The NCC: Going Deeper

Although temporal concerns have been the mainstay of the National Council of Churches throughout its twenty-four-year history, there have also been brief spurts of interest in the spiritual side of life. The NCC’s Governing Board witnessed the latest such attempt at a semi-annual meeting in New York last month. For the first time, the NCC staff is attempting to draw up a definitive policy statement on evangelism. A pair of new papers have already been prepared as resource materials for the evangelism statement.

NCC general secretary Claire Randall indicated she was thinking of the move as part of what she called a “search for transcendence.” The board had authorized establishment of a working group on evangelism, complete with paid staff if funds are forthcoming, at a meeting earlier this year.

Ms. Randall said the NCC would not abandon its advocacy role for the poor and needy. But she added that “we have to move to struggling more specifically with deeper areas of concern.” She cited growing demands for consideration of “another kind of life style” and the need for exploring “the peculiar responsibility of the church having to do with the meaning of life.”

Underlining the latter point was Dr. Curtis Roosevelt, head of the United Nations liaison with non-government organizations (appropriately enough on the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of his late great grandmother Eleanor). “In my arena,” said Roosevelt, “I do not observe any religious organizations acting as if they understood their unique role.” He said that the present style of Christian religious organizations was either aping or competing with foreign offices or a style indistinguishable from social organizations.

“Someone has to begin speaking to the major issues of our day … in terms of who are we, where we came from and where we are going,” Roosevelt declared. Role clarification might be aided, he suggested, by asking about “the balance between expressing the opinion of your membership and expressing the opinion of the ‘enlightened elite’ of the institutional leadership, its bureaucracy and governing body.”

Ms. Randall said a special meeting is planned which will bring together leaders to discuss the issue.

At a news conference at the close of the three-day board meeting Ms. Randall also referred to a panel on the future of ecumenism, saying she expected the NCC to be “moving in the directions suggested there.” Specifically cited were comments made by the Reverend Arie Brouwer, executive secretary of the Reformed Church in America. Brouwer headed a task force which sought unsuccessfully for a radical restructure of the NCC several years ago. He is now voicing an urgent appeal for the cultivation of “a national ecumenical ethos.”

This, he says, means the articulation of such ecumenical aspirations of peace, love, faith, human dignity, hope, and joy “in the symbols, myths and realities of the Christian faith.… I want something that is experiential, confessional, and testimonial. I am talking about an ethos that comes out of a community—an extension of the liturgy.” Brouwer added that he thought that there were many in and out of the NCC who were ready for implementing such a concept. He did not elaborate, however, any more explicitly as to what he had in mind, except to say that he opposed the idea of ecumenical life being dominated by structure.

In one of the papers on evangelism, David James Randolph, a United Methodist executive, argues for an “alternate evangelism” that would be neither crusade evangelism nor social action. “Social transformation” is nonetheless one of the terms used to describe it, along with “celebration” and “interpretation.”

In the other evangelism paper, Robert C. Campbell, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches, contends that the term “evangelism” describes two things: “the total activity of God in Jesus Christ and His collaboration with His people reshaping personal, group, and institutional life toward the New Creation” and “the life style of those who respond to the total activity of God in Jesus Christ.”

Evangelical leaders are not believed likely to hail such theologizing as a stride toward transcendence. However, staff writer Elliott Wright of Religious News Service unearthed a penitently-worded confidential statement which he says “strongly suggests” that ecumenical and evangelical leaders are drawing closer together. The statement, adopted by the NCC’s Division of Church and Society, expressed “a deep feeling of kinship” with the Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns drawn up in Chicago by participants at last year’s ad hoc “Thanksgiving Workshop.” Wright quotes the statement as confessing a lack of love for “those who have disagreed with us on the need to transform the structures of society. We have been too often inclined to criticize or ignore those who have tended to emphasize the personal rather than the structural.”

Wright describes the statement as recognizing the shortcomings and defects in the ways the more ecumenical Christians have gone about seeking a just society. He quotes it as saying, “While we do not in any way recede from our continuing determination to seek justice for all of God’s children, we acknowledge that we have not sufficiently shown this determination to be rooted in Christ’s Gospel.”

It was understood that the statement would be sent to the Thanksgiving Workshop coordinator, Dr. Ronald J. Sider. A second meeting of the workshop group is scheduled this month.

Actually, the Governing Board never did take any action on evangelism as such. Neither did it surface any concern over the dismissal of six key executives of the NCC (see July 26 issue, p. 37). Newly-hired staff members were introduced to the board as part of a personnel committee report but no mention was made of how the positions came to be vacant. Finally, as the last act before adjournment, a board member asked for the floor and read off the names of those who are leaving and they were applauded for past services.

In other action, the board adopted resolutions expressing what it terms the “inadequacies” of President Ford’s amnesty program, demanding suspension of U. S. aid to Brazil, Chile, Philippines, the Republic of Korea and any other recipient governments “as long as each persists in the jailing of political prisoners and other flagrant violations of human rights”; and calling for negotiations aimed at enabling “the people of Cyprus … to decide their own future without any foreign intervention.” In still another resolution, Ford was criticized for expressing opposition to the court order which started busing in Boston.

Also approved was a continuing dialogue with representatives of so-called gay (homosexual) churchmen. Spokesmen said that the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, an association of 71 predominantly gay congregations, is known to desire membership in the NCC.

