“Evangelism” is back in focus for the recently reorganized National Council of Churches. After two days of discussion by the council’s section on church renewal (one of five such controlling “sections,” which oversee priority areas of the council’s work), the NCC’s Governing Board, meeting in Los Angeles last month, approved plans to create a working group on evangelism complete with a paid staff—if the funds come in from member denominations.
The new group is described as being aimed at member denominations’ evangelism executives, though nonmembers will be invited to join also. The action was suggested by a task force on evangelism set up by the board at its Pittsburgh meeting last year and headed by Lutheran Church in America evangelism director Raymond May. The task force asked the board to set up a unit to assist member denominations with evangelism by providing resources, doing research on evangelism, offering training in “witnessing and proclamation,” and engaging in field projects. The group is to be lodged in the NCC’s division of Church and Society. Its first meeting will be in the spring, said May, by invitation only.
Contingent approval of the working group came about because of denominational grassroots concern over the NCC’s neglect of evangelism, according to board members who spoke up during the section discussions.
John Anderson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Dallas and a former Southern Presbyterian evangelism head, said in an interview that preoccupation with social activism during the 1960s meant evangelism was “not a hot agenda item. It went by the boards.” Now, he said, the pendulum is swinging back to evangelism—although the board noted that its new group will seek to work in the areas of both “personal and societal salvation.” Every denomination represented at Los Angeles “is more aware of the need,” said Anderson. Certainly the council “underplayed” it, affirmed May, adding that the new group is “an attempt to recognize a growing concern” signified in part by Key 73. (Both Anderson and May were involved in the year-long Key 73 evangelism program, and several NCC member churches, including the Lutheran Church in America and the United Methodist Church, supported Key 73 heavily.)
Opening the evangelism group to non-NCC members is seen as one way of carrying out another of the board’s decisions—to reach out to “conservative evangelicals.” That was one of several priorities laid out by the section on church unity. Other targets of the interest of this section were Roman Catholics and Jews. In fact, increased cooperation with the Catholics was listed as the section’s number-two priority (topping the list was a regionalization plan to increase liaison between ecumenical bodies at national, state, and local levels). In a welcoming address, the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, Timothy Cardinal Manning, invited the council to join Catholics in celebrating “Holy Year” in 1975. Pope Paul proposed the year as one of “renewal and reconciliation” for Catholics. Manning said a formal invitation for NCC participation is forthcoming from the U.S. Catholic conference of bishops.
The NCC executive committee announced a $200,000 Lilly Foundation grant to establish a Jewish-Christian relations office at NCC headquarters in New York. The grant, spread over two years and to be divided between the new office and the NCC’s existing Middle East desk, got the Jewish-relations office off the ground. Approved last year, it has been waiting for financial backing. NCC staffers say the office will develop “strategies for encounter” between Jews and Christians and operate as an information clearing house. (The American Jewish Committee applauded the new office, calling it a major step in overcoming “past misunderstandings.”)
But while busy with resolutions and hours-long section meetings, the Governing Board also made time for non-NCCers to castigate the council over real or imagined sins. Heading the parade of critics was a group of New York blacks (and one white social worker) who had taken over and barricaded the NCC offices only five days before the Los Angeles meeting began. Calling themselves the Committee for Justice—Social, Racial, and Criminal, the activists demanded the ouster of the brand-new NCC general secretary, Claire Randall, for alleged “racist bigotry,” a radical restructuring of the council by establishment of an autonomous division for justice funded by a 10 per cent “tithe” of the NCC budget, and a public apology to a former black NCC staffer, Robert Chapman, fired with fourteen other staffers in a staff shakeup last year.
The group appeared in Los Angeles as part of the deal to end the thirty-six-hour office take-over. But after listening to a forty-five minute harangue, described by one delegate as “mid-sixties inflammatory rhetoric,” and larded with personal invective against Ms. Randall, the Governing Board rejected the demands in a nearly unanimous vote. (Ms. Randall took office on January 1 and was installed in a quiet service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.) Nevertheless, delegates spent a total of eight hours in a racism workshop spread out over the four-day meeting.
