Samuel Johnson once made an acid remark about women preachers, and on another occasion declared what a fearful thing it was to contradict a bishop. He would not have been happy at the Lambeth Conference that concluded last month in London, for the world’s Anglican bishops were found to be contradicting one another over the ordination of women.
The topic brought into rare alliance two men from the same country who are normally found on opposite sides. “If the ministry of the church is opened to women,” said Archbishop Marcus Loane of Sydney, Australia, “it would sound the death knell for the church in its appeal to men.” He saw deep theological reasons against the proposal, which, he declared, conflicted with the doctrine of the headship of Christ.
Supporting his evangelical colleague was a high churchman, Bishop Ian Shevill of North Queensland. He pointed out that ordination of women was unknown among Roman Catholic and Orthodox, who make up the majority of Christendom, and he called rather for “creative dialogue with these historic churches.”
Pentecostal Social Credo
The 200-member policy board of the Assemblies of God, biggest U. S. Pentecostal group, last month passed a precedent-setting statement balancing sin and social concern. Noting “grave crises” in American life, the board said “devised confrontations” and “revolution” do not heal alienation. “Community-betterment projects and legislative actions on social improvement … should be prominent” but are inadequate. The Church’s “most significant social contribution,” the statement said, is in meeting man’s greatest need—personal salvation through Jesus Christ: “It is only as men become right with God that they can truly become right with one another.… In these matters the world does not write our agenda.” The statement vowed influence for “justifiable social action in areas of domestic relations, education, law enforcement, employment, equal opportunity, and other beneficial matters.”
Among those contradicting was Bishop G. W. Barrett of Rochester, New York, who saw no biblical or theological arguments against ordaining women, suggested that statements to the contrary appeared “emotional” or “due to prejudice,” and contrived to make an equation with racial discrimination. An English Congregational observer, the Rev. John Huxtable, suggested that the prospect of a great flood of women seeking ordination “terrifies some of you.” But it was a false alarm, he said: only about eighty women had been ordained by his denomination in fifty years—and this, moreover, did not keep the men away.
The outcome reflected a typical Anglican love of compromise: the conference passed a resolution that declared that at present there are no conclusive theological arguments for or against ordination of women to the priesthood—but that it did not endorse such ordination. The bishops did, however, agree to recommend as an interim step that Anglican churches be encouraged to permit duly qualified women to share in the conduct of services, to preach, baptize, read the Scripture at Holy Communion, and assist in distribution of the elements.
On intercommunion, another explosive topic, the conference resolved to permit the practice in cases of “special pastoral need” and on a reciprocal basis. In a related matter, the bishops corrected a longtime anomaly by agreeing to allow ministers of the Church of South India to exercise their ministry in Anglican churches and to re-examine the relation of the Church of South India and Anglican churches “with a view to entering into full communion with that Church.” At present not a single one of Anglicanism’s nineteen provinces is in communion with the CSI.
Bishop W. L. S. Fleming of Norwich, who is also an explorer and geologist, supported a Maltese petition to the United Nations for drafting an international treaty on oceanography. This said that the ocean floor, beyond national limits, should be preserved from economic exploitation and from national competitions, and should be used only for peaceful purposes. International pacts were necessary, Fleming said, since the oceans were in danger of pollution and dumping, and could serve as sites for undetectable military equipment, including nuclear devices. The bishops listened with interest, espied no heresy in the proposal, and resolved accordingly.
Some heated differences of opinion emerged, however, when the conference discussed the proposals for reunion of the Methodist Church and the Church of England. A warning was given that dissentient Methodists and Anglicans (both evangelical and high church) have signified their intention not to participate in the merger scheme as it stands at present. Finally the proposals received the blessings of the conference, “even if,” in the words of one reporter, “members of the two churches are torn among themselves over the issue.”
