The NCC: Speaking in Softer Tones

Meeting within blocks of Cincinnati’s Riverfront stadium, the governing board of the National Council of Churches was reminded last month that it is in a new ball game now. The “outs” for many years in federal government matters have now become the “ins” and therefore should change their tactics, NCC president William P. Thompson urged.

“It is no secret,” the United Presbyterian executive said in a presidential address, “that it had been very difficult for the council to communicate with officials in the executive branch for more than eight years. As a result, many of our staff colleagues had become accustomed to a confrontational style which assumed that the addressee would not give serious consideration to the arguments advanced and the recommendations proposed.”

With the change in administration in Washington, that “confrontational style” is no longer appropriate, the NCC’s top officer claimed. He mentioned that the doors opened even before President Carter’s inauguration, and he was a part of a group that met with presidential advisor Charles Kirbo before Carter moved into the White House. He did not mention the new access to the Oval Office made possible by the appointment of ex-NCC staffer Andrew Young to a top administration post (that of United Nations ambassador).

In his address, Thompson lamented that council staffers were so overworked and tired that they sometimes were unable to reflect on current trends enough to realize when they should try different approaches. He cited the change in federal administration to prove his point: “After the inauguration, the first staff-drawn communications addressed to the executive branch submitted for my signature did not reflect this new posture [the Carter openness to the NCC]. Indeed, the old confrontational rhetoric was still present.” He went on to note that when the problems were called to the attention of staffers, they came up quickly with new and satisfactory drafts. He suggested that they “would have adjusted more promptly to the changed situation on their own initiative, had they not been so burdened and overextended.”

With the staff half the size it was a decade ago, the NCC president called on board members to give better leadership to the staff by identifying priorities and cutting out certain programs. He did not say which programs he thought should be eliminated, but he got the board’s backing to pursue a study of the council’s purposes.

The board followed its president’s lead in changing the style of addressing the federal government. For instance, a resolution on nuclear testing “commends President Carter for [his] new disarmament initiative, urges him to pursue a treaty for complete cessation of all explosive nuclear testing by all nations,” and urges churches to get members to commend him. Carter’s energy policies were also endorsed.

Another resolution, urging more federal funding and administration of childcare centers, was non-combative in tone.

On a more sensitive issue in ecumenical circles, the board passed a resolution “on grand jury abuse.” It mentioned the work of federal investigators currently probing terrorist activities and said agents “routinely threaten uncooperative persons with subpoenas from a grand jury,” but the document addressed no demand to the nation’s chief law-enforcement officers, the President and the Attorney General. The current investigation of Hispanic organizations in the churches was noted, but the resolution reached back into earlier administrations to identify probes of “the anti-war movement, the activist student movement, the Native American movement, the Black movement, the trade-union movement, the Roman Catholic peace movement,” and others.

Concerned that “the bail process guaranteed by the Constitution is being abused by the use of excessive bail … to incarcerate poor and/or politically active minority persons,” the board authorized its president to “visit the Attorney General” and other officials “to urge upon them the NCC’s grave concerns” (but not to demand anything). An Ecumenical Minority Bail Bond Fund was authorized by the board last year, and it recently posted a $50,000 bond on behalf of a youth in a Georgia murder case.

Although the Carter administration was treated with great respect by the governing board at this meeting, leaders of a member denomination did not fare so well. The two Episcopal Church officials primarily responsible for allowing federal agents to see some of the records of that denomination’s Hispanic office would have been “repudiated” for their actions under terms of a resolution submitted late in the meeting. As finally passed, however, the document calls for an NCC commission “to meet with the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church to aid him” in getting out of jail the two members of his headquarters staff who refused to cooperate with a grand-jury probe of the church’s Hispanic commission (see March 18 issue, page 55). The presiding bishop, John M. Allin, is a member of the board but was not at the Cincinnati meetings (held in an Episcopal church). The resolution calls for restoration of the salaries of the jailed staff members and payment of their legal expenses. In an unusual move, the board also set a deadline for the commission to report results to its executive committee. The executive committee of the board was instructed to distribute to the board an early report of its action on the commission’s work (due in the hands of the executive committee by June 15).

Some of the states of the nation also got less than respectful treatment from the NCC policy-makers. A classic case of “confrontational” tactics was employed against the states that have not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. The board authorized a boycott of national NCC meetings in any such state (most of which are in the South), and it asked member denominations to avoid having conventions there.

Excellent Religion Reporting

Russell Chandler, religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, won this year’s top award of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA)—the Supple Memorial Award—for excellence in the reporting of religion in the secular press. The award was presented at last month’s annual meeting of the RNA. Chandler is a former news editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The St. Petersburg, Florida, Times won the RNA’s Schachern Award for its weekly supplement on religion, edited last year by Lee Kelly, now a reporter in Austin, Texas. Gen Hammong of the Niagara Falls, New York, Gazette won the Cassels Award for excellence in reporting religion for papers with 50,000 or less circulation.

