Can Evangelicals Reform Methodism?

United Methodists’ “silent minority” (evangelicals) began clearing its throat at the renewal group’s first national convention in Dallas last year. This year it found its voice at a four-day convocation (July 7–10) in Cincinnati, and the evangelicals plan to make that voice heard at the highest levels of Methodism.

“We have moved out of the criticizing stage into the action phase,” said Dr. Robert G. Mayfield, general chairman of the Convocation of United Methodists for Evangelical Christianity. “Evangelicals now have power within our own hands to gain representation on our national boards, commissions, and agencies.”

The evangelical strategy to influence the United Methodist hierarchy hinges on laymen. The plan is to elect evangelical laymen as delegates to jurisdictional and general conferences and encourage “selective giving” in the pews. As the convocation met, the denomination reported basic benevolence giving was down 10 per cent from a year ago.

“We are not promoting a cash boycott but regard selective giving as sound stewardship,” explains the Reverend Charles W. Keysor (Keysor’s article “The Silent Minority,” published in Christian Advocate magazine in 1966, launched the “Forum for Scriptural Christianity” and its publication, Good News magazine, which sponsored the Cincinnati and Dallas conventions. Keysor is pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Elgin, Illinois.)

Two of the twenty-eight convocation seminars were aimed directly at showing evangelicals how to “work within the decision-making processes” of the church. One workshop, conducted by two young Ohio pastors, was called “Strategies for Influencing Annual Conferences.” The other was led by a Dallas pastor on “The Fine Art of Selective Giving.”

Advice given evangelicals attempting to influence church conferences coupled the spiritual with the practical: Read your Bible, pray, get a copy of the Methodist Discipline and Robert’s Rules of Order, watch the professionals—then speak up.

The strong possibility that bucking the establishment lessens a minister’s chances of getting appointed to the better churches was met with the blunt assertion: Where can an evangelical go but up anyway in the United Methodist Church? And where can a bishop send him that God can’t use him?

The bone in the gullet of Evangelical United Methodists was described by the keynote speaker, Dr. Leslie H. Woodson, board chairman of the Forum. He told the 1,600 delegates: “Evangelicals have been given curriculum resources which we cannot use, assigned pastors we cannot follow, handed programs we cannot share, and given leaders we cannot trust. Yet we are told to give our tithes while we starve to death.”

The evangelicals are causing some concern—and obvious irritation—to certain church bureaucrats. At a press conference, representatives of United Methodist publications and agencies were so hostile to the panel of convocation leaders that the religion writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer described it more as a “medieval inquisition than a press conference.” Referring to the public meetings—featuring swinging singers from Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, inspirational messages, and hearty singing and loud “Amens”—one church publication representative said it made him “want to vomit.”

While most of the messages were inspirational, the convocation was far from a “pie-in-the-sky” production. Dr. Gilbert James of the Department of Sociology of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, conducted a hard-hitting seminar on “The Evangelical Flight From the City.”

Church-Sponsored Renewal

While out-of-power evangelicals map strategy to bring the United Methodist Church back to theological orthodoxy, the establishment is running a program of its own to aid spiritual recovery. It’s the Lay Witness Renewal Mission, developed under the direction of the United Methodist General Board of Evangelism. A number of lives have been changed.

How does it happen? Laymen of various backgrounds and ages, many of them coming a great distance at their own expense, are invited into a local church for a weekend of spiritual sharing and discovery.

One by one, members of the visiting team relate simply, honestly, and briefly the problems and joys of living a life of faith. They don’t preach or use high-pressure tactics; in simple words they tell of meeting Jesus Christ and how he changed their lives.

After the initial witnessing there is sharing and informal prayer in small groups. In an atmosphere of love and acceptance even the most reserved person feels free to express his doubts and frustrations. In no way do the team members suggest they are perfect, and perhaps it is in this context—one human being honestly relating to another—that the Holy Spirit works.

One Minnesota minister said of a recent mission in his church: “This is very low-key evangelism. All these people do is come in and tell what Christ means to them, but it gets other people excited.”

