Symphony—Or Cacophony? Lutherans Play It by Ear

The hoped-for symphony involving the 3.1-million-member Lutheran Church in America (LCA), the 2.5-million-member American Lutheran Church (ALC), and the 2.8-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) seems as far away now as it did three years ago. At least that was the feeling among many of the 681 delegates to the LCA’s sixth biennial convention, which met in Dallas earlier this month.

Dr. J. A. O. Preus, the Missouri Synod’s embattled president, greeted the delegates on Independence Day and declared Missouri Synod’s unwillingness to lose its freedom. He told the assembly that “we are not interested in organic union at the present time, feeling that such union can succeed and be a fruitful device for carrying out the Lord’s work only when it is founded on consensus in the doctrine of the Gospel and all its articles.” The traditional position within the LCA is that doctrinal talks are unnecessary, since the church holds to the Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Small Catechism. But the head of the more conservative sister church disagrees.

Preus explained that the LCMS’s hesitation grows out of “genuine ecumenical concern—not narrowness” and that the “refusal to extend the hand of fellowship must sometimes be done for the sake of the Gospel, on behalf of the entire church.” He applauded the LCA’s and the ALC’s decision to participate in new theological discussions and quoted LCA president Robert J. Marshall’s recommendation that the church reconsider its theological affirmations. “Affirmations,” however, was too weak a word for Preus; he suggested to Marshall that the LCA draw up “guidelines”—“or call them anything you like, but not merely affirmations.” “That’s just a suggestion,” he added, amid laughter and applause.

During Marshall’s press conference after Preus’s speech, the LCA president said Preus was more distant from Lutheran union than “I would like.… But we’re no more willing to compromise our theology than is the Missouri Synod Church.”

The question of Lutheran union first came before the convention several days prior to Preus’s greetings. The LCA, considering restructure (most of the week-long convention was spent discussing, approving, and reconsidering bylaw and constitutional amendments), was uncertain whether a change in organization would hinder further talks with the ALC. Kent S. Knutson, president of that denomination, was asked to answer that question.

“I’m glad I have access to the floor. Do I have a vote?” asked Knutson.

“Not yet,” replied Marshall. But it seemed from the reception the delegates gave Knutson that such a vote might not be far away.

Knutson assured the delegates that restructure wouldn’t hinder further Lutheran unity. He emphasized that the ALC, which enjoys pulpit and altar fellowship with both the LCA and the LCMS (those two churches don’t, as yet, have pulpit and altar fellowship with each other), wants union with both Lutheran groups (a traditional stand that could change, report ALC observers). Although the LCMS has declined to participate at this time in the Inter-Lutheran Consultation for Achieving Common Organizational Structures, it will send official observers. The ALC has been involved in restructure studies for several years; at the last convention it appointed four members to serve on the Inter-Lutheran Consultation.

Dr. George Forell of Iowa City, Iowa, professor of religion at the State University of Iowa, suggested to delegates that they issue an immediate invitation to the ALC for merger, adding, “Let’s forget about the Missouri Synod. Everyone knows they’re going their own way.” His suggestion was greeted with thunderous applause.

Forell was one of the most vocal opponents of restructure, which was given first-reading approval. At the next biennial convention, to be held in Baltimore, the church will have to approve it again. The new organization could not go into effect until at least 1975.

The new structure and function would reduce the number of church boards and agencies and do away with a large biennial convention. Instead, a smaller, 250-member annual legislative convention would be held. Some delegates expressed concern that too much power would be given to a few people; there was some talk of a compromise—an annual legislative convention plus a large quadrennial meeting.

LCA president Marshall sees the church moving toward “a more episcopal form of government.” In his report to the convention he recommended the new function and structure, and called for two changes in title, synod president to “bishop” and convention president to “presiding bishop.” Marshall stressed that the term “bishop” would emphasize the pastoral rather than the political or administrative duties of church leaders. But in a surprise vote during the convention’s final session, the measure failed by a mere fifty votes to receive the needed two-thirds majority. The issue, according to some observers, is likely to come up again. The ALC in 1970 approved use of the title on an experimental basis.

