Southern Presbyterians: Changing Patterns

Conversation under the magnolia trees was perhaps more subdued at the 1976 Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) general assembly than it was in 1969, but the topics were the same. This year’s assembly, held on the Stillman College campus in Tuscaloosa, was the denomination’s first in Alabama since the Mobile meeting seven years ago.

Some of the Mobile actions, particularly the authorization to draft a new confessional stance, were the signal for an exodus of thousands of conservatives. Many of those who left in the aftermath of the 1969 decisions became a part of the Presbyterian Church in America, which reported a communicant strength of over 60,000 at the end of 1975. Meanwhile, the PCUS continued its decline in communicant strength, recording a net loss of 12,000 in 1975 to a total of 878, 126 on the rolls at year’s end.

One of the committees named to implement Mobile’s major actions brought its final recommendations to Tuscaloosa, and their approval may pave the way for still more defections. The assembly’s 330-to-55 vote for a new doctrinal position is the first of three steps necessary for a change in the PCUS constitution. Before the committee’s package becomes the official theological stance of the denomination, it must be approved by three-fourths of the sixty presbyteries (district governing bodies) and by a subsequent general assembly.

The package that the presbyteries will be inspecting in coming months includes new ordination vows, a book of confessions, and a new contemporary declaration of faith. The United Presbyterian Church adopted a similar, but not identical, package in 1967. If the PCUS proposal becomes its official doctrinal position in 1977, an early vote on union with the United Presbyterian Church is anticipated.

Another of the 1969 actions that displeased conservatives was the authorization to begin merger talks with the United Presbyterians. A plan of union for the nation’s two largest Presbyterian bodies is now being studied at all levels of both churches, but it has not been submitted for formal approval in either. Under the PCUS constitution, both union and doctrinal changes require approval by three-fourths of the presbyteries, and the merger advocates are waiting to see how the vote goes on the confessional question before submitting the merger plan. Meanwhile, the 1976 assembly went on record in favor of reunion of the churches, divided since 1861.

When plans for the “continuing church” (later to become the PCA) were announced five years ago, some of the leading evangelicals who stayed in the PCUS identified union and doctrinal change as the decisive issues for them. They made the point then that one assembly’s expression of its opinion on either question was not a constitutional mandate to the church. Consummation of a merger or inclusion of new doctrinal standards in the constitution would be cause for separation, however, some of them explained. Those who hold this position may need to take a new look at it next year since both proposals are expected to be closer to constitutional status.

The political facts of life in the denomination have also changed in the last five years. Not only has much of the conservative leadership departed, but the voting patterns have been altered. The number of presbyteries has been reduced, with boundaries changed in many places.

If the presbyteries follow the patterns of the 1976 assembly, most of the debate on the new theological stance will be over the contemporary declaration. The other elements in the new package, the concept of a book of confessions and new ordination vows, got little attention on the floor of the assembly.

The declaration written by the ten-member committee would be one of ten documents in the book of confessions. The denomination’s current doctrinal standards, the Westminster Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms, would be included also. Others in the proposed collection are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Geneva Catechism, the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Barmen Declaration.

If the new theological stance is incorporated into the church’s constitution, future ordinands will vow that they “sincerely receive and adopt the confessions of this church as, in their essentials, authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do,” and will affirm their intention to “be instructed and led” and “continually guided” by the ten creedal statements.

Currently, lay officers and clergy vow that they “sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.”

The vow concerning the Bible was nearly doubled in length. Currently it reads: “Do you believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice?” The new question, to which all ordinands would be required to give an affirmative answer, is: “Are you convinced by the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as unique and faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ, are the Word of God and therefore the authoritative standard by which your faith and life are to be directed?”

Only one of the elements in the vows as proposed by the committee was changed at the assembly. The committee, in fact, proposed the vow that has been in use many years, “Do you promise subjection to your brethren in the Lord?” As amended, it would require submission to “brothers and sisters.”

It took only a voice vote to defeat a proposal that the three Westminster documents be retained as the primary standards of the denomination, with the others in the book serving as supplementary standards. One of the principal speeches against staying with Westminster exclusively came from a former moderator and retired seminary professor, Ernest Trice Thompson of Richmond, Virginia. He warned against a “narrow confessionalism.”

One of the principal opponents of the entire new theological stance for the PCUS was a member of the ten-person panel that brought the package to the assembly, Robert T. L. Liston, retired president of King College, Bristol, Tennessee. He submitted a written minority report, but no motion was made to consider it.

Only minor amendments were accepted in the committee’s declaration. At one point the word “free” was substituted for “liberate” in deference to members of the assembly who had expressed fears that the document might appear to promote “liberation theology.” Even with the change of this word, the chapter on “the Christian mission” retains an emphasis on achieving changes in the structures of society.