Next were representatives of a Native American conference also taking place in Los Angeles. The Indians, with less rhetoric but equal passion, demanded recognition from the NCC that Indians are oppressed. They challenged the council to support demands that Indians be exempt from taxation and that a 1 per cent tax on the gross profits of American business be turned back to the Indians as “reparations” for past injustice. The Indians also demanded that the council issue a pronouncement “that all religions, especially those outside Christianity, be considered equal within the eyes of the Almighty.” The prime beneficiary of such a declaration, they added, should be traditional Indian religions.
Appearing before the board with thanks instead of demands were representatives of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which promoted a boycott of the Farah Manufacturing Company in El Paso, Texas (see March 15 issue, page 59). The clothing workers thanked delegates for supporting the boycott. Announcing settlement of the dispute, ACW spokesman Arthur Keyes drew laughter with his end-the-boycott appeal that delegates “please buy Farah slacks.” United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez also stopped by to thank delegates for aid in farm-produce boycotts and to laud the council as the first major religious body to support the UFW. (After passing a resolution of support, ten NCC delegates personally took the UFW case to the Gallo Wine Corporation, which is engaged in a union dispute with the UFW. They later reported to the 200-plus other delegates that they had made little headway.)
In other council actions, Christians in Korea and Haitian refugees in the United States came under scrutiny. Delegates called for restoration of freedom in Korea, noting that six clerics had been jailed and many others “harassed” under current martial law in that country. They also urged the U.S. State Department to drop its plan to deport more than 400 Haitian refugees; the refugees had been deprived of their rights, they said, and faced possible death or imprisonment in Haiti.
The Governing Board also: established an Energy Crisis Task Force to work with energy agencies to “alleviate the impact of the crisis” among the poor; condemned further U.S. aid to South Viet Nam until freedom of press and speech are restored there; called for Congress to act “expediently” on impeachment of President Nixon for his sake and the nation’s; and, finally, called for public financing of election campaigns.
Worse Than Kidnapping
Forced abduction of teen-agers and adults for the purpose of changing religious beliefs came under heavy fire at the Los Angeles meeting of the National Council of Churches’ Governing Board (see preceding story).
“Kidnapping for ransom is heinous indeed,” a board resolution declared, “but kidnapping to compel religious deconversion is, if possible, worse.” The resolution condemning “deprogramming” grew out of a study by the NCC section on Culture and Life Fulfillment and was drafted by staffer Dean Kelley, who heads the NCC’s religious-liberty division. Kelley drew on his studies of deprogrammer Ted Patrick and gave the board background information from Patrick’s trial in New York last year, in which he was acquitted of assault and unlawful imprisonment charges brought by the New Testament Missionary Fellowship. Kelley appeared as a prosecution witness in the case (see August 31, 1973, issue, page 40).
The board adopted the resolution with little debate and few negative votes. It charged that while kidnapping is a serious federal crime, few grand juries are willing to indict those charged with kidnapping for the purpose of deprogramming, and fewer court juries are willing to convict.
The board invoked the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in defense of those who choose different religious life styles and said that while defection from the family faith may cause “intense anguish for parents” it is not justification for forcible abduction. It scoffed at charges that some religious groups employ force, drugs, and hypnotism to hold believers. “If true, such actions should be prosecuted under the law,” it said, “but thus far the evidence all runs the other way: It is the would-be rescuers who are admittedly using force.”
The solution, said the board, may lie in putting the right to choose a religion in the same category with the right to vote and guaranteeing both to 18-year-olds.
Armstrong Aftermath: A New Church
A new national church was born in Washington, D. C., this month, offspring of thirty-five former ministers of the Worldwide Church of God. Their labor pains were induced by unhappiness with the theological and administrative leadership of the WCG’s chiefs, Herbert W. and Garner Ted Armstrong; some resigned, others were expelled (see March 15 issue, page 49).
The new group, called the Associated Churches of God, has gathered between 2,000 and 3,000 members surfeited with Armstrongism. Two former WCG regional directors, Kenneth Westby of Washington, D. C., and Walter Sharp of Big Sandy, Texas, are chairman and vice-chairman of the fifteen-member board of trustees of the new church.
The breakaway group immediately set forth distinctives from the parent body: no requirement for tithing; permission for persons to remarry after divorce and remain members of the church; and autonomy at the congregational level with no rigid central authority.
