in their traditionally conservative Convention and they want it now.

The occasion was Mission 70, a modern, upbeat attempt to interest youth in church occupations. It featured dialogue, drama, choreography, and McLuhan-like multi-media presentations. A few National Baptist black young people attended also.

NBC national-affairs correspondent John Chancellor told the opening-night audience that the “dominating problem of the seventies and the rest of the century will be population, resources, and environment.” He warned that our present plans will consume all of the free world’s resources by the year 2000. “We have thirty-five to one hundred years to get the system back into order or the world will end, not with a bang but with a gasp for air.… The young will be trying to clean up the skies, rivers, and lakes. They will have allies they don’t have now.… New values will be needed when the world is governed not by more for everyone but enough for everyone.”

Chancellor claimed the “myths made up to process immigrants into American society” are now anachronistic and must be replaced. “There is a spectacular opportunity for ministry in the seventies,” he said. “Faith may have a chance to make a comeback … and that is where all of you come in.”

The large majority of young members of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination took his call to revolutionize values seriously. Said one: “I’d like to see us get into the twentieth century before it’s over.”

Dissatisfaction with Southern Baptist inaction on pollution, Viet Nam, and poverty was expressed with increasing vociferousness. But the loudest, most disgusted voices (there were many) castigated the widespread Southern Baptist practice of racial discrimination. Tales of pews refused to blacks were told and retold. Nine Michigan blacks attending Mission 70 were refused housing by an Atlanta church. Hundreds of conferees put their words into action by sweeping over Atlanta ghettos with brooms and garbage pails, receiving nationwide publicity and some local resentment for their efforts.

Everyone wanted change, but most decided to remain Southern Baptists. They consoled themselves with the belief that the establishment is “going to die soon.” Then “we can be the ones who will change the church.” A few decided, bitterly, to leave the “heathen field of the church.”

Almost unanimously the conferees adopted a revolutionary (by Southern Baptist standards) position statement, “Here We Stand.” It committed them to “minister not only to the spiritual but also to the physical needs of man, be involved in a worldwide quest for universal peace, deal with the problems of over-population, pollution, and technology, work towards the brotherhood of all men, and respond to poverty and all other forms of human suffering in the world today.”

ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.

Deans List Top Ten

Name the top ten Christian liberal-arts colleges, quizzed Biola College’s dean of students. Six participants in Craig E. Seaton’s survey of deans of students at Christian colleges either claimed such a listing was impossible or declined to make such judgments.

Seventeen of the eighteen who answered the question listed their own institutions of higher learning. And all eighteen selected Wheaton College. The results:

1. Wheaton College

2. Westmont College

3. Taylor University

4. Seattle Pacific College

5. Gordon College

6. Houghton College

7. Earlham College

8. Bethel College, St. Paul

9. Bob Jones University

10. Biola College, Olivet Nazarene, and the University of Redlands

Why those colleges? The reason most often given was their “long established reputation for all-around excellence.”

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.