No-Hosting The Wcc

Soon after the World Council of Churches announced its general assembly would be held in Nairobi, Kenya, next November, strife shattered the peaceful unity of many of Kenya’s churches. At a recent press conference General Secretary John Kamau of the National Christian Council of Kenya stated that the NCCK will host the WCC meeting at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Conference Center, the first WCC assembly on African soil in the WCC’s twenty-six year history. But some evangelical members of the NCCK, claiming they were not consulted, said they will protest the decision.

The NCCK is not a member body of the WCC, but some of the main-line denominations, such as Anglicans and Presbyterians, are members of both the WCC and the NCCK. Conversely, many groups such as the Africa Inland Church, the Africa Gospel Church, the Southern Baptists, and their mission sponsors are NCCK members but not WCC members.

“We are apprehensive that the public will think that all members of the NCCK endorse the World Council, and this is definitely not the case,” asserted a member of the Africa Inland Church. Some state they are reconsidering their membership in the NCCK. They say the Kenya body must decide whether the hosting of the two-week assembly is worth the loss of member churches. It may be that the WCC denominations that are also in the NCCK will have to sponsor the assembly by themselves, say observers, rather than as members of the NCCK, which has many evangelical constituents.

The WCC has 271 member bodies in more than seventy countries. NCCK chairman Lawi Imathiu, presiding bishop of the Methodist Church in Kenya, said the Catholic Church will send a delegation to the Nairobi gathering—another WCC first. He added that participants will also include people who are in no way connected with the church. The assembly agenda includes social, political, and technological problems as well as strictly church concerns, he noted.

Earlier, Bible Presbyterian leader Carl McIntire announced his separatist International Council of Christian Churches will hold its general assembly in Nairobi next July.

HAL OLSEN

Religion In Transit

Dr. Clate A. Risley, former executive secretary of the National Sunday School Association and head of Worldwide Christian Education Ministries, was shot to death, apparently by a would-be robber, outside the WCEM office in Chicago last month.

Wheaton College in Illinois was selected as the site for the Billy Graham library and archives on world evangelism. Former mission educator Donald Hoke, who headed up the recent Lausanne congress on evangelization, will oversee the library. Also, officials of both the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association say they want Wheaton to be a repository for collections of EFMA and IFMA mission documents.

Dr. Orville S. Walters, a University of Illinois medical school professor of clinical psychiatry, is the new president of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, succeeding theologian Carl F. H. Henry. IACS directors approved a $10,000 research and writing grant to United Presbyterian mission educator Samuel H. Moffett of Seoul to complete a history of Christianity in Asia.

A bill aimed at putting prayer back in public schools was introduced into Congress by several senators, including evangelicals Strom Thurmond and Carl Curtis. The bill would limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and district courts to issue any ruling that restricts voluntary prayer in the schools.

The Lilly Foundation has given a grant of $1.6 million, its biggest ever, to fund centers to train clergymen for ministries on campuses. Heading the project is Catholic priest Leo Piguet of Purdue University.

Personalia

Resigned: Charles E. Hummel, as president of Barrington College, Rhode Island, effective January 31; Lars I. Granberg, as president of Northwestern College (Reformed Church in America), Orange City, Iowa, effective next August; H. Leo Eddleman, as president of the Criswell Bible Institute in Dallas, effective when a successor is named.

United Church of Christ clergyman Frederick W. Whittaker, president of Bangor (Maine) Seminary, will serve a two-year term as president of the 200-member, forty-year-old Association of Theological Schools (formerly American Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada), an accrediting agency for theological schools and the conduit for millions of dollars in research, program, and personal assistance grants.

World Scene

Roving bands of high school students in the Arunachal Pradesh district in northeast India have assaulted scores of Christians, burning down or damaging more than 100 homes, 37 churches, and 180 granaries, and stealing food and farm animals. Scores of Christians sought refuge in a Baptist mission compound, others—destitute and hungry—are hiding in the hills. The Baptist World Alliance reports “rapid growth of Christian churches in the last ten years has alarmed anti-Christian forces in the area.”

After five years of operation, Britain’s evangelical relief agency, The Evangelical Alliance Relief (TEAR) Fund, reports a record year for money spent on aid projects: $1.01 million to 132 evangelical-sponsored projects in forty-one countries. These range from support of short-term medical personnel to the building of a hydroelectric plant by the Ruanda Mission in Burundi (Africa) and a series of wells in India.

Pastor Jose Goncalves of Porto, Portugal, was elected president of the European Baptist Federation, representing work in sixteen nations. Alexei Bichkov of Moscow, general secretary of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, was named vice-president.

More than 100 delegates, representing fifty-six churches with about 6,500 members, attended the twenty-second annual assembly of the Spanish Baptist Union near Barcelona. Professor Jose Borras of the Baptist Seminary in Madrid was reelected president. Two Baptist leaders from Cuba reported on Baptist work in that land (250 churches, 15,000 members, 800 baptisms a year).

DEATHS

HENRY J. CADBURY, 90, New Testament scholar, former Harvard divinity professor, a translator of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and a founder and chairman of the American Friends Service Committee; in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, of injuries suffered in a fall.

D. C. WASHINGTON, 69, executive director of the Sunday-school publishing unit of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A.; in Nashville, Tennessee.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.