Marxists on the Spot

Several international meetings have been held to collect and analyze information on Communist policies toward religious bodies, anti-religious propaganda, “underground” churches, and related matters.

The latest and probably most significant of these meetings took place in Ottawa last month. More than seventy persons participated, including two professors from Yugoslavia. Scholars who had been invited from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland did not arrive because of “pressing” duties.

The International Symposium on Religion and Atheism in Communist Societies was closed to the press in an apparent effort to create a relaxed atmosphere in which a dialogue could develop between participants from varying ideological persuasions. Thus observers couldn’t quote participants directly. But papers presented at the symposium are to be published by Carleton University. The university, along with its Committee on Soviet and East European Studies, sponsored the symposium in cooperation with the Canadian Association of Slavists and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

Certain apprehension was expressed during the five-day session about the relations of the Vatican and the World Council of Churches with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Several participants voiced fear that both the Vatican and the WCC might be going too far and too fast in efforts to accommodate Communist leaders.

Some wondered whether an “ecumenical Munich” might not be in the offing in which dissenting Christians and underground churches would be forgotten or sacrificed to obtain a modus vivendi with Communist governments. Such an appeasement mood is seen, it was pointed out, in the failure of such international bodies as the Vatican and the WCC to recognize documents that have been coming from religious dissenters in the Soviet Union.

The problem of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union received considerable attention. Those present seemed to agree that the Jewish community in North America does more for Jews in the Soviet Union than Christians do for their fellow believers there.

It was emphasized that recent worldwide protests against harassment of Jews and, in particular, their difficulties emigrating to Israel, had had some positive results. It was suggested, moreover, that an interreligious and ecumenical approach to the problems of the Jews, anti-Semitism, and religious and national dissenters would be more effective than fragmented efforts.

One of the speakers who had been invited to the Ottawa symposium was Dr. Erika Kadlecova. She had lost her position as director of the Office for Church Affairs in Czechoslovakia as punishment for her “liberalism” under Alexander Dubcek. She had supported the Christian-Marxist dialogue and urged that Christians not be treated as second-class citizens. The dialogue fell into disrepute after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Dr. Kadlecova has been reported working as a ticket-seller in a cinema.

Participants in Ottawa agreed that international meetings should continue at regular intervals and that their work should be coordinated. Another meeting will probably be held in London in 1973 under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism.

Although the religious issue is primary, the meetings have been organized not by churchmen but by scholars. Major denominations in the United States and abroad have yet to demonstrate any substantial interest in the plight of persecuted believers in the Communist countries. Neither has there been much grass-roots interest: Religious Ferment in Russia by Michael Bourdeaux has sold only 600 copies in the United States.

Seasoned Insight

The American general who led the United Nations peace team to an armistice in Korea seriously doubts that a settlement to the war in Viet Nam can be negotiated.

“We’ve practically thrown away the lives of 50,000 men,” says retired Lieutenant General William K. Harrison. “The only thing we can do is get out slowly, and Mr. Nixon is doing his best.”

Harrison feels it would be suicidal to pull out all American forces at once. He wonders why anti-war critics now urging such a move did not speak up when the American military buildup began. “Nobody complained about the war until it started to drag out,” he declares. “Now it is being called immoral.”

Harrison, now 75, was chief U. N. negotiator at Panmunjom, Korea, from May, 1952, until a truce was signed on July 27, 1953. He probably has more experience negotiating with Communists than any other living American. Long active in the Officers Christian Union, he currently serves as its president.

In an interview in his home near Clearwater, Florida, last month, Harrison said that time is on the side of North Viet Nam. “The enemy has got us by the throats,” he stated. “The situation is such that we cannot expect to get any concessions from them at the negotiating table.”

Harrison said that he does not feel the United States should have become involved militarily in Viet Nam, but that once forces were committed victory should have been sought. Military strategists may have underestimated enemy capability, he added, but the cause of much of the problem is that U. S. forces’ hands have been tied. He doubts that the Soviet Union or even China would have entered the war had the harbor at Haiphong been bombed. “They have more to fear from each other,” he observed.

Harrison expressed sympathy for Lieutenant William Calley because “in the heat of battle anything can happen,” but noted that “from all evidence, he committed murder and should be punished.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Distinguishing Holiness

To distinguish itself from “mystical sects who currently make use of the word ‘holiness’ ” and to make room for Canadians, the National Holiness Association has changed its name to the Christian Holiness Association.

The decision came at the organization’s 103rd convention in Kansas City last month, where 2,000 delegates represented 1.5 million constituents of twelve affiliated and eleven cooperating denominations. The theme of the meeting was “Absolutely the Lord’s!”

