Methodist Missions Arm Is Plunged into Row over Economics and Race

Why does the Board of Global Ministries praise socialism and fund the defense of a political officeholder?

The United Methodist Church’s Board of Global Ministries (BOGM) is no stranger to controversy. It is the missions arm of the church, and it is the largest and most affluent of all Methodist agencies. In 1981 its budget was close to $70 million.

It was also in 1981 that the BOGM’S women’s and world divisions captured headlines for helping to organize a conference held to support the Southwest Africa People’s Organization, which is known to be armed by the Soviet Union and supports violence as the answer to Namibia’s quest for independence. In the spring of 1982, the world division granted $30,000 to the Institute on Economics and Social Research in Nicaragua, an organization connected to that country’s leftist Sandinista regime.

In the most distant past, the BOGM has disseminated controversial literature favorably portraying Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China. Now, two new issues have fanned the flames. They concern an economics book published by the women’s division, and financial support for a Mississippi mayor accused of conspiring to commit murder.

The book, An Economic Primer, is a collection of 12 essays written by seven authors. Its stated purpose is “to assist United Methodist women in understanding economic development in the world.” But the result of the 41-page publication, according to two influential professors from United Methodist-related universities, is strongly anticapitalistic. Most criticism of the primer has been directed at essays written by Phillip Harvey of the State University of New York and Morley Nkosi of Hofstra University. After learning of complaints about the primer in workshops sponsored by the United Methodist Women, the denominational newspaper asked Gustav Papanek of Boston University and Martin Bronenbrenner of Duke University to review the book.

Papanek, a specialist in the economies of Third World nations, lauded the book’s purpose, but stated that it is “singularly lacking in facts” and that “much of the writing is [in polemical style] like the worst of chamber of commerce propaganda.” “Naturally,” Papanek said, “the capitalist reality falls far short of the socialist ideal. [But] you should compare ideals with ideals.…” Bishop Finis A. Crutchfield, president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, says the primer is “heavily weighted against the capitalist system,” that it is “not carefully documented,” and that it “leads one to conclusions that are extremely leftist.”

However, Barbara Weaver, executive secretary for development education in the women’s division, denies the primer is being used to advocate socialism. “The purpose of the primer,” she says, “is to be a discussion starter. It is one of a variety of materials we use in our workshops. Both dominant economic systems of the world have serious problems. We’re only beginning to raise questions and to talk about economics.” Bishop Crutchfield criticized only the primer, which he has read carefully, and not the workshops, with which he is not familiar. He said, “I feel only that the women’s division has an obligation to uphold free enterprise as favorably as it has upheld socialism.”

In almost all cases, the concern about the BOGM has been sparked by perceived leftist tendencies. Ira Gallaway, senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Peoria, Illinois, has addressed some of the BOGM’S problems in his recent book, Drifted Astray (Abingdon Press, 1982). Gallaway said, “The Board of Global Ministries has contributed to a number of organizations in Third World countries, organizations which lean toward the totalitarian collective impulse, embracing it as the only solution to helping the poor and oppressed.”

Recently, the BOGM became entangled in the Mississippi murder case. In late November, the board’s assistant general secretary, John Jordan, and two staff members were suspended, then reassigned following a dispute over their providing Methodist money for the defense of Eddie Carthan, the former mayor of Tchula, Mississippi. Carthan was acquitted of conspiring to murder a political opponent, but remains in jail for assaulting an officer.

The three staff members worked for the United Methodist Voluntary Services. The organization is run by the BOGM, and it provided $3,000 to a legal defense fund for Carthan and $8,000 to the United League of Holmes County, an antiracism group that backed Carthan.

Carthan was viewed symbolically by BOGM officials as a victim of racism and political repression. Jordan sent an accusatory telegram to the sheriff of Holmes County. Officials in New York were embarrassed upon their discovery that the sheriff is black. The three were suspended because they did not consult local Methodist authorities before acting. Randolph Nugent, chief executive of the BOGM, said their actions created a “grave situation with serious consequences.”

