Liberation—Still The Agenda

Since most of the sixth annual convention of the 800-member National Committee of Black Churchmen was closed to the press, there were few things for reporters to write about. Executive director J. Metz Rollins, Jr., said discussion centered on a re-evaluation of the committee’s role in the black liberation movement. Seattle Baptist pastor Gil Lloyd was elected president.

Afterward, about one-third of the 150 clergymen and laymen attending staged a commemorative march from American Methodism’s first Methodist church, located on John Street in New York, to the site of the first African Methodist Episcopal church. Brooklyn A.M.E. Zion pastor Calvin B. Marshall recalled that 176 years earlier black founders of the A.M.E. church had left John Street to “find a place where they could worship God under their own vine and fig tree.” The black church is still struggling for the liberation of blacks, he asserted.

Rollins called on blacks to resist oppression “with whatever tool you have at hand.”

CHRISTMAS CHOICE

The United States Postal Service has again issued two Christmas stamps, one with a secular (Santa Claus) and one with a religious theme. The religious stamp depicts a detail from a National Gallery of Art painting, “Mary, Queen of Heaven,” by an unknown sixteenth-century painter. The print order calls for one billion stamps each, the largest ever for Christmas stamps or any other commemorative issue.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Singing In Our Church

Millions of television viewers know that God’s eye is on the sparrow because of a bubbling black woman who had all eyes on her at a testimonial-birthday dinner (she is 76) in Los Angeles last month. Accompanied by Billy Graham pianist Tedd Smith, Miss Ethel Waters sang the famous spiritual to the more than 1,000 wet-eyed attendants.

Among the guests were Billy Graham and his wife, Bop Hope, Hugh Downs, who served as master of ceremonies, Julie Harris, with whom the singer worked in Member of the Wedding, and Tricia Nixon Cox, representing the President and his family.

The tribute also marked Miss Waters’s sixty years in show business. Guests previewed Time to Run, a film of her life made by World Wide Pictures, an arm of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Organization.

Graham presented her with a silver plate engraved, “With love and appreciation for fifteen years of singing in our church.”

Learning The Hard Way

Oregon priest Emmet Harrington, director of education of the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, learned the hard way about the way it is in the Catholic Church.

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Harrington had released four doctrinal guideline booklets that, according to Archbishop Robert J. Dwyer, “did not conform to the doctrines of the church.” With that, the archbishop suspended the Catholic educator.

The offending pamphlets dealt with penance, baptism, confirmation, and communion. Dwyer said the booklet on baptism minimized the doctrine of original sin. The one on communion covered its aspect as a community meal but not as the sacrifice of Christ (the essence of the Mass), he asserted; it therefore minimized Catholic belief in the communion elements. As for the pamphlet on penance, the archbishop said it rejected the obligation for individual confession—contradicting a specific directive he had issued.

Dwyer reconsidered his decision after six days of conferences with Harrington and his staff. In a compromise statement the education director agreed to withdraw the controversial “source books” from circulation and to submit all future teaching materials first to the archbishop for approval.

One Million Watts

Application has been filed with the Federal Communications Commission by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) for permission to operate a one-million-watt shortwave radio station from a mountain on the island of Maui, Hawaii. If granted, it would be the most powerful privately owned shortwave station in the world, capable of covering most of the South Pacific and the Far East.

The FCC, however, has had a freeze on new applications for years because of a shortage of frequencies, the complicated technology involved, and the need for new rules, according to an FCC official. He says the new rules should be out by June. Frequencies are assigned through mutual agreement with other nations that have signed the International Radio Agreement. (The Communist-bloc nations have not signed.)

Currently there are only three private shortwave stations operating in the United States: WNYW, a Mormon station in Massachusetts beaming its programs to Europe; Far Eastern Broadcasting Company’s KGEA in Belmont, California, an evangelical missionary station; and WINB in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. The latter is owned by Bible Presbyterian minister John Norris of nearby York; it operates at 50,000 watts of power, beaming five hours of gospel and conservative political broadcasts daily to Africa and Europe. (Norris also owns WGCB of Red Lion, an AM station involved a few years ago in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision upholding the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine.”)

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The BGEA project has been on the drawing board for twelve years, said a spokesman. Building estimates exceed $2 million. A 1,100-acre site on the slopes of Mt. Kailili has already been acquired. If the facility is built, a curtain antenna will be suspended between two 500-foot towers on the property in order to radiate the million-watt signal. (The largest government-run stations operate at 250,000 watts.) Programming will include educational, news, and cultural broadcasts, as well as religious ones. Studios of KEIM will be used; it is a 5,000-watt AM station in Honolulu owned by evangelicals. Broadcasts will cover South Pacific islands never before reached by such a station, said the Graham spokesman.

In other radio matters, Moody Bible Institute has applied to the FCC for a license to operate a 100,000-watt educational FM station in southern Florida. WMUU-AM and WMUU-FM, operated by Bob Jones University, have refiled for license renewal (held up since 1969), claiming management is trying to hire blacks and increase minority-group programming. And a federal court upheld an FCC decision to withhold renewal from WXUR of Media, Pennsylvania, owned by Faith Seminary in suburban Philadelphia. The case’s central figure is controversial radio preacher Carl McIntire, Faith’s president and de facto station director.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Modest Ecumenism

Lutherans and Episcopalians have taken a “modest” step toward pulpit and altar fellowship. In a report released last month, theologians of both traditions unanimously recommended that intercommunion on the local level be initiated.

After three years of talks the nine Lutherans and nine Episcopalians stated that the two denominations are in essential agreement on the primacy and authority of the Bible, the doctrines of the two creeds, justification by grace through faith, baptism, and the apostolicity of the church, though the latter proved somewhat controversial. Traditionally, Episcopalians have doubted the validity of ordinations not performed by a bishop who was himself not ordained “in apostolic succession.”

Each side submitted a paper to the theological studies division of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. The Lutheran paper, signed by members representing the three major Lutheran bodies (the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), stated, “If we do not yet recommend complete altar and pulpit fellowship, we do believe that we have examined sufficient areas in sufficient depth, and have found sufficient agreement, to take the recommended modest steps.”

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A Lutheran press spokesman said that intercommunion on the local level is happening now “and has been happening for some time, but it’s extralegal.” Each of the Lutheran presidents must decide how he wants to handle the report. “It will take convention action to make it official policy” of the three participating bodies, the spokesman said. He added that this will probably be “very easy to get for the LCA and the ALC, though Missouri might balk.”

Recommending intercommunion before all doctrinal matters have been considered is “not the tradition among Lutherans,” the theologians said. Indeed, this is the very problem raised by Missouri in discussing union or pulpit and altar fellowship with the LCA and the ALC. If intercommunion is “officially” accepted, it may appear that Lutherans can agree more easily with Episcopalians than with one another.

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