That annual family reunion in the South known as the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S. (PCUS), has all the marks of other family gatherings. Kissin’ cousins embrace if only briefly, gossip is exchanged, meals are eaten, songs are sung, the departed are remembered, prayers are said, deference is paid to the elders, some business is transacted. Around the edges of the crowd are some trying to make deals, others hatching up some kind of mischief, and some expressing unhappiness with the whole program.
This year at Montreat, North Carolina, a favorite uncle was chosen chairman (or moderator, as Presbyterians say). He was the favorite of a majority, at any rate. It took two ballots, and on the second L. Nelson Bell won.
The executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, former medical missionary, is uncle to more than one generation of children of missionaries and Montreat summer visitors. He has lived on the church’s assembly grounds since returning from China in 1941.
He won the denomination’s top post over another medical man, Joseph A. Norton, a Little Rock radiologist who is his junior by twenty-five years. When the voting was all over, Bell had a 221 to 212 victory over Norton. He appealed for the prayers of the assembly. “By God’s help,” he promised, “this time next year we’re going to be closer together than ever before.”
Bell was nominated by Texas lawyer Dale Edwards, who said he was not speaking for any group or faction but simply believed Bell was the man most likely to succeed in reconciling the dissension-torn church. Election of a theological conservative can be construed as direct word from the Assembly that there is a place for conservatives in the denomination.
Bell’s separation from the organized conservative forces in the church last August (see September 24, 1971, issue, page 42) was not mentioned in the nominating speech, but there was scarcely a person in the Assembly who had not heard of his refusal to endorse dissidents planning for a “continuing” Presbyterian church in the event of a PCUS-United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (UPCUSA), merger.
With the election over, the commissioners gave retiring moderator Ben Lacy Rose a standing ovation. He turned out to be more active in “retirement” than many expected. Not only did Bell call on him to preside during some crucial debates, but he was also a leading debater on several issues.
The Assembly followed the lead of Lacy, a professor at Union seminary, Richmond, on the question of staying in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), on calling for an end to the war in Southeast Asia by the end of this year, on reaffirming the legality of union presbyteries with the UPCUSA, on rejecting a proposed commendation of Brazil’s activist Roman Catholic archbishop Dom Helder Camara, and on approving a minimal doctrinal statement about evangelism.
Rose came out of the assembly with more power than Southern Presbyterians have ever given any officer. He will be chairman of a provisional general executive board that during the coming year will supervise agency restructuring. All the denomination’s program and service boards will go out of existence by January 1, 1974, and their functions will be taken over by a single huge body.
William A. Benfield, Jr. (1970 moderator), Rose, Bell, the other candidates for moderator this year, and about sixty other elected members will make up the provisional board. It will have five divisions; Rose will suggest which members will serve on which division. Initial-step appointments are expected to be made before the next Assembly. First steps also will have been taken by then in a new priority-setting process so that the 1973 meeting of the denomination’s governing board can approve the goals.
Proponents of the reorganization argued at Montreat that instead of centralizing power the new plan puts more decision-making authority in the church courts at all levels. Of the seventy-one members on the permanent board, forty-two will be nominated by the seven new regional senates. Assembly commissioners elected by the presbyteries will have a larger role in approving priorities and budgets than before, proponents claimed.
As the new structure is being put together during the coming year, the denomination will also be adjusting to the reduction of senates from fifteen to seven.
Among the constitutional matters on which the presbyteries will be expected to vote is church union. Since the talks with both the UPCUSA and COCU are in the stage of studying draft plans of union, there will be no vote until after the lines are redrawn. The Assembly turned down an attempt to instruct the UPCUSA negotiating committee to present a plan next year.
The United Presbyterian withdrawal from COCU gave Rose an argument for continued PCUS participation. He said the consultation needed the only Reformed voice remaining in the talks. The Assembly voted 264 to 164 to remain.
With much of its time devoted to housekeeping and political matters, the Assembly had little left for theological concerns. At one point the theology of Campus Crusade for Christ came under a speaker’s fire, but the court—at the urging of several students—voted to pray for that organization’s Explo ’72, which was meeting the same week. On the final morning a new interpretation of ordination vows for both laity and clergy was approved, with the court rejecting 264 to 50 a report that would have put the denomination on record as holding to biblical inerrancy.
Zaire: Unwilling Partners
Evangelical missions and churches in Zaire are breathing a bit easier but enjoying it less following the decision of the government to allow them to continue operation—as members of the liberal-oriented Church of Christ of Zaire (CCZ), the only Protestant church now permitted to function. All thirty-three groups of the largely conservative Council of Protestant Churches, axed in a government crackdown on proliferation of religious sects and pseudoreligious groups (see April 14 issue, page 4, and May 12 issue, page 37), were on a recently released list of seventy-two bodies the government will recognize. Also on the list: Mormons and several groups rejected by the other five officially recognized religious groups. Curiously, though lumped together in the CCZ, each group will be allowed to retain its “proper legal status.”
The CCZ, in contradiction to its earlier call for other churches to obey the government, denounced the list and said it would publish its own within ten days. President Mobutu Sese Seko apparently is caught in a behind-the-scenes struggle between opposing forces in his government. CCZ leader Bokambanza Bokeleale was suddenly called to Geneva for consultation with World Council of Churches leaders. (“We are listening to all sides,” commented WCC general secretary Eugene Carson Blake while disclaiming that the WCC is “taking an active role in deciding or influencing this matter.”)
