Up from Bedlam?

United Methodists adjusted their theological base last month, legislating a major change in their Book of Discipline that charts a course “between doctrinal dogmatism … and doctrinal indifferentism.”

“We do not possess infallible rules to follow, or reflex habits that suffice, or precedents for simple imitation,” says a newly conceived theological statement. The 4,800-word statement was designed to be included in the Discipline along with John Wesley’s Articles of Religion of 1784, his General Rules, and the Confession of Faith of the old Evangelical United Brethren Church.

Delegates to the United Methodist General Conference,United Methodism’s supreme legislative assembly, which, though normally quadrennial, has met every two years since 1964 because of heavy press of business. meeting in Atlanta, approved the package with virtually no debate by a signed but secret ballot of 925 to 17.

Also part of the package is a section entitled “Historical Background” which notes that “by the end of the nineteenth century, and thereafter increasingly in the twentieth, Methodist theology had become decidedly eclectic, with less and less specific attention paid to its specific Wesleyan sources as such. Despite continued and quite variegated theological development, there has been no significant project in formal doctrinal reformulation in Methodism since 1808.”

The package was put together by a thirty-six-member commission headed by the theological elder statesman of United Methodism, Professor Albert C. Outler of Perkins School of Theology, Dallas. He described it as an effort to clear up some of the theological “bedlam” in the church, but said the new theological statement should not be regarded as a creed.

The “Historical Background” argues that Wesley and the early Methodists had a collegial formula for doctrinal guidance that was unique in Christendom. “It committed the Methodist people to the biblical revelation as primary without proposing a literal summary of that revelation in any single propositional form. It anchored Methodist theology to a stable core, but allowed it freedom of movement in the further unfoldings of history.” Thus, though doctrinal statements are said to be “landmarks in our complex heritage,” they “never have been and ought not to be legal tests for membership.”

Nevertheless, the explanation continues, there is an identifiable “marrow” of Christian truth that “must be conserved.… This living core … stands revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience and confirmed by reason.”

The commission’s task was especially difficult in that, as every Methodist knows, Wesley and his early followers insisted that there be no changes in the doctrinal standards they laid down. Yet, as every Methodist also knows, and as the new theological statement observes, “the theological spectrum in The United Methodist Church ranges over all the current mainstream options and a variety of special-interest theologies as well.” The statement goes on to say that “this is no new thing. Our founders supported what Wesley called ‘catholic spirit.’ ”

Facing this perplexity, the commission chose a line of thought that is at best close reasoning and at worst sheer paradox: “Our newer historical consciousness allows us to retain the various landmarks of our several heritages, interpreting them in historical perspective. Similarly, our awareness of the transcendent mystery of divine truth allows us in good conscience to acknowledge the positive virtues of doctrinal pluralism even within the same community of believers, not merely because such an attitude is realistic.”

The commission’s statement declares that “there is a core of doctrine which informs in greater or less degree our widely divergent interpretations,” but that “core” is not identified.

The statement merely says that “from our response in faith to the wondrous mystery of God’s love in Jesus Christ as recorded in Scripture, all valid Christian doctrine is born. This is the touchstone by which all Christian teaching may be tested.”

The two-week General Conference worked its way through a maze of issues, including consideration of a new social creed and an organizational restructure. Some 20,000 petitions from individuals, churches, and groups had to be dealt with. Approximately 15,000 of these were stimulated by Good News, the increasingly potent evangelical force in United Methodism.

But the theological package was the historic highlight of the sessions. Entitled “Our Theological Task” and subtitled “The Gospel in a New Age,” the new doctrinal statement was four years in the making. It touches upon a number of traditional Christian doctrines, including the Trinity, salvation, “life in the Spirit,” and Scripture.

“An active stress on conversion and the new birth” is listed under “Distinctive Emphases of United Methodists.” “Whatever our language or labels for it, we hold that a decisive change in the human heart can and does occur under the promptings of grace and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Such a change may be sudden, dramatic, gradual, cumulative.”

The view of Scripture is essentially Barthian. The Bible is called “the deposit of a unique testimony to God’s self-disclosures.” but a distinction between Scripture and the Word of God is clearly implied.

If the statement is taken seriously by the nation’s 10.6 million Methodists, they will have their work cut out for them. It says: “In charting a course between doctrinal dogmatism on the one hand and doctrinal indifferentism on the other, The United Methodist Church expects all its members to accept the challenge of responsible theological reflection.”

The statement notes that “of current importance is the surfacing of new theological emphases focusing on the great struggles for human liberation and fulfillment. Notable among them are black theology, female liberation theology, political and ethnic theologies, third-world theology, and theologies of human rights.… The United Methodist Church encourages such developments so long as they are congruent with the gospel and its contemporary application. However, no special-interest theology can be allowed to set itself in invidious judgment over against any or all of the others, or claim exemption from being critically assessed in the general theological forum.”

