When the triennial convention of the Episcopal Church is held in 1979, the ranks will probably be thinner than at the 1976 sessions, where delegates authorized a new prayer book and ordination of women to the priesthood. Some 1,750 Episcopalians who are unhappy with the 1976 actions met in St. Louis last month to lay the groundwork for a new Anglican denomination in America.
They came from all over the United States and from Canada (ordination of women has also been authorized there), but the participants stopped short of formally organizing a new denomination. Instead, many of them signed a six-page “Affirmation of St. Louis” and took home copies for parishoners to sign. The document claims the Episcopal conventions of recent years have caused schism “by their unlawful attempts to alter faith, order, and morality.” The signers insist that they want only traditional Anglicanism.
The formal organization of the new denomination, which has the tentative name of the Anglican Church in North America, could come early next year. Signers of the affirmation have stated, meanwhile, that they will not recognize actions taken against them by the Episcopal Church (or by the Anglican Church of Canada).
“We affirm that the claim of any schismatic person or body against any church member, clerical or lay, for his witness to the whole faith is with no authority of Christ’s true church, and any such inhibition, deposition, or discipline is without effect and is absolutely null and void,” a key passage of the document declares.
While denying the spiritual authority of the U.S. and Canadian Episcopalians, signers of the St. Louis document insisted that they want to continue in communion with the “See of Canterbury and all other faithful parts of the Anglican Communion.” One reason that no breakaway diocese has been officially constituted yet is that the dissidents are having trouble finding three bishops in full communion with Canterbury to consecrate their own new bishops. James Mote, rector of a Denver parish that broke away soon after the 1976 convention, is the nominee for bishop of the non-geographical Diocese of the Holy Trinity. He was named at a meeting of the diocese held in connection with the St. Louis gathering. Other dioceses are being formed with the encouragement of the coalition that organized the unprecedented gathering. Proponents of the split say that when three bishops are ready to be consecrated there will be three bishops ready to perform the ceremonies—even though the consecrators may thus be subjecting themselves to ecclesiastical discipline.
Reporters at St. Louis spotted about ten bishops in attendance, even though only two were known to be in sympathy with the meeting’s organizers. Among the prelates attending was the Episcopal Church’s top officer, Presiding Bishop John M. Allin. He asked to be given a spot on the program, but he was not allowed to speak. At a communion service during the conclave he went forward and knelt at the feet of two California priests who had been deposed, accepting the elements from them. The presiding bishop told reporters that he was against divorce and went to St. Louis to see if he could do anything to help avoid a split.
A month before the St. Louis meeting the presiding bishop invited some of the dissident priests, including some who had already been deposed, to visit with him in Connecticut. A two-paragraph statement issued after that session said that the discussion was “marked by cordiality and an open exchange of views” and that conversations would be continued. Five men, including Mote, met with Allin.
No date has been announced for the next meeting of the breakaway body, but the coalition expects it to be within a year. To be considered a constitutional assembly it would have to be convened by episcopal authority. Thus the formation of the denomination must await consecration of the bishops.
The number of Episcopalians who would go into the new body is anybody’s guess; estimates have ranged from 50,000 to 500,000. The organizations that formed the coalition behind the St. Louis meeting claim a membership of 50,000. They believe they will be joined by thousands of others when Episcopalians realize that there is another denomination to which they can belong. One official of the coalition said that many priests who came to St. Louis “just unhappy” went away determined to lead their parishes out of the denomination. It was estimated that a quarter of those attending were clergymen. Participants ranged from the “low-church” evangelicals to “high-church” Anglo-Catholics.
While no one knows how many will leave, many observers believe that the anticipated split will be the largest in Episcopalian history. The denomination has 2.8 million members. There have been few defections since the Reformed Episcopalian Church was formed a century ago. Even as the coalition was trying to encourage the formation of a new denomination, a number of individual Episcopalians—lay and clergy—were transferring their membership into other churches. Some went into such groups as the Old Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in America.
In Australia, meanwhile, the Anglican General Synod took a step that could lead to the ordination of women. After a three-hour debate, the three houses of the synod resolved that “the theological objections raised do not constitute a barrier” to the priesthood for women. The motion that finally passed was a substitute for one declaring “there are no theological objections” to females in the ministry. Approval in principle is only the first of several actions that must be taken before the first woman can be validly ordained in Australia.
