A definite thrust toward social concern was generated by the Southern Baptist Convention in its annual meeting of 15,000 messengers over the Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach. It was unclear immediately whether the thrust would be enough to overcome some forces of reaction and maintain a course that would put the nation’s largest Protestant denomination in a new orbit.
“The name of the game is ‘involvement,’ and it is played not just on Sunday but on every day of the week,” declared the Rev. James L. Pleitz, the Pensacola, Florida, pastor who was elected chairman of the SBC Executive Committee. The extent of that involvement must be worldwide, the unusually quiet messengers were told by Senator Mark O. Hatfield. And that involvement must be in concert with other Christians, particularly other evangelicals, insisted the Rev. J. D. Grey.
Ignition of the theme took place in the pre-convention meetings of the Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference and the Women’s Missionary Union. Nearly every speaker dwelt on the need for social concern. The hardest-hitting was the Rev. Buckner Fanning of San Antonio, Texas, who said:
“Unless our churches become places of worship where people of all races and classes meet together in Christ through through worship and fellowship; unless we become great streams of new life flowing out from our sanctuaries into the hot, parched prairies of human needs; unless we Baptists experience a change of attitude and a change of direction, then we too will pass into the graveyard of denominations.”
In his own church, Fanning reported, the tradiational “study and do nothing” organizations have been dumped in favor of groups actively involved in ministering to the needs of people in such places as classrooms to tutor dropouts, clinics for the indigent ill, foster homes, a food-and-clothing center, a job-placement office, and a home for unwed mothers.
“Nowhere did Christ ever tell the world to come to the church, but repeatedly he told us as his body and his Church to go into all the world with his Gospel,” said Fanning.
Despite a few sputterings, that theme seemed to lift the Southern Baptists from their traditional stand-offishness and emphasis on a preaching-only ministry once the convention itself got under way. The thrust was most powerful as Hatfield warned that “hunger will shape the destiny of nations more than any other force in the world today.” Rebuking the Christian Church for failing to carry out its mandate to alleviate human suffering and needs, the Conservative Baptist layman said the consequence has been that government has had to move in with attempts to feed and heal the bodies of men without being able to feed and heal their souls.
The failure of affluent, self-centered American Christians to be concerned with the starving millions in the world played a part in bringing about the costly conflict in Viet Nam, said Hatfield, former Republican governor of Oregon, who recalled seeing people dead of starvation in Hanoi when he visited there as a sailor in World War II. He added that Christians “have an obligation to use our creative forces to find alternatives to war.”
That also was the gist of a report of the Christian Life Commission that created the only real controversy during the placid convention. It called poverty, the population explosion, race, religion, power-hungry leaders, and totalitarianism all contributors to the threat of war.
The controversy arose over the mildly “dovish” views on Viet Nam expressed in the report as it was made by Foy Valentine, executive secretary of the commission. He called upon “all the churches not to be blinded by distorted appeals to false patriotism so that they lose sight of the personal tragedy, the great sorrow, and the fantastic cost attached to the present conflict.” He added that “a spirit of solemn penitence is in order.”
Urging public debate on the issues and criticizing those “who doubt the patriotism of anyone who questions our government’s present official position,” the report encouraged government leaders to “continue to pursue patiently every course that might lead to a peaceful settlement of international problems in general and of the Viet Nam conflict in particular.”
Despite the fact that a Sunday School Board survey made at the convention showed that two-thirds of the messengers could be considered “hawks” on Viet Nam and favored escalation of the fighting there, the messengers overwhelmingly turned down attempts by the Rev. Rufus Spraberry of Texas and the Rev. Ray O. Jones of Tennessee to get them to declare open support of American policy in Viet Nam or to demand an end to what was called a “no-win” policy in the war. However, at the suggestion of Harold Coble of California, the report was amended to make it clear that Southern Baptists were not calling for the withdrawal of U. S. forces from Viet Nam “apart from a just and honorable peace.”