Another divisive issue is the rise of Pentecostalism. Dr. Walter Wick, president of the Indiana-Kentucky synod, reports that many Lutherans are being converted to the charismatic movement by Catholic Pentecostals. Marshall appointed a special commission to study the problem.

Additionally, the delegates adopted statements on ecology and social justice, the latter a controversial paper calling for forthright efforts to ordain ex-convicts. The convention also approved a budget of $30.7 million for 1973 and $31.4 million for 1974.

If the three Lutheran bodies are having some trouble getting together on an organizational and hierarchical basis, they are cooperating on the local level in social, welfare, and educational endeavors. While Lutheran adults discuss structure, LCA young people through Key 73 are trying to improve relations among the three groups.

The LCA has developed a strong program for Key 73. Early in the convention a special late-evening session was held to celebrate “the year of evangelism,” which is to begin with a kickoff “Come Together Sunday” in December. New Jersey pastor Frank D. Fry, son of the late Franklin Clark Fry (the LCA’s first president), keynoted the Key 73 presentation. He gave a Lutheran-styled Jesus cheer (“J-E-S-U-S is the Christ!”), the closest anyone came to overt excitement about evangelism throughout the convention.

Nevertheless, some of the younger delegates felt disappointed. Twenty-year-old Kathleen Peterson told the convention she was “disillusioned at the lack of concern for the church’s real mission, which is to win souls to Jesus Christ.” In an interview she commented, “I don’t think anyone here really understands what Key 73 means.”

Meeting at the same time as the regular convention, youthful Convo 72—some observers called it a Lutheran version of Explo ’72—drew nearly 300 young people to study evangelism and to learn to work within the church.

Among Lutheran youth working in Key 73, 17-year-old Nancy Schoenfeld of Parsippany, New Jersey, is one of the most outspoken. She is chairman of the evangelism committee (and the only young person on it) at her home church. “We’re getting too hung up on numbers,” she commented. Some of the church people, she said, see Key 73 as a chance to bring in more church members—make Lutherans instead of Christians. But that isn’t her idea. “We’ve got to be willing to lose members during our year of evangelism emphasis to win some to Christ.”

The big youth involvement in Key 73 will come in August next year. Miss Schoenfeld expressed hope that it will be the start of a real “coming together” for all three Lutheran bodies. Mass evangelism rallies with rock as well as gospel music will be featured at “The All-Lutheran Youth Gathering” in Houston’s Astrodome, to which the LCA has invited ALC and LCMS young people. “The one thing we will avoid—tactfully, I hope—is holding communion services, so that the Missouri Synod kids can participate,” she said. (Communion was held frequently at Convo 72.) Miss Schoenfeld hopes the kids can pull off the unity that continues to elude the adults.

Nazarenes: Touch And Grow

While workmen were still getting the Miami Beach convention hall in shape for the national political conventions, more than 25,000 Nazarenes (640 of them voting delegates) moved in for their church’s eighteenth General Assembly. Florida governor Reubin Askew, Democratic keynoter and an evangelical, welcomed the visitors and bade them to “spread the healing touch of the Gospel throughout the world.”

Though unmanned, the three giant television booths installed for the political conventions suggested that the world was looking in. Occasionally, the oratory seemed to respond to the outside stimulus. General Superintendent George Coulter in a State of the Church message called for an application of the Christian touch “to the needs of suffering humanity.”

Members of the Church of the Nazarene have traditionally hewn to a rigorous gospel, abstaining from the world, urging church loyalty, maintaining a strict conservatism while trying to extend that healing touch. The denomination reached out to divorced persons and voted overwhelmingly to admit “repentant” divorced persons into church membership, an action which in reality only brought the church manual into line with widespread practice.

But neo-Pentecostalism was something else. Although speakers affirmed that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross,” no official room was allowed in the quadrant of meetings for members interested in glossolalia. A small but growing number of Nazarene ministers and laymen during recent months have professed receiving the gift. A move to get assembly approval of a hard-nosed statement against the practice was sidetracked. This prevented even a discussion of the charismatic phenomenon.