Five hundred people gathered at a recent Lay Renewal Conference in Wisconsin to learn how to become more effective lay witnesses. In groups of three, sitting with knees touching, they experimented in communicating their faith. Each person had the opportunity to witness, listen, and evaluate.

Young people stood in line waiting to testify to the whole group. Many of them visited a nearby town, confronting people on the street with their eager witness. A feeling of spontaneity and love prevailed; one young woman expressed the wish that she could “take this spirit of love and acceptance back to my home church.”

Perhaps the ability to take such an experience “home” is the key to the reality of renewal. Since a lay witness mission in Minnesota, one Methodist church has seen a spiritual emphasis restored in the life of its people and the formation of a dozen or more small groups to sustain this new life. About ten of the members participate in lay missions in other churches.

One person, in new awareness, noted: “After all those years of listening to sermons that told me how to grow, I finally discovered that first I needed to say ‘yes’ to Christ, and I did.”

MARIAN PARRISH

Dr. James’s address, “The Christian as the Agent of Change,” was laced with Scripture but highly critical of evangelicals who prefer joining “harmless knife-and-fork clubs” to confronting social ills in a way that could cause conflict with vested interests. It was widely applauded. Warned Dr. James:

“A ‘decision for Christ’ is not necessarily the regeneration of a believer, and saying ‘yes’ to a list of religious propositions does not necessarily result in the new birth. Where does social action start? At the Cross, and it could very well end there literally for us, if we take our commitment seriously.”

Even Arthur West of the United Methodist Office of Information—whose stomach apparently was feeling better at this point—ran up to Dr. James to declare: “You just saved the day for some of us.”

Young people at the convocation had separate meetings; they reflected the hyper-fundamentalist feeling of today’s “Jesus People”—and also their concern.

They began with a panel on racism in which a Cincinnati black pastor and a Mexican-American pastor from El Paso, Texas, both charged that blacks and Chicanos are “second-class citizens” in the church. The Reverend Robert Stamps, Methodist chaplain at Oral Roberts University, later gave a moving account of a “miraculous” healing he had witnessed and then delivered one of the hardest-hitting sermons on racism that this reporter has heard in years.

“Blacks and Chicanos should not just be included in the Church—they are the Church,” Stamps told about seventy-five young people. “It’s not enough to give somebody a tract. The saving gospel is always a social gospel.”

Had he attended the evangelical Methodist convocation in Cincinnati, John Wesley’s heart would have been warmed all over again.

Alaska’S ‘Apostle’

A historic-preservation grant of $6,822 by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to the 1,000-member Metlakatla Indian Community on Annette Island, south of Juneau, will preserve a cottage in which the Reverend William Duncan, often called “Apostle to the Alaskan Indians,” lived from 1887 until his death in 1918 at the age of 86. The home of the English-born Anglican priest will house a library and museum.

In 1857, Duncan, newly ordained at age 25, was sent by the Church of England Missionary Society to convert Indians in British Columbia to Christianity. He was highly successful with members of the Metlakatla tribe.

Thirty years after his arrival in Alaska, Duncan visited President Grover Cleveland to plead for a new home for his people. The Canadian government, he said, was trying to force the Indians to move to government-controlled reservations. Also, the Anglican church was trying to remove him and require the Indians to follow a more regimented form of formal worship.

President Cleveland granted the Indians homesteading rights to any land they selected in nearby southeastern Alaska. Duncan and 800 members of the tribe moved by open canoe to the then uninhabited Annette Island. Suffering extreme hardship, they built log houses and established new trading outlets for fish and furs. The indomitable clergyman who led them and shared their sufferings ministered among them for thirty-one more years, without support from organized mission groups.

The Annette converts are associated today with the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Hutterite Hassle

Hutterites, normally indifferent about political issues, are objecting to Manitoba legislation they feel strikes at the heart of their basic principles. The bill, which has received first reading in the provincial legislature, would force the Hutterite colonies to give money to any member who leaves them.

Communal living is a fundamental with the group, which traces its origin back to 1528 in central Europe. Jacob Hutter led a wing of the Anabaptist movement to adopt “community of goods” based on Acts 2:41.