The Rev. James Duke of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, moved that the Christian Life Commission be dissolved, partly because its stand against racial discrimination was creating “general distrust of Southern Baptist literature.” The motion was defeated soundly. The CLC announced that its communications director for the past six years, Ross Coggins, would become Southeast administrator of the federal VISTA program this month.
The messengers apparently were reluctant to take clear-cut stands on any social issue. They had been warned—by speakers at the evangelists’ conference, in the opening sermon by Dr. Lindrum P. Leavell of Wichita Falls, Texas, and in a major address by Dr. W. A. Criswell, well-known pastor of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas—that the main business of the Church is to reconcile man to God through the preaching of the Word. So resolutions adopted on birth control and church-state relations were carefully worded to be innocuous.
Nevertheless the air of change permeated the crowd, which included two preachers for every layman, and there was little doubt that many Southern Baptist messengers would go home with new determination to work with other Christians in seeking solutions to social problems as a demonstration of the love of God they will continue to preach from their pupils.
Social Action Through Evangelism
Evangelist Leighton Ford incorporated a social-action program into his three-week crusade last month in Seattle. Featured speakers were four Washingtonians whose Christian faith propelled them into social service. Richard J. Simmons said Billy Graham’s 1951 crusade gave him the impetus to start “Job Therapy,” an employment program for ex-convicts. United Press International reporter Orv Boyington told about a young prisoner he sponsors; Donna Haldane spoke of the Neighborhood House Tutorial Program, aimed at low-income families; and John Dawson described his decision to become a missionary surgeon in Korea.
In his closing sermon Ford said, “You cannot be a private Christian. The Christian must show allegiance to Christ in his personal, church, and social life.”
Some 1,500 of the 75,000 who attended the crusade responded to Ford’s customary appeal for commitment to Christ. But a new appeal was made also at the “Christian Action” night. A form was distributed listing ten fields of service that needed volunteers, and people were asked to fill out the form and hand it in if they could help. A special offering was taken for rehabilitation of prisoners and for two war-on-poverty efforts.
On the side, Ford, a 35-year-old Southern Presbyterian clergyman, spent considerable time conferring with civil-rights and poverty workers.
Ford’s mentor and brother-in-law Billy Graham followed a similar theme in a press conference with War on Poverty chief Sargent Shriver last month. “I hope the Congress gives him more money next year than they did last year,” Graham said.
Graham then moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, for his first major Canadian crusade since 1955. On closing day, June 4, he drew an overflow crowd of 25,000 persons, the largest in the history of Winnipeg Stadium. The attendance total for the eight-day crusade was 126,000, and 3,500 persons responded to the invitations. On June 15, Graham was to fly to London for a Britain-wide effort that includes extensive use of closed-circuit TV.
Evangelicals Eye New Links
Top Baptist churchmen came out strongly this month for new dimensions of evangelical cooperation. As a result, the Southern Baptist Executive Committee is undertaking a year-long study and will probably make recommendations in 1968.
The move came following an editorial plea in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (June 9 issue, p. 24) and a speech by Florida pastor Jess Moody proposing mutual action by conservative Protestants across denominational lines. The proposals won wide publicity.
H. Franklin Paschall, re-elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, voiced support of more cooperation with other Christians in a “oneness of spirit.”
American Baptist Convention President L. Doward MacBain told a press conference: “I think it is not only possible, but it is absolutely essential for evangelicals to cooperate.”
Joseph H. Jackson, president of the big National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., said “there is no obstacle between Christians committed to the same Christ.”
The Rev. Alastair C. Walker asked SBC messengers to set up a special committee to explore evangelical unity. A substitute motion prevailed, however, which entrusted the task to the group that handles Southern Baptist business between annual meetings.
At Colorado Springs, executives of more than a dozen major independent missionary agencies agreed to establish a joint research center. They also issued a statement asserting that “a manifestation of … unity is essential to the hastening of world evangelization.”
Interchurch Stir In Edinburgh
Nothing stirs the interest and raises the temperature of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly more than the debate on interchurch relations. Last month’s annual assembly in Edinburgh was no exception, particularly when it discussed the continuing negotiations with Anglicans.
