Seventh Day Baptists: At 300, Still Alive

Three-hundred-year anniversaries are rare in a nation just approaching its own 200th birthday, so America’s Seventh Day Baptists really had something to shout about at their tricentennial celebration last month on the University of Massachusetts campus at Amherst.

The birthday party was largely a family vacation affair for the 500 who gathered at the 159th annual SDB General Conference to relive their denomination’s founding in 1671 and trace their subsequent history.

Many of the 5,300 SDBs are one big family, with recurring last names and shared ancestry. The sixty-six churches across the country are concentrated in the northeast.

Historical plays, vignettes, dialogues, and lectures took the place of the usual inspirational and devotional meetings, though time was allowed for denominational housekeeping.

For many, the high point of the week was a pilgrimage to Newport, where the second SDB meetinghouse, built in 1729, still stands. In the small white sanctuary adorned only by two tablets of the Ten Commandments, young men in white wigs and knickers and young women in bonnets and heirloom dresses reenacted their forebears’ separation from Newport, Rhode Island, Baptists over the issue of the Sabbath. Other scenes dramatized the role of SDBs in the founding of Brown University and in the American Revolution.

For a small denomination with a unique doctrinal stance, the SDBs have been remarkably active in ecumenical affairs. The group is a charter member of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and the Baptist World Alliance. One SDB leader, the Reverend Alton Wheeler, is on the 120-member WCC Central Committee, and he is a vice-president at large of the NCC, where eight fellow SDBs are part of the General Board or General Assembly.

The SDBs are also active in evangelistic endeavors, including participation in the upcoming Campus Crusade for Christ Explo ’72 program and the Key ’73 campaign. SDB young people are enthusiastic about evangelism, says SDB evangelist Mynor Soper.

American SDBs are outnumbered by their foreign-mission converts abroad. Of these 7,500, 4,000 are in Malawi. Jamaica is another focal point of mission work, and with the emigration of Jamaicans to England the long-dead SDB movement in that country has been resurrected.

Overseas growth prompted formation of the SDB World Federation, which held its first meeting in Westerly, Rhode Island, prior to the Amherst meetings. Twenty-one delegates, mostly black, from nine of the twelve foreign conferences attended, selecting target areas for mission expansion.

Since early days SDBs have adhered to traditional Baptist doctrine. Their difference is that they observe the Sabbath on Saturday and hold to the perpetuity of the Ten Commandments, though without the legalism associated with most Sabbath-keeping groups.

The Sabbath remains important, as the Reverend Paul Osborn of Nortonville, Kansas, president for 1971–72, explains: “If it does make a difference, we ought to proclaim it; if not, join the [other] Baptists.”

American SDB membership has steadily declined from a peak of 10,000 early this century. Urbanization and increased mobility are probably the major reasons for the loss in the largely rural-based denomination, according to Wheeler.

To mark the tricentennial, a special choral-dramatic production involving everyone assembled was performed on the Sabbath as a celebration before God, the “audience.” One hymn caught the prevailing spirit:

Three hundred years have come and gone;

God of our fathers, lead us on

Beyond the search for moon and space

To greater search for peace and grace.

Whether the SDB family can survive three more centuries remains to be seen, but meanwhile the “search” is on. And with the Holy Spirit out front, says Wheeler, the SDBs are optimistic.

With God And The Marxists

Significant things are happening in the religious scene in Iron Curtain countries. The latest reports come from Religious News Service writer Ewart E. Turner, who has probed around inside the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

While the Federation of Evangelical Churches and the free churches of the GDR have adopted pro-GDR statements on war and politics, they have also spoken out against religious discrimination and persecution by the state.

Fringe members are leaving the church, but offerings are increasing and young people are joining. Many youths witness openly, and faith runs deep among Christian university students. Family devotions and home Bible-study groups are increasingly evident. Parents and grandparents are learning how to deftly skirt the ban against educating children in the faith.

Federation bishop Albrecht Schoenherr comments, “Christians have found living beside and working with Marxists to be a school of God.”

Visible Unity

At its triennial meeting in a Louvain, Belgium, Jesuit seminary last month, the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission recommended that the new prime purpose of the WCC be: “To call Churches to the goal of visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic fellowship, expressed in worship and in common life in Christ and to advance towards that unity in order that the world may believe.”

The 135-member theological commission offered the recommendation in response to a request from the WCC’s policy-making Central Committee. The measure cannot be acted upon until the WCC’s next world assembly, slated for 1975.

The meeting marked the first time that Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox theologians met as voting equals in the Faith and Order movement, established in 1927 and an arm of the WCC since 1948. Seven Catholic members were present, and the controversial Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens, primate of Belgium, was keynoter.

Visible unity—the stated ideal—at times proved elusive for even the ecumenically minded commission members. Suenens announced “with deep sorrow” that he could not invite the non-Catholics to participate in a scheduled mass. Three Protestants, however, walked to the altar and were not refused communion. One observer commented, “Human barriers, not human beings, were clearly the common enemy.”

Of Salary And Celibacy

Is priesthood on the way out?

In the Roman Catholic Church, one almost gets that impression. Even at Catholic University in Washington, D. C., supposedly a bastion of conservatism, controversies over salary and celibacy have had a serious impact.