Pastoral Training Under Tutors
Preparing men for the ministry is too important to be left up to seminaries. That was the message of the fifth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PC A) last month as it adopted a unique approach to ministerial training. In effect, it will require future pastors in the young denomination to undergo four years of preparation beyond college, with at least one of those years spent working under an experienced pastor.
Candidates will have three options:
• Three years in an established seminary plus one year under a pastor’s tutelage.
• Two years in a seminary plus two under a tutor.
• Two years under a tutor studying academic subjects, followed by two concentrating on “practical” subjects.
Parts of the plan go into effect immediately, but the constitutional provision that mandates a fourth year of training before ordination must be approved by a majority of the denomination’s regional presbyteries and two future assemblies. Presbyteries, which retain the final judgment on a candidate’s qualifications, will be required under the proposed amendment to license a man for a year before ordination. Currently, licensure is optional.
The 62,000-member denomination, formally established in 1973, has no seminary of its own. In its action on theological education, the assembly advised the presbyteries to “be diligent in counseling candidates for the ministry to attend seminaries that are committed” to the church’s doctrinal position. It listed as examples three institutions approved at the first assembly (Westminster of Philadelphia, Covenant of St. Louis, and Reformed of Jackson, Mississippi) and a fourth proposed from the floor this year (Reformed Presbyterian of Pittsburgh). The PCA education committee, which recommended the wide-ranging new approach to candidate preparation, ruled out establishment of a PCA-controlled seminary. The cost of starting such a school would be “phenomenal” and “prohibitive at this time,” said the report. Without such an institution under its control, the denomination is in no position to direct the preparation of its candidates unless it adds the year beyond a master of divinity degree.
The most innovative feature of the new educational approach is the option of four years of post-college study outside seminary altogether. “Under the tutelage of qualified ministers” of the PCA, candidates who choose this option would spend the first half of the course mastering the academic subjects and the last half in the “practical” area. The assembly emphasized that its approval of this option “is not to lessen the demands of academic achievement for ministers in the PCA, but rather to allow more flexibility to our ministerial candidates in achieving the academic and practical requirements” for ordination. Those going the tutorial route would still be required, for instance, to learn the original language of the Bible.
For the second year in a row the PCA governing body declined to plunge into the college business. The 1976 assembly turned down a proposal to buy an available site to start a denominational college. This year commissioners (delegates) heard a proposal that the PCA share control of Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, which is on record favoring such shared control. Over seventy of the college’s 550 students are from the PCA. After long debate the question was sent back to the education committee with instructions that it clarify Covenant’s policies on use of government funds.
An assembly budget of $4.1 million was adopted, with half earmarked for the church’s growing overseas agency. To promote its domestic expansion, the 400-congregation body launched a campaign for $5 million to start new churches.
One of the assembly’s most intense debates was on a resolution to ask President Carter to maintain the present American military presence in Korea. There was little evidence that commissioners favored the reduction of troop strength, but there was considerable opposition to church action on what was seen as a “political” issue. Proponents finally won by invoking the Westminster Confession of Faith statement that in “cases extraordinary” church bodies could venture outside the ecclesiastical realm and petition the civil authorities. This case was described as extraordinary in view of the possibility that a North Korean Communist invasion could endanger the lives of thousands of Christians in South Korea.
The assembly declined to accept the invitation from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) to send an “ecumenical delegate” to the next PCUS assembly (see July 29 issue, page 35). Most PCA members and churches were formerly in the PCUS. On the eve of the PCA assembly in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, the PCUS headquarters announced that a PCA congregation, the first to do so, had returned to the PCUS fold. The thirty-six-member Pineville church in Pass Christian, Mississippi, left PCUS in 1974, joined PCA, and then became independent. PCA’s annual report for 1976 showed that it received four more former PCUS congregations.
Jackson: Keeping It Cool
Pastor Joseph H. Jackson, 73, of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago was reelected by acclamation as president of the nation’s largest black denomination, the 6.5-million-member National Baptist Convention, U.S.A.
In another action, the 10,000 delegates at last month’s annual meeting of the NBCUSA in Miami denounced the use of school busing to achieve racial integration as “political expediency” at the cost of quality education, racial strife, and community pride. Jackson proposed the resolution, claiming that busing really delays the solution to the problem of school segregation: integrated residential neighborhoods, where schools would be integrated automatically.
The participants declared in another resolution that homosexuals should not be discriminated against as long as they practice their life style in private.