James R. Robb, associate editor of Good News magazine, a publication of an evangelical caucus of United Methodists, believes the United Methodist church structure easily lends itself to internal disputes. Robb believes middle-level personnel have too much autonomy, partly because they can hold their positions indefinitely and thus, become more familiar with church operations than do board members, whose tenure is limited to eight years.

Mass Palau Rally Caps Guatemala Centennial Year

Church historian Virgil Zapata, head of Guatemala’s Instituto Evangelica America Latina, said he believes the crowd that flocked to Guatemala City on November 28 to hear evangelist Luis Palau was the second largest ever to hear an evangelical preacher and certainly the largest ever in Central America. Crowd estimates, from various sources, ranged from 350,000 to 700,000. Billy Graham preached to 1.1 million people in Seoul, Korea, in 1973.

More than 3,000 Guatemalans reported having made Christian commitments during Palau’s eight-day campaign. Palau told listeners that the people of Guatemala would enjoy greater liberty in the future as they find freedom in Christ. He stressed that Guatemalans must apply the teachings of Christ to their individual, family, and national lives.

Palau was invited to Guatemala by the nation’s 120 Protestant denominations. His campaign climaxed a year-long evangelical celebration that recognized the one hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Protestant missionaries in Guatemala. According to a Wycliffe missionary, church growth in Guatemala has far exceeded the available church space. Today, more than 22 percent of Guatemala’s five-and-a-half million people claim to be evangelical, including its most notable Pentecostal, General Jose Efraín Ríos Montt, the country’s president.

At the final crusade meeting, Ríos Montt followed Palau to the microphone and said that “a nation finds its grandeur in fulfilling the Word of God.… Violence and subversion will not change the world; only God who is sitting on the throne of the heavens can bring change. Armies and swords are not God’s means for bringing change, since God brings peaceful change by the work of the Holy Spirit.” The president then prayed that God would look upon the nation with eyes of love so that a new Guatemala might be built through peace.

Ríos Montt became president on March 23, 1982. Since then, several church groups and organizations, including Amnesty International, have blamed his government for the massacre of thousands of the country’s indigenous Indians. Ríos Montt and Guatemalan government officials have consistently accused leftist guerrillas of the violence. Some journalists have charged there has been a widespread misinformation campaign to discredit Ríos Montt and his intended reforms. The conflict has broadened to include evangelical-Catholic friction.

Palau’s campaign received more media coverage than any of his previous 95 crusades dating back to 1966. Each of his messages was broadcast live on 14 radio stations, including one in El Salvador.

Palau believes Guatemala will be the first “reformed” nation in Latin America. “By reformed,” he says, “I mean a nation where it is obvious that the doctrines of the gospel have brought about a social and political transformation.”

Contact With Evangelical Church In North Vietnam Restored After 28 Years

For the first time since 1954, when Vietnam was split, mainstream evangelicals in the United States have met with the modest evangelical church in northern Vietnam. The contact was made by Reg Reimer, Asia director for World Relief Corporation of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Reimer traveled to Vietnam in November mainly to assess the damage done in the country’s Nigh Tinh Province by Typhoon Nancy a month earlier. During his first meeting with the Vietnamese organization that coordinates foreign assistance, Reimer requested a meeting with evangelical church leaders in the north. Four days later, he met with two pastors from Hanoi’s largest evangelical church.

The evangelical church in southern Vietnam has more than 200,000 adherents, but the church in the north is tiny. Reimer believes that even such meager estimates by the pastors of 40 churches serving 10.000 people are exaggerated. Reimer also noted that the congregations were receiving an ample supply of Bibles from both East and West Germany.