The convention demonstrated the relevance of rigorous self-surrender for the modern generation. Youth from the association’s eighty educational institutions swarmed the conclave. In a seminar titled “Rapping With the Now Generation,” hippies—puffing on cigarettes in front of the anti-tobacco Wesleyans—were brought in from the streets to serve as impromptu panelists. Listening teams from seven area seminaries and numerous colleges engaged in dialogue with speakers. “There is a new religious revolution among young people that has not yet fully bubbled to the surface in all news media,” commented Asbury College president Dr. Dennis Kinlaw.

Female delegates also confronted the feminist revolution when Verda Nye, vice-president of the National Organization of Women, spoke. She was invited over the protest of one CHA executive member who had misgivings about bringing in outside “trouble-makers.” Miss Nye was instead moved by the warmth of Wesleyan women. She broke into tears as Miriam Millenger, Nazarene missionary-nurse, testified. “Oh, I was blessed,” she later commented, expressing what seemed to be sincere interest in the Gospel. A personal follow-up was planned.

Another group, however, received scant attention. Only two blacks attended the convention, and speakers bypassed specific mention of ministry to Negroes. A social-action seminar was attended by only a dozen persons, and seminar speaker Dr. Leslie Parrott said: “I’m not so sure I believe in social action. If you preach to the needs of people that will take care of it.” Some of the Wesleyan denominations originally came into being over the anti-slavery issue.

Realignment, Southern Style

Three independent, conservative groups within the one-million-member Presbyterian Church, U. S., called for a realignment of Presbyterianism last month that would create a “fervently evangelistic Church, faithful to the Bible, the Reformed faith, and Presbyterian polity [government].”

The proposal, issued in Atlanta, in effect asks for the formation of a denomination by persons of Presbyterian and Reformed faith who oppose both the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) and a projected merger of the Southern Presbyterian Church with the 3.2-million-member United Presbyterian Church.

Executive committees of Presbyterian Churchmen United (composed of clergymen and elders), Concerned Presbyterians (laymen), and the Presbyterian Journal (a weekly magazine long opposed to UP-Southern Presbyterian merger) released the document.

The statement reaffirms commitment to the constitution of the present Presbyterian Church, U.S., and opposes actions that would “destroy the historic witness of our church to the true message and mission of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The document continues: “We hope and pray for the restoration and preservation of our church as a truly Reformed and evangelical body.”

In other sessions the Executive Committee urged cooperation with Key 73 as well as between sister holiness bodies. “We do not need organic merger as badly as we need unity of purpose and spirit …” pleaded Myron F. Boyd, CHA president and bishop of the Free Methodist Church. He and the other officers were reelected.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Religion In Transit

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York has announced that Birthright, a counseling service giving alternatives to abortion, has been set up as its special service to residents of New York (see April 23 issue, page 36).

The rector, wardens, and vestry of St. Thomas Episcopal Church (New York), one of the denomination’s most influential parishes, charged national Episcopal leaders with “authoritarianism” and said the parish had lost confidence in them because church money had been allocated to some groups “practicing or advocating” violence and radical social reform.

The United Presbyterian Church reported that for the first time since 1967 giving to the general mission of the church was up for a quarterly period: an 18 per cent increase for the first quarter of 1971. Local income also rose markedly.

United Methodist churches in the southern California earthquake suffered between $700,000 and $1 million in damages.

The Mormon Church will have three million members by July, according to reports at its 141st anniversary in Salt Lake City last month, where record growth was cited.

The American Bible Society has sold or given away nearly two million copies of its 1971 Daily Bible Reading plan—more than twice as many as in 1970.

A new type of gonorrhea, resistant to conventional treatment, has aggravated an already “rampant epidemic” of venereal disease in California, according to public health officials. They cited, in order, promiscuity, parental permissiveness, and the Pill as causes for the rising incidence of the disease among the young. Three-fourths of the infected are said to be under age 24.

A two-week crusade coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Alaska Baptist Convention brought 450 new members to churches there.

The smallest Lutheran synod in the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (Eielsen Synod), is now down to five congregations and about seventy-five members—and counting.

The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar has sold more than one million albums and is headed for the two-million mark, according to a Decca Record spokesman. Superstar is also scheduled to become a movie.

Regional offices of the American Lutheran Church in Washington, Chicago, Dallas, Palo Alto, and Minneapolis have been closed; twenty-two positions were dropped in the action.

Personalia

After eight years as editor of the California Southern Baptist, Dr. J. Terry Young will become a theology professor at New Orleans Baptist Seminary.