Environmentalists will be disappointed that no attempt was made to tie in biblical injunctions regarding stewardship with the doctrine of Creation.

Black Evangelicals: Keeping It Together

More than 100 registrants attended the annual business sessions of the National Negro Evangelical Association (NNEA) in Jackson, Mississippi, last month, with hundreds of local church members listening in at evening sessions. They discussed busing and President Nixon but passed no resolutions.

Emphasis was given to implementation of the Gospel in society and to the necessity of keeping body and soul together in evangelism.

Chicago pastor-professor William Bentley, re-elected president, said he attended a recent black political caucus in Gary, Indiana, and saw “the vacuum that exists when there is no Gospel.”

As for cooperation with white evangelicals, delegates decided they had run the gamut of rhetoric with inadequate response and must now do “what has to be done” alone.

Thousands attended a Saturday-night youth rally addressed by evangelist Tom Skinner, named NNEA board chairman, and hundreds professed faith in Christ. NNEA leaders say they see an upsurge of spiritual interest among young blacks that they must do something about.

Social-Action Shakeup

The United Church of Christ recently announced it was firing its entire social-concerns division staff of sixteen and would reorganize the department along more modest lines to service local church needs.

At the annual ministers’ meeting of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, NACCC executive secretary John H. Alexander said the UCC action was a recognition of growing grass-roots discontent with controversial social-political statements and activities initiated by the UCC’s social-concerns people.

The action may be traceable in part to renewed interest in congregational autonomy at the local level, which in turn was triggered by study of the proposed Consultation on Church Union (COCU) plan to merge ten denominations—including the UCC.

The fifteen-year-old NACCC, says Alexander, has survived long enough to show that it can provide fellowship for churches valuing local autonomy.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Nigeria: Evangelism Now

Response to the Gospel in a former war zone in Nigeria is “phenomenal,” according to a recent Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) dispatch.

At Enugu, rebel capital during the recent civil war, a church affiliated with the SIM-related Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA) is holding three Sunday-morning services to accommodate crowds of nearly 1,000.

“Entire communities are turning to Christ,” report missionaries. With some ECWA pastors now serving five or more churches, the ECWA—to meet urgent demands for leadership—has reopened a Bible school at Aba that had closed during the war. Seventy are enrolled. Meanwhile, graduates of crash courses in evangelism for laymen are instructing new converts in outlying districts. At the first women’s conference of the ECWA, held a few months ago at Aba, more than 100 women spent afternoons in neighborhood evangelism, reportedly leading many to Christ.

And at a week-long school of evangelism in Keffi, sponsored by New Life For All, students—mostly pastors—led 599 to Christ.

Libya Releases Evangelists

Under pressure from the U. S. State Department and the king of Belgium, the Libyan government finally ordered the release from prison last month of four young men affiliated with Operation Mobilization, an international evangelistic organization. The four were arrested last August while handing out tracts in Tripoli, sentenced to four years in jail, and fined $300 each. They were convicted of importing literature without a license, giving false reasons for entry into the country, and endangering public peace.

James Geisler and Clinton Smith of the United States, Henri Daniels of Belgium, and George Salameh of Lebanon said that they had a good lawyer and were treated well in prison but that a letter-writing campaign by Americans imperiled their chances of release. All four are back at work evangelizing in other countries. Smith’s wife bore their first child while he was in jail, and Salameh had to postpone his wedding set for last September.

Worst Mission Crash

Fire in the starboard engine of a Piper Aztec followed by an explosion that tore away the right wing resulted in the first air tragedy for the Wycliffe Translators—affiliated Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS). Seven persons, including five missionaries, died in the New Guinea crash, the worst missionary aviation disaster in history.

Those dead: veteran JAARS missionary pilot Doug Hunt; Darlene Bee, a Wycliffe translator for the Usarufa tribe; Oren and Francine Claassen, translators for the Rawa tribe; short-term missionary Kathleen McNeil of New Zealand; and two New Guinea tribespeople.

Dr. Bee’s irreplaceable manuscripts containing important data on the difficult New Guinea highland languages were recovered. Usarufa tribespeople asked that she be buried in their village; men of the village served as pallbearers.

Visiting Episcopal clergyman W. Graham Pulkingham of Houston conducted a memorial service at the Wycliffe base.

Religion In Transit

The Internal Revenue Service says it may reject deductibility of contributions to a number of private Christian high schools and academies in the South for alleged segregationist admission policies.

That ad for priesthood students in Playboy a while back is paying off. Of 600 inquiries so far, twenty-eight young men may be studying for the priesthood by next month, says a spokesman for the manpower-short Order of the Most Holy Trinity in Maryland.

Faculty members clashed with officials of the (Catholic) University of Dayton who rejected a $65,000 federal grant to study male fertility because it required masturbation for collecting sperm samples.