That these talks continue to arouse deep suspicion in the Kirk could be seen from a counter-motion by Dr. Harry Whitley, John Knox’s successor at St. Giles’ and no friend of episcopacy. What he asked was deceptively mild: a message from the assembly to the people of Scotland that we “still believe Presbyterian government is agreeable to God now, and not at a later date to be arranged when we will all be given ecclesiastical passports to show we are legitimized.” Whitley wanted unity (he said), but only if it was consistent with all the basic articles of the Church of Scotland. His move to safeguard this position was defeated, but the closeness of the vote could not have escaped the notice of the interchurch committee, the most controversial in the Kirk.
More successful was a motion by the Rev. Andrew Herron, clerk of Glasgow Presbytery, who disliked the committee’s complaint that its task was “made even less easy by deliberate opposition both by certain outside influences and by some members of our own Church, both ministers and members.” Herron, a law graduate, succeeded in adding a section about respecting “the position of those ministers and members who … cannot wholeheartedly concur in the objective of One Church as this has so far been defined.”
The convenor, Dr. Nevile Davidson, had earlier denied that there were pressure groups within the Anglican-Pres-byterian conversations and that ecumenical talks distracted the church from its primary call to mission. His committee successfully resisted an attempt to appoint a special body to examine the Anglican “doctrine of the Historic Apostolic Succession,” and another that would have incorporated in the interchurch relations committee “a few watchdogs” to ensure that the Anglicans did not do what they said they were not going to do.
The possibility of women ministers moved a significant step forward when the assembly by a 397–268 vote agreed to send down to presbyteries an overture proposing that women be ordained to the ministry on the same terms as men. The matter will thereafter come before the 1968 assembly for decision. The Panel on Doctrine set up to consider the whole question had contented itself with a report outlining two separate views of the subject for the assembly’s consideration. This was the first meeting of the supreme court since women became eligible for eldership in the Kirk, and three were in attendance. Such a novelty was this that one was at first refused admission by the doorkeepers; John Knox’s views on the “Monstrous Regiment” may still have their devotees.
The proposal to have the matter of the ordination of women sent to presbyteries came from the Rev. W. Grahame Bailey. “The arguments … brought against the ordination of women,” he told the fathers and brethren, “are of the same kind as were used by the Roman Catholics to oppose Galileo; the Protestant evangelicals to refute Darwin; by other Christians to oppose abolition of slavery; to refuse chloroform to women in childbirth; to prevent in our own church the employment of women as missionaries; and still, by our fellow Presbyterians, to uphold another form of discrimination—racial discrimination. All these arguments, remember, were based on the Bible.”
In the sort of forceful and eloquent speech the assembly knows so well, Lord (formerly Sir George) MacLeod of Fuinary seconded a counter-motion urging the government to dissociate itself from American policy in Viet Nam. “What would you think,” he demanded of a packed house, “if there were 500,000 Chinese troops in South Mexico bombing North Mexico, saying they were doing it lest capitalism sweep into South Mexico, saying they are prepared to wait there until there are free elections, provided these free elections result in Communism being elected?”
This typical speech got its typical reaction: applause for the oratory, defeat for the motion. Carried was the committee’s recommendation that the government be urged “to continue its efforts to persuade all parties in Viet Nam to reduce the scale of the conflict as a practical step to transferring it from the battlefield to the conference table.” MacLeod later led an anti-war vigil.
The General Assembly also, inter alia, elected Dr. Roy Sanderson as moderator … sent down to presbyteries a proposed basis and plan of union with the 30,000-strong Congregational Union of Scotland … learned that there were 359 fewer ministers now than eighteen years ago, when the population was smaller by 150,000 … heard that its communicants, numbering 1,233,808, showed a 60,000 decrease since 1961 … listened for the first time to an Orthodox churchman (Metropolitan Emilianos) … narrowly defeated a motion to press for “single public schools for all the children of Scotland, irrespective of denomination” … and warmly applauded the moderator when he expressed congratulations to the Glasgow Celtic soccer team, which had just won the European cup.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Scots On Sex
When the Wolfenden Report was published in 1958, its proposal to legalize homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private was accepted by all the major churches in the United Kingdom except the Church of Scotland. This year, however, the Kirk’s Moral Welfare Committee suggested that the existence of a seldom invoked law was “an undoubted obstacle to the redemption and rehabilitation of these unhappy people” who must be assured that “the Gospel of Christ is for them too” and that the Church “will not regard them as outcasts but will meet them with understanding and help.” Although the committee made it clear it was not condoning homosexual practices, the motion met with strong opposition. The Rev. R. S. MacNicol pointed out that such behavior produced character deterioration, that all church members should be reminded of Colossians 3:1–6, and that homosexuals need to be reminded that there is salvation and freedom for them in Jesus Christ. It was this view that eventually won the day by a majority vote.