On a motion from Bishop Neil Russell of Zanzibar it was agreed that bishops, “as leaders and representatives of a servant church, should radically examine the honours paid to them” during worship services, in titles and customary address, and in style of living. Two bishops dissented. Said the conference secretary, Bishop Ralph Dean of Cariboo, “I do not allow my people to call me ‘My Lord.’ If they see me in the street and say, ‘How d’you do, Bish,’ that’s all right.” Also executive officer of the Anglican Communion, Dean has the job of liaison among bishops. A series of flying visits has taken him sixteen times round the world in three years. “A sort of church 007½,” he says.
A communion service was held for 15,000 people at the White City Stadium, usually the scene of athletics, soccer matches, and dog racing. Assisted by sixty pairs of bishops, Archbishop Campbell MacInnes, who retires from his historic see of Jerusalem later this year, conducted the service. Preaching was Bishop Hassan Bernaba Dehquani-Tafti of Iran. The ultimate aim, he said, was not to preach philosophy and theology, “important though these are,” but to make disciples of all nations. “This means that first of all we must be disciples ourselves; and that in its turn means that we must have within ourselves that divine quality of self-giving love, which was revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ.”
PERSONALIA
Retired medical missionary Robert Baird McClure is the first layman ever elected moderator of the United Church of Canada. He won the two-year term on the fourth ballot at the opening of the UCC meeting in Kingston, Ontario. McClure, son of a medical missionary in China, served there until the Communist takeover and later worked in India.
Cesar Chavez, leader of the California grape-pickers’ protest, told a Pax Romana conference in Philadelphia that artificial birth control is being promoted as a way to “exterminate the poor and all the non-white peoples of the world.”
The U.S. Congress On Evangelism
An interdenominational group has announced that the United States Congress on Evangelism will be held September 8–14, 1969, in Minneapolis. The Rev. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, “Lutheran Hour” speaker, is congress chairman, and evangelist Billy Graham is honorary chairman.
Hoffmann, who spent several days with the executive committee of eight Minneapolis churchmen last month, said the meeting will seek “a more urgent declaration of the Gospel to our generation” and re-establishment of “the original strategy for universal evangelism”—bold witnessing by all believers in Christ. He said “our goal is to lift both the spiritual and temporal burdens of man,” by, among other things, “a vigorous attack upon the Satanic forces which produce misery, inequity, emptiness and all other evils in our society.”
The U. S. congress is one of several inter-church regional meetings inspired by the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism. A West African congress was held in July. An Asia-South Pacific congress is scheduled next month, and a Latin American meeting next year.
The local committee is led by Evangelical Covenant pastor Paul Fryhling and includes: American Lutheran Church evangelism director Conrad Thompson, Lutheran pastor William Berg, Methodist pastor C. Philip Hinerman, President Carl Lundquist of Bethel College (Baptist General Conference), Evangelical Free Church editor Mel Larson, and George M. Wilson and Victor Nelson of the Billy Graham association. Nelson is executive secretary.
An invitation to meet in the Minneapolis Auditorium was extended by a “Minnesota Committee of 100” ministers and laymen, including Governor Harold LeVander. The congress expects to assemble 8,000 church leaders, evangelists, ministers, and laymen from scores of denominations and interdenominational organizations.
A. D. Pont, church-history professor at South Africa’s Pretoria University, was ordered by the Johannesburg Supreme Court to pay $90 a month for the rest of his life to two fellow academicians he libeled in a Dutch Reformed newspaper. He had alleged that the pair, associated with the apartheid-opposing Christian Institute, were Communist conspirators.
Colonel Hans E. Sandrock, a veteran American Lutheran Church Air Force chaplain, was appointed executive director of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board in Washington, D. C.
Pastor Brooks Ramsey of the 1,700-member Second Baptist Church in Memphis resigned after reporting he was harassed for his stand on race relations. The church declined to accept his resignation, however, and instead ousted all forty-five deacons.
