Editors of nine major Protestant journals will meet in Philadelphia September 30 as part of a significant ecumenical turn in the church press.
So far, the journals have traded advance information on upcoming articles, have shared articles when others are interested, and have joined to commission several articles. Plans are in the hopper to form inter-staff teams for special reporting assignments.
Their informal cooperative venture, called Interchurch Features, is the brainchild of Robert Cadigan, veteran editor of America’s biggest denominational magazine, Presbyterian Life (United Presbyterian Church).
The development is a natural result of the ecumenical movement and the Consultation on Church Union. The group consists of the general-circulation magazines of the COCU denominations, minus those of the two Negro bodies, which have much smaller budgets, plus the Lutheran (Lutheran Church in America) and the United Church Observer (United Church of Canada). Presbyterian Survey was added last spring after the Presbyterian Church U. S. (Southern) joined COCU.
Cooperation is also a way the leaders can counter the lethargy in denominational journalism. Many church journals are just managing to hold their own in circulation and advertising lineage. Some are slipping noticeably.
Interchurch Features Circulation
“It’s because we’re raising tough issues, which get people irritated,” says the Episcopalian’s Henry McCorkle. But he points out another problem: the big, rich secular magazines are increasingly getting into religion and competing with church journals. They are pouring money into major feature stories on Christianity and moral issues, and so the average church member says, “I saw an article by so-and-so in the Saturday Evening Post. Why wasn’t it in the Episcopalian?”
The reason is usually money. McCorkle says, “the big slicks spend more on editorial promotion in a year than our entire budget.” Financial realities started cooperative ventures such as the Interfaith Group in advertising prior to editorial sharing.
If denominational magazines pool their resources, they can move from what Cadigan calls “tipping the writer” to lining up top professionals and paying them $1,000 plus expenses. And if the piece runs in all nine publications, the potential audience will be 3.6 million, which compares favorably with that of the secular giants.
So far, the copy-sharing has been more limited, mainly bilateral agreements. The biggest project in print so far was a spring series on COCU in advance of the annual meeting. Not all the journals carried the series, and some that did dropped part of it.
To Cadigan, the significance of the arrangement is that “nine editors have concluded that they are not in competition with each other, and have no reason to hold back on one another and every reason to share.” There is very little overlap in their circulations.
The sharing dates back to 1960, when McCorkle left as managing editor of Presbyterian Life to become the first editor of the Episcopalian. The ties between the two Philadelphia-based magazines were natural and soon another local editor, G. Elson Ruff of the Lutheran, became part of the circle.
In summer, 1965, Cadigan realized “we all had to say something about church union” and hosted editors from the six COCU denominations, plus A. C. Forrest of the Observer from Canada, and Ruff. The result was Inter-church Features, a syndicate without any bank or bylaws. The same group met at the Associated Church Press convention in St. Louis and two other times prior to this month’s get-together.
Editors send lists of what they plan to publish to one another, and can ask to see photocopies of items they are interested in. They can then arrange for simultaneous or later printing, with payment determined by the magazine that developed the article. An example was Presbyterian Life’s series on Vatican II by Robert McAfee Brown.
In a variation on this, the Episcopalian arranged with the publisher for excerpts from the new book Letters of C. S. Lewis. The magazine then offered the idea to the eight other members, and some proceeded to make their own reprint arrangements.
Interchurch Features has two other commissioned projects now in process. William Lee Miller of Yale Divinity School is doing a roundup of church involvement in anti-poverty programs. A second feature will deal with abortion laws. Most of the magazines contributed to the pool on these, but each will decide on its own whether to use the copy. A future possibility is writer-photographer teams drawn from several magazine staffs to take a thorough look at an ecumenical inner-city project.
Asked what other magazines might be joining, Cadigan said, “We haven’t nominated anybody else. It should not be so large that it’s unwieldly.”
McCorkle said the three Philadelphia magazines had more flexibility than the nine. But he hopes the editors will increasingly get together through conference telephone calls for unified efforts to cover, for instance, fast-breaking racial developments.
Speed is becoming less important for some editors, however, such as J. Martin Bailey of the United Church Herald (United Church of Christ), which switched from biweekly to monthly publication this month. Bailey said that since radio, TV, magazines, and newspapers are improving their coverage of religion, “we are no longer the first purveyors of significant religious news.” Also, he says, people need church-in-the-world stories rather than old-style news of “ecclesiastical happenings.” Bailey will put the money saved by producing half as many issues into color and other design elements. (The Christian of the Disciples of Christ is the only weekly in the magazine group.)
The 37-year-old editor, who holds two journalism degrees, emphasized that the change will not affect his desire to produce “a forthright journal of liberal opinion.” He said some may hear of the format switch and think, “Well, they finally clamped down on Bailey.”
Church and Home, the Evangelical United Brethren biweekly, is the newest of the magazines in the group and is in the process of moving its offices from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Dayton, Ohio. But once it moves there, the magazine may disappear, since its denomination is on the verge of merger with The Methodist Church, whose big-circulation Together is a fellow member of Interchurch Features.