One of the critics of the chapter on mission was the veteran missionary who was elected moderator of the assembly. Jule C. Spach, who has served as a lay missionary in Brazil for twenty-five years, won the top post on the second ballot. He got 204 votes to the 193 cast for Sara B. (Mrs. John D.) Moseley, chairman of the denomination’s Division of International Mission and the wife of the president of Austin College. He says the closest he came to having his record ruined was in 1950 when he was taken to a Wichita Falls hospital for surgery. By vote of First Baptist’s deacons, the Sunday-school class was moved to his hospital room.

Spach turned presiding duties over to Mrs. Mosely during most of the debate on the confessional issue. He did not speak from the floor on the issue, but prior to his election he had said he thought the declaration was weak, especially in the mission section. He told reporters at the end of the meeting that he was happier with the doctrinal package than he had been when he came to the assembly and that he could “back it” as he traveled around the church.

Whether the moderator’s position will be strong enough to swing votes in the presbyteries remains to be seen. The overwhelming vote of the assembly for the new stance was seen by some observers to suggest that the proposal will get through the presbyteries without much difficulty. Organized evangelicals who have remained in the PCUS are expected to mount a campaign to get more than a quarter of the presbyteries to vote against it. A leader in that fight will be Harry Hassall, new executive editor of the Open Letter, a publication of the independent Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians. As a commissioner in Tuscaloosa he called for defeat of the whole package, which he described as inconsistent with the Scriptures and with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. Hassall charged that the new declaration was based on a low view of Scripture. Among the other deficiencies he cited were its lack of a clear statement on the physical resurrection and the physical return of Christ, an “agnostic” view of heaven and hell, and a universalistic approach to salvation.

Among the former moderators attracted to the debate were J. McDowell Richards, retired Columbia Seminary president, and Matthew Lynn, the 1969 presiding officer who appointed the drafting committee. Richards asked for a delay in sending the matter to the presbyteries, but Lynn spoke successfully for dispatching it immediately. The vote will be the first in the PCUS requiring a three-fourths margin since 1968–69, when the necessary number of presbyteries approved a plan of union with the Reformed Church in America. (The RCA did not muster enough votes on its side to consummate the union.)

The assembly also:

• Ruled, as the church’s highest court, that presbyteries cannot commit to any other body (such as the East Alabama Presbytery commission that honored dismissal requests from more than twenty congregations in 1973) the power to dismiss churches to other denominations, thus setting the stage for civil actions by “loyal minorities.”

• Refused a presbytery’s request that an outright condemnation of homosexual practice be issued, referring the proposed document to a unit that has been studying the issue several years.

• Authorized a study of the unofficial organizations in the denomination, a move prompted by some commissioners’ objections to the assembly-related activities of the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians.

• Reaffirmed its continued participation in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) by defeating an attempt to halt funding for the church’s COCU delegation.

On finances at the national level, the assembly adopted a plan that supporters said would encourage more people to give to keep missionaries at work overseas. The plan, if fully funded in 1977, would still not guarantee a specific number of workers abroad, however. Supporters hope that it would keep at least 300 at work through the year. From a high of over 500 earlier in this decade, the number is being cut to 310 by the end of 1976. Even if the assembly-approved plan succeeds in 1977, the amount of money available to those missionaries as work budgets would be further reduced from the amount available this year.

Technically, all members of the denomination are represented when the church governing bodies assemble for a vote. The “votes” that will be watched just as carefully in the remainder of 1976 and in 1977 are those collected when the offering plates are passed in every congregation every Sunday.

PERFECT ATTENDANCE

When Bill T. Adams was 7 he showed up for a Sunday-school class at a small church in Colorado City, Texas. That was seventy years ago, and he hasn’t missed a Sunday since, according to a Dallas Morning News story. The retired educator now attends First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas, where last month he marked his seventieth year of perfect attendance in Sunday school.

Pulpit Vacancy

Ernest T. Campbell, 51, minister of the 2,500-member Riverside Church of New York City since 1968, resigned unexpectedly last month. His last sermon was on July 4. Citing “pressures and demands” of a recently enlarged administrative role that deprived him of “joy and satisfaction” in the ministry, he said he has no immediate vocational plans. During his tenure, the ministerial staff shrank from seven to four, membership dropped by more than 600, and budgets were trimmed (last year’s income was $35,000 short of the $450,000 budget goal). There were social-action controversies, but the church weathered them (responding with more than $400,000 in minority-aid programs). Board members, describing themselves as “shocked” by Campbell’s announcement, say the minister has been under no pressure to resign.

