Mother Church’s Daughters: Distaff Dissent

These days hardly any profession dares label itself “For Men Only.” Except religion.

Since the Apostle Paul put them soundly in their place (“Let the women keep silent in the church”), it has been “all right if women come to church with a cake in their hands,” as Roman Catholic theologian Dr. Elizabeth Farians puts it, “but if they come with an idea in their heads, they’re not welcome.” Adds a Jesuit sociologist: “We shall witness the complete removal of discrimination in the Catholic Church on the day when there is a pregnant pope who is either African or Asiatic.”

Not only Catholics want to feminize the church; Protestants and Jews are waving the women’s liberation banner, too. Women who have long made major contributions to filling church pews and womaning church programs are no longer putting up with lack of power to form church policy.

What are they doing about it? Leading the way is Dr. Cynthia Wedel, first female president of the National Council of Churches. The long-time ecumenist won last December over a black, male opponent by a vote of 387 to 93. Before the election a women’s caucus had accused the Church of “anachronistic attitudes” toward women “long after other societal institutions have begun to shift.”

Now the whole Church seems about to shift. One of the major moves will give Mrs. Wedel, an Episcopal lay-woman, the right to vote in the House of Deputies at her church’s next General Assembly.

At the American Baptist Convention last month, women served notice that next year they will demand a female president—the fifth in the convention’s history (there have been fifty-three male presidents).

In the Catholic Church, women may now read the Bible and act as song leaders during mass—if no men are available. In some places, they are allowed to help distribute Communion elements.

Women’s interest in church power is not a phenomenon of the seventies’ women’s liberation movement. Early in this century Mrs. Emmaline Pankhurst was fond of bolstering faint-hearted followers with this advice: “Trust in God; she will provide.” In 1919—before women were voters—a group of church women formed the American Association of Women Ministers, which is still working for women’s ordination (see August 22, 1969, issue, page 34).

Some denominations (United Presbyterian, United Methodist, United Church of Christ) now willingly ordain women—and often put them in the small, rural churches that clergymen don’t want. Or clergywomen, like the Reverend Elaine Marsh, find posts as ministers of education. At Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, Miss Marsh’s duties—not, she says, prejudice—keep her out of the pulpit.

But other clergywomen have come up against prejudice. Being a woman in the ministry “is very much of a handicap,” says the Reverend Clara E. Parker, pastor of a Midwestern Pentecostal congregation that she founded in 1932. But, she adds, “if God calls and ordains you, you have got to go out and do it.”

Women students have long been admitted to seminaries—mostly to earn the Master of Religious Education degree. Now many want a B.D.—and wear miniskirts, eschew the title “Reverend,” and avoid fervent liberationism. “We’re sort of in sympathy,” says a woman at Union Theological Seminary in New York, “but we don’t like the radical rhetoric and the simple reductions of the movement.”

Sue Ellen Porter is an evangelical with a new B.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary and an active interest in women’s position in society (she is a member of the National Organization of Woman and the Women’s Liberation Movement). Women’s traditionally subordinate position, Miss Porter believes, results from the fall, not from creation, and is reversed by redemption through Christ’s atonement.

She came to this conclusion after a year of “personal agony” when she started seminary. In the scientific world she had known, “discrimination against women existed but was not particularly acute.” In seminary she found attitudes of male supremacy hard to swallow, though they were bolstered with Scripture references. Finally, frustration and her commitment to biblical authority sent her to the Bible. At least one of her male professors has commended her exegesis, and many of her male classmates now share some of her concern for women’s position in the Church.

In some denominations, women seeking ordination face a new frontier. Betty Schiess, 46-year-old wife of a Syracuse, New York, physician and mother of three children, hopes to become the Episcopal Church’s first ordained female priest in two years when she finishes her work at Rochester Center for Theological Studies. Her bishop, the Right Reverend Ned Cole, Jr., backs her ambition but will not ordain her “until it is legally possible.” That may not be far off. Last month the Diocese of New York recommended that canon law be altered to allow ordination of women.

