NEWS
A surprisingly intense effort to clip the political wings of the National Council of Churches met predictable resistance at a decision-making level last month.
The NCC has long been criticized for issuing pronouncements and advocating actions identified with the ideological left. Under an arrangement suggested by the NCC General Board’s special restructure task force, the “advocacy function” would be relegated to a secondary level and made optional for member denominations.
The General Board didn’t take kindly to the plan. “This model might make the wrong people happy,” said Methodist bishop James Mathews, a noted activist. Leaders of black denominations were especially critical. “Many of us are jealous for the heritage of the National Council,” said one.
The decentralization effort grows partly out of a desire of some churchmen to make American conciliar ecumenism more inclusive, and partly out of the fact that the present NCC has had a hard time paying its bills. One General Board member who had just come from the World Council of Churches Central Committee meeting in Ethiopia said that the WCC, in apparent contrast, is undergoing greater centralization (see story, page 46).
The fifteen-member restructure task force, headed by the Reverend Arie R. Brouwer, had worked for a year determining what kind of an organization should supplant the present NCC. Its plan was unveiled at the General Board’s four-day winter meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, and decentralization was the key recommendation.
“This model is an interim plan for a particular period in history,” the task force declared. It pointed to “a great distrust of centralized authority, great pressure to include previously unempowered minorities, and a great desire for more open channels available to participation at all levels” and said that in light of such conditions “it seems impossible and therefore unwise to try to build a strong central structure which demands firm commitments of members.”
The task force added that if conditions change in the next ten years or so, another structure could then be worked out.
The task force wanted the General Board to revise the model and then refer it to member communions for evaluation and response. This, it was said, could be done “without prejudice to any later decision.” But the General Board balked. Instead, it ordered NCC president Cynthia Wedel to appoint a new “Committee on Future Ecumenical Structure” to revise the model, giving more emphasis to the following:
“1. The advocacy function of a central representative body which gives meaningful unified consideration and witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
“2. Centralized development of priorities and the concomitant budget accountability and program development.
“3. The development of a system which provides for the empowerment of minorities at every level and flexible approaches at the point of action and a facilitative style of staff leadership.”
The action was largely the result of a move by the United Church of Christ delegation. Interestingly, UCC president Robert Moss had served on the task force.
Efforts to make the proposed new structure more attractive to communions outside the present NCC may have been damaged by a speech delivered to the General Board the night before the action on the model was taken. The speech was that of Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin, general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). The bishop was reported to be ill, and his address was read by Monsignor Bernard Law, executive director of the NCCB’s Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
In it the bishop underscored perfect unity as the goal of ecumenism and quoted the Decree of Ecumenism from Vatican II: “This unity, we believe, dwells in the Catholic Church as something she can never lose, and we hope that it will continue to increase until the end of time.”
He acknowledged that “it may have been viewed as more diplomatic” if he had not included that sentence in the address. But he said that “in the interest of truth and understanding … two points must be understood by us all. The first is this: A Catholic view of ecumenism sees as its goal what might be variously referred to as perfect ecclesiastical communion, ecclesial unity, or organic unity.… The second point is this: The Catholic Church does have an understanding of herself as possessing elements of the unity willed by Christ for his Church which are not present to the same degree in other Christian churches and ecclesial communities.”
The next day a black church leader stated on the floor that he took exception to the implication that he was being invited “back home.” “I have never left home,” he said. “My home is where I am now.” Earlier in the meeting a black board member asked what the price would be of bringing in Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans. “Some of us will not sell our souls for a mess of pottage,” he said.
Bernardin was quoted as saying that the possibility of Roman Catholic membership in the World Council of Churches is “being studied in all its aspects by the Catholic Church,” but that it “is a question the complexity of which becomes more evident the more deeply it is studied.”
Young people, who have participated in NCC affairs more actively in recent months, said little during the Louisville meeting. The most vehement expression came in the response made by a young woman who had served on the task force to a board member’s complaint that the task force had been “tinkering” with the NCC. That remark alienated her so much, she said, that she was tempted to get on the telephone and call for demonstrations like those that had made a shambles of the NCC’s 1969 General Assembly in Detroit.
Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, NCC general secretary, who originated the restructure effort at the Detroit meeting, commented: “We have been through a critical period.” He said he was happy at the way things turned out in Louisville but conceded that the lack of discussion of the theological bases of conciliarism has been a “shortcoming.” At present, membership is open to those communions that “confess Jesus Christ as Divine Saviour and Lord.”
Espy had called for creation of a broadly inclusive General Ecumenical Congress that would meet periodically in the interest of unified expression. The task force perpetuated that idea by recommending that an annual “Inter-Church Conference” be held. The conference, whose name the task force changed to “Conference of Christian Churches,” would not take any binding actions on its member agencies.
Action would be at the level of self-governing and self-sustaining “consortia” organized separately from the conference. These consortia would be originated for a specific purpose by any two or more communions.
Espy originally wanted so-called para-ecclesiastical organizations to have some significant role in the conciliar structure. This designation could include such diverse groups as the American Bible Society, the National Committee of Black Churchmen, and Campus Crusade for Christ. Now, Espy says, he feels that only churches should be directly involved in structures.
Espy’s report to the Louisville meeting included a critique of the task-force model. Most of its features, he said, “I heartily affirm.” Significantly, however, he said he wanted to see the functions of the Interchurch Conference broadened so that it could issue pronouncements.1Latest stand taken by the General Board accuses the Harrisburg grand jury of violating rights of accused persons by naming “co-conspirators” without indicting them. The board took the action after hearing a speech by Congressman William Anderson (D.-Tenn.) defending the Berrigan brothers. He declared: “The Interchurch Conference should be given the explicit freedom to address its views on urgent subjects, in its own name, to the general public and the government.”
This year will probably tell the story. The new committee, headed by Dr. Thomas Liggett of the Christian Church (Disciples), is to get official reaction from communions on its revised model in time for the General Board to adopt an approved model at a September meeting in New Orleans.
Degree Decree
Carl McIntire’s embattled Shelton College in Cape May, New Jersey, has had its degree of troubles. Last year its academic dean was ousted for not having a valid bachelor’s degree—to say nothing of the master’s and doctoral degrees he had claimed (see May 22 issue, page 38). And last month the state Department of Higher Education revoked the license of the small, fundamentalist school.
But the shutting off of its degree-granting privileges did not daunt either McIntire or Shelton’s faculty. “We don’t expect to close; we’re going to continue as if we have accreditation,” Dean Edwin Larson told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He added that the school’s standards were “up to snuff” and that the board had exceeded its powers in revoking Shelton’s license.
Larson confirmed that the decision would be appealed in court and a $5 million damage suit filed against the board. McIntire was more vociferous: “It’s a liberal frame-up and the premeditated murder of a Christian college.”
The board said Shelton has “substantial academic deficiencies, coupled with a lack in institutional integrity and administrative competence.” It also charged the college with a lack of “candor in dealing with the public, students, and the state.”
The 140-student college has been aswirl in controversy since it moved to New Jersey in 1954. McIntire recently bought property at Cape Canaveral, Florida, that includes a college site.
Walking Inn
The Christian Service Corps, based in Washington, D. C., has walked its way into new headquarters: a 106-room, seven-story hotel.
The actual move from five scattered offices throughout the city took place this month, but the “money-raising walk” for the agency known as the Christian Peace Corps happened last November. Then sponsors paid from a penny to $10 a mile for CSC volunteer hikers, who trekked over a twenty-five-mile route. The walkers marched to the tune of $13,000—enough to guarantee a lease-purchase option on the Alturas Hotel on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington, and to pay the first month’s rent and operating expenses.
The corps, which has trained and placed 110 evangelicals in educational, business, clerical, ministerial, communications, and other fields since it was organized by the Reverend Robert Meyers almost six years ago, will use the first floor of the hotel for offices. Training and housing facilities for corpsmen will be located on the second floor, and the rest of the building will be leased to Christian groups and individuals.
The hotel, renamed the Christian Inn, will specialize in youth seminars. Room rentals and a coffee shop are expected to make the venture self-supporting, according to Walter Heywood, hotel manager and assistant to director Meyers.