Reaction from WCG headquarters in Pasadena, California, was predictable: the action proved that a “handful of ministers” had schemed for months to split over trumped-up issues, declared Stanley Rader, the WCG’s chief legal counsel. Their insubordination, he continued, had “breached their trust to the church, the brethren, and to God,” and apparent widespread unhappiness over the church’s booklet, “Divorce and Remarriage” (now recalled by Herbert Armstrong), was only “an excuse.”
Rader also said regional directorships (three of the departing ministers had filled these positions) had been scrapped in favor of direct communication between field ministers and headquarters (dissidents called it a spy system).
Meanwhile, the future of two WCG vice-presidents remained queasy. After resigning because certain demands made of the Armstrongs went unmet, David Antion (Garner Ted’s brother-in-law) and Albert J. Portune reconsidered two days later. Both were “offered” two months’ leave with full pay, and Herbert Armstrong promised to devote his “life and energies” to binding up the wounds.
Antion and wife retreated to Hawaii; Portune said he would go to desert regions, either along the Colorado River or at Palm Springs. “I feel the organization is trying very hard to solve this problem,” Portune said of his change of heart.
Antion’s and Portune’s decision to stick with the establishment—at least for now—seemed to be an about-face. Hours before, the pair had given a reporter a copy of the letter they had written the Armstrongs. Among other things, it said doctrinal and administrative problems were “bonafide issues” that Garner Ted himself had “agonized over to both of us and before dozens of other of the headquarters and field ministers for a long time.”
Their accusations were blunt: “You, Ted, yourself, have decried the dictatorial and unbearable rules and labeled it as being out of the dark ages. You … have been one of the primary ones to repudiate your father’s methods and conclusions in the D&R [Divorce and Re-marriage] booklet. You, Ted, yourself, have been one of the most outspoken of us all about the opulence, ornate buildings, and hundreds of thousands of dollars—even millions—spent on paintings, punch bowls, gold fixtures, vases, sculpture, jewelry, bric-a-brac, and the like … and we could go on and on.”
Dissidents were predicting at mid-month that up to 30 per cent of the WCG’s 167 active pastors (there are 263 U. S. congregations) would leave within weeks. Also to be seen is how the breakaway congregations will fare without the Armstrong aura, and whether, as Rader insists, the purge was a spring tonic to the ongoing church.
RUSSELL CHANDLER
BODY FOOD
The little community of Chapin, Ohio (population: 150), has been without a grocery store for three years. But Pastor James Davidson and his congregation at the Salem United Methodist Church have decided to do something about it. They are going into the grocery business.
Davidson says the store will hire low-income Chapin residents to operate it. Equipment for the venture is being donated by church groups.
Key: Epidemic, ’74?
There’ll be an epidemic of evangelism in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) this year and next if the Reverend Roy C. Key has anything to say about it. And he may. Last fall the Ames, Iowa, minister was elected president of the church’s National Evangelistic Association (see November 23, 1973 issue, page 58).
In the loosely structured Christian Church, the association has no policymaking power and a small budget. But, says Key, successful evangelism needs a “contagious community of faith” more than power or money or even methods. “All the traditional methods are pretty important,” he drawls in a Southern accent still strong after more than a decade in the Midwest, but it’s faith that must be catching.
Although two full-time staffers in the Disciples’ Indianapolis headquarters provide evangelism materials, the Evangelistic Association is “not an integral part of the structure,” according to Key. Still, in a church historically devoted to unification, there have always been “those of us really concerned about evangelism, about personal commitments to Jesus Christ as Lord,” who have kept the bug alive. At times evangelistic concern has waned, Key says, because of crises of faith rather than because potential evangelizers don’t know what to do. Now, he believes, interest is swelling, and he hopes the Evangelistic Asociation will inject it with insights from the perspectives of both individual conversion and social action and with the implications of current theologies for evangelism.
Ideally, he muses, all elements of church structure should be “inbreathed by evangelistic concerns.” Usually, though, that structure departmentalizes evangelism, education, worship, service, and the like. But “without being a worshipping community a church can’t be an evangelizing community,” Key says. And the people need to “know what Christian faith is and have some ability to communicate it.”