RNA membership is limited to reporters who cover religion for secular newspapers, wire services, and news magazines. The awards are named for pioneer members of the organization who have since died.

Evangelical Press: Issues and Awards

More than 300 editors, writers, and publishers associated with evangelical publications met last month in Springfield, Missouri, for the annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association. There were headline speakers (British author and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, revivals researcher J. Edwin Orr, biblical archeologist Robert Cooley), tours (the headquarters of the Assemblies of God and the hospital that services the nation’s forty federal prisons), and awards.

The American Baptist, the monthly periodical of the American Baptist Churches that joined the EPA only last year, was named “Periodical of the Year.” Other magazines that won first-place excellence awards in their categories were: Moody Monthly (Moody Bible Institute), Worldwide Challenge (Campus Crusade for Christ), Navlog (Navigators), Christian Living (David C. Cook), Campus Life (Youth for Christ), Group (Thom Schultz Publications), and Success (Baptist Publications).

In the eighteen-category “Higher Goals” competition, CHRISTIANITY TODAY won five first-place awards (cartoon, “Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel,” by John Lawing; personality, “Solzhenitsyn—Whose Face in the Mirror?” by Cheryl Forbes; first person, “The Ones Who Are Left,” by Elisabeth Elliott; critical review, “The Omen,” by Thomas Howard; reporting, “A Minister Is Missing,” by Edward E. Plowman).

Among the other first-place awards: Eternity (best cover, full color); Beyond, published by JAARS, the air arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators (best editorial); Campus Life (fiction, humor, and single photo); His (poetry and original art); Reformed Journal (tie, critical review, and standing feature); World Vision (photo feature).

Eleanor Burr of OMS Outreach was elected president, the first woman to hold the post in the EPA’s thirty-year history.

Lively debate marked several panel discussions; the main argument was over whether denominational news organs have a responsibility to inform constituents of all vital developments, even when what is happening involves controversy. Generally, the journalists favored disclosure, the publicists favored burial.

Muggeridge, 74, gave a speech he has given often: the moral standards of society are eroding hopelessly, and the media carry a large share of the blame. He held up Christianity as the only hope in a darkening world that someday will be engulfed by Communism.

Reporters found him in interviews to be witty, friendly, and candid. Although he spoke freely about his conversion to Christ (he says friends in England attribute his God talk to senility), he declined to be identified as an evangelical. He believes evangelical “dogma” is too “strict.” He had unkind things to say about the spiritual condition of the Anglican Church, about legalization of abortion, and about homosexuality. He expressed belief that the world’s moral and spiritual decline is “irreversible.” The main question, said Muggeridge, is: “How long can the Christians hang on?”

The Praying Editors

Struggling to stay afloat, the largely Protestant Associated Church Press appeared to succeed at its spring New Orleans convention. The attendance was up slightly from a year before, the number of paid-up member publications was reported to be a respectable 105, and a new leadership team was installed.

As in several recent years, the ACP met in joint convention with the larger Catholic Press Association (CPA), and editors from each group were free to sample parts of the other’s program. In both the ACP and the CPA this year, there was greater interest than in recent years in what banquet speaker George Gallup, Jr., called the “inner life.” One ACP session entitled “The Editor as a Person of Faith” attracted a capacity crowd, and CPA “praying and sharing” sessions drew unexpected turnouts—even at times when editors were otherwise free to tour New Orleans.

Gallup, who has been commissioned to survey CPA readers, reviewed the results of recent polls that show that “the inner life is in.” With the evangelical movement providing the thrust, America is in the early stages of spiritual revival, the pollster reported. The accent is on youth and on experiential religion, he said, and this raises questions of whether the country will be more religiously mature by the turn of the century. Gallup challenged members of both associations by declaring that the religious press “will have a lot to do with how this question is answered.”

During his address the pollster announced that Gallup International is starting a center for religious research at Princeton. It will house archives and help persons who are doing research in religion.

Ray Dobbins of the Cumberland Presbyterian, outgoing ACP president, told members that even though membership declined by about twenty-five publications in the last year, the ACP still has a vital role to play. He noted that it is “one of the most inclusive ecumenical expressions of the whole Christian Church.” Dobbins said the ACP “can help discover and make manifest this one Church of all Christendom.”

Elected to succeed Dobbins was Howard E. Royer, Church of the Brethren executive and editor of that denomination’s monthly, Messenger. Lutheran pastor Donald Hetzler of Geneva, Illinois, former director of the National Lutheran Campus Ministry, was named executive secretary of the ACP on a half-time basis. He succeeds Dennis Shoemaker, who had served full-time. The ACP adopted a 1977 budget of $37,000 and a 1978 projection of about $39,000.

The CPA installed Robert Fenton, publisher of Catholic Digest, as president. Ethel M. Gintoft of Milwaukee, associate editor of the Catholic Herald-Citizen, was named vice-president; she is the first woman ever elected to a high CPA post.

