‘Talks Right, and Walks Left’: The Episcopal Church Convention

NEWS

The Reverend Jerome F. Politzer, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Chapel, Del Monte, California, andCHRISTIANITY TODAYnews editor Russell Chandler attended the sixty-third General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Houston, October 11–22. Here is their report:

Episcopalians watched the erosion of their church.

Or they saw new relevance—daring concepts of stewardship, mission, and social justice for the oppressed and dispossessed in action.

Which happened depends on the interpretation of events at General Convention—and how the church responds. Some of the more important actions:

• Minority-group funding—The General Convention’s Special Program (GCSP), which gives church money without strings to empowerment organizations—many militant and a few violent—was continued and expanded with significant new guidelines on violence and veto power.

• Women—Women deputies were seated for the first time in the 181-year history of the 3.5-million-member church, but women were refused eligibility for ordination as priests or bishops by a narrow vote swayed by clerical deputies.

• Missions—Overseas missionaries were reported down 100 since 1966 to 164; further cutbacks in personnel and dollars are anticipated.

• Centralization—More power was concentrated in headquarters staff, standardization proposed for seminary exams and clergy deployment.

• Executive Council—A conservative drive eliminated a specific provision for women, youth, and racial minority persons on the denomination’s most important board. The council was reduced from fifty-one to forty-one members.

• Consultation on Church Union—Lethargic approval for a two-year study “without implying approval of the plan in its present form” rolled through both houses with minimal debate (none at all by the deputies), but it appeared Episcopalians are leaning Romewards rather than “homewards” toward COCU, the ambitious union plan for nine major American Protestant bodies.

• National Budget—Falling income since 1967 reached crisis proportions this year; diocesan pledges lagged $3.5 million behind the $14.7 million quota. Delegates struggled with a suggested $11.8 million basic budget as the convention reached its final hours.

Long before delegates took their seats in the heavily guardedThe security budget was boosted from $3,000 to $50,000 as the convention neared, an arrangements spokesman said privately. In part because of a threat on Presiding Bishop John E. Hines’s life (two months before), and fears of possible disruption by outside extremists and by militants close to Episcopal-funded groups, plainclothesmen augmented pistol-carrying police, and Hines was assigned a bodyguard. As the convention drew to a close, there had been no incidents. House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (the two units of the church’s bicameral governing body), but far the most pressing thing on their minds was the state of the highly controversial GCSP. Grants totaling nearly $5 millon have been given to poor and minority groups since the Seattle convention authorized the GCSP in 1967. The Episcopal Church has stepped ahead of all other denominations in risking this kind of project for minority groups.

A few grants have sparked fire for violence associated with the funded groups. Examples: $40,000 to the New Mexico-based Alianza (leader Reies Tijerina is doing time for assaulting two forest rangers); $25,000 awarded two days before the Houston Convention to the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee in Denmark, South Carolina (its leaders were convicted of entering Episcopal-related Voorhees College in the same town at gunpoint).

Houston was showdown time for the GCSP. Blacks rallying behind Negro Leon Modeste, $23,200-a-year head of GCSP, were determined to make sure of its expansion and a continuation of the “no strings” policy that can keep Episcopal brass from knowing even the names of the real leaders of a funded organization.

The Reverend Fred Williams, suave leader of the Union of Black Clergy and Laity (UBCL), spearheaded two brief walkouts during preliminary GCSP skirmishes, charging “bias” in a panel set up to discuss all sides of the GCSP. Not all black delegates went along with Williams. The UBCL said the panel was rigged and racist, but the real bone of contention was the scheduled appearance of an NAACP leader. Williams and others saw a plot to pit blacks against one another, since radical blacks consider the NAACP an “Uncle Tom outfit.”

Modeste, Williams, and company shouldn’t have feared NAACP deputy John Morsell, an Episcopal layman. He said a study of GCSP grants had surprised him; in most cases they were conventional.

But Morsell’s incisive speech contained a few zingers for those who cared to listen. There is no such thing as a church grant without strings, Morsell said, elaborating: “It’s the church’s money. The recipients will one day be back for more, and they will then be expected to demonstrate they should be given more.” He also said turning money over to minority groups without restraint was “a denial of black manhood.… Only children are dealt with on the theory that they are not responsible or accountable for their actions.”