Another trail-blazer is Sally Priesand, who decided when she was in the tenth grade to become a rabbi. Now in the third of five years at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Miss Priesand has lasted longer than any other woman there. Hebrew Union’s president, Dr. Nelson Gleuck, apparently does not object to his female student, although Orthodox Jews and many Conservative and Reform Jews as well, do. Yet a Conservative Jewish theologian declares: “Personally, if our great shortage of personnel persists, which is probable, I think this resource of woman power shouldn’t be ignored.” His words may be prophetic.

Elsewhere in the religious establishment, women are more often seen than heard. Slightly more than 10 per cent of the Evangelical Press Association’s member periodicals have women editors. Almost no women’s names appear among contributing or consulting editors to religious magazines (including this one). While women staff the magazines, there is reason to suspect that sometimes their employers choose them on the assumption that women can live more cheaply than men.

In most institutes of Christian education, women are welcomed as teachers (perhaps for similar pecuniary reasons). But though women may run the classrooms, they rarely run the schools. Some Christian colleges (Barrington, Bob Jones, Greenville) list a few women among their board members. More (Azusa-Pacific, Calvin, Wheaton) do not. And female professors rarely teach in seminary classes.

One who does is the Reverend Peggy Way, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. During her ten years as a clergywoman, Mrs. Way has served in a variety of ministries. Recently she wrote in The Christian Ministry: “I am becoming angry at so often being the ‘only’ or the ‘first’ woman.…” She complains that a man in the pulpit is “almost totally unequipped to minister to the largest group present” and concludes that the church needs women more than women need the church.

A United Methodist Church executive echoed that sentiment in a comment she made to soothe potential male hysteria at the prospect of being run out of church by women. “We’re not going to take over the church,” said Miss Theressa Hoover. “We don’t want it that badly.”

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Missionary Work To Resume In Cambodia

Despite the war and an unsettled political climate, American missionaries are heading back to Cambodia. They had been banned from the country for five years.

The first to get visas to return are the Reverend and Mrs. A. Eugene Hall of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Cambodian officials have indicated more visas will be granted, according to the Reverend Louis L. King, CMA foreign secretary.

The Hall family first went to Cambodia in 1961. They were obliged to leave, along with all other North American missionaries, in 1965, when Cambodia and the United States broke off diplomatic relations.

Hall, son of a Methodist minister, was a Tennessee Golden Gloves boxing champion in his teens and attended the University of Miami under an athletic scholarship. He committed his life to missionary service while attending a church in Chattanooga and subsequently enrolled at Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College and Nyack (New York) Missionary College. Prior to going to Cambodia he served as pastor of a congregation of Lumbee Indians in Lumberton, North Carolina.

The CMA and Seventh-day Adventists are the only non-Catholic agencies known to have carried on missionary activity in Cambodia. Roman Catholics have been present since at least the sixteenth century; nearly a century of French rule gave them the inside track on missionary activity. But no great numerical inroads have been made upon the Buddhist culture.

The Reverend A. L. Hammond was the first CMA missionary to Cambodia. He took up residence in the capital city of Phnom Penh in 1923. Largely because of Hammond’s translation work, the British and Foreign Bible Society issued a complete Bible in the Cambodian language in 1954.

The CMA counted twenty-nine local congregations in Cambodia when it had to withdraw its American missionaries in 1965. A French committee has had oversight of the work in the intervening years.

Greek Orthodox Priest: 123 Years Old

Several months ago CHRISTIANITY TODAY learned of a Greek Orthodox priest, living in an obscure mountain village in Greece, who claims to be 123 years old. Correspondent Thomas Cosmades was asked to investigate, and he sent two American friends from Athens to interview Archpresbyter Demetrius Liondos, perhaps the oldest cleric in the world. Here is the report:

As we headed for the village of Verniki, where the old priest lived, we found ourselves on a muddy, mountainous, rather dangerous dirt road with no sign of people anywhere. Several times we got stuck in the mud and had to push the car. It was a rather hair-raising experience—slipping and swerving on a steep, narrow road, with a drop of hundreds of feet at the edge.