Glossolalia globe-trotter David J. Du Plessis of Oakland, California, said he met a number of delegates at the World Council of Churches meetings in Uppsala who had been “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” later preached to 4,000 at the International Gypsy Conference in Les Choux, France.
Bishop Hans Niklot Beste of the Evangelical Church of Meckenburg, East Germany, is new chairman of the East German Bishops’ Conference. He succeeds Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, Pomeranian bishop who supported Evangelical unity across Germany’s East-West lines. Krummacher was denied governmental permission to attend WCC sessions at Uppsala.
PROTESTANT PANORAMA
Preaching and holding church office by women are “contrary to Scripture,” ruled Colorado’s Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod meeting. It also rejected a recommendation of altar and pulpit fellowship with the American Lutheran Church, an issue to be voted on nationally next July.
The Lutheran World Federation’s Theology Commission, meeting in Geneva, endorsed Christian participation in violence “to carry out a revolution with the goal of bringing about a more just legal structure.”
Seventeen of the nation’s twenty largest Sunday Schools are Baptist, according to a Christian Life magazine survey. Akron (Ohio) Baptist Temple, with an average weekly attendance of 6,300, tops all others. The 17,000-member independent church is pastored by the Rev. Dallas Billington, who founded the church with fourteen persons in 1935.
The 500-congregation National Christian Missionary Convention, the Negro group within the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), voted 97–9 to dissolve and form a new lobby within the national denomination, which will vote this month on the same issue.
Property of the proposed Maryland Baptist College, aborted amid controversy by Southern Baptists last November, will be sold to avoid further losses.
MISCELLANY
Ten-year-old Mark Painter will remain in permanent custody of his writer-photographer father, a bohemian type, in California. The boy’s grandmother, awarded custody in 1966 by the Iowa Supreme Court, credited a visit to her son and a report by United Church of Christ minister Clay Lumpkins of Gilbert, Iowa, for her decision not to fight the contested case further. The New York Conference of the Methodist Church had filed a brief with the U. S. Supreme Court in the father’s favor, but the court refused to intervene.
Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Dwight L. Moody, Frederick Muhlenberg, John Carroll, Cardinal Gibbons, Mary Baker Eddy, and Brigham Young are included in an exhibition of 160 distinguished Americans at the opening of the new National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C.
The First Apostolic Church of Bell Gardens, California, is moving to Atlanta because, as one member put it, God is going to make California “fall off in the water.” He said pastor Donald Abernathy had previously predicted the Watts riot and the Arab-Israeli war.
Deaths
DOUGLAS HORTON, 77, retired dean of Harvard University Divinity School; World Council of Churches leader and Congregational Christian executive; negotiator of the merger that formed the United Church of Christ; in Randolph, New Hampshire, of a heart attack.
EUGENE SMATHERS, 60, rural pastor elected as 1967–68 moderator of the United Presbyterian Church; in Big Lick, Tennessee, after a long illness.
OSCAR FRANKLIN PELFREY, 65, lay minister of the snake-handling Church of God in Jesus Name sect; in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, of rattlesnake bite during a service.
HARRY ELMER BARNES, 79, philosophical naturalist and vocal foe of Christianity; in Malibu, California, of a heart attack.
Pinebrook, the Bible conference near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, made famous by the late Percy Crawford, was sold last month to the Bible Fellowship Church.
Since Canada’s liberalized divorce law went into effect in July, a 300 per cent increase in applications (643) is reported in the Toronto area, compared to the same month last year.
The eight-week premiere showing of the new Billy Graham film “Two A Penny” in London (July 19 issue, page 49) drew attendance of 22,786, with 850 of those filling out cards requesting further spiritual help.
Latest Soviet paper to condemn “illegal” activities by underground Baptists such as religious instruction and praying in unauthorized places is Lenin’s Banner.
Vatican officials denied press reports that the corps of seventy ceremonial Swiss Guards are threatening to strike for shorter hours and higher salary. They admitted there had been “some grumbling” among the group, whose pay is $160 a month.