The issue may have had a bearing on the election of a successor to retiring general superintendent Samuel Young. Support for William Greathouse, president of Kansas City’s Nazarene Seminary who led through seven ballots, faltered after he failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority. Prior to the voting a local newspaper story branded Greathouse a moderate on the tongues issue. But moderation on this issue was clearly not in the minds of the delegates, scores of whom have devoted part of their ministry to keeping their congregations free from ecstatic speech.

Instead, on the fifteenth ballot—the longest election in the church’s history—front-runners were bypassed for a compromise candidate, Charles Strickland, a 56-year-old former missionary who heads Nazarene Bible College in Colorado Springs. Said to be a cautious conservative, he joins five incumbents (re-elected with virtually no opposition) on the Board of General Superintendents. The board is responsible for administrative policy for both foreign and domestic work.

Coulter, president of the board, reported that the past quadrennium had been a period of growth. Per capita giving jumped from $203 to $235, enabling the church to surpass its $30 million world evangelism budget goal by $1.4 million. More than 100,000 new members were received during the four years, resulting in a net gain of 11.3 per cent and pushing total membership past the half-million mark for the first time. Nearly 200 new churches were added; there are now about 6,350.

In a related meeting, 5,000 Nazarene church school workers listened to minister Paul Moore of New Milford, New Jersey, knock the spending of “billions of dollars” on “elaborate Sunday-school facilities used but a few hours weekly.” He suggested as an alternative neighborhood Bible classes where the teacher hosts a group at a mutually convenient time. Members of his church conduct twenty of these classes, he said, with attendance exceeding those held in the church building.

In a meeting of 4,000 youths Moore lambasted the faddism associated with the Jesus movement, charging that the movement “is being co-opted from every direction.” Young Christians must go beyond the “highs” and commit themselves to serious Bible study, prayer, witnessing, and fellowship, he declared. (Moore’s Maranatha Nazarene Church is the largest Jesus movement center in the Northeast; more than 5,000 young people have been converted there in the past two years, according to reports. Recently he persuaded Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, to set up an extension department near his church to offer theological training to movement people.)

Maranatha singer Ike McKinnon urged his comrades to “leave a little of the Holy Spirit’s influence here” for the Democrats and Republicans. “He can show them how to lead our country.” he affirmed.

ELDEN RAWLINGS

Amazing

A 200-year-old American hymn tune, with words by a former English slave trader, played by, of all things, a Scottish bagpipe band, is the runaway hit record of 1972 in Canada and Britain. “Amazing Grace,” performed by the regimental pipes and drums of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (a British cavalry regiment), was recently the number-one record in Britain and now tops charts in Canada. Sales in the United States are brisk but have apparently peaked, say industry spokesmen.

More than 100,000 copies of the 45 rpm single sold in Canada within three weeks of release, and sales of the band’s long-play album total half that. Amazing, says a distributing company official.

BARRIE DOYLE

The Anguish Of Agnes

Only three weeks after Rapid City, South Dakota, experienced the worst flood in the state’s history—and churches and organizations were just starting to make some headway in relief efforts—tropical storm Agnes hit the East Coast, causing the worst flooding there in the nation’s history. Scores of churches and parsonages were destroyed, and many church members were among the dead and uprooted.

The Assemblies of God alone suffered property losses in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area exceeding $1 million. Forty-two United Methodist churches in central Pennsylvania were ravaged. Flood waters swept through the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s publishing facility in Harrisburg, ruining $300,000 worth of printed material.

As the waters subsided, relief poured in from many denominations and groups. Money remained the biggest need. Food, clothing, and muscle power were abundantly provided. For instance, 400 Southern Baptist volunteers helped families in the Harrisburg area rebuild homes. Salvation Army volunteers and disaster teams were at work throughout New York and Pennsylvania.

Immediate relief help in the central Pennsylvania area came from Mennonite and Amish workers. More than 500 volunteers, some of them working through the Mennonite Disaster Service, shouldered shovels and brooms to help disaster victims dig out from under the debris. The workers refused to be photographed and resisted interviews. “We don’t want publicity,” explained an Amishman from Lancaster County.