When we felt we could drive no farther, we decided to walk the rest of the way—a journey of several hours. Finally we spied a village, and leaving the main road we struck out on the shortest possible route.

Farther up the mountain we met the village priest, the 55-year-old grandson of Liondos, who served as our interpreter and took us to the old priest’s home. There we were greeted by some of his ninety-four grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

We waited in a low-ceiling room that contained a table, a couple of beds, a baby crib, several cupboards, and a big pile of homemade blankets. Many photographs of the children were hung on the walls.

Finally the old man entered, walking erect and without evident difficulty (until about a year ago he had walked to the next town and back—a long and arduous walk—to get his retirement money of about $33 a month). He was thin, with bony hands and sallow skin, but seemed to be in fairly good health. He had no teeth, and his long hair (done up in a bun) and long beard were gray with yellowish streaks. Although his hearing was very poor, his eyesight seemed quite good. Because of his deafness and our foreign accent, he could not understand us at all, and so we spoke through the interpreter.

He wore the black robe of a priest and a round, black cap. For pictures, he put on the stovepipe hat of a priest. When he came into the room he had us kiss his hand, and he made the sign of the cross over us. Before we left he insisted on blessing us with his “holy cross,” which was to him a charm with magical powers. He said that the Virgin Mary had given it to him and one who touched it would be healed of sickness.

Liondos told us he was born in Verniki on January 28, 1847, and has lived there his entire life. Several villagers questioned were not quite sure if he was really 123, but his grandchildren attested to it. One sister is still living, as is one of his three daughters, who is 80. Liondos said he was married when he was about 30. As a priest, he could not remarry, according to Orthodox practice, after his wife died.

He remembered many details about the Turkish occupation: “In 1912 I was leader of a band of guerrillas against the Turks. All of this was done in secret. We fought for our country and our faith.” The main thrust of the account was that he had prepared the ground for the liberation of the Greeks in Epirus from the Turks.

The old priest seemed to have very little knowledge of spiritual things, however. Since he was illiterate, he knew nothing about the Bible; in fact it seemed he did not really know the word Bible. Cosmades reports that many old priests, and even some young ones, “are not too far away from Liondos in their interpretation of Christianity.” He still knew the prayers and blessings he had memorized. During our visit we were made very aware of the ignorance and spiritual darkness of these mountain people.

Among questions and answers in the interview:

What has been the most exciting moment of your life?

Everything, since I am still living.

Did you go to a school to become a priest?

No, I never went to any school. The little education I got was from my father and grandfather. Before I became a priest I made barrels.

Why do you think you have lived so long?

The Virgin Mary, Christ, and God know. I did not have any special diet.

What do you think about the youth of today?

Would that I were a young person today! Now the young people are free: they eat, they drink, they go on trips, they have teachers to give them an education—a life we never had. In my youth, life was very difficult under the Turkish rule.

What advice do you have for young people today?

They should cross themselves well with the three fingers. By this they show their faith in the Trinity: Christ, God, and the Virgin Mary.

How can we obtain eternal life?

We must pray to God, and with our faith in Christ and the Virgin Mary, we will live well here on earth. For the eternal life, if we do good works here we will fare well in the life hereafter, and if we do bad works here we will fare badly hereafter.

Beyond The Brick Walls

Dr. D. Reginald Thomas resigned as pastor of renowned Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City last month in order to devote full time to a radio ministry with the Presbyterian Lay Committee. The new Sunday radio program, the “Presbyterian Hour,” will begin June 7 on NBC.

Thomas said that the session of Brick Church, where he has been pastor for five years, accepted the resignation (effective September 1) “graciously” and that there had been no opposition by his church to his association with the conservatively oriented Lay Committee. It has been the target of criticism from a number of liberal United Presbyterian officials.

