NAE: Bringing Evangelicals Together

“Bring us together” may have a hollow ring when used as a slogan for the Nixon Administration, but it was a vibrant theme at the twenty-eighth annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, held April 7–9 in Kansas City. More than 1,000 delegates attended numerous sessions, large and small, to be challenged, inspired, and informed about the task of “Saving the Seventies.”

Ever since the Protestant Reformation, evangelicals have been divided organizationally, ethnically, theologically, and geographically. The NAE is attempting to bring together evangelicals across these divisions in matters where cooperation is possible, perhaps necessary.

The NAE is concerned about drawing many more black evangelicals into its fellowship. The National Negro Evangelical Association (see April 24 issue, page 37) is a member, a black pastor was the principal speaker one morning, and a black evangelist gave a hard-hitting challenge at one of the luncheons. A major challenge is to go beyond tokenism; how this will be done is yet unclear.

More promising was the attempt to bridge the generation gap. For the first time young evangelicals were recruited to attend the convention. Scores responded, and youth were in charge of an evening session. Already college students have been added to some of the commissions, and the central board will soon add student members. For most observers, participation by the young people, many of them refreshed by the nationwide Asbury revival (see March 13 issue, page 46), was a convention highlight.

The new NAE president, who will serve for a two-year term, is Hudson Taylor Armerding, 51, president of Wheaton (Illinois) College. Armerding, scion of a prominent Plymouth Brethren family, is a member of the independent College Church of Wheaton and has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

He succeeds Arnold Olson, the executive head of the Evangelical Free Church. Armerding believes that the NAE has an excellent opportunity to widen its constituency both among evangelicals who have been reluctant to cooperate even in limited areas outside their own denominational traditions, and among evangelicals who are in denominations dominated by more liberal theological views. The new first vice-president is Myron F. Boyd, a Free Methodist bishop; the second vice-president is G. Aiken Taylor, editor of the (Southern) Presbyterian Journal.

Rather than demand an all-or-nothing commitment, the NAE seeks to serve evangelicals to the extent and in the areas they desire. Of the scores of evangelical denominations, only thirty-four, all predominantly white (with a total of about 27,000 congregations), are full members of the NAE. Another 3,000 congregations that are either independent or in non-NAE denominations have joined individually.The better-known National Council of Churches has thirty-two denominations with about 140,000 congregations. Of these, 51,000 are in its six black denominations, and more than 40,000 are in the United Methodist Church.

Many thousand more congregations are served through 180 local associations (liaison with them is maintained by five NAE regional offices) and fifteen commissions and affiliate bodies. All fifteen had program sessions interspersed through the Kansas City convention.

Many have executive staff and conventions of their own, such as the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, National Religious Broadcasters, and the National Sunday School Association. The NAE has an active World Relief Commission. Last year it distributed over $3 million worth of goods abroad. The NAE also maintains a Social Concern Commission to advise on domestic agencies and affairs, and an Office of Public Affairs to inform the government of NAE positions.

This year’s resolutions included support for “every legitimate effort to maintain balance in ecology”; for “the rights of all nations in the Middle East, both Israeli and Arab, to exist as sovereign nations”; and for strict enforcement of drug laws.

Indicative of the harmony pervading the meetings was the fact that only one resolution provoked much discussion. Whether to say “some” or “most” public schools are doing well in inculcating moral and spiritual values was resolved by affirming that “many” were. This is the kind of “bringing together” the NAE wants to do, but on more substantive matters.

DONALD TINDER

Houston’s Mayo ‘Clinic’: Complicated Chemistry

Members of the Mexican-American Youth Organization (MAYO) in Houston have promised to take to other Texas cities their fight to gain “community control” of little-used church buildings.

Several militant brown youths took over the former Christ Presbyterian (U.S.) Church in February, after the mostly white congregation moved out of a neighborhood becoming mainly Mexican-American. The Brazos Presbytery had promised the Christ Church building to its Juan Marcos Church, a Mexican-American group trying to find its own place in the brown community of Houston’s north side. Accusing all hands of failing to minister to the poor of the community, the MAYO youth forced their way into the temporarily vacant building and set up a free breakfast program and a tutoring service. It took a court injunction to make them allow Juan Marcos to enter its new property.

MAYO leaders appeared at a Texas Council of Churches meeting in Dallas after the Houston confrontation had made state headlines, to warn other churches they could expect similar treatment. In Houston, meanwhile, they continued to press their claims by picketing the prestigious First Presbyterian Church (second largest in the denomination) every Sunday morning. At first, they were not allowed inside. After finally being granted entry, thirty demonstrators marched around the sanctuary with raised fists and interrupted pastor John William Lancaster’s sermon with shouts. The church sought an injunction to keep the MAYOs out.

Behind what some see simply as a dispute between poor, brown “Chicanos” and affluent Anglos lie other complex problems. The incident has underlined a schism between tradition-oriented Mexican-Americans and the New Left among them. Juan Marcos pastor Ruben Armendariz, 62, admits: “They call me Tio Tomas [Spanish for ‘Uncle Tom’], and Malinche.” (Malinche was an Indian who supposedly married a Spaniard and helped Cortez conquer Mexico.)

The charge is made against brown Americans who refuse to champion the militant plea of groups like MAYO, La Causa (The Cause), and La Raza (The Race), many of which claim that all lands in the American Southwest should be returned to Mexican-Americans. While conceding that the militants are making some inroads against poverty, Armendariz objects to what he views as a racist thrust: “I’m against pitting our people against the Anglos.”