Key and his First Christian Church in Ames know from recent experience what an injection of evangelistic fervor can mean. During a year of All Church Evangelism (ACE), members dialed every listed telephone in their university town—about 10,000 calls. For their pains their church grew hardly at all, and Key himself suffered a heart attack. One professor they contacted ultimately made a Christian commitment—and began attending another Church.
Still, Key says, he would advise other congregations to expend that kind of effort. “Just keeping house as usual is not very rewarding,” he notes. “Reaching out helped us become what we wanted to be anyway.”
JANET ROHLER GREISCH
Skeeter’S Still Singing
Country music star Skeeter Davis left Nashville for a March tour of Africa with Bill Lowery and the Christ Is The Answer crusade. Miss Davis, 41, was a fifteen-year veteran of the world-famous “Grand Ole Opry” until she was suspended on December 8 after criticizing Nashville police on the live WSM radio show the night before.
Just before singing “Amazing Grace,” Miss Davis chided police for arresting eleven young people from Christ Is The Answer as they distributed tracts at a local shopping center. According to Miss Davis, who witnessed the arrests, she felt compelled to speak out “on behalf of my brothers and sisters who were arrested for telling people that Jesus loves them.” After the Opry performance, Miss Davis visited the jail, saying that her heart was heavy for her people.
Nashville police would say only that shoppers had complained that members of the group were pestering them. Those arrested were charged with either trespassing or disorderly conduct. Only two out of a total of sixteen persons arrested during December were convicted, and they served ten-day jail sentences.
Officials at the “Grand Ole Opry” and its parent corporation, National Life and Accident Company, have declined to comment on the entertainer’s suspension. Miss Davis meanwhile has publicly stated that she has no intention of apologizing to the police for her remarks.
Miss Davis, known for her mod wardrobe and for a menagerie of dogs, a dove, ducks, and a wildcat, skyrocketed to stardom with her 1953 recording of “I Forgot More.” The twenty-year veteran RCA recording artist continued as a soloist after the death of her singing partner that same year and later received a Grammy Award. A non-drinker, she has always refused to appear in clubs that serve alcohol. A few years ago she stopped growing tobacco on a farm she owns because of her stand against smoking.
In Nashville, Miss Davis attends an interdenominational church, Lord’s Chapel, pastored by Assemblies of God minister Billy Roy Moore. Since her December suspension from the Opry, Miss Davis has been touring the South with Lowery’s group. She first met the so-called Jesus people during a record promotion tour in Indianapolis, then began participating in their services when Lowery moved his group to Nashville last fall.
In January she sang at a “Jesus Country Rally” with Lowery’s group in Las Vegas, a favorite crusade mission field where last year the group met with stiff opposition from casino operators and the police.
A number of evangelicals in Nashville and elsewhere once sympathetic to Lowery say they were turned off by his negative preaching.
Lowery and his band were formerly part of a Milwaukee-based Christian youth commune headed by street-Christian leader Jim Palosaari. Palosaari and another segment of the Milwaukee group have been evangelizing in Europe for more than a year. They plan to tour the United States with a musical (The Lonesome Stone) they produced about Jesus people.
GENEVIEVE J. WADDELL
Consulting On Canterbury
As expected, Anglican Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury for thirteen years, announced he will retire in November when he reaches the age of 70. The announcement touched off another round of speculation as to his successor from among a field of likely candidates.
At the recent Church of England general synod Ramsey fielded several questions about the appointment of his successor. For some time the procedure whereby episcopal appointments are made has caused mutterings in the ranks. The Queen appoints the new archbishop on advice from the Prime Minister. But for the first time members of the church will have some say in the choice. Under amended rules of the general synod, its standing committee—composed of clergymen and laymen—is consulted (the committee was scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Wilson’s man this month).
After Ramsey had countered questions at the synod with the customary soothing assurances about “the fullest possible consultation with the church,” longtime establishment scourge Christopher Wansey of Chelmsford put the issue more bluntly: “Is the standing committee content that the next successor to the chair of St. Augustine should be selected by a civil servant, and finally be decided upon by a politician, neither of whom has the slightest moral or legal right to usurp an entirely Christian function?”