Thomas’s commitment to the Lay Committee will mean extensive travel and public appearances. “This is very much a family church,” he said of his congregation, explaining why he felt unable to retain both his pastorate and the radio ministry.

Thomas followed the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse on another radio ministry a few years ago: the “Bible Study Hour.” The expository style of Thomas’s preaching could “become a kind of reconciling factor” between elements within the Presbyterian Church, he said.

The Lay Committee is dedicated to promoting a stronger emphasis on spiritual leadership within the church and discouraging public pronouncements by the denomination on political, economic, and social issues.

Revivals In Bloom

In many parts of the country this spring, revivals are blossoming, especially among high-school and college students. Revival flowered at Emmanuel College in Franklin Springs, Georgia, after students heard testimonies of Bryan College (Dayton, Tennessee) students who had heard testimonies of Travecca Nazarene students who had heard testimonies from Asbury College (see February 27 issue, page 36, and March 13 issue, page 46).

Other revivals—some linked to Asbury—bloomed at Calvary Temple, Denver, Colorado; South Meridan Church of God and Anderson College, Anderson, Indiana; Roberts Wesleyan College, North Chili, New York; Seattle Pacific College, Seattle, Washington; and high schools, a university, a seminary, and churches in six northern New Jersey and eight Texas towns.

Concession Of The Confession?

Church of Scotland presbyteries are to be asked to continue consideration of a proposal to change the status of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which the kirk at present regards as its principal subordinate standard. Exhibiting a certain native canniness at the prospect of demoting an institution long past its third century, the panel on doctrine has agreed that nothing should be done hastily—which might be interpreted in terms of its apprehension of opposition from the more conservative highlands and islands.

The panel stresses that its aim is to make the theological position of the kirk more specific rather than more vague. At present, ministers and elders are required to subscribe to the confession but are allowed “liberty of opinion on such points of doctrine as do not enter into the substance of the faith.” As the latter term has not itself been defined, the panel feels that a statement of fundamental doctrines should be substituted for “a subordinate standard.”

There is no doubt that relegation of the confession will produce sharp reaction from more Calvinistic Scottish Presbyterian bodies, toward whom, ironically, the national church has recently been making overtures in an ecumenical spirit.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Civil War Aftermath: ‘Return To Life’

Ibo families in Enugu, original capital of breakaway Biafra, are holding special rites to return their relatives to “life.” The relatives are the 1,500 prisoners of war thus far freed by the Nigerian government. Most had been presumed dead and given traditional burial in absentia. Now sacrifices and thanksgiving services reverse the rites. The official releasing center, St. Barth’s Church, is thronged daily with anxious relatives awaiting new arrivals.

Enugu is beginning to regain its prewar bustle. Streets are filled with pedestrians, stores are reopening, and electricity is back in some suburbs. Train whistles announce the resumption of vital rail traffic between north and south.

Whining U. S. helicopters overhead are one reminder of the struggle to return life to the sixty-mile-wide enclave that was all that remained of Biafra at the first of this year. The helicopters, a gift to the Nigerian Red Cross and State Rehabilitation Commission, shuttle food and medicine into villages deep in the rain forest.

“The general situation in the war-devastated areas should be stabilized by the end of August,” said the UNICEF director in Nigeria, “though nutrition will remain a problem for months.” By the end of this month the Red Cross will end its relief feeding and hand over its operations to the State Rehabilitation Commission. Enough Ibo doctors and nurses are now available (they predominated in the pre-war federal health services) that British, German, and Canadian medical relief teams are moving out.

Surprisingly, in place of bitterness and resentment, there is a general attitude of relief among the Ibo people; they are glad they can get on with reconstruction. Federal soldiers are still in the East Central State (former Biafra’s heartland), but during liberty they mingle freely in the markets, unarmed. Road patrols and other security measures are in the hands of civilian police.

The current fear is not of northern soldiers but of ex-Biafran soldiers. Accustomed to the power of a gun, penniless and hungry, gangs of them roam the countryside, shooting up and looting villages.