Also involved is a secularism as rampant in the brown community as it is among Anglos. For the MAYOs, it is not enough for the Church to meet the needs of the poor. Control of social programs must be handed over to “the people,” or the MAYOs themselves.

Some observers question the motives of MAYO community-service programs, believing this is merely a front to elicit support for MAYO racial causes. Only when they speak to church groups do they claim, “When we shout ‘Viva la Raza’ [Long Live the Race], we’re really praying.”

The matter is further complicated because Anglo denominational staff members are more socially minded than many minority-group churches within the same presbytery. While Juan Marcos plans some community-aid programs—now that it has moved into its new facilities—Armendariz stresses that social action is not the primary function of the Church. Meanwhile, MAYO says that Juan Marco’s community programs are “too spiritual” and that they should be dominated by people from the community, regardless of church affiliation.

The Reverend William J. Fogleman, executive presbyter, invited representatives at the Dallas ecumenical meeting to survey the whole picture in Houston, in light of the MAYO promise to carry the battle to other cities. “You might use it as a test-tube case,” he told them in a metaphor appropriate for an issue with complicated chemistry.

RONALD DURHAM

Religion In Transit

The committee working on plans to unite the United and Southern branches of the Presbyterian church wants six other denominations to enter the talks: Associate Reformed Presbyterian, Cumberland Presbyterian, Hungarian Reformed, Second Cumberland Presbyterian, Reformed Church in America, and United Church of Christ.

A graduate of San Francisco Seminary (United Presbyterian) left $10 million in her estate for a library on religious law at the University of California at Berkeley. It was the largest single donation to the school since its founding 102 years ago.

Wycliffe Bible Translators is closing a deal to buy seven acres in Santa Ana, California, for its general offices and southern California center.

Missionaries from widely scattered and isolated settlements in Canada held a conference in Yellowknife last month sponsored by the Evangelical Fellowship of the Northwest Territories.

Membership in the Presbyterian Church U.S. declined 4,256 last year, the first loss since its origin as a communion in 1861.

Contributions to the National Committee of Black Churchmen (for the Black Economic Development Conference) passed the $200,000 goal last month … In Philadelphia, a group of 100 Quakers turned over $3,000 in personal “reparations” to the local branch of the BEDC.

Under attack for alleged racism, the Mormon church held its 140th semiannual conference in Salt Lake City last month with a doubled security guard. Meanwhile, Boyd Packer, assistant to the Council of the Twelve, hinted a future change in God’s revelation concerning Negroes might lift the Mormon doctrine that bars blacks from the priesthood.

Twenty scholars and editors disclosed a plan in Durham, North Carolina, last month for a thirty-volume edition of the works of John Wesley. The project could take twenty years.

A state court declared Maryland’s 247-year-old blasphemy law to be unconstitutional last month. When the law was enacted, the penalty called for the offender to have a hole bored through his tongue.

Delegates at the first convention of the Black Christian Nationalist Movement voted to make the church a primary “revolutionary force for the liberation of black people.”

Deaths

PATRIARCH ALEXEI, 92, head of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1945, a bishop since 1913, and metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod during the church’s dark days after the Russian Revolution; in Moscow.

JAYMES P. MORGAN, JR., 37, assistant professor of systematic theology at Fuller Seminary; of cancer, in Pasadena, California.

TOM REES, 59, director of Hildenborough Hall conference grounds in Kent, England, evangelist and Bible teacher in Europe and the United States; in New York City.

J. W. STORER, 85, retired executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Foundation and a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; in Nashville.

Personalia

United Press International senior editor Louis Cassels received Villanova University’s St. Augustine Award for “distinguished achievement in communications journalism.” Cassels’s Religion in America column appears in 500 newspapers throughout the nation.

Two more priests have thrown their hats in the political ring and are running for the Democratic nomination for Congress. Episcopalian Thomas B. Allen, active in civil-rights and antipoverty causes, will challenge the seat held by Representative Gilbert Gude in Montgomery County, Maryland, and militant Roman Catholic Louis R. Gigantafrom the inner city of New York will seek a seat from his state.

The United Church of Christ Board for World Ministries has named Dr. David M. Stowe, head of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Overseas Ministries, as chief executive of the UCC agency.

Metropolitan Opera star Jerome Hines is one of eight new directors elected to the board of the Laymen’s National Bible Committee.

The Reverend Ernst Lange, 42, has resigned as associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches and director of its Division of Ecumenical Action.

Missioner, lecturer, and scholar Arthur F. Glasser, former home director of the China Inland Mission Overseas Missionary Fellowship, has been named associate dean and professor of missions at the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission.

World Scene

The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church is now officially recognized as an independent national church for America within the worldwide Orthodox Communion by the Patriarch of Moscow. The move so far has not been recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul (see February 27 issue, page 37).

A key recommendation by the Committee on Society, Development, and Peace (SODEPAX), meeting in Baden, Austria, was that churches set up an international, interconfessional information office to collect and evaluate reports of “political assassinations and torture” throughout the world.

Evangelist Luis Palau opened a Mexico City crusade backed by 200 evangelical churches last month with 12,000 persons attending. Of these, 989 made decisions for Christ.

In order to witness publicly to their faith in Christ four Argentine couples were married in a Buenos Aires park.

Reconstruction of the site of Dan began near the Golan Heights last month as archaeologists’ excavations revealed evidence of the biblical city’s ruins.

Two Protestant Polish churches, the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession and the Reformed Evangelical, have declared full pulpit and altar fellowship, a step started 400 years ago.

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