Negro Churchmen Lament Lack of Capital

Negro churchmen say they are convinced U. S. cities need “not more studies of the causes of the ‘civil disorders,’ not more ‘anti-riot’ controls, not more welfare handouts, and certainly not more piecemeal appropriations for limited aid to the cities.”

The real problem, says a statement adopted by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, is a lack of capital: “Even as Negroes in 1863 saw themselves deprived of necessary land, so Negroes today see capital flow through their communities without capital gain for their communities.”

The NCNC, which in effect is the ecclesiastical arm of the responsible element in the black-power movement, held a meeting in Washington last month that coincided with the one-day conference of the star-studded Urban Coalition.

The Negro churchmen voiced support of the coalition’s bid to “reorder our national priorities” and to establish “earn and learn” centers.

They also endorsed in general the coalition’s call upon Congress “to move ahead on the many proposals already before it which seek to remedy the root causes of our urban crisis.” But that endorsement had a hollow ring, because black-power churchmen seem to be growing increasingly dubious of the effects of government handouts.

“Neither emergency job programs nor any present legislative proposals can be more than palliatives providing short-term relief unless one critical need is placed at the center of the stage,” they declared.

That one need is identified as capital. “The despair and disillusionment among black people in America will not be intercepted—peace will not be achieved—unless the historic wrong which has denied us a stake in this nation’s capital economy is righted.”

To this end, the Negro churchmen called for creation of a “national Economic Development Bank.” Such a bank would use funds from government and private sources to lend money at reduced interest rates for Negro homes, schools, and business. It would be run “by persons who have sensitivity and commitment to meeting the special needs and requirements.”

This veering off from reliance upon government aid is a notable contrast to the course suggested by most liberal churchmen, whose comments have been a can-you-top-this scramble. NCC President Arthur S. Flemming urged Congress to provide full funding of the Office of Economic Opportunity “at no less than 2.1 billion dollars.”

The Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who was billed as spokesman for the religious community at the Urban Coalition meeting, echoed ecumenical appeals. He declared that “we of the churches have demonstrated that we do not have the answers, at least not in the form of discernible specifics.” He went on, nevertheless, to quote a resolution of the National Council of Churches’ 1966 assembly that asked political leaders to give highest priority to equal-opportunity programs. He also quoted from a report of the World Council of Churches’ 1966 Geneva conference that poses the question whether “violence that sheds blood in planned revolutions may not be a lesser evil than the violence which, though bloodless, condemns whole populations to perennial despair.” Hines’s own view was that “no anti-poverty program will work unless and until poverty itself is re-defined, and ministered to, in human rather than material terms alone.”

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The Urban Coalition brought together nearly 1,000 prominent political, business, labor, religious, and educational leaders. The mayors of a number of the biggest American cities were on hand. The coalition met in the plush Shoreham Hotel in Washington, prompting civil-rights leader Marion Barry to take the rostrum even though he hadn’t been invited. “When you hold these meetings,” he said, “please don’t have them out here at the Shoreham. Hold them down where the people are, get down there and try to get to the nitty-gritty. When that time comes we’ll begin to scratch the surface of the urban problem.”

From the ecclesiastical bureaucracy has come an eighteen-point program on what local churches and ministers can do before, during, and after racial riots. The plan was drawn up by the United Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race and has won endorsement from the counterpart commission in the Southern Presbyterian denomination and from Foy Valentine, executive secretary of the Southern Baptists’ Christian Life Commission.

The plan includes such suggestions as planning meetings with local authorities and with ghetto leaders and getting out “interpretative materials” for white congregations to exert political pressures. Procedures are also described for what can be done during and after crises.

Triumph, a monthly put out by well-informed Roman Catholic conservatives, devotes a portion of its first-anniversary issue to analyzing the political and religious factors in the rioting of the past summer. Triumph editors say the riots prove the American Negro has rejected both the political and social premises of secular liberalism.

They say that “Islam seems to have something to offer the Negro, something that Southern Puritanism because of past associations cannot offer, and that secularized, liberalized Protestantism rejects out of hand: time, and some plausible instructions in what to do with it. Time to rebuild the family; and Islam teaches him the discipline and gives him the ethical rationale for the job. Time to stand on his own feet; and Islam teaches courage, perseverance. Time to show the white man a distinctive culture; and Islam offers a proud heritage.”

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The Roman Catholic Church, Triumph declares, “has been hiding from the Negro.”

Protest From Arkansas

First it was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Now the Viet Nam war has an even less expected opponent: the official Arkansas Baptist Newsmagazine. Last month, Erwin McDonald became the first Southern Baptist editor to advocate that the United States pull out.

His editorial said South Viet Nam is “dominated by military junta” and that Premier Ky’s regime had no intention of permitting a fair election this month. The vote was to be monitored by a group of U. S. citizens named by President Johnson, including a last-minute addition, the Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of National Presbyterian Church.

The Arkansas paper said “there may have been a time when the big question for us was how to get out and save face.… The question now is how can we save our soul if we stay in?”