The biggest problem now appears to be a shortage of usable currency. Biafran bills and coins, circulated by the rebels but not backed by goods or services, are now worthless. The federal government has not yet announced any plan to convert the currency. The problem goes deeper, however; many Ibos oppose general conversion on the basis that a few profiteers amassed fortunes at the expense of the masses during the war. And they are resentful of the way local men, placed in charge of distribution, sold food that was supposed to be supplied free.

Some priests and pastors who were not conscripted by the Biafrans were involved in the racketeering. Since the war’s end, one clergyman, put in charge of relief supplies for his village by federal troops, was found guilty of misappropriating eight bags of rice. The soldiers (who come mostly from non-Muslim communities) flogged the pastor and removed him from the relief post.

On the other hand, many evangelical pastors earned the respect of the people by their integrity during the war. Before the war evangelicals found difficulty in penetrating predominantly Roman Catholic Iboland; now many disillusioned parishioners are turning to evangelical churches. Sunday-morning attendance at the Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA) service in Enugu has grown from a prewar sixty to a current average of 400.

ECWA pastors now form the core of workers for ECWA-SIM (Sudan Interior Mission) rehabilitation programs. These include a clothing project, a farm-tool and seed project aiding blacksmiths and farmers, and reconstruction of a Bible college, with student scholarships. World Vision, Christian Nationals Evangelism Commission, the National Association of Evangelicals, and World Evangelical Fellowship are among agencies financially aiding these projects.

After initial fears of post-war revenge proved groundless, Ibos began trickling back to other parts of the federation to seek work and claim property kept in trust by government decree. To many foreign observers, it is astounding to see an Ibo whose whole family was massacred being welcomed back by city officials and paid the rent that had accrued on his once ransacked property.

There is still a hard hill to climb in national reconstruction. But if attitudes of the past five months prevail, there is every hope that Nigeria’s ethnic groups will learn to live and work together. And there also are good prospects for the growth of the Church in the days of reconstruction.

W. HAROLD FULLER

Days Of Dissent

“Karl Marx will bring us a new day and a new society,” shouted the bearded, youthful demonstrator, raising his arm in the black-power salute. The protester, who had a large, red fist stenciled on the back of his shirt, spoke to a small group of commuters at a downtown bus stop on the eve of the giant rally that brought at least 50,000 to the nation’s capital early last month to protest President Nixon’s decision to send U. S. troops into Cambodia.

As the protester moved on, a man lounging on the steps of the U. S. Treasury Building, waiting for a bus, shrugged and said to no one in particular: “There’s a lot of weirdos around here today.”

But it wasn’t just the weirdos and the unkempt who converged, physically and symbolically, on Washington, D. C., to oppose the administration’s Cambodia policy. Virtually no segment of society was unaffected by the series of events unleashed by the President’s fateful decision.

There was, for example, the Reverend William Cruickshank of Syracuse, New York. With grayish crew cut, white shirt, and tan wash-and-wear suit, he was one of about 400 clergymen and church leaders active in Washington last month, lobbying against expansion of the war. The United Methodist Building near the Supreme Court was a focal point for many young persons who swarmed into the city to voice their dissent.

There was Quaker Haverford College near Philadelphia. The entire college community of 700—including the president, students, even janitors—headed for Washington to conduct one-day seminars for members of Congress to explore alternatives to the government policy. Men wore coats and ties; some even trimmed their hair.

Three clergymen appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify on the war; top executives for higher education of five Protestant denominations (Lutheran Church in America, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian Church U. S., United Presbyterian Church, and United Methodist Church) and of the NCC accused the federal government of “acting out” its refusal to listen to peaceful dissent “by the use of government rifles against the students at Kent State University”; and the president of the American Jewish Congress also raised his voice against the National Guard killings.

