Mainline Protestants Organize to Challenge Their Churches’ Positions on Public Policy

The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) is helping to organize mainline Protestants who are disturbed by the public policy positions of their denominations. During two days of meetings in Washington, D.C., Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and United Methodists explored ways to introduce different points of view to church officials on positions regarding Central America, U.S.-Soviet relations, and political choices facing Third World governments.

There is a strong evangelical component in each of the caucus groups, but they differ from theologically based movements, such as Good News within the United Methodist Church. By concentrating on issues of human rights, democratic values, and religious liberty, IRD spokesmen say, caucus members may attract a broad following within their churches and press ahead for discussion about what their churches stand for and how corporate witness should be carried out.

IRD is a Washington-based nonprofit research and education organization that has vigorously challenged the foreign affairs initiatives of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC). It attracted national news media attention in 1983 when Reader’s Digest and “60 Minutes” reported on links between the ecumenical movement and left-wing political causes abroad.

The recent meeting with mainline Protestants indicates a shift in focus for IRD, said program director Diane Knippers. “We want to be more than just a gadfly, critic, think tank, or publisher. We want to change our churches, and that calls for efforts by church activists.” The only way ecumenical councils will change, she said, is through pressure from within their member denominations.

United Methodists make up the single largest block of IRD’s 2,000 members. A caucus called United Methodists for Religious Liberty and Human Rights took shape in that denomination under IRD sponsorship in late 1983. At the United Methodist general conference last May, the caucus surprised everyone with its determination and success. A denominational magazine, engage/social action, reflected an official hats-off attitude:

“With sophisticated aplomb, this tiny group went about herding its agenda through the conference. With a visibility and influence that seemed far out of proportion to the strength of its parent body, members passed out press kits, held press conferences and briefings, and diligently tracked its resolutions through legislative committees. Its efforts paid off with the passage of a statement on religious freedom, amendments to the Central America resolution, and a minor addition to the Social Creed.”

IRD board member David Jessup, head of United Methodists for Religious Liberty and Human Rights, urged Episcopalians and Presbyterians at the IRD meeting to pursue a similar track. He encouraged them to “begin to organize an alternative—a set of structures, activities, materials, and channels of giving that will appeal to significant numbers of our fellow Christians.”

Mainline church bureaucracies are designed to effect social change in the world, he pointed out. “One cannot walk through the corridors of the great church bureaucracies, read the bulletin boards, and observe the staff activity without sensing the overwhelming importance of this political aspect of church life.”

Jessup said protests raised by U.S. church officials in the wake of President Reagan’s order to invade Grenada illustrate his point. Church spokesmen “duly amplified the howls of outrage of their Caribbean counterparts,” he said. “Somehow they never got around to letting their constituents know that the Grenadian Council of Churches approved of U.S. actions.”

IRD aspires to outdo mainline denominations and the NCC at their own task of educating church members. The institute provides research reports and evidence to bolster its claims of religious liberty abuses abroad. Beyond Soviet oppression and Central American conflict, IRD will broaden its focus to include critiques of right-wing regimes such as those ruling the Philippines and South Africa. In a letter to South African Ambassador Bernardus Fourie, IRD’s board of directors called on that government to “take immediate steps toward racial integration, full political democracy, and elementary economic justice.”

The success in May of the Methodist caucus provided ample encouragement for Episcopalians and Presbyterians at the recent IRD meeting. Episcopalian Barbara Denluck, assistant to the president of CREED, a group assisting persecuted Christians behind the Iron Curtain, said the Episcopal effort is designed to be nonconfrontational and not divisive. It arose among parishioners who felt alienated because they disagreed with official church policies on foreign affairs, she said.

The 37 Presbyterians in attendance decided to form a caucus within the Presbyterian Church (USA) to draw attention to violations of religious freedom and ways in which undemocratic forms of government oppress the faithful. Similar lay-led groups within the denomination advocate prolife policies and respect for the integrity of Scripture. Pressuring denominational officials to hear another political viewpoint is considered particularly crucial among Presbyterians because of their deep involvement in lobbying efforts on behalf of Nicaragua’s revolutionary government and in ecumenical exchange programs with the Soviet Union.

“I’m not sure the leadership of the church is so far gone that we can’t engage in dialogue,” said Terry Eastland, a member of National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. “But the point is that God has not always resurrected the same entity to carry on his work. I don’t know how long mainline denominations will be vessels for living truth.”

Presbyterian officials will fight caucus efforts “tooth and nail” because “the problem is that church elites of mainline denominations are even more removed from political reality than other kinds of elites,” predicted Mark Amstutz, a Presbyterian layman and chairman of the political science department at Wheaton (Ill.) College. “When people join the name of the Lord with their particular predispositions, it can really be problematical.”

Frank Watson, who heads a steering committee of Episcopalians within IRD, said the problem goes beyond specific foreign affairs positions. “It’s an attitude toward what freedom is all about and toward democracy itself,” he said. “When you listen to Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Malcolm Muggeridge, you realize that democracy will not exist without a moral dimension to it that the church must assume.”

Visits to the Soviet Union by mainline church officials have the effect of suggesting that church life there is not so bad, Watson said. “Those of us who know better than that want to point out that there is persecution there.”

Such criticism of mainline denominations is not appreciated at the Episcopal Church’s Washington, D.C., office. “The devious tactics of IRD are not conducive to dialogue,” said William L. Weiler, the office’s director. “They are not offering an invitation to open dialogue but laying hold of a springboard to promote their own views.

“The Episcopal Church, along with believers of other traditions, have found ways of working together very effectively,” he said. “I regret [that] an aberration like this diverts us from everyday witness and ecumenical endeavor.”