Campbell, a Presbyterian, succeeded Robert J. McCracken, who followed the famed Harry Emerson Fosdick (both were Baptists) in Riverside’s noted liberal pulpit. The church is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ.

COMING SOON

Important congressional hearings on cult leader Sun Myung Moon and on religious repression in the Soviet Union were held in Washington last month. Reports on these hearings, along with coverage of evangelistic outreach during the Bicentennial, will appear in the next issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Cristival ’76

One of the spin-offs of the European Congress on Evangelism in Amsterdam in 1971 was a German coalition called AFEVA (an acronym for the German version of Working Group for Evangelistic Action). Last month AFEVA sponsored Cristival ’76 in Essen, a week-long program of Bible study, career-oriented workshops, modern music, and seminars on contemporary issues that attracted 10,000 German young people. It was capped by a Sunday-morning service in a stadium at which evangelist Billy Graham spoke. Open to the public, the rally drew 40,000.

At the request of organizers, Graham refrained from issuing an invitation to receive Christ at the end of his message. The evangelist said he was not entirely happy about that arrangement but acquiesced anyway. Leaders explained that by avoiding an invitation, “a basis of credibility” for extensive evangelism later could be better established with the state church (whose Lutheran members are unaccustomed to traditional evangelical styles).

A special AFEVA committee with 150 advisors worked successfully to enlist the cooperation of state-church congregations. (Many churches in the Rheinland and Westphalia districts took part, and contributed the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars.) A state-church youth pastor, Ulrich Parzany, was named Cristival’s chairman. The vice-chairman was Peter Schneider, general secretary of the German Evangelical Alliance and a key figure in AFEVA.

Part of the inspiration for Cristival came from two other youth events, SPREE ’73 in London and Eurofest ’75 in Brussels, said Schneider. “They showed us what could be done in Germany,” he commented. Like those two events, Cristival featured a big bookstore and many display booths sponsored by a variety of Christian organizations and institutions.

There was a heavy emphasis on missions, and correspondent Robert P. Evans reports that the participants gave a sizable offering to Anglican bishop Festo Kivengere of Uganda, one of the Cristival speakers, for his evangelistic work throughout Africa.

Canadians Concerned

About 1,100 persons were on hand for the opening meeting of the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s 102nd general assembly, but many had to watch on closed-circuit television from the basement of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and two other locations in Arnprior, a town of 6,000 near Ottawa. It was the first time an assembly had met in so small a town.

The commissioners (delegates) elected as moderator A. Lorne Mackay, 61, minister of Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, Ontario. (Mackay says he intends to speak out, especially on society’s moral permissiveness.)

Taiwanese Presbyterian executive C. M. Kao outlined church response to recent troubles on Taiwan involving alleged repression of religion, including the confiscation of Scriptures in minority languages.

In response to a presentation by missionary Glen Davis, who serves with the Korean Christian Church in Japan, the assembly sent a cable to Korean president Park Chung Hee. In it the commissioners voiced distress at the way government critics are treated, and asked for mercy and compassion in the case of Kim Chul Hyun, a Presbyterian theological student convicted of spying for North Korea and sentenced to death. Davis implied that Kim may have been manipulated into confessing to the crime after spending five months in jail and seeing a lawyer only once.

Correspondent DeCourcy Rayner reports that the denomination’s communicant membership decreased by 2,764 in 1975 to 171,791—part of the reason a study of the state of the church was ordered for the next assembly.

Church-history teacher Allan L. Farris, 56, was elected to head Knox College in Toronto.

DEATH

WILLIS J. KING, 88, retired United Methodist bishop and educator; in New Orleans.

Sticking With The Wcc

Twice there were neighborhood bomb alerts during the general assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church in Belfast, but participants simply moved away from windows and the proceedings continued. A nearby explosion caused no damage to the meeting hall—or to the assembly’s agenda. Among the resolutions passed were some about various aspects of Northern Ireland’s political troubles. One paid warm tribute to the police and security forces; another asked the media to refrain insofar as possible from using the words “Catholic” and “Protestant” in reporting on the violent situation.

The predominant issue was that of membership in the World Council of Churches. A motion to withdraw, backed earlier by three of the denomination’s five synods, was vigorously debated. Eventually, the assembly voted 481 to 381 to “withdraw … only if the basis of the WCC is so altered as to deny the fundamental doctrines of the faith confessed by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and/or its constitution is so altered as to infringe upon the freedom of our church to order its own life and witness.”

The church’s general secretary, Jack Weir, formerly a missionary to Manchuria, was elected moderator. American consul W. Alan Roy gave an address on the role of Presbyterianism in the founding of the United States. He singled out for special praise Ulster minister Francis Mackeemie, who founded the Presbytery of Philadelphia and helped to establish freedom of religion in America in a landmark case in 1707.