Meanwhile, most of the evangelical groups have adopted a wait-and-see posture. Only a few persons have left over the issue of separatism. But, clearly, the biggest crisis is yet to come.
ROBERT L. NIKLAUS
Rebuke From Fellow Peaceniks
Wrangling within the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference has been further underlined in an open letter from the East German regional committee chiding the CPC’s U. S. supporters. While acknowledging past American diligence in the antiwar cause (pointing out that Daniel Berrigan had participated in the CPC’s 1964 Prague assembly), the letter asks bluntly, “What are the reasons for which your efforts have until now been without result?” Were they concerned only with the lives of GI’s and not with the Asians involved, the letter asked. “How else is it to be explained that the number of Christians participating in anti-war campaigns has diminished since the time that almost only Asians have been killed on the battlefields?” The American methods of legal dissent, suggests the letter, “lead in essence to a stabilization of the system which is waging the war in Southeast Asia.”
J. D. DOUGLAS
Sweden’S War On The Family
In 1968 the Swedish government issued a report called “The Status of Women in Sweden.” Stockholm’s Socialist daily Aftonbladet headlined its story, “Women, Don’t Let a Man Support You!” (Sept. 28, 1968, p. 1), and commented (favorably), “The government is making an assault on marriage … The place of woman is in the labor-market, not the home.”
The following year the Swedish minister of justice established a committee to study the abolition of marriage in the old sense. The new laws accomplishing this abolition may be enacted to take effect on July 1, 1973, according to Svenska Dagbladet (June 8, 1972, p. 7). They will mean the end of both religious and civil marriage ceremonies. A simple notification will replace both marriage and—after a three-or six-month “period of reflection”—divorce. Marriage will officially mean little more for a couple than a common address—there are no special duties or rights.
The Swedish tax reforms of 1970 had already abolished all the tax advantages of marriage. In fact, not only do children born out of wedlock now receive larger state subsidies than those born to a married couple, but unmarried parents get a better tax break and the children get a better deal at the state-run day nurseries.
Proposed new laws would pressure all children to attend state day nurseries from age six months. The official Swedish Investigation Commission for Day Nurseries has this to say: “The children need to experience alternative systems of values and norms.…” The compulsory state nursery must come because “it offers more models of imitation and identification than the parents.” Mrs. Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s atheistic minister for church affairs, has publicly declared that the government will pay no attention to “orthodox zealots” who object to this obligatory state program; the state will never permit Christians to split society.”
Another aspect of the Swedish government’s strategy for becoming the only determining factor in the education of children is the obligatory teaching in sex-education courses that sexual relationships are more or less acceptable at any age. There is a campaign against parents who “poison children with Christian morality.”
When Sweden’s present minority prime minister, Olof Palmé, was minister of education, he proclaimed the state’s intention to force the closure of Sweden’s few remaining private schools (then numbering fifty, now about twenty). Compulsory state religious instruction aims, according to Bishop Bo Giertz of Gothenburg, at creating skeptics and atheists. In 1971 thousands of Christians protested this tightening state monopoly to U Thant, then secretary general of the United Nations. A small group of Lutherans has opened a court action against the Swedish government before the Commission on Human Rights of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. The Swedish government was one of the prime movers in forcing Greece out of the Council of Europe because of alleged lack of democratic freedoms there.
An action committee led by twenty-eight representatives of religious and political groups has launched an appeal “Rädda Familjen!” (Save the family!) in an attempt to alert Swedes to the implications of what their government is planning. So far the appeal has made little headway. An ideological indifference has characterized most Swedes since the Social Democrats began their unbroken reign forty years ago.
The present Social Democratic government controls 48 per cent of the seats in the Riksdag, and can maintain itself in power only because the Communists (3 per cent) do not vote against it.
TOM G. A. HARDT
Foul Play On The Tiber
“Nothing but fairy tales!” brusquely commented the ex-secretary of Pope Pius XI, Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri. Church-history buffs would swear, however, that they were perusing a document straight out of the Middle Ages, when Machiavellian intrigue enveloped the papal throne with uncanny regularity. According to French and Italian journals, Pope Pius XI was assassinated February 10, 1939, on orders of Benito Mussolini, and Pope Pius XII was the subject of a kidnap plot by Hitler.
Paris Match, a French weekly, published what it claimed to be excerpts from the memoirs of the former deacon of the Sacred College of Cardinals, French Eugène Cardinal Tisserant, who died last February. An intimate friend of the defunct Tisserant, Monsignor Georges Roche, allegedly made the memoirs available to the press, announcing that Tisserant had left in his possession “an explosive document.”
Roche, however, denied that he had given the weekly paper the information that formed the basis of its articles; he called the allegation “utterly without foundation.” There are reports that Roche hired two lawyers in Rome to “defend my honor.”
French and Italians accepted these revelations as normal fare for their neighbor across the Tiber. Living in Italy for the past seventeen years, this writer has observed that European Latins often gossip about “possible” foul play in Vatican circles. In 1962 the congenial barber who regularly cuts my hair predicted that Curia conservatives were so infuriated with Pope John XXIII at the end of Vatican Council II’s first session that John would never live to open the second session the following year. He didn’t—and you’ll never convince my barber that he wasn’t put away.
ROYAL L. PECK