Another section of the committee’s report to come under fire was the suggestion that the assembly welcome the British Council of Churches’ Sex and Morality report as a “contribution towards the presentation to all sections of the community of a reasoned and positive statement of Christian insights into personal relationships.” When this report was originally presented to the BCC (see Current Religious Thought, Nov. 25, 1966), it was hotly opposed by the Kirk representatives on that body. Two of them were in the assembly and left their listeners in no doubt that they had not changed their minds. Flourishing a copy of the offending booklet, the Rev. John R. Gray of Dunblane Cathedral exclaimed with characteristic vigor that he knew “of no worse pamphlet than this wretched thing.” For the committee, the Rev. John Peat said the report was trying to do something like justice to the real nature of human relationships and to show understanding and compassion.
Not only was all reference to the BCC report deleted by the assembly, however, but a section was added “unequivocably and unambiguously” stating that sex should be confined within marriage, and that the strong help and grace of God was available for those who tried to keep this standard.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Love: Not A Four-Letter Word
Clergy witnesses were at odds on love, sex, and four-letter words during a five-week obscenity trial that ended May 27 in San Francisco with the conviction of three booksellers. At issue was “The Love Book,” an 825-word poem with an explicit first-person account of a woman’s sexual experience replete with four-letter words. It was written by Miss Lenore Kandel, attractive 35-year-old disciple of the city’s Satan-worship cult.
Jesuit priest Robert Brophy, who teaches English at the University of San Francisco, defended the poem as “an integrated presentation of theology along with the celebration of love.” Jewish and Unitarian witnesses agreed. But another Jesuit, former President Herman Hauck of the University of Santa Clara, described the work as “sinful,” “nauseating,” and “orgiastic.”
In a bitter exchange with American Civil Liberties Union defense attorneys, the Rev. Carl Howie of San Francisco’s Calvary Presbyterian Church questioned whether Kandel witness J. M. Stubblebine is qualified to be chief of the city’s mental-health services.
The jury foreman, bus driver Edward Johnston, said “none of us felt ‘The Love Book’ had any social importance.” ACLU plans to appeal the convictions, which carry punishment of up to six months in jail and a $500 fine.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
South African Purge
The Netherlands Reformed Church (NHK) of South Africa voted last month to throw out any members who belong to the Christian Institute, an ecumenical organization that believes the Bible teaches against racial segregation.
The Johannesburg Sunday Times said, as paraphrased by Ecumenical Press Service, that Afrikaans theologians consider this “one of the most far-reaching and authoritarian decisions taken by a Protestant body, and a drastic intervention in the personal religious life of individual Christians.”
NHK members are even prohibited from reading the institute’s monthly Pro Veritate. The synod meeting also defrocked two of its best-known theologians, J. A. Stoop and B. J. van der Merwe, for being “sympathetic” to the institute and for criticizing Article 3 of the church constitution, which limits membership to whites. The Reformed factions are also embroiled in a libel suit due for a ruling shortly.
In response to anti-institute moves in the NHK and the other major Reformed group, the Johannesburg congregation attended by institute Director C. F. Beyers Naude is questioning church authority. Elsewhere, a clergyman quit in protest over whites-only Christianity, and a congregation voted to pull out of the denomination because its minister was suspended. Meanwhile, seventy pastors at a conference for southern Africa Lutherans said separate racial development (apartheid) is unscriptural.