Reimer speaks the Vietnamese language fluently and was accompanied on his trip by a representative of Church World Service of the World Council of Churches, which maintained strong ties with the church in Vietnam, even during the war years. One of the pastors Reimer met expressed regret that evangelicals had not done the same. The pastor wanted to “put the past behind,” and he encouraged evangelicals to take the same active political stance that the National Council of Churches has taken relative to United States policy on Vietnam.

The board of directors of World Relief has approved Reimer’s recommendation that the agency send $25,000 worth of aid in the form of food, clothing and other items to Vietnam. Only 70 lives were lost to the typhoon, but 150,000 metric tons of rice, a mental hospital, a library, and a medical training school were among other losses.

World Relief prefers to work with a counterpart organization or with the church in the country receiving aid, rather than with the government. But in this case, the government organization handling the assistance has been deemed reputable. “The Vietnamese distinguish between America’s government and its people,” Reimer said. “We can do the same. We’re not interested in their government, but we care a lot about their people.”

Parliamentary Ministers?

The Church of England General Synod has decided that clergymen of the national church should be free to become Members of Parliament like other citizens and has asked the British government to introduce the appropriate legislation. The vote by which the motion was carried in the synod (181 to 147), however, reflected the grave misgivings felt by some about this proposed break with tradition. A well-known evangelical, O. R. Johnston of Oxford, considered that the pastoral vocation was “totally incompatible with party allegiance and discipline,” and that clergymen who were aspiring parliamentarians should (as at present) renounce the exercise of their orders. Bishop Stanley Booth-Clibborn, supporting the motion, said that while the church should not carry a party label, a particular clergyman might do so.

It is now up to Parliament to rescind the 1801 Clergy Disqualification Act. Such legislation would have far-reaching consequences theologically and politically. It would also necessarily involve the position of clergy of the Church of Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of Ireland, all of whom are at present similarly debarred from the House of Commons.

World Scene

The Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) held its formal inaugural assembly in November at Huampani, Peru. The more than 300 participants represented 85 member denominations, 23 observer denominations, and other groups, CLAI elected a 16-member governing body headed by Argentine Methodist Bishop Federico Pagura. Brazilian Gerson Meyer is the secretary general. An invited representative of the Latin American Roman Catholic Bishops (CELAM) failed to appear.

A last-ditch attempt by conservative evangelicals to regain control of the Latin American Biblical Seminary in San José, Costa Rica, has failed. In an October business session that lasted into the early morning hours, moves by Christian businessmen to elect conservative Costa Rican evangelicals to its board were defeated. The dominant liberal faction easily secured the appointment of its man, Bolivian Methodist Anibal Guzman, as rector, replacing fellow liberal Carmelo Alvarez of Puerto Rico. The seminary is part of the Latin American Evangelical Community (CLAME), evolved from the ministry of the Latin America Mission. The CLAME general assembly, which meets this month, will issue a report on the seminary. But if it does not recommend expulsion, the seminary is expected to withdraw voluntarily.

UFM International has received a signed contract from Brazilian authorities for performing education and health work among several tribal groups in Brazil’s rain-forest interior. The contract with the Brazilian National Indian Foundation insures a continuing witness to the Kayapo, Canela, and Guajajara Indians.

A Northern Ireland Roman Catholic priest has called on clergymen to throw themselves into the line of fire, if need be, to try to halt the escalating communal violence. “Victory,” said Denis Faul, known as the IRA priest, “would be when a Catholic priest would risk, or indeed give, his life to save a Protestant man from being murdered by paramilitaries masquerading in the name of the Catholic population.”

A Norwegian regional court has reversed the ruling of a local court in the controversial case of Lutheran Pastor Børre Knudsen. Knudsen protested Norway’s abortion law by refusing to perform the “state” part of his duties, such as conducting marriages and maintaining the church register, and by returning his government salary (CT, April 9, p. 58). The lower court vindicated Knudsen, but the regional court deprived him of his post as a parish pastor. Knudsen’s attorney said the ruling establishes that the state “has the right to oust a pastor who preaches the Word of God in accordance with the bishops’ interpretation.” Knudsen is appealing to Norway’s supreme court.