NCC president Dr. Cynthia Wedel was joined by national leaders of four denominations in charging the Nixon administration with “following a pattern” of repressing dissent. She and United Presbyterian stated clerk William P. Thompson, United Church of Christ president Robert V. Moss, and United Methodist Council of Bishops president John Wesley Lord said in a statement that Nixon was indifferent to the moral dimensions of the war and unable to “undertake the intellectual burden of peace.”

The three top leaders of the World Council of Churches also deplored the U. S. “invasion” of Cambodia and the expansion of the Indochina war. Pope Paul said the widening of the war meant the risk of increased misery and death.

Twenty-four Protestant religious leaders issued a nationwide call to an emergency interreligious convocation to help end the war in Indochina. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of churchmen were expected in Washington May 26 and 27 for briefing on war issues and lobbying with congressmen.

But religious voices were heard on the other side of the Day of Dissent debate, too. Dr. Blahoslav Hruby of Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, an NCC publication, assured Nixon of his support against Communist aggression and called on the President to “give all possible aid to Cambodia and Israel.”

Father Matt J. Menger, the first American Catholic priest to go to Laos, where he spent fourteen years as a missionary, declared he is “certain that the United States should be involved” in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia.

A coed of the University of California at Santa Barbara told a church congregation in nearby Montecito that the “silent majority” of students there, whatever their view of the war, want to go to class, not strike. She told of students’ being chained out of their classes and of one man who was shouting “On strike!” and turning on fire alarms, disrupting classes. If more than half the students want to strike, she said, then it’s majority rule; if not, then the rights of the non-striking majority should be honored.

Meanwhile, on the Wheaton (Illinois) campus, a band of college men besieged the girls’ dorm in a perennial spring antic shouting, “Throw down your panties.” The girls did.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Skinner Crusade Shows Interracial Cooperation

Blacks and whites can work well together in mass evangelism, but such cooperation is no substitute for expert organization. That seems to be a chief conclusion of leaders associated with the Tom Skinner crusade conducted April 19–26 in Chicago.

“The significance of the crusade,” said Jack Daniel, director of Chicago-land Youth for Christ and a member of the Skinner crusade executive committee, “was that it was a first: a black evangelist holding an integrated crusade and speaking to the needs of the entire city and suburbs.” White evangelicals were strongly represented at each of the nightly meetings, which drew from 3,000 to nearly 8,000, the capacity of the Coliseum. There were about 1,000 decisions for Christ; perhaps a third of them were “first-time” commitments for salvation.

But promotion bloopers cut potential attendance and all but blanked out secular news coverage of the crusade. Skinner’s promotion man, Frank Pickell, admitted a publicity “breakdown” in Chicago. A planned TV appearance by Skinner on a major local talk show was bumped in favor of one by black militant Stokely Carmichael, and a scheduled press conference never materialized. The problems were in no way racial.

Skinner unintentionally ruffled some black churchmen early in the crusade when he stressed that a person can know Christ as Saviour without joining a church. Some didn’t come back.

A Chicago reporter attending the crusade noted: “It was a good interracial experience.” Concluded CHRISTIANITY TODAY correspondent Barbara Kuehn: “Skinner gave a warm invitation and showed real love for the people.”

Do Blacks Draw Blanks?

Evangelist Tom Skinner scolded editors of evangelical publications last month for failing to promote racial equality. Skinner was the only black among about 150 persons who attended the twenty-second annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association in Washington, D. C. He spoke at the closing banquet.

Evangelical periodicals seldom report on black activities, Skinner said. When they do, he added, the activities reported are often “filtered” by white writers in such a way that it would be better if there had been no report. “I challenge you white evangelical people of the press to hire black people at the top echelons of your staffs and to report the black news as it is,” he said.

Other highlights of the three-day convention included stimulating papers by Dr. Calvin Linton of George Washington University and Dr. Kenneth Pike of the University of Michigan. Linton told the editors how they could witness the rebirth of great evangelical literature. Pike showed how his widely acclaimed new linguistic theories could be appropriated for a more effective communication of the Gospel.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

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