A compromise resolution package put GCSP on the map for three more years. Local bishops won a veto power over grants in their diocese (it can be overruled by a majority of Executive Council members), but routine passage will be by a screening committee loaded with ethnic minority persons and some non-Episcopal non-Christians.

Bishops have thirty days to veto a local grant and now must see full reports beforehand.

Delegates disagreed about whether tricky new wording on violence will make it easier or harder for violent groups to get Episcopal money. Old language, which ruled out second-hand or “pipe-line” grants (see September 26, 1969 issue, page 42) has now been replaced with a guideline barring money to groups and their workers if either “advocate the use of physical violence as a means of carrying out the program of the organization.” And grants would be cut off if the group or its officers “shall be finally convicted of a crime which involves physical violence” while the organization’s work is being carried out.

The “joker in the deck,” according to one bishop, is the “final conviction” phrase, since most observers feel that means “after all legal appeals are exhausted”—often a matter of years. Also, it appears that groups such as the Black Economic Development Conference could now get funded, since—while advocating violence as an option to overthrow the government—the BEDC doesn’t use violence to conduct its programs or to print its materials calling for possible violence.

“We fund groups, not individuals, anyway,” commented Modeste, “and even though individuals in a group might be violent, we’ve always been able to prove that the group as a whole isn’t violent.”

The net effect is to make it easier to isolate and identify violators of the violence criteria, but to narrow the definition of who or what activities may be ruled violent. Presumably the Weathermen, whose violence is integral to their program, wouldn’t qualify for a GCSP grant. Whether a Black Panther breakfast program for children could is less clear.

Women were both talked about and—for the first time—talking and voting in the House of Deputies. Thirty women delegates were seated immediately as the conclusion of action started at Seattle. Special delegates—youth, blacks, and others—with voice but no vote were also allowed at non-legislative workshops, hearings, and assemblies. An expected hassle over seating them faded to a murmur. A handful of Submarine Church youth surfaced for a while but split with the convention early to “free Angela,” saying: “You are dancing death dances in clerical robes while we are at war.”

The sixty-third General Convention decided it wasn’t the time to ordain women as priests and bishops, but if the lay delegates had had their way, the resolution would have passed. The lay delegation voted in favor (49¼–41¾), but the clerical delegations voted against (38¼ to 52¾), thus killing the measure for three years. The proposal was to interpret he and man in pertinent church documents generically to mean both sexes, thus avoiding constitution changes.

Adverse effects the measure might cause among Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions helped torpedo it; doubtless it will rise again.

The Episcopal Church’s involvement in overseas missions can be described in one word: retrenchment. Besides the 100 overseas appointees recalled since 1966, headquarters office staff has been cut in half, according to a report given by Mrs. Harold C. Kelleran, chairman of the Overseas Review Committee.

Financial squeezes at home have sometimes accelerated the church’s efforts to develop independent indigenous churches on the mission field (four Japanese clergymen can be hired for the cost of one American priest), Mrs. Kelleran said. And she pointed to a concept of mission that may soon become standard for liberal churchwork overseas (as well as at home): social activism.

The House of Bishops’ decision to elect a bishop for Ecuador could be either a stray evangelistic opportunity or an importation of a North American cultural pattern having little present relevance.

Concern for evangelism was almost nonexistent at the Houston convention. The only official presentation was Project Test Pattern, the church’s multi-media experiment in parish renewal.

A few voices were heard crying in the wilderness of ethical humanism and political activism. The suffragan bishop of the Philippines told a meeting of the Eighth Province that greater evangelistic effort was needed to help people “climb the mountain of Calvary.” And a group of seminarians issued a statement claiming “the Gospel of Jesus Christ can never be subordinated to political and social activism.”

For those seeking involvement and relevance and the assuagement of guilt through good works, the sixty-third General Convention was an exercise in fulfillment. Bishop Hines—who himself proposed “a responsible review” of his performance as presiding bishop—has the good will and backing of the large majority of both lay and clerical members of his church.

The inclusion of minority members at all levels of decision-making and participation plus real compassion for the needs of the poor were the brightest spots on a gray horizon. But the glorious Gospel of Christ and his power are gradually fading into the background as the Episcopal Church, in the words of one of its clergyman at Houston, “talks right, and walks left.”