The World Council of Churches has transferred funds from other programs to the Program to Combat Racism in spite of repeated assurances to the contrary, a West German source charges. Rolf Scheffbuch, spokesman for a discussion group in the Würtemberg Synod of the (Lutheran) Protestant Church in Germany (EKD), disclosed in November that German church tax funds contributed to the wcc budget had been transferred from the departments of world mission, evangelism, and development to the Program to Combat Rascism’s special fund used to support liberation movements. This runs counter to assurances made by the WCC Executive Committee at Jamaica in 1979 that the Program to Combat Racism would be financed solely by funds designated for it. The EKD is the largest contributor to the WCC, at an annual rate of close to $1 million.

The pastor of an unregistered Pentecostal congregation in the Soviet Union has been sentenced to five years of hard labor and two years of exile. Pyotr Golikov, 55, was sentenced after a three-day November trial in Rostov, where his church is located. Golikov was active in the campaign of Pentecostals to emigrate from the USSR and has disseminated documentation on their persecution. He was charged with “organizing group activity that disturbs public order” (leading worship) and with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”

Dutch Christians organized a campaign to win freedom for the “Siberian Seven” last month. Their letter writing and telephoning campaign is targeted to political leaders Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan and evangelist Billy Graham. Meanwhile, part of the “Seven,” the Vashchenko family, won approval for a visit to the U.S. embassy in Moscow of nine children and one in-law. The embassy, however, would allow only two to visit at a time, a condition the four Vashchenkos inside the embassy rejected.

Black Africa’s least evangelized country is cautiously inviting back some missionaries. In the mid-1960s, Guinea rejected membership in the “French Commonwealth” and turned toward the Eastern bloc. At the time, all missionaries were expelled except for eight with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (which had made more progress than others in Africanizing its work). Since then, Guinea, whose population is 75 percent Muslim, has edged back toward political neutrality. This fall it invited the Philafrican Mission of France to enter and work in the area of leprosy and other communicable diseases.

Pressures on the church in Ethiopia have certainly not damped down response to the gospel in the capital, Addis Ababa. The SIM International-related Meserete Hiywet Church reports 670 professions of faith in four months. Attendance at a nightly Bible study has had to be limited because of inadequate classroom space. And classes for new believers and for training new deacons are full.

Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios, “first among equals” in the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy, has left Istanbul for unspecified medical treatment in Switzerland, and has cancelled all contacts.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has given assurances that Coptic Pope Shenouda III will be released soon. He was responding to questions in November by a group of visiting American Catholic journalists. He said he is “looking for a decent way” to do this without triggering renewed violence between Muslim and Coptic extremists. Shenouda was stripped of his powers and banished to internal exile in September 1981 by President Anwar Sadat after Shenouda had canceled Easter celebrations nationwide the previous year to protest inadequate government protection for the Coptic Orthodox Christians in clashes. Last April, 32 out of 45 Coptic bishops signed a petition calling for Shenouda’s release, saying he poses no security threat. Eight who did not sign are still detained. Mubarak is still wary of the outspoken primate and told the journalists, “We warned Shenouda several times to slow down, not to create problems.”

A second Protestant seminary was opened in China in November with 50 students in the first class. The new school, the Northeastern Theological Seminary, is located in Shenyang, a suburb of Peking. Earlier, a seminary was established at Shanghai for China’s breakaway Catholic church. It opened with 36 students.

Lutherans are considering establishment of a new radio station to beam into China. Meeting in Hong Kong in November, an exploratory working party indicated a desire for programming that is supportive of the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement church. This, it said, would provide a moderate alternative to the broadcasts of Trans World Radio and Far East Broadcasting Company, which now account for more than 90 percent of religious broadcasts to the mainland.

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