Four centuries of often intense persecution forced the Hutterian Brethren throughout Eastern Europe and thence to North America. Two-thirds of the world’s 11,000 Hutterites now live in the three Canadian prairie provinces; the others live in Montana, Washington, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.

Hutterite leaders contend that any attempt to disrupt the community of goods is an infringement of their religious liberty. And, adds the Reverend Jacob Kleinsasser, a Manitoba spokesman, the Hutterites will leave the province if the legislation becomes law. If the forty colonies did pull out of the province, Manitoba would lose 4,000 rural residents at a time when the farm population is already in sharp decline.

LESLIE TARR

Ira Sabotage Continues

The reform program of the Northern Ireland government has taken another step forward now that provision has been made for minority-party members to have more say in policy-making.

Welcomed by the parties concerned, the measure will do little to modify the tactics of the illegal Irish Republican Army, which continues its attacks on police and military patrols, as well as general disruption of life and trade in the province. Incendiary bombs and devices placed in factories, stores, and public buildings have caused a number of fires.

Extensive precautions were taken to keep the peace during the Twelfth of July celebrations, when thousands of Orangemen marched in commemoration of victory gained at the Boyne over the Catholics in 1690. Protestants deny that the celebrations are an affront to the Catholic community, which, they point out, is free to celebrate like occasions in its own history.

S. W. MURRAY

On Criswell’S Brow

“This is my real calling,” quipped Dr. W. A. Criswell of the Dallas, Texas, First Baptist Church as he dug a hole in which to plant a tree recently in the young Baptist Forest between Nazareth and Mount Tabor. The immediate past-president of the Southern Baptist Convention told how the people of his church had raised more than $2,000 for the project because “our Lord loved this land.”

“Please observe,” joked a ceremony official, “that the first water for the trees is holy water—the sweat off Dr. Criswell’s brow.”

More than 100 million trees have been planted in Israel since the founding of the state in 1948. Some 400 members and friends of Criswell’s church attended the plaque unveiling and tree planting. Criswell and congregation, in the Holy Land for the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, also took part in a symbolic groundbreaking in the strip that borders Upper Nazareth (Jewish) and the old city of Nazareth (Arab) for an anticipated “Baptist-Jewish Friendship House.”

DWIGHT L. BAKER

God In Small Type

Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn may publish his newest book, August 1914, in the Soviet Union if he prints the word “God” in small type.

Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize for literature last year, writes this in his prologue to the book, which was published in Paris recently. The order was reportedly given by the Russian office for censorship.

The Russian author says of “atheistic narrowmindedness”: “If we write the names of regional party leaders and of the secret police with capitals, why shouldn’t we use capitals for the highest, creative power in our universe?”

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Catholic Lay Group Seeks World Parley Of Christians

The National Association of Laity, a 12,000-member group devoted to reform of the Roman Catholic Church, wants a worldwide Christian meeting: “a council of the entire Church called by independent laity, not subject to appointments or control by Pope or bishops.”

The suggestion was in one of several resolutions passed by the body at its fifth annual convention on the Bronx campus of Fordham University. The world-wide gathering, the resolution said, should go through at least three phases: a study of strictly Catholic doctrine and structural questions; an investigation of the common problems of all Christians; and a study of common grounds with all who believe in God.

The NAL was established four years ago in the aftermath of Vatican Council II. The name was changed from the National Association of Laymen at this year’s meeting in deference to its women members, who are said to compose half the body of twenty-five local chapters.

In another nod to women, the association called on the American representatives to the fall bishops’ synod in Rome to recommend the ordination of women as priests.

The 600 delegates also adopted a statement on abortion that struck a middle course between traditional Roman Catholic doctrine and statements presently being made by many liberal Protestant bodies. It said that forbidding abortion under any circumstances is “much too narrow and totally ignores the rights of the mother and father and of the family in general.” But the delegates went on to say: “The abortion-on-demand position is equally as narrow … proclaiming the superior and absolute rights of the mother to determine the fate of the unborn fetus.” About 60 per cent of the delegates favored the abortion statement.