Miscellany

Appeals for a papal encyclical against racism came from the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice and Urban League chief Whitney M. Young, Jr. After talking with the Pope in Rome, Young had “great hopes” he would comply; but officials unofficially told Religious News Service not to expect an encyclical in the foreseeable future.

Southern Baptists asked for 100 volunteers to go to Fairbanks, Alaska, before freezing weather sets in to help repair nine Baptist churches hit by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage in last month’s floods. The floods began the day before the state convention was to meet. United Presbyterians also issued an emergency appeal.

In the first half of this year, church construction dropped 4 per cent from the 1966 level, the Commerce Department reports, with the dip intensifying in June. Private-college building, however, took a major upswing.

Internal Revenue Service warns that “contributions” normally paid for admission to charitable fund-raising activities are not tax deductible.

Evangelical Press Association, which recently won tax exemption, is talking with Associated Church Press about a joint convention in Washington, D. C., in 1971. EPA will also meet there in 1970 and ACP in 1968.

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The Columbus, Ohio-based Bible Meditation League decided its work will be better described by a new name, Bible Literature International. It distributes tracts, Scripture, and correspondence courses in 175 languages to 100 nations.

Spokesmen for the National Council of Churches, U. S. Catholic Conference, and Synagogue Council testified in support of the proposed 1967 federal fair-housing law.

The legislative arm of the LCA-ALC college-student group passed a unanimous resolution urging Lutheran denominations to “seek organic reunion with the Roman Catholic Church.”

The general committee of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students met in Wuppertal, Germany, last month and surveyed its work in thirty-seven nations, including eleven added since the last committee meeting in 1963.

After years of tumult, the last Christian missionaries were to be evacuated from Aden by September 9, when the British colony becomes independent. Church of Scotland, Danish, and Red Sea Mission leaders issued a statement asking prayer for the now-isolated “infant Church of South Arabia.”

A survey of 4,710 people in Kazan, Soviet Union, showed 21 per cent believed in some religion. Only 3 per cent of the believers were under 30 years of age, and 81 per cent were women. But one-third were members of the working class.

Protestant Panorama

Methodists will decide next year whether to order conference votes on joining the proposed united church of North India in 1969. Methodist conferences—and other denominations—rejected a 1962 union plan, and rejoined negotiations in 1965.

The International Council of Christian Churches says it will help build 200 new churches for those who pulled out of the Church of South India, charging liberalism.

Although the Southern Baptist Convention withdrew official support of the project, thirty SBC pastors willing to accept limits on political commentary will aid an evangelistic drive by South African Baptists this month. The 45,000 Baptists there, who worship along racial lines, include more blacks than whites. Overseas Baptists rarely visit.

More than 100 Mennonites left Canada’s far-north Peace River area for Bolivia to seek “greater fulfillment of customs and traditions,” and more are expected to leave. The group, which had hoped to get a government-supported school of its own, disliked modern pressures in public schools.

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At the foot of a statue of Christ during the Pentecostal World Conference in Rio, leaders of two Wesleyan denominations in Chile with 680,000 members and the 63,000-member Pentecostal Holiness Church of the United States signed a pact of doctrinal agreement and mutual membership.

Personalia

The Rev. David G. Colwell, chairman of the Consultation on Church Union, will be in Seattle this month while the Episcopal Church votes on COCU. He has taken the pulpit of Plymouth United Church of Christ there, moving from First Congregational, Washington, D. C.

Harvard Divinity student Sam W. Brown, 24, after leading the first ballot, lost last month’s vote for president of the National Student Association. The winner was activist Oberlin graduate Edward Schwartz.

Washington columnist Jack Anderson claims Richard Cardinal Cushing chuckles at recalling how he and Joseph Kennedy “made strategic contributions to Protestant ministers in West Virginia to help win friends and influence voters for Jack Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary.” Amounts supposedly ranged from $200 to $ 1,000, depending on the size of congregations.

Army Captain Colin Kelly III, 27, son of America’s first hero in World War II, enters Philadelphia Divinity School this month to study for the Episcopal Ministry with an eye on the military chaplaincy.

The Rev. Kenneth M. Lindsay, executive director of the Greater Detroit Council of Lutheran Churches, was elected public-relations director of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Unlike New York-based predecessor Norman Temrne, now with the American Bible Society, Lindsay will locate in St. Louis.

Miss Lillian Tookman, former publicity chief for Decca Records and later a staffer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was appointed public-relations director for the Armenian Church of North America.

World Vision named the Rev. Spencer De Jong (Reformed Church in America) as acting director of its thirty-seven orphanages in Indonesia. He will also direct the relief program suspended during the attempted Communist coup in late 1965.

James W. Reapsome, editor of the defunct Sunday School Times, this month becomes chaplain and religion professor at Malone College (Quaker) in Canton, Ohio.

At New York’s Constitutional Convention, former Bronx probation officer John Carro told how he couldn’t get an orphanage to accept fatherless Lee Harvey Oswald when he was 12 years old because he was a Lutheran. The convention then passed a provision ending nearmandatory matching of religion in adoption, guardianship, and custody cases.