Jackson, serving his twenty-fifth term as NBCUSA president, told reporters he felt the most significant action of the convention was approval of a $40,000 grant to Meharry Medical School in Nashville to set up a perpetual scholarship fund. Meharry, a United Methodist-related institution, reportedly has trained 43 per cent of the black doctors and dentists in the United States. The 100-year-old school has fallen on hard times and is running sixty to ninety days behind in paying its bills, according to a United Methodist report. President Lloyd C. Elam asked 500 of the school’s administrators, staff, and faculty members who make more than $10,000 a year to cut back to thirty-two hours weekly. The faculty senate, however, has called on the teachers to work a full schedule for the next few months even though they may not get paid for it.
In his press interview, Jackson called on other black leaders who have been criticizing President Carter’s domestic policies to cool it. If Carter is forced into applying “phony economics” for short-term employment gains, he warned, it could be disastrous for everyone over the long haul.
A member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, Jackson favors church involvement in economic and social concerns, but he is a political conservative on many domestic issues. He says civil disobedience is unpatriotic in a democratic system that provides for constitutional ways to bring about change in the law, but he endorses such tactics and even armed revolution in countries like South Africa where, he says, blacks are oppressed and have no legal recourse.
Truth After Myth
In recent years one of the most notable developments on the British campus scene has been the decline in support for the Student Christian Movement (SCM), the liberal arm of interdenominational work among students. The SCM’s publication of Honest to God in 1963 may have been a financial bonanza, but it predictably did nothing for the cause of Christ in the colleges.
This summer, SCM Press did it again with The Myth of God Incarnate, a title that will do nothing to discourage sales among the humanist echelons, and that is a fair indication of the book’s provocative contents. (See Sept. 23, page 30.) Most of the seven contributors are Anglicans; the editor, Professor John Hick, is a minister of the United Reformed Church (a 1972 union of English Presbyterians and English and Welsh Congregationalists).
Within a few weeks a paperback reply came from orthodox sources. The Truth of God Incarnate (Hodder and Stoughton). One of its five writers, veteran missionary bishop Stephen Neill, summarizes The Myth this way: “It seems that we are being offered a God who loved us a little, but not enough to wish to become one of us; a Jesus who did not rise from the dead, and therefore offers no answer to the great and bitter problems of humanity; and a gospel which is just one of many forms of salvation, and perhaps not that which is most suitable to modern Western man.”
The Truth’s editor is Canon Michael Green of Oxford, well-known evangelical speaker and unashamed advocate of what he calls “traditional full-blooded Christianity, complete with an inspired Bible and an incarnate Christ.”
His associates include Roman Catholic bishop and theologian Christopher Butler and (perhaps more surprisingly) Professor John Macquarrie, the widely published theologian not previously known for defending orthodoxy. It is reported that Inter-Varsity Press declined to undertake publication of The Truth because of the broad base from which Green insisted on launching it.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Muzzling An Advocate
The Vatican last month ordered Jesuit priest John J. McNeill to stop speaking and writing on the subject of homosexuality. He was charged with advocating and promoting theological views that are contrary to church teaching. He was also accused of allowing “false hopes” to be raised in the homosexual community by suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church will change its position. Additionally, he was instructed to remove from future editions of his well-publicized book, The Church and the Homosexual, the words imprimipotest, which indicate that official permission has been granted to publish the work. The Vatican said permission was given on the basis that the views were simply being presented to the theological community for scholarly discussion. But, said the Vatican, McNeill had instead become involved in pushing a position that is contrary to traditional church teaching on homosexuality.
McNeill, who describes himself as a homosexual committed to priestly celibacy, insists that homosexual practice can be morally good and should be viewed in the same way as heterosexual relations.
Police Blotter
Crime is on the increase in church circles. The following are among a number of cases that have been highlighted in press accounts recently:
James G. Fish and his wife Pauline of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were found guilty of bilking churches and developers in four states out of more than $600,000.
According to testimony, the couple established the Consortium Funding Corporation to arrange loans for institutions seeking funds for development. For this service, the pair charged an advance fee, which they promised to return if loans could not be obtained. A number of witnesses, including pastors, said they or their churches were offered loans but received neither them nor refunds of their advance fees. The indictment stated that the Fishes had induced an official of the National Church Aid Association of Springfield, Missouri, to give them a list of churches seeking financial aid.