Both associations got reports on the latest postal developments. They were reminded that the Commission on Postal Service had recommended only a few days before the New Orleans convention that all preferred (subsidized) mail rates for non-profit organizations be phased out by 1997. In a related matter, the CPA passed a resolution opposing a government effort to tax the advertising revenue of non-profit publications.

British Baptists

For the first time in its 153-year history, the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland will have a woman as president: Nell Alexander, 62, a dramatist who is a member of Zion Baptist Church in Cambridge. She was elected vice-president at the recent annual assembly of the union in Nottingham, England, and will be installed as president next year.

Former general secretary Ernest A. Payne was installed as this year’s president. In an address, he noted that a majority of Britain’s Baptist churches practice open Communion and open membership (inviting any believer to join whether baptized or not).

The some 1,500 delegates at Nottingham heard that membership has decreased to 181,798 (in 2,137 churches) since last year (continuing a trend), that fewer children and young people are involved in church programs, and that baptisms have fallen off. The delegates quickly approved a resolution requesting the union’s executive council to set up a commission “to examine the reasons for the numerical and spiritual decline.”

The Baptist Missionary Society, which has work in ten countries, reported at the meeting that mass baptisms of hundreds of converts were taking place in northern Angola. Things elsewhere in the war-ravaged land are unsettled, though, and missionaries and pastors have been uprooted, the report indicated.

General Secretary Alexei Bichkov of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union, the current president of the European Baptist Federation, brought the assembly’s closing address. He was interrupted several times by enthusiastic applause. “We praise the Lord that more doors are wide open to proclaim Jesus Christ,” he said. “We are proud to be his ambassadors in our country, for our people are thirsting for the good news of the Gospel.”

Responding to the constant stream of criticism leveled at the All-Union Council by supporters of the non-registered or “underground” churches, Bichkov said: “Our first task is to witness. We don’t belong to any political party. There is no such thing as ‘saving’ or ‘unsaving’ churches.… There is only the saving power of Jesus Christ.” He said the people in the mainstream Baptist churches in the Soviet Union “pray for our brothers who are in prison.” He also stated his belief that all forty-one dissident Baptists now in Soviet prisons—including well-known leader Georgi Vins—will be released by the end of this year.

Religion in Transit

The People’s Church, Canada’s largest evangelical congregation, again exceeded its goal in its annual “faith-promise” missionary fund-raising effort. Total pledges for the coming year: $1.13 million. The amount includes $143,000 to help alleviate poverty in Haiti. The church shares in the support of 470 overseas missionaries (thirty-five from its own congregation of 2,000-plus) and numerous mission projects both abroad and in North America. The church’s total income for all purposes topped $2.6 million in 1976, a $1 million increase over the preceding year.

While he was in London last month, President Carter attended an 8 A.M. Sunday service at Westminster Abbey. Anglican bishop Knapp Fisher led the congregation in prayers for Carter and the American people. When the collection plate was passed, the President found himself without British money and borrowed a handful of coins from a British bodyguard. On a tour later to the abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber, where a group of scholars translated the King James Bible (1611), Carter said, “That’s the one I use,” and praised its beauty.

Death

CLEAVANT DERRICKS, 68, black clergyman who composed hundreds of gospel songs (“Just a Little Talk With Jesus,” “We’ll Soon Be Done With Troubles and Trials”), many of them published with little or no remuneration to him; in Knoxville, Tennessee, after a long illness.

At the July, 1974, convention of Lutheran Church of America, delegates issued an appeal for funds for world hunger. More than $9 million has come in since then for that purpose, say LCA officials.

The University of Pennsylvania agreed to buy the five-acre campus of the old Philadelphia (Episcopal) Divinity School for $608,000—$400,000 less than what Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church offered. A Moon spokesman accused the Episcopal Church of bias in the transaction.

A group of seminarians and teachers at the Presbyterian seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, believe it’s time to purge sexist language from sermons and religious publications—and to recognize God the Mother. In places in the Bible where God is more like a mother than a father, he should be called God the Mother, says Thomas Parsons, moderator of the group.

World Scene

The 31,000-member Church of Christ in Thailand, formed by a 1934 union of Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, added a new presbytery to its existing geographical and ethnic ones. It will consist of lepers, ex-lepers, and others who have felt isolated and want to express their identity. In other action taken by the 150 delegates at the church’s recent general assembly, youth work and evangelism were added as priorities. Existing ones; renewal, leadership training, reorientation of mission strategies, revaluation of the ministry, and witness to Thai society.

Nearly 3,000 persons from ten European countries gathered in Essen, West Germany, recently for the Third European Congress on Disciplemaking, sponsored by the Colorado-based Navigators organization. Special tribute was paid to Gien Karssen of Holland, a woman pioneer of Navigators work in Europe.

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