Five Protestant leaders in the Massachusetts Council of Churches spoke out sharply against Catholic archbishop Humberto S. Medeiros’s stand against birth control, calling it “repugnant.”

President Nixon will not address the Southern Baptist Convention next month after all because, say spokesmen, he may still be touring the Middle East after his visit to Russia. A number of church members had criticized the proposed convention appearance.

A ten-day crusade in Mobile, Alabama, led by Texas evangelist James Robison recorded 2,395 professions of faith among the 70,000 in attendance.

Thirty-five new churches were received into the Baptist Missionary Association of America at its annual meeting in Houston. Messengers spoke out for separatism and against tongues in a doctrinal statement they adopted. The denomination has 1,500 churches with 200,000 members in twenty-nine states.

More than 12,000 persons jammed into a Kansas City (Missouri) Youth For Christ rally to hear celebrities and to view the burning of a $600,000 mortgage on YFC’s auditorium in the suburbs. Kansas City YFC, with its 140 high-school YFC clubs, is reputedly the largest YFC branch in the country, and is now producing television shows.

The spread of venereal disease has become so serious, says the New York State Council of Churches, that it will now support legislation allowing the sale of prophylactics to persons under age 16.

Many National Council of Churches officers and denominational leaders have scored American escalation of the war in Indochina. But the grass roots may support President Nixon. Delegates to the annual convention of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Texas rejected 373 to 118 a resolution that criticized American bombing and urged withdrawal of U. S. forces.

A shakeup of sorts may be under way at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. It has been brought into closer alignment with the college division—and with Evangelical Free Church policy. Graduate programs may be cut back. At least one professor has resigned over the rearrangement.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court ruling in Missouri that the state constitution could prohibit the use of public funds for church-related schools, and that denial of state funds does not violate the religious rights of the parents of children.

Berkeley’s controversial Free Church, funded since its founding in 1967 by Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, closed its doors amid staff firings and verbal blasts at director Richard York by the street people he worked with.

Personalia

Reformed Church in America executive secretary Arlie R. Brouwer has declined to serve as president of his denomination’s two seminaries.

After near unanimous opposition from the ten seminaries of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Jesuit Albert R. Jonsen declined a board invitation to become GTU’s acting president. Jonsen resigned in 1969 as president of the University of San Francisco amid a no-confidence vote by the USF board and complaints about his handling of finances.

Evangelist Billy Graham was awarded the 1972 Franciscan International Award for “true ecumenism.”

Hair music director Rick Shorter tells how he found Jesus in a special 250,000-copy evangelistic edition of Insight, a Seventh-day Adventist youth paper to be handed out at Explo 72 and elsewhere. Shorter now runs an SDA drop-in center in Greenwich Village.

Frank P. Sanders, an elder of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., has been nominated by President Nixon to be undersecretary of the Navy. He is active in many evangelical causes.

Former Anglican dean of Johannesburg Gonville ffrench-Beytagh flew to London after a South African appeals court quashed his five-year prison sentence on charges of subversion.

World Scene

Burgeoning Indonesian churches (Protestants have doubled to six million in the last five years) are sending missionaries throughout the land. One team working with the Karo Bataks reports that the local church increased by 40,000 in one year.

More than 100 missionaries from eight American denominations serving in India issued a statement that sharply criticizes the United States for supporting the “anti-democratic forces” of West Pakistan instead of India and Bangladesh in the recent conflict.

John Newton’s 1779-vintage hymn “Amazing Grace” set to an old Scotch tune topped the song popularity charts in Europe last month.

Reuters news service reports that both Protestant and Catholic church services have resumed in Peking after a long break during the Cultural Revolution. Easter services at two churches were attended by about thirty persons each.

More than 15,000 youths from eighty countries visited the Taizé religious community in France during the Easter weekend for prayer and small-group sharing.

After the biggest national church convention in Zambia’s history, delegates from twenty-five denominations—nearly half of them evangelical—called on churches to help develop the nation.

Unless President Nixon takes action by the middle of May to free American prisoners of war in Indochina, Illinois fundamentalist minister Paul Lindstrom says his elite commando unit of 105 American volunteers and thirteen foreign mercenaries will storm Communist POW camps and release the prisoners themselves. Lindstrom issued his vow in Saigon last month.

Deaths

ESTHER BACON, 56, Lutheran Church in America missionary nurse who delivered more than 20,000 babies during her thirty years in Liberia; in Zorzor, Liberia, of lass fever, a newly discovered virus found in West Africa.

JOHN DIXON, 84, retired Anglican archbishop of Montreal; in Montreal.

ERLING EIDEM, 91, archbishop emeritus of the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden and one of the first presidents of the World Council of Churches; in Vanorsborg, Sweden.

J. ARTHUR RANK, 83, Methodist layman and British film czar who used biblical themes in many of his motion pictures; in Winchester, England.

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