Methodists Aid Draft Opponent

The United Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns voted last month to accept a theology student’s draft card. A spokesman said the board would forward it to the youth’s Selective Service board “as a symbol of his resistance to the draft.”

Following the vote, taken after an hour’s debate, Federal Circuit Judge Robert Mann of Tampa, Florida, announced he was resigning from the board because he “could not be associated with the violation of law” that he said the action would entail. Others said they did not think the law was being violated. Mann had been a member of the board for ten years.

The board, in its annual meeting held in Washington, D. C., acted to “receive and transmit to Selective Service boards, letters, with supportive data” from members of the denomination who want their individual protest to be accompanied by an “official statement such as support of conscientious objectors or of those who engage in non-violent resistance to the draft.”

The spokesman for the board said the vote was 25 to 9, with one abstaining. He added that the board had specified that its action would not commit it to endorse positions taken by those who oppose the draft, and stressed that it regarded itself as acting and speaking only on its own behalf and not for the denomination.

The card in question belongs to Horace R. (Jay) Jones II of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jones, 24, is a candidate for a master of theology degree at the University of Chicago, but is not in school this semester. He is currently not subject to the draft because he has a theological student exemption.

Jones first attempted to get church action last April from the United Methodist General Conference, but a legislative committee succeeded in sidelining his request by a narrow vote. Then he took the card to the United Methodist Council on Youth Ministry, which urged the Board of Christian Social Concerns to accept this and the card of “any man who decides that he in good conscience cannot voluntarily relate in any way to the Selective Service system.”

Jones was quoted as saying that his decision was based largely on his church training.

Mcintire Shuns Prophecy

Claiming last month’s March for Victory a “glorious success,” an event “used of God far beyond our fondest dreams,” fundamentalist Carl McIntire is promising another on May 8. It will be the climax of a march-of-the-month plan that will include rallies in San Clemente on January 30, and Key Biscayne on February 27.

“We believe President Nixon is either walking down a blind alley or over a precipice,” said the indomitable Bible Presbyterian preacher. “Therefore, we are going to confront him with an increasing cry for victory every month of the year.”

In addition to the events at Nixon’s homes away from Washington, McIntire announced:

• National Victory Sunday on November 22. The thirty-fourth Bible Presbyterian General Synod that met following the October march suggested the project in an effort to put the word victory back in the vocabulary.

• A Christmas emphasis on peace by victory, presenting Christ as the Prince of Peace. Christmas cards showing George Washington crossing the Delaware have been designed.

• Simultaneous marches in the capitals of all fifty states on March 19.

The May 8 culmination march will be different from previous Washington rallies, McIntire declared. He refused this time to estimate the number of supporters who will march with him. Mrs. McIntire, he told newsmen, would be there, but he was not promising the presence of anyone else, so that the emphasis could be on victory.

Jews First American Settlers?

Columbus Day observances were scarcely over when Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon presented new evidence about who really discovered America. The Brandeis University professor of Mediterranean studies suggested last month that Jews reached America 1,000 years before Columbus.

The evidence for Gordon’s claim is an inscription found in a burial mound at Bat Creek, Tennessee, in 1885. It went untranslated for nearly a century because a photograph of the stone, published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., which sponsored the expedition and now houses the stone, was printed upside down.

Gordon’s study of the inscription convinced him that its five letters, translated “Belonging to Judah,” are the forms used on Hebrew coins about 100 A.D. “The inscription attests to a migration of Jews,” he told a meeting of the North Shore Archeological Society of Long Island, “probably to escape the long hand of Rome after the disastrous Jewish defeats in 70 and 135 A.D.”

The renowned archaeologist emphasized that the “circumstances of the discovery rule out any chance of fraud or forgery.” This stone, he declared, is the one thing in Hebrew characters found in America by bona fide archaeologists sponsored by a reputable organization.

It is not, however, the only Roman relic to appear in Tennessee: farmers have occasionally uncovered Roman coins dating from 132–135 A.D. And a group of people known as Melungeons, still living on Newman’s Ridge in eastern Tennessee, maintain a persistent tradition that their ancestors arrived on Phoenician ships centuries before Columbus. They are not Indians, Negroes, or Anglo-Saxons, Gordon notes; rather, they are Caucasians of Mediterranean descent.