The aghast archbishop sidestepped, pointing out that any suggested change involved going through proper channels. He might have added that it would mean political as well as ecclesiastical legislation. All told, the usurper’s prerogative of choosing the 101st archbishop this year is not in jeopardy.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Religion In Transit
Among the Grammy Award winners: the Bill Gaither Trio for “Let’s Just Praise the Lord” (best inspirational performance); the Blackwood Brothers for “Release Me From My Sin” (gospel); and the Dixie Hummingbirds for “Love Me Like A Rock” (best soul gospel).
A new convenience for immersionists is being advertised. It’s called Bapto—a disposable baptismal robe. The complete kit includes a cloth to keep water out of the nose, a paper towel for drying, and a plastic bag in which to put everything after the ceremony.
New York Seminary will cut back its courses, enrollment, and facilities, according to President George W. Webber. It will move to the Union Seminary campus, discontinue biblical studies, and concentrate on “model programs in the practice of ministry.”
A county court in Pittsburgh ruled that property used by four congregations which withdrew from the United Methodist Church belongs to the denomination. (The churches were formerly part of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, which merged with the Methodist body, and have since affiliated with the Evangelical Church of North America.)
The occupational title “clergyman” is one of fifty-two “sex-stereotyped job titles” that is being eliminated by the U. S. Census Bureau from its classification system. From now on, the job title will be simply “clergy.”
Some 3,000 delegates to the executive board meeting of the 4.5-million-member National Baptist Convention of America, a predominantly black body, voted unanimously to ask poor people not to accept the food the kidnappers of Patricia Hearst demanded for her release.
The Washington National Cathedral will get a piece of the rock returned from the Sea of Tranquility by Apollo 11 astronauts, thanks to former NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine and some string-pulling at the White House. Paine has donated a stained glass window depicting creation in which the rock chip will be embedded.
Personalia
Succeeding Professor William Barclay, 67, Scotland’s best known biblical scholar (see March 15 issue, page 52), in the chair of biblical criticism at Glasgow University will be Irish-born Dr. Ernest Best of St. Andrews.
Miss Ann Douglas, daughter of a black United Presbyterian minister in North Carolina and a staffer of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), was chosen to be IFCO’s new executive director. To date, the coalition has allocated some $4 million in grants to U. S. and foreign groups.
DEATHS
HERBERT J. ELLIOTT, 76, bishop of the separatist United Christian Church, a small denomination of churches in New York and New Jersey (not to be confused with an older Pennsylvania group); in Glendale, New York.
LEROY EDWIN FROOM, 83, prominent Seventh-day Adventist historian and ministerial leader; in Takoma Park, Maryland, of a heart attack.
RUTH G. JEFFREY, 76, pioneer Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary to Viet Nam and daughter of Jonathan Goforth, famed Canadian Presbyterian missionary to China; in Markham, Ontario, of a heart attack.
PAUL J. LINDELL, 58, director for thirty-three years of the World Mission Prayer League, an independent Lutheran fellowship with 130 missionaries in ten fields; of cancer, in Minneapolis.
HARRY B. MCCORMICK, 90, leader in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and in ecumenical circles; in Martinsville, Indiana.
O. CLAY MAXWELL, 90, pastor of New York City’s Mt. Olivet Baptist Church and National Baptist Convention leader; in New York.
WILLIAM T. PHILLIPS, 79, founder and bishop of the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God, a black body claiming 100,000 members in 350 churches; in Mobile, Alabama.
As expected, Federal Communications Commission member Richard E. Wiley, 39, an evangelical Methodist (see February 15 issue, page 45), was appointed by President Nixon to head the FCC, replacing Dean Burch.
New presidents: Assembly of God pastor Robert H. Spence, Evangel College, Springfield, Missouri; educator C. Ellis Nelson, Louisville Seminary (United Presbyterian); Christian education specialist and seminary teacher KennethO. Gangel, Miami Christian University. Former pastor and seminary executive Ray P. Rust was named acting president of New Orleans Baptist Seminary (Southern Baptist).