Noted biographer Gerard Noel has become editor of the Catholic Herald, one of Britain’s two leading mass-circulation weeklies.

American Baptist missionary Roger W. Getz of the Philippines will become head of Viet Nam Christian Service in June. The organization is administered by Church World Service, Lutheran World Relief, and the Mennonite Central Committee.

Dr. Raymond M. Olsen has resigned as president of California Lutheran (ALC and LCA) College in Thousand Oaks, reportedly because of frustrations encountered in trying to make the small liberal-arts school financially stable.

They Say

Methodist Bishop Gerald H. Kennedy of Los Angeles about reports that the COCU effort to merge nine Protestant denominations may be dead: “The best news I’ve heard of in a long time.” On preaching (to the Minneapolis Ministerial Association): “Preaching only gets dull when fellows forget what the Gospel is.… It takes a real gift to make preaching boring, but we can do it.”

Dr. Charles S. MacKenzie, Presbyterian educator and evangelical clergyman now pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in San Mateo, California, will become president of Grove City College, Pennsylvania, September 1 … The Reverend Charles A. Platt, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Ridgewood, New Jersey, has been named president of the Lord’s Day Alliance of the United States.

The Latin America Mission has extended until 1974 its loan of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Howard to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Howard will continue as IV’s missionary director during this period and will head the 1973 Urbana missionary convention.

The Reverend C. Peter Wagner, a Quaker, has been named associate professor of Latin American studies at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission and executive director of Fuller’s Evangelistic Association. He has been active in Bolivian interdenominational activities for fifteen years.

Jewish evangelist Morris Cerullo, president of World Evangelism, plans two Spanish crusades this summer: Miami, June 21–25, and Los Angeles, July 28–August 1.

Ailing Adam Clayton Powell, 62, the former U. S. congressman, announced his resignation last month from the pastorate of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York. The clergyman is also retiring from politics, plans to live at Bimini in the Bahama Islands.

United Presbyterian activist professor-theologian Robert McAfee Brown was arrested Good Friday for blocking the entrance to the Berkeley (California) draft-board office. The Stanford University Religion Department head’s son, Peter, 22, was arrested with him.

A few days after federal indictments against twenty-three members of the Black P Stone. Nation charged with defrauding the government of almost $1 million in antipoverty funds, the Reverend John R. Fry, pastor of Chicago’s First Presbyterian Church, announced his resignation. Fry, who had been criticized for harboring the coalition of street gangs in his church, defended them as having “great influence and promise.” Fry will become visiting lecturer on social ethics at San Francisco (United Presbyterian) Seminary.

As expected (see April 23 issue, page 42), the Reverend George Sweeting, senior pastor of Chicago’s Moody Memorial Church, will become president of Moody Bible Institute August 1. Dr. William Culbertson, MBI president since 1948, will stay on in the newly created post of chancellor.

The editor of the Toronto Presbyterian Record, Decourcy H. Rayner, was elected president of the Associated Church Press at its fifty-fifth annual convention in Philadelphia last month, succeeding Christian Herald editor Kenneth L. Wilson, who completed his two-year term.

World Scene

The Navigators have resumed work in Taiwan after an absence of more than a decade. Two staffers have moved to Taichung, and nationals from Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia are expected to join them shortly.

A small band of militant Jewish youths released frogs and mice in the offices of two New York Soviet agencies to harass Russians with ten symbolic plagues during Passover week.

Papers read at the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, to be held in Israel June 15–18, will be published in book form, according to conference coordinator Gaylord Briley. He said that some 3,000 participants are being asked to the parley and that attendance is by invitation only.

American archaeologists are expected to begin excavations this July in Hesban, presumed site of the remains of the biblical city of Heshbon, the Israelites’ first great military conquest on their way from Sinai to the Promised Land, The effort is sponsored by Andrews University (Seventh-day Adventist) in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

Roman Catholics in the city of Worms have appealed to Pope Paul VI to reconsider the papal order condemning and excommunicating Martin Luther as a heretic 450 years ago.

The Vatican’s Liturgy Congregation has renewed an old campaign to get rid of such old favorite wedding marches as “Here Comes the Bride” in church weddings. More “sacred” music should replace the offending selections, the commission said.

While the priest’s away, the laymen will pray—in Church of Our Lady (Catholic) at Fort Qu’appelle, Saskatchewan. The laity, with official consent, prayed the rosary, read Scripture, and distributed Communion while their priest attended a priests’ conference at Regina.

The International Christian Broadcasters have set June 13 as the annual day of prayer for gospel broadcasting around the world. The ICB has more than fifty missionary radio and TV stations.

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