Mormons Move On

Elder Harold B. Lee, 73, a former school principal, businessman, and first director of the widely hailed Mormon welfare program, has been named president of the three-million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was appointed this month, less than a week after the death of Joseph Fielding Smith, 95, president since 1970. (In Mormon belief, the president is the channel of continuing revelation from God.)

Lee, at 73 the youngest Mormon president in forty years, has been credited with masterminding a reorganization of the Utah-based church that resulted in a doubling of its world-wide membership in the last ten years.

Recent figures show the church has jumped more than 50 per cent to 2.1 million in the United States alone, to become one of the twelve biggest churches in the country. The Mormons recently announced a complete revamping of their supervisory structure to cope with the accelerating growth. The revamp applies particularly to the training program for the church’s estimated 12,000 mostly short-term self-supporting missionaries.

Now There Are Two

A Canadian Presbyterian church that has been under guidance of a General Assembly-appointed commission since it was torn apart over the charismatic issue has called a former Pentecostal as its pastor. The new minister of First Presbyterian in New Westminster, British Columbia, is Kenneth Wheaton, 36, of Toronto. He was ordained under the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada before becoming a Presbyterian a few years ago.

The 500-member congregation split after the assembly commission called for the “dissolving of the pastoral tie” between the church and its charismatic pastor, Calvin Chambers. Half the congregation followed Chambers and now worship in nearby rented quarters as the “First Continuing Presbyterian Church.” Chambers remains a minister in good standing of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and various officials say that no action against him is currently contemplated.

Controversy reached the national level after the Westminster Presbytery responded to evidence that First Church’s session was divided over Chamber’s approach to charismatic matters. Charles Jackson, another Pentecostal-background Presbyterian minister in the area, disagreed with a presbytery decision to ask Chambers either to cease overt charismatic promotion or to resign. Jackson appealed to the General Assembly, which in response appointed the commission a year ago. The commission ordered Chambers’s removal in November, stating that because of the controversy he could no longer minister to the whole congregation. The body will serve in its watchdog role for another year.

Wheaton said he left his former denomination when he realized he simply “was not a Pentecostal.” He maintained, however, that he has no animosity toward charismatics and will adopt a live-and-let-live attitude toward the nearby group pastored by Chambers.

For his part, Chambers conjectured that Wheaton is a charismatic like himself. “The sad thing is that Mr. Wheaton may be coming to a congregation which denies the reality of these [charismatic] gifts and has expressed its intolerance in removing the minister and all the congregation who did not agree with them,” Chambers said in a letter published in the Columbian, the New Westminster daily paper.

Various presbytery officials noted, however, that some charismatic families remain in First Church. They pointed out that the church complaint was not over charismatic practices but over the alleged downgrading of other church members by charismatics.

LLOYD MACKEY

Convention Circuit

Spring and summer months are crowded with church conventions and conferences. Here are the facts and figures on some of them:

General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. Messengers to the forty-first annual meeting in San Diego, California, voted unanimously to oppose “ecumenical evangelism” as represented by Key 73 because it “opens the doors to confusion.” The church also announced that thirty-eight congregations joined them but that twenty-one others exited for various reasons, including disagreement with the denomination’s separatist stance. (The 1,400 GARB churches have 250,000 members.)

The delegates commended California for requiring that a creationist view of science be given validity in state schools, recommended standard use of the King James Bible and urged that great care be taken with modern versions, applauded President Nixon for his Viet Nam stand, denied the theory of evolution, opposed the abolition of capital punishment, and spoke out against anti-Semitism in both America and Russia.

Reformed Church in America. The RCA General Synod overwhelmingly selected a layman as president—only the second in the church’s history and the first in thirty-five years—in the annual meeting at Loudonville, New York. Harry De Bruyn, a 40-year-old Chicago-area lawyer, was chosen on the first ballot. Delegates of the 385,000-member church approved women’s serving as elders and deacons by removing the word “male” from position qualifications, approved a $4 million benevolence budget despite a current deficit, and voted to stay out of the Consultation on Church Union.