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Evangelicals And The American Revolution

In a stereotype-shattering discussion of evangelical participation in the American Revolution, Geneva College professor Howard Mattson-Bozé argued that evangelicals played a far more significant role than historical consensus recognizes. He told a meeting of the Conference on Faith and History in Dallas last month that evangelicals contributed to the American revolution a radical, democratic political and social ethic that was drawn from the Scriptures and the experiences of the Great Awakening.

“Their influence was more in giving strong emotional support than in providing an intellectual raison d’être.” Thus, by failing to “infuse society with their conception of the revolution, they left its interpretation to the secularists.”

Comparing the historical status of the evangelical to that of the Negro, Mattson-Bozé noted that “secular history, like white history, is the reflection of the dominant group and a distortion of the truth, and therefore is unsatisfactory.”

Another historical scholar, Congregationalist Cecil B. Currey, said that the Quakers tried to maintain their traditional pacifist stance during the American revolution but that in the process they lost both their evangelical theology and their political power.

“Other evangelicals,” Currey said, “saw their survival as a group in the aligning of their aims with those of the area in which they dwelt and were as a result able to enter wholeheartedly into the patriotic movement.” The Quakers would not do this, and “patriots mistook Quaker dedication to their ideals as antipathy to the American cause.”

The high point of the meeting of the evangelical historians was a spirited panel discussion on the revolutionary mood today. Reformed scholar C. T. McIntire, noting that many evangelicals associate the American way of life with Christianity while many in the ecumenical movement identify with the revolutionary left, called for a biblically oriented “third direction.” He said this “Christian way of life” would permit Christians to confront both the American civic, secular religion and the neo-Marxist cultural faith. McIntire, son of the controversial radio preacher, pointed to “Honor America Day” as the most recent instance of evangelical identification with the American civic religion.

Dr. W. Stanford Reid, noted Canadian scholar, cautioned the group that the solution to man’s problems is not revolution. “The stress in the New Testament is always on regeneration rather than revolution, and in a sense this is much more radical because regeneration means changing a man’s nature, not just his situation.”

Nevertheless, he urged evangelicals not to ignore social problems, and he criticized prevailing attitudes regarding involvement in the world. “I don’t believe the Christian should be or even think of himself as a conservative. He should welcome change as long as it is in the direction of equity and justice.”

Noting that more churches are controlled by forces opposed to change, Reid asserted: “Perhaps what you have to do is start a revolution in the Church itself. The reason for the development of the so-called underground churches today is that dyed-in-the-wool Tories are sitting on top of things in the individual congregations.”

“The desire of people to get out from underneath them is simply a repetition of what happened at the time of the Reformation.”

RICHARD V. PIERARD

Business Evangelism

Across the river, as one leader put it, are scores of “unconvinced” businessmen, and the Christian Businessmen’s Committee International, says publications director Phil Landrum, is determined to build a bridge to those “men on mahogany row.” At last month’s annual convention in St. Louis, CBMCI chairman Paul H. Johnson revealed a ten-year plan for spanning that river.

The doctrinal and social structure of CBMCI remains unchanged by the goals; “satisfied customers” will continue to testify about their Christian experiences at luncheon and dinner meetings. But Christians in local committees will be discouraged from attending without a non-Christian guest. Leaders expect this “Fifty-Fifty Plan” to contribute to another of the ten-year goals: a 10 per cent membership growth per year to a total in 1980 of 26,000.

The number of local committees will get a boost from two other plans: Project’70, which hopes by 1980 to see committees in all American cities with a population above 25,000, and PRICAP, which gives priority to establishing CBMC groups in the capitals of states, provinces, and foreign countries. Increased emphasis on the “I” in CBMCI was immediately apparent in the appointment of Englishman Ted Hubbard to the executive committee and the decision to hold the May, 1971, board meeting in London.

“These goals are to serve as guidelines for the organization,” Johnson told the 850 delegates at the thirty-third annual convention. They will be evaluated and perhaps modified every six months, Landrum added, emphasizing their elasticity. The ten-year plan, he said, was an example of how Christian businessmen can put their knowledge to use for evangelistic ends.

Turning Over Old Leaves

“In 1898, when I was ten years old, my parents subscribed for The Youth’s Instructor for me, and I read it clear down to its last issue—and wept at its funeral. Then I turned to greet with open arms and welcoming smiles its youthful successor. I truly love it.”—Letter to the editor, Insight, October 6, 1970.