Cadigan believes that “the church press could be an advance agent of union rather than follow the churches.” But instead of merger and disappearance, he talks about having “some percentage of the magazines in common,” with the rest of the material prepared by denominational editors. Such improvements as instant delivery of written matter on tape will “make this mechanically easy within years,” he said.
McCorkle, at the risk of shudders from some of his colleagues, is willing to dream aloud about “a Christian newsweekly on the order of Time and Newsweek” that would incorporate the resources of various denominations merging into a union church. “There might even be a market for that prior to union,” he thinks.
The idea isn’t new. Cadigan recalled pipe dreams about a Protestant World two decades ago and, because of that experience, doubts such a magazine will appear. Stephen Rose has suggested an independent, non-denominational news-weekly in his Chicago journal, Renewal.
McCorkle doesn’t think a united church magazine would be a handmaiden to the denominational headquarters. “We are far more independent today than was the case ten or fifteen years ago.” He believes most church publications have gone beyond the “house organ” stage and are “specialized magazines,” serving a particular audience.
But the magazines’ economic dependence on church headquarters still presents a journalistic handicap. Commitment to COCU, for instance, is likely to make objective coverage of this preeminent story particularly difficult.
Church Beats E.U.B. In Court
When a local church quits its denomination, courts almost invariably hand property rights over to the denomination. The pattern was broken August 25 in the case of Faith Church in Santa Ana, California, which left the Evangelical United Brethren this year over ecumenical issues and went into the Evangelical Free Church.
EUB’s schismatic history includes lots of property suits, but the national denomination has always won, either at first or on appeal. This time Superior (county) Court Judge Lester Van Tatenhove ruled that EUB officials waited too long to assert their rights to the $200,000 Santa Ana property.
The EUB Discipline states that under trust provisions, the denomination owns the property, even when the actual deed is only in the name of the local church, as is the case with many EUB congregations.
Van Tatenhove, a Presbyterian, noted that the EUB made no move to enforce its rights until Faith Church had paid off all its mortgages. He said EUB officials should have known the congregation “did not, and did not intend to, submit their property to control by the denomination.”
District Superintendent O. E. Schafer said, “I am amazed that the judge overlooked all the church law involved.” He considers the ruling a “purely technical matter.” An appeal attempt is likely to be launched by California Conference executives this month. Lawyer John Moody, an EUB member in San Diego, is confident the Van Tatenhove decision, which “totally ignored what we fought out in court for five weeks,” will be overruled.
Most cases involve a majority vote for pull-out, while a minority asserts its rights to hold the property and remain loyal to the denomination. Even in congregational systems, the courts side with the denomination. (For a followup on the classic Wichita Baptist case, see July 30, 1965, issue, page 47.)
But Faith Church claims that 100 per cent of its members—active and inactive—wanted to quit the EUB. The rationale was set forth in thirty-nine whereases addressed to the state conference in March, 1965. The church listed complaints about modernism, said it had opposed the 1946 merger of its parent denomination (United Brethren in Christ) into the EUB, attacked the National Council of Churches, and shuddered over the pending merger with The Methodist Church, on which the EUB national conference votes this November.
Schafer says the latter argument is “beside the point,” since the EUB-Methodist merger hasn’t been “consummated.” In fact, the California Conference is fighting the merger.
The state conference decided to turn down Faith Church’s petition for withdrawal and replaced the church’s pastor of ten years, Paul Alleman, with loyalist Ehrhardt Lang. After the ceremony in which Schafer and Moody presented Lang to the congregation, lay officials stood up and announced they were no longer EUBs. Faith Church eventually moved intact into the Evangelical Free Church.
After the lawsuit was launched this July, Alleman left for Denver, where he is candidating for a new pulpit. On September 25, the embattled church’s pulpit will be taken over by the Rev. Warren Wedan, a Free Churcher.
Despite the gain of 200 new members, Free Church District Superintendent Wallace Norling admits “we feel very awkward” and stresses that his denomination does not practice churchstealing. But if an independent congregation comes to the Free Church seeking a “broader fellowship” and agrees with its beliefs, he says, “we have no policy for excluding them.”
No matter what might happen to Lang et al. v. Faith Evangelical United Brethren Church et al. in the district Court of Appeals, the case has brought new attention to a big, silent ecumenical issue—legal rights to property. Despite discussion and dialogue, it is likely that many congregations in the Consultation on Church Union would prefer to stay outside if they wouldn’t lose their buildings. Organic union may be made, not by words, but by deeds.
An Interchurch Bible
A Bible designed for Protestants as well as Roman Catholics will be released this fall by Oxford University Press. The Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, originally produced for Protestants alone, will hereafter be published in an “ecumenical edition” with the imprimatur of Richard Cardinal Cushing, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston. It will probably be as close as Roman Catholic and Protestants have ever come to a common Bible.
The text of the Bible is that of the Revised Standard Version, which has been left intact. A paragraph has been incorporated into the foreword indicating that Cushing has granted an imprimatur (there will be no imprimatur page as such). Fourteen changes have been made in annotations to indicate Catholic options. They were drawn up in consultation with Catholic scholars. The Apocrypha appears as a virtual appendix following the New Testament.