African Methodist Episcopal Church. Charges and counter-charges of malfeasance and misadministration were bounced back and forth during the twelve-day quadrennial convention in Dallas of the 1.6-million-member black denomination. The 1,200 delegates heard charges against four bishops: John Bright of New York, E. L. Hickman of Georgia, H. N. Robinson of Alabama, and W. F. Ball of South Carolina. All were acquitted except Ball, who maintained his innocence. Ball, president of the AME Church General Board, was twice in the past two years ousted from office—and twice reinstated. He was bounced again.

On the convention’s final day, Bishop Bright, 55, who was a champion of South African liberation and was twice named by Ebony as one of the 100 most powerful black men in America, collapsed on stage of a heart attack and died a short time later.

The convention adopted a $12 million budget for the 1973–76 quadrennium and elected eight new—and younger—bishops to office.

Christian Reformed Church. After a year-long denomination-wide debate on the nature and extent of the Bible’s authority, the 148 delegates at the annual synod in Grand Rapids declared by an overwhelming vote that the Bible is “the self-authenticating … saving revelation of God in Jesus Christ.” While acknowledging that God is the source of the Scriptures, the synod also recognized that the peculiar nature and extent of scriptural authority derives from what God has done in history.

In a hotly contested decision, the synod ruled that abortion is a murderous act except when continuing a pregnancy would endanger the mother’s life. But the delegates also decreed that those who in crisis resort to abortion should be dealt with not judgmentally but with loving concern.

The body adopted a $10 million budget for the 285,000-member denomination and elected Grand Rapids pastor Clarence Boomsma president.

On the ecumenical side, the CRC synod gave its blessing to plans for a two-day meeting this fall with the Reformed Church in America. Discussion will center on the reasons the CRC left the RCA in 1857. This will be the first such confrontation in the 115-year separation. But the delegates decided to discontinue frustrating efforts toward union with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Canadian Reformed Churches. Although not itself a member of the World Council of Churches, the synod instructed its delegates to the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, of which it is a member, to oppose any efforts by the RES in its summer meeting in Australia to oust the Gereformeerde Kerken of the Netherlands because of its WCC membership.

Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America. Ashen-faced Archbishop Iakovos of New York announced to the 1,000 delegates and guests at an anniversary dinner for Athenagoras I, 86-year-old patriarch of the 200-million-member Greek Orthodox Church, that the primate was dead. Spontaneously the delegates to the twenty-first biennial congress began singing, “May His Spirit Be Eternal.” Athenagoras, the first Greek patriarch to meet with a Roman pope since the fifteenth century, died in Istanbul of kidney failure caused by a fall he suffered several days earlier.

A special plenary session that lasted until midnight adopted all the housekeeping resolutions on the agenda; then the congress adjourned.

The Turkish-born Iakovos, considered a major contender for election to the office of patriarch, was denied entrance into Turkey for Athenagoras’s funeral, presumably a Muslim-motivated move.

Evangelical Free Church of America. The nearly 900 delegates to the 64,000-member church’s eighth General Conference, meeting on the campus of Trinity College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, heard encouraging reports of the schools’ and denomination’s physical and financial growth. The schools, recently rumored to be in deep financial trouble, have raised $800,000 of the $900,000 needed to balance their budget, reported Harry L. Evans. Also, $250,000 was shaved from next year’s needs through “frugalities” and other measures. He added that enrollment has increased.

The delegates passed resolutions against: legalizing marijuana, offering indiscriminate amnesty to draft evaders, abortion on demand, the occult, and homosexuality (but churches were urged to show “love” and “concern” for homosexuals). They resoundingly approved participation in Key 73.

Church of the Brethren. Budget problems highlighted the annual meeting at Cincinnati; four staff persons, including the 181,000-member church’s news editor, were released and two others deployed to non-staff positions. The changes were intended to make a dent in a $200,000 deficit and bring a balanced 1973 budget within reach.

The church approved plans for entering an “associated relationship” with the American Baptist Convention to increase cooperation between the two without destroying denominational autonomy. The 1,000 delegates waffled on abortion, opposing it because it destroyed fetal life but agreeing it should be accepted as an option where other choices lead to greater loss of life. They voted to sell all stocks and bonds the church has in defense industries.

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