Not all Seventh-day Adventists on the far side of thirty have responded so warmly to the denomination’s new youth weekly, Insight. Church officials at last month’s Autumn Council criticized the pocket-sized journal’s “way-out art”—presumably the combinations of camera and canvas that create the magazine’s effective but non-representational illustrations.

But young people apparently took to Insight immediately. Although its 118-year-old predecessor, The Youth’s Instructor, lay untouched in student lounges, college administrators report that copies of Insight vanish rapidly. Editor Don Yost, who is completing work for a doctorate in journalism from Syracuse University, and his under-thirty associates have succeeded with young people by filling Insight’s first six months with articles about ecology, peace, and the generation gap. The stamp of the denomination appears in concern for healthful living and the second coming of Christ as well as in news about SDA young people and a daily study guide for the week’s Sabbath-school lesson.

This fall there’s a new look to another magazine for young people. Most of the names are the same, but the slick paper and larger size are firsts with what the October editorial calls “The New Improved His.” For its thirtieth birthday, Inter-Varsity’s campus magazine got a new art editor, Mickey Moore, who contributed to its “bolder, more active, immediate, and flexible” image.

Other changes appear in the writing style, which is to be “less complicated and academic.… We’ve tried to eliminate the dullness that can easily intrude into a theologically-based magazine,” and in the promise of additional articles geared specifically for underclassmen and new Christians.

Some of His’s faithful readers may wonder if reaching thirty has been detrimental to the magazine, but editor Paul Fromer expresses only optimism for the new look.

Champion Convert

Brooks Robinson, highly revered third baseman of the world champion Baltimore Orioles, became a convert to Roman Catholicism shortly before this year’s World Series.

Robinson, who was voted the most valuable player in the series, had been a Lutheran.

His instruction in the Catholic faith was given by the Reverend Martin A. Schwalenberg of the St. Charles Borromeo parish in Baltimore. The priest is a longtime friend of the baseball player and his parents. Robinson is from Little Rock, Arkansas but now lives in Baltimore and is the darling of the city’s sports fans.

A totally new journalistic effort also appeared in October—an eight-page tabloid called American Report. Published by—though purportedly “not a house organ of”—the National Committtee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned, the weekly promises “to bring significant and frequently neglected news and viewpoints on social change, particularly as it affects the religious community of North America.” The first two issues include articles on racism in Mississippi, the presence of U.S. reconnaissance teams in China, and the GM strike, as well as the antiwar reports predictable from the successor of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Viet Nam.

The paper incorporates “First Source,” a one-time publication of the National Council of Churches Communication Center. “Its aim,” declares the first supplement, “is to offer first-hand, first-person perspective … direct from those who battle the anti-personal in church and society.”

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Strife In Catholic Education

The U. S. Catholic school system can be destroyed “from within” by the very persons who teach in and administer it, according to a veteran Catholic educator.

Monsignor George A. Kelly said the entire discussion on state aid to parochial schools may soon become irrelevant “if some priests, some brothers, and some sisters have their way” and continue to pull out of Catholic education. His address was given before a group of bankers in New York City.

Acknowledging that “religious communities are in turmoil,” the priest said that unless Catholic teaching orders “put their houses in order, it is possible … that the vast educational work of the Church will … disintegrate by attrition.”

Monsignor Kelly, former New York archdiocesan secretary of education who now holds a chair in contemporary Catholic problems at St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York, called on the Catholic laity to commit themselves to continuing Catholic education and encouraging the teaching nuns, priests, and brothers.

“In the long run,” he said, “doing this may be more important than fighting for state aid.…”

On Togetherness

A black Baptist pastor has called for a “ceasefire” between evangelicals and social activists in the church.

Speaking at the 163rd annual meeting of the New York Baptist Convention, the Reverend Granville A. Seward said: “Let us have a ceasefire between these two camps. Both are wrong. Both are inadequate. We need the wholeness of both working together.”

The Newark, New Jersey, minister said neither the approach of spreading the Gospel and saving souls nor the stressing of the social gospel was adequate by itself. Both approaches are needed, he insisted. “We must be both evangelists and social activists.”

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