President Robert E. Hayes, Sr., of Wiley College, a United Methodist-related black school in Marshall, Texas, and two of his former aides, were charged in a federal indictment on ten counts of alleged embezzlement of federal education funds. The indictment alleges that the three conspired to “embezzle, steal, and convert to their own use and the use of others $255,948” in federal aid funds between 1972 and 1975, and that they issued false fiscal reports to the government. The indictment came following months of investigation by FBI agents and investigators from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Hayes insists he and the others are innocent but declines to comment further.
In Wilmington, Delaware, authorities arrested Jay Patrick Green, Jr., 28, and charged him with producing an estimated $250,000 in counterfeit $20 bills. Green was seized as he was closing down his print shop. Officers found sheets of uncut bills in his apartment, where he lived with a girl friend, according to press reports. Green, who headed firms known as Patrician Press and Literature Discovery, formerly ran Creative Christian Libraries, which advertised in leading Christian publications but failed to deliver on many prepaid orders and did not refund the money to customers. He has been associated with his father in similar businesses in the past. In 1974 he was sentenced to a prison term of from eighteen months to five years in Kent County, Michigan, for passing a bogus check, but was apparently released on probation, say the press accounts.
Authorities are investigating numerous allegations involving Tabernacle Hospital in Chicago, described as the first hospital in the country to be owned by a black church. The hospital is owned by Tabernacle Baptist Church of Chicago, whose pastor is Louis Rawls. Rawls is president of the hospital board and also directs the Tabernacle Foundation and a related music company. Five former hospital officials claim that federal funds held by the hospital may have been diverted to Rawls’s church and other enterprises.
The Internal Revenue Service has tax liens on the hospital totaling more than $800,000; a government audit shows that the hospital failed to pay to the federal government hundreds of thousands of dollars withheld from employees’ pay-checks.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Board of Health has ordered Tabernacle not to admit any more patients until things get sorted out. A rash of fires of mysterious origin recently destroyed many of the hospital’s administrative records, and police and fire units were still investigating the blazes last month. The police were also searching for a suspect in the murder of John Dawkins, 33, a former hospital employee found shot to death in his apartment on September 2. He reportedly was a personal secretary to Rawls.
Reporters were unable to reach Rawls for comment.
Religion in Transit
City attorney John R. Risher of Washington, D.C., has ruled that it is a constitutional violation for the University of the District of Columbia to provide office space and other assistance to campus ministers as has been done in the past for a Roman Catholic nun and a Baptist minister.
Pastor Eugene McGee of First Alliance Church in New York City and his congregation sponsor outreach efforts to the Jewish community. Things began happening after the church held a conference on the topic in June. There were anonymous telephone threats of bodily harm, a door and three stained-glass windows were broken, and a $15,000 bus was fire-bombed. One caller identified himself as a member of the Jewish Defense League, but the JDL formally disavowed any involvement. Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee said he deplores both the violence against the church and the evangelism directed at the Jewish community.
The right of teachers in parochial schools to organize for collective bargaining was endorsed by the U.S. Catholic Conference in a report described as advisory and not binding. Unions of school teachers exist in about two dozen of the Catholic Church’s 165 dioceses, according to estimates, and disputes involving the issue of union membership are before the courts in five dioceses.
A United Press survey shows that twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are still providing Medicaid funds for abortion, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June that such payments are not obligatory. The federal government warns it will stop reimbursing states that continue to provide public funds for welfare abortions. (A California study shows that taxpayers spent $27 million for 77,000 abortions of 142,600 reported in that state in 1976. Formerly, the federal government picked up 90 per cent of the bill; the state will fund the program for now, but cutbacks are expected soon.)
It was bound to happen: a Christian comic-strip version of Superman—Gospelman—has made his appearance. The super-hero is the creation of Walter Zacharius, a former publisher of such “girlie” magazines as Swank and Gallery. Zacharius, who says he has been born again, has launched a new varied-feature family magazine, Nashville-Gospel, available on newstands. Amy Carter is the cover girl of a recent issue. In another issue Gospelman emerges victorious in a clash with publisher Larry Flynt of Hustler.
Personalia
Don Kessinger, 35, Chicago White Sox infielder and a former All Star player with the Chicago Cubs, is the first winner of the Danny Thompson Memorial Award for “exemplary Christian spirit in baseball.” The award, sponsored by Baseball Chapel, will be presented by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn at the second game of the World Series on October 12. It is in honor of Danny Thompson, a Texas Rangers infielder who died of leukemia last year. Thompson, who professed Christ as Saviour in 1973, was a chapel leader for the Minnesota and Texas teams. All twenty-six major-league teams now have chapel services, with total attendance averaging about 400 per Sunday.