The most prolonged dispute at Catholic University centered on the Reverend Daniel C. Maguire, who has taught moral theology there since 1966. The 40-year-old Maguire announced his intention to marry nearly two years ago and applied to Vatican authorities for laicization. He was determined, however, to remain on the faculty.

University authorities saw things differently and terminated his contract. Many feel that Maguire’s support of a 1968 statement critical of Pope Paul’s encyclical against birth control was a factor. There were persistent rumors that Maguire would sue the university for breach of contract.

A decree of laicization finally came through from the Vatican last month and Maguire married Miss Marjorie Reilley, a 29-year-old doctoral candidate. Maguire agreed to give up his battle to remain on the Catholic University faculty. He will be teaching at Marquette instead.

Meanwhile, two priests did sue the university, charging monetary discrimination. The two, the Reverend David J. K. Granfield and the Reverend Joseph A. Broderick, both law professors, said that the school refuses to pay them salaries commensurate with their experience and tenure because they are Roman Catholic priests. Their case has been pending in a federal district court.

Such developments have added up to a man-sized headache for Dr. Clarence Walton, the university’s first lay president, who has been trying to painlessly remove the institution from tight Vatican restrictions. He also must answer to fifteen bishops on his board, not to mention the grass roots.

Continuing tensions have resulted in reduced revenue for the school. Churches all over the country are supposed to take an offering for Catholic University once a year, but in a huff many have terminated their giving. As a result, the school has been operating under something of an austerity program for a number of months. Dozens of faculty members have been dismissed because of budget cuts.

The situation at Catholic University is perhaps a microcosm of the present situation in which all of Roman Catholicism finds itself. New controversies erupt regularly, and an increasing number seem to involve the priesthood. A new study out of the Vatican confirms that priests are leaving in increasing numbers. An official report circulated among American bishops last month indicated that two-thirds of the Roman Catholic priests in this country feel the pope misused his authority in issuing the encyclical against birth control.

There is currently considerable concern over who the Vatican will name to succeed Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington. The National Black Lay Caucus has demanded that a black priest be chosen. At the present time Auxiliary Bishop Harold Perry of New Orleans is the only black Catholic bishop in the United States, where there are an estimated 800,000 blacks among the nation’s 48 million Roman Catholics.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Religion In Transit

The fundamentalist Minnesota Baptist Convention at its 112th annual meeting went on record opposing President Nixon’s planned visit to Red China. The group also rapped the Jesus movement for “unbiblical dress, language, and conduct.”

The “organized church” in Britain will disappear within forty years if the present downward trend in church membership continues, warned Kenneth G. Greet, secretary of the British Methodist Conference, in a denominational journal.

For the first time in its history, Sweden will grant financial aid to churches other than the state Lutheran church. A $380,000 subsidy was approved by the parliament for Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and other churches.

Easing of government restrictions enabled the 80,000-member Reformed Church in Romania to import 10,000 Hungarian Bibles provided by the United Bible Societies.

More than 1,000 blacks attending a joint meeting of the national Catholic black clergy and lay caucuses in Detroit selected a committee to investigate the feasibility of forming a black Catholic church in America.

Mexico plans to give a giant statue of Jesus Christ with an observation tower in the crown of thorns to the United States in 1976 as a present for America’s 200th birthday celebration. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, it will overlook Corpus Christi Bay.

The Latin American Bible Seminary of San Jose, Costa Rica, reports the largest student enrollment in its history—eighty-two students from nineteen countries—as well as plans to open an extension in New York City for training Spanish-speaking pastors.

Personalia

Mark Sharmon, 21-year-old British university graduate who was a Communist until a Campus Crusade for Christ worker recently led him to Christ, is walking 2,000 miles from London to Jerusalem. Sponsors have promised contributions for every mile he covers. He hopes to raise $24,000 for Christian relief work in Pakistan and Nigeria.

Dr. Bruce Metzger, New Testament scholar at Princeton Seminary and president of the Society of Biblical Literature, was elected president of the Society for New Testament Studies—an international body of scholars—at a meeting in Holland.

C. T. McIntire, 31, self-styled “radical Christian” who has taken issue with his famous father, Carl, on several counts, has accepted a full-time post as professor of history at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto beginning September, 1972.

Yoshima Yamamura, a Japanese Christian minister, has invented an inexpensive speech aid enabling laryngectomees to speak and sing; although his own larynx was removed because of cancer eight years ago, he has maintained a busy preaching schedule.

Deaths

JOSEPHINE WHITE, 42, Presbyterian medical missionary; in Afghanistan, murdered by an unknown assailant.

ANGUS DUN, 79, retired Episcopal bishop of Washington, D. C., prominent theologian, former dean of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chairman of the committee that censured the late Bishop James A. Pike; in Washington, after a stroke.

CLAIR M. COOK, 59, Methodist minister, writer, former head of the Religion and Labor Council, administrative assistant to Senator Vance Hartke; in Washington, D. C., of a heart attack.

JAMES F. “PROPHET” JONES, 63, flamboyant millionaire who was Dominion Ruler of the Church of the Universal Triumph and prophesied that people will stop dying in the year 2000; in Detroit, after a stroke.

DONALD BLACKWELL, 24, youth counselor who went to Death Valley to fast forty days, read the Bible, and pray; in Death Valley, of unknown causes.

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