THE CHANGING FRONTIERS OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
The thirty-two people who staff the headquarters office of Americans United for Separation of Church and State are keeping their fingers crossed this spring. Legally, things have been going their way: they have won nineteen out of twenty court cases opposing state aid to religious schools (see News, March 1 issue, p. 107). Financially, however, the non-profit organization is in a bind, having run up a deficit of nearly $200,000 last year.
AU leaders realize that the lack of funds is partly the result of success. Some supporters, caught in complacency, have not increased their giving to offset inflation. The organization’s income was reportedly about average last year, but expenses increased considerably. A large amount was spent to set up retirement funds for several key people who have served the organization faithfully.
Executive Director Glenn Archer thinks AU would have received more money had not the economic situation been unconducive to the selling of stocks. He says the political climate also discouraged giving.
Still another factor is that gifts to Americans United cannot currently be deducted from income tax. AU’s appeal of the withdrawal of its tax-exempt status by the IRS is now before the U. S. Supreme Court.1A sister organization has been set up as a tax-exempt group that vows to do no lobbying. Lobbying is what prompted the IRS to revoke AU’s tax-exempt status.
AU does have somewhat of a financial cushion in that it owns its own office building in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, D. C. Regional offices in Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles may be shut down to cut costs.
The financial challenge is not the only one to be faced by the successor to Archer, who is to retire later this year. Different kinds of issues are being raised than those in which AU has been immersed for a generation. Until recently, church-state separationists have been concerned mainly with keeping sectarian influences out of public education. Now they may be called upon to do battle with anti-religious and occult influences. So-called deprogrammers and prayer-amendment advocates also bring up the need for more protection under the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment.
So far, AU has not offered to help citizens who want to bring suit against anti-religious teaching in public schools. One such case has been brought by Washington Star-News religion editor William Willoughby, who wants the courts to require that government-financed textbooks deal more fairly with the question of origins.
AU has also been silent on the Equal Rights Amendment. And although the sympathies of AU leaders are with the Supreme Court’s pro-abortion ruling, they have not taken an official position.
New leaders may be prodded to take a hard look at the growing fascination of public school teachers with supernatural phenomena. A prime example is Bryant Junior High School in Minneapolis, where a course being given covers not only superstitution and myth (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, witches, and so on) but astrology, palmistry, numerology, and ESP. A letter from the English Department told parents that a séance would be conducted, and that if finances permit, a medium or witch would be brought in as a guest speaker.
DAVID KUCHARSKY
World Scene
Global population has reached 3.8 billion, say statisticians, and is increasing by 70 million souls a year. It is expected to double within 35 years.
A dissident Catholic priest known popularly as “Padre Chemita” nearly won the election for mayor of Guatemala City. He placed second in a field of twelve, losing by less than 3,000 votes. The padre was bitterly opposed by the hierarchy (he has advocated social reform, “desacrilization” of the priesthood, and an “authentically Guatemalan” church that will give its wealth to the poor). Evangelicals apparently gave him strong support; several were on his slate.
Nene Ramientos, leader of the Christ the Only Way (COW) evangelism program in the Philippines, reports that 10,000 evangelistic home Bible-study groups and nearly 6,700 Christian fellowship groups have been formed in the first phase of the program. In this year’s second phase, evangelistic campaigns will be held in twenty cities.
A group of forty-two evangelical Baptists in Barnaul, Siberia, have requested permission to leave the Soviet Union, citing Soviet Jews as a precedent, according to a Swedish Baptist source.
Church membership in East Germany dropped from 9 million to 8.4 million over the last year, according to East German sources. Most losses were in Lutheran and Lutheran-Reform churches.
According to a story in the African Christian Messenger the city of Accra, Ghana, has been shaken by reports of resurrection of a 39-year-old man named Kwaku Adjei. Pastor S. K. Badu of the Holy Trinity Healing Church at Dichemson, Kumasi, is said to have interrupted his morning service to go to Adjei’s deathbed and bid him rise.
A new African Methodist Episcopal printing house was recently dedicated in Capetown, South Africa. It will provide bilingual materials in ten dialects for AME churches in South Africa, Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria. (There are 75 AME churches in Africa and two church-sponsored colleges, supported by annual gifts of nearly $150,000 from the denomination in the United States.)