New presidents: Eldon R. Fuhrman, Wesley Biblical Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi; Stanley D. Letcher, Jr., Midwest Christian College, Oklahoma City.
Resigned: J. Richard Palmer, 61, as president of Scarritt College in Nashville, Tennessee, a United Methodist school; Gordon Werkema, as president of the Christian College Consortium, based in Washington, D.C. (he has accepted an executive post at Seattle Pacific University).
World Scene
President-for-life Idi Amin of Uganda, a Muslim, banned all but three Christian denominations from operating in Uganda on grounds that they are security risks. Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox churches can continue to function, but Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, the Salvation Army, and other groups must close down. About 90 per cent of the country’s 11 million inhabitants are estimated to be nominally Christian. Amin did not indicate how long the closures are to remain in effect.
More than one-third of Norway’s 1,700 churches are closed and empty each Sunday because there are not enough clergymen to go around, according to a Church of Norway (Lutheran) report. It says the situation is serious in the Bjorgvin diocese, where some 100 churches are empty each week.
The Marxist government of Burma, a predominantly Buddhist nation, has published 10,000 copies of a Bible edition in Burmese. Christian representatives in the parliament had complained about the unavailability of Bibles. Burmese Christians say they cannot get exchange funds to import Scriptures from abroad, and they cannot obtain paper to print Bibles themselves. The new Bibles were placed on sale in parliament for $4.80 each.
Assurances have been given to Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority that a controversial draft law—one that would make abandonment of the Islamic faith a crime punishable by death—will be shelved, according to Coptic sources. Pope Shenouda III had led a week-long prayer vigil and fast of Copts (estimated to number six million out of Egypt’s 40 million population) to protest the proposed law, which was drawn up at the request of Muslim conservatives in the People’s Assembly. It includes other tough measures based on the Koran. There has been a recent resurgence of hard-core Muslim fundamentalism, especially among young people, and Egyptian leaders are worried that it may lead to increased violence. A former minister of religious affairs was recently murdered, and members of a fanatic Muslim youth group were arrested for the crime.
More than 2,000 black, white, and “colored” Christian leaders of a variety of denominations took part in a week-long “deliberately integrated” charismatic conference on the Holy Spirit in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was sponsored by Logos International, the New Jersey-based charismatic publishing firm. Anglican archbishop Bill Burnett of Capetown served as conference chairman. He was assisted by clergyman Nicholas Bhengu, founder of the Back to God Crusade in South Africa and son of a Zulu chief, and retired Anglican bishop Alphaeus Zulu of Zululand, South Africa, along with others. About 100 black leaders attended from Rhodesia, according to press reports. The main emphasis that emerged was the need for unity in the church.
The general assembly of the World Psychiatric Association at its sixth congress in Honolulu voted by a narrow margin to censure the Soviet Union for abuse of psychiatry for political purposes, and a committee was established to investigate allegations. Some 4,000 delegates from sixty-three countries attended. A number of national psychiatric societies sided with the Soviet delegates, who claimed that they were victims of “unsubstantiated slander.” Former Soviet prisoners, including Christians, have claimed they were drugged and tortured in psychiatric institutions in attempts to alter their beliefs or drive them insane.
The Communist government in what was formerly South Viet Nam is giving the church “many problems” and “some persecution,” according to sources quoted in the Alliance Witness. The sources say forty-five Protestant pastors, including the former army chaplains, have been imprisoned, and others are endangered. Controls have been imposed on religious activities, church property has been confiscated, work schedules have been arranged to interfere with church gatherings, and a person may be denied employment for attending church services, say the sources. (The largest Protestant body in Viet Nam is the Evangelical Church, which grew out of the work of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.)
Deaths
SAMUEL FLOYD PANNABECKER, 81, a leader of the General Conference Mennonite Church and president emeritus of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary; in Goshen, Indiana.
JOHN NEVIN SAYRE, 93, Episcopal clergyman active in pacifist causes and the world peace movement, and chairman for many years of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation; in South Nyack, New York.
THOMAS F. STALEY, 74, Presbyterian layman and financier (a founder of the Reynolds Securities firm) who established a foundation to bring to school and college campuses “a persuasive presentation of the Christian gospel in a climate of conviction” (programs are conducted currently at more than 200 educational institutions); in Port Chester, New York, of a heart attack.