S. W. MURRAY

Religion In Transit

The Democratic party’s plank on abortion is “irresponsible” and “morally offensive,” declared Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, last month. He said the so-called compromise plank amounts to “opposing protection for the life of the unborn and endorsing permissive abortion.” The mildly worded plank states that an attempt to pass a constitutional amendment to overthrow the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion is “undesirable.”

Following protests by right-to-life forces, Macmillan Science Company of New York announced it will no longer offer human embryos embedded in plastic through its catalogues that are distributed to teachers. A spokesman told Religious News Service that the firm has sold no “fetal material in over a year.” He also denied that any embryos were the result of “induced abortions.”

Some Harvard scientists want to experiment with creating new forms of life (at U. S. government expense of $500,000), but fellow scientists and city officials are opposed. They say the genetic experimentation (in which simple and complex organisms are mixed) is a health hazard.

Of the 130 bishops expected to attend the general convention of the Episcopal Church in September, 82 will vote for approving ordination of women to the priesthood, predicts northern Ohio bishop John H. Burt. The decisive vote will take place among the clergy and lay delegates in the House of Deputies. As of now, the vote in this body is shaping up as an extremely close one, with a slight edge expected for the pro-ordination forces. In another development, Presiding Bishop John M. Allin was quoted as telling Milwaukee bishop Charles T. Gaskell in a letter that he is opposed to approval of women’s ordination, an apparent reversal of an earlier stand.

Rose Kennedy, mother of the late President, declared her son “did believe in and practice his religion.” Her comment came in response to New York Times columnist James Reston’s comment that John F. Kennedy was not “a deeply religious man” like Jimmy Carter. Kennedy attended church regularly and understood the meaning and value of prayer, said his mother.

Officials of Aide Olympique, an agency coordinating Christian outreach at the Olympics, expect up to 3,000 young people to hit Montreal this month in a vast and varied outpouring of Christian witness. Some recruiters, however, say they are having trouble signing up participants to help reach the anticipated six million visitors, the 10,000 athletes, and the city’s three million residents. Organizers meanwhile say adequate housing is available for the young missionaries.

Several publishers are scrambling to get into print with books on presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter. Logos International had advance orders for more than 150,000 copies of its June 28 release, The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, by journalists Howard Norton and Bob Slosser.

The National Courier, a biweekly tabloid published by Logos International, will switch from covering both the secular and religious beats to reporting only religion stories, according to an announcement by editors. Hassles with the Internal Revenue Service are partly to blame, say sources.

World Scene

The government of Nepal has ordered the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Wycliffe Bible Translators) to withdraw its overseas workers. Some ninety adults from several nations are affected by the order. They were working on twenty minority languages. No official reason was cited for the action, but sources surmise that the conversion of some nationals to Christianity prompted it. Elsewhere, Wycliffe’s future appears more secure: government and university officials in Columbia have toned down opposition in recent months, and national leaders in Peru are asking the government there to rescind its Wycliffe ouster order.

An estimated 2.6 million persons, slightly more than half of them women, have been sterilized in India as part of the nation’s population-control program, say government sources.

Israeli archaeologists have discovered an ancient Judean fortress on a hill overlooking a plain north of Mount Sinai. Inside: a rare collection of Hebrew and Phoenician inscriptions dating to about 800 B.C. The fortress was apparently built by King Jehoshaphat to protect a trade route between southern Judea and the Red Sea port of Elath. Bedouins still use ten ancient wells at the foot of the hill.

Methodist bishop Emilio Julio Miguel de Carvalho of Angola claims Protestants in his land have more freedom under the present Marxist-oriented government than they did under former Portuguese colonial rule. Protestants are opening up churches that have been closed since 1961, when a nationalist uprising was followed by arrests and deaths of many Protestants, he says. The state is supervising education, but churches are still operating schools, he adds, and Sunday schools and seminaries are open.

Despite President Ford’s evacuation advice, hundreds of Americans were still staying in Lebanon early this month, including a number of missionaries (six Southern Baptists were among them).

Italy’s Communists won thirty seats on Rome’s Municipal Council—the most gained by any party—and garnered 35.5 per cent of the city’s total vote (676,000 to 630,000 for the Christian Democrats, the next highest of eight other parties). Thousands of Communists marched through Rome, chanting “Rome is red, Italy will be.” A coalition headed by the Christian Democrats, however, still holds the balance of power—and the mayor’s chair.

The Canadian parliament voted 133 to 125 last month in favor of abolishing capital punishment.

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