NAL outgoing president William Caldwell, 44, an aluminum-company executive, lamented that liberal Catholics don’t appear as interested in church reform as in the past. But, he continued, people are “just as interested as ever in living their day-by-day lives as Christians and they are open to all sorts of new religious life styles.”

Dr. Joseph O’Donoghue, the NAL’s only paid staff member and one of the priests suspended in 1968 by Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington, D. C., for opposing Pope Paul’s birth-control encyclical, said the liberal reform group was attempting to forge an alliance with conservative Catholic laymen. All strata in the church are interested in “spiritual development,” according to Caldwell. Two resolutions, introduced by O’Donoghue, were supportive of conservative Catholics.

Other resolutions favored the removal of all U. S. troops from Viet Nam by December 31, and congressional action to stop the funding of military operations; the encouragement of diverse liturgical forms with laymen allowed to exercise their own “lay priesthood” in liturgies in family homes or “wherever they may choose to gather”; and a continued strong stand for open financial accounting by Catholic dioceses and institutions.

At one NAL presentation, Sister Janice Raymond of the Sisters of Mercy gave a paper on “Women’s Lib and Nuns.” Women have been seen in three major roles, she said. One is “relational,” such as being “Jenny’s mother,” or “John’s wife.” Another is that of a sex object, as in the “Playboy cult.” The third she called “the eternal feminine.” In the case of nuns, she added, this involves “the consecrated Virgin syndrome.”

In a separate development, a draft—possibly the final version—of a constitution for the Catholic Church stirred up a beehive of controversy in Europe between progressives and the Vatican old guard. Progressives were sounding the alarm that the document, called Lex Fundamentalis and composed of ninety-five canons, could freeze present church reforms, thus stifling the spirit generated by Vatican II.

The world’s 3,000 bishops had been asked to give approval (by mail) of the document by August 1, a date said to preclude responses from many national hierarchies and scholars. The document is not set for discussion at the world bishops’ synod in October, but the Vatican hopes for final approval from a special commission of cardinals immediately following.

Reaching The Groovy Ones: Jesus Nightclub

The Gospel is going high class on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, once the turf of the unpretentious Jesus people.

Right On, a Jesus nightclub believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, opened last month in a building once the scene of topless and bottomless shows, female impersonators, and lesbian entertainment.

With a dark-wood bar (soft drinks only) and tables, elegant red walls and carpeting, pool tables, and a door charge of $2.50, Right On is designed to appeal to the young sophisticates who visit other clubs on the Strip, according to co-manager Barry Wood, pastor of First (Southern) Baptist Church of Beverly Hills.

“The groovy ones with change in their pockets are not being touched,” says Wood. He thinks that the current emphasis on hippie culture in evangelistic circles has resulted in a neglect of the middle-class, over-25 age group.

Right On’s unique ministry reaches out through both entertainment and preaching. In addition, Christians ready to witness mingle in the crowd.

Opening-night shows before a full house featured Larry Norman, perhaps the best-known Christian pop singer in the country; the Philharmonic, a Christian rock group; Karon Blackwell, a folk-soul nightclub performer; and Cynthia Clawson, a singer in the television summer variety show “The Newcomers.”

Located among nude clubs, discotheques, and gas stations in the heart of the Strip, the building is being leased for four months from Bill Gazzarri, who also operates a teen hard-rock dance hall featuring movie projections and closed-circuit television of the young writhing dancers in jeans and hotpants.

Scheduled summer appearances in Right On include the first Hollywood performance of Jimmy Owen’s new Christian rock musical, Show Me (see May 21 issue, page 50) and a new two-act play, Requiem for Man.

Wood insists on professionalism and first-class talent. Some disagreement exists over just how much preaching should occur and how many Christians should be placed in the audience, but managers hope to avoid both extremes—appealing only to church-goers and becoming too secular.

Two and a half years ago, His Place was evicted from the adjacent building because owners felt the Gospel was bad for Strip business. Blessitt’s staff prayed that business in the buildings would stagnate. His Place has moved, but the Gospel is going Right On.

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