In New York, however, Episcopal Church presiding bishop John M. Allin has commissioned a study of church membership in the NCC and the WCC. Noting that Episcopal participation in the ecumenical councils has been taken for granted, Allin said it may be better to “start afresh, rather than to struggle in a disjointed organization wherein participation is difficult and not accurately representative of the churches’ membership.”

A similar study is under way in the Presbyterian Church (USA). A committee is expected to present its final report at a general assembly meeting in May. Indications of sensitivity to members who question official church policy already are evident. Those sensitivities may encourage these caucus groups to press more insistently for an end to political polarization within mainline denominations.

Lutheran theologian and author Richard John Neuhaus, addressing the IRD gathering, appealed for a renewed understanding of the nature of the church. “The church is nothing less than the bride of Christ,” he said. “It should be neither of the left nor of the right nor of the spineless middle. We must work toward the time when people don’t have to feel they must choose their church on the basis of its politics.”

North American Scene

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a lower court ruling leaving church property under the control of a local Presbyterian church. In 1977, a congregation in Schenectady, New York, voted to sever relations with the Presbyterian Church (USA) over doctrinal differences. The Presbytery of Albany then appointed an administrative commission to replace the church’s governing board, saying the congregation’s action violated church law. By declining to review the case, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that the congregation is not subject to the jurisdiction of the presbytery or of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

America’s Catholic bishops have offered guidelines to influence future laws concerning medical treatment of terminally ill patients. In a three-page document, the bishops criticized many existing statutes as a violation of a patient’s right to life. The document suggested that future laws recognize that the patient’s right to refuse medical treatment is not absolute.

A federal judge has ruled that allowing federally financed teachers to conduct classes in Missouri’s parochial schools violates the U.S. Constitution. U.S. District Judge Joseph Stevens, Jr., ruled that the practice runs the risk of excessively entangling church and state. He stayed the injunction against the practice, however, until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a similar case.

A Gallup poll indicates that the percentage of churchgoing Americans remained unchanged in 1984, with 4 out of every 10 adults attending a church or synagogue. Attendance has varied within a range of only two percentage points since 1969. However, the proportion of Catholics attending mass fell 23 percentage points from 1958 until 1982, while Protestant church attendance remained steady. Catholics still lead Protestants in attendance—by 51 percent to 39. Twenty-two percent of Jews said they attend synagogue.

A judge in Virginia has found two men guilty of shouting anti-Catholic slogans. Ronnie McRae and Timothy Schuller were fined $100 for making excessive noise outside a Catholic church. A priest testified that the men stood across the street from the church and yelled “violently anti-Catholic” slogans at parishioners arriving for mass.

The U.S. Agency for International Development will discontinue funding for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Funding will not be renewed because the group finances abortion-related services in other countries. Federal funding for fiscal 1984 was about $14 million and was expected to be around $17 million for 1985, approximately 30 percent of IPPF’s proposed budget. An IPPF spokeswoman said less than 1 percent of its budget is used to finance abortion-related activities.

A Catholic study is calling for the immediate training of lay people as “professional ministers” to fill certain pastoral roles. Theologically trained laymen would help offset the declining numbers of priests and nuns. A task force—commissioned by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—reported that the number of American Catholics rose from 45 million in 1970 to 52 million in 1983. During that same period, the number of priests and nuns dropped from 194,000 to 151,000.

Lutheran church membership in North America remained steady in 1983, according to the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A. In 1983, total membership was 8,826,832, about 6 percent of the world Lutheran population. The Lutheran Church in America is the largest Lutheran group, with more than three million members.

The National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV) reports that 46 percent of the 900 rock music videos it studied contained violence or suggestions of violence. An NCTV study indicates that 13 percent of the violent vidoes contain sadism, with an attacker deriving pleasure from committing a violent act. The study reported that Michael and Jermaine Jackson appear in some of the most violent music videos.

Minnesota’s Catholic bishops have blocked a proposed ecumenical lobbying effort to support legislation that would give protected status to homosexuals. The bishops opposed the recommendation of the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition, saying the proposed legislation would legitimize homosexuality and could affect the hiring practices of church schools and other religious agencies. The Joint Religious Legislative Coalition is made up of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the Minnesota Council of Churches, and the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Personalia

Evon Hedley has been named chairman of the Slavic Gospel Association’s (SGA) executive committee, SGA’s vice-chairman for 20 years, Hedley replaces Warren Wiersbe as chairman. Wiersbe, director of the Back to the Bible radio broadcast, becomes SGA’s vice-chairman.

Gordon Loux has been named president and chief executive officer of Prison Fellowship Ministries, Inc. (PFM). PFM is a newly established umbrella organization that will provide senior management and staff support for three ministry subsidiaries. Prison Fellowship USA will become the organization’s U.S. ministry arm; Justice Fellowship will continue its prison reform work; and Fellowship Communications will provide ministry materials. Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson will serve as chairman of PFM.

J. Robert Nelson has been named director of the Institute of Religion at Texas Medical Center in Houston. An ordained United Methodist minister, he will direct the institute’s program in relating concerns of health, medical care, religious faith, and ethics. Nelson is professor of systematic theology at the Boston University School of Theology.

Guy Bon Giovanni has been elected general overseer of the Christian Church of North America. He has served as a pastor, as director of the denomination’s missions department, as assistant general overseer, and as immediate past vice-president.

James M. Dunn, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, has been elected president of Bread for the World. Dunn has served on the organization’s board of directors for six years. Bread for the World is a Christian organization that advocates public policies that help feed the hungry.

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