NEWS
Cleveland Indians second baseman Frank Duffy last month gave up his spot to Billy Graham for the ten-day northern Ohio crusade in Cleveland Stadium. The evangelist, speaking from a platform erected at second base, had to cope with a record heat wave and a downpour one night, but he still drew more than half as many (372,440) as the Cleveland Indians attracted for all of last year’s baseball season. Inquirers numbered about 19,800—just over 5 per cent of the attendance.
Participation by Catholics and blacks got a lot of press attention. The official Catholic position was one of lukewarm neutrality, described by a diocesan official as “neither recruiting nor forbidding attendance.” Many Catholics attended, a number served on various crusade committees, and at least one priest and several nuns were among those who responded to the invitation. (A Danish visitor to Cleveland told of attending a Protestant church on Sunday morning where he was warned against attending the crusade. But at a Catholic church that night he was encouraged to attend.)
Black ministers and musicians were on the platform every night. Prominent black James E. Johnson, assistant secretary of the Navy, gave a testimony. Despite initial gloomy forecasts, the final verdict was that black attendance equalled or bettered that at the typical public event in Cleveland. Graham frequently touched on the note of reconciliation. The Wednesday-night audience burst into applause when he declared, “Christianity is not a white man’s religion. It is not a black man’s religion. It is not an Oriental man’s religion. Jesus belongs to the whole world.” The modern dilemma, he emphasized, is that “the world has become a neighborhood but not a brotherhood.” Cleveland—with a large black population and a recent history of racial turmoil—knew what he was talking about.
The northern Ohio media gave priority treatment to the meetings. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, largest newspaper in the state, commented editorially: “His [Graham’s] appearance and his work here should be recorded as a major event in Cleveland’s history.”
Youth under twenty-five made up more than half the audiences, and youth response was equally high. There was a camaraderie that crossed racial, social, and age lines. For instance, black soloist Ethel Waters, 76, performed at one “Youth Night.” The enthusiastic applause she got suggested the absence of the generation gap—and any other kind of gap.
Two hundred young people, including a contingent from Explo 72 (see July 7 issue, page 31), ranged the streets of Cleveland daily in search of souls. Some 1,700 decisions were recorded through these street forays.
More than 1,000 ministers attended the four-day crusade-related “School of Evangelism” during daytime hours. About 35,000 have attended these schools since their inception a few years ago.
Many observers at the Cleveland crusade commented on the evangelist’s message, which simply centered on the same basic gospel truths he proclaimed in a Los Angeles tent in the fall of 1949. That crusade lasted eight weeks. The total attendance was 350,000 and there were 3,000 inquirers. Now, twenty-three years later, they flocked in greater numbers to hear him proclaim the same truths in a ten-day midsummer crusade in Cleveland Stadium. And more than six times as many walked the aisles.
The great American pastime may not be baseball after all.
The Word At Miami
While Senator George McGovern impressed delegates and commentators with his new political machine at the Democratic National Convention, Christians created an impact among the “non-delegates” who camped in Flamingo Park and demonstrated outside the Miami Beach Convention Hall.
The witnessers drew frightened resistance from the Jerry Rubin-led Yippie-Zippie faction, who tried to bar them from the park. Bernard Lafayette, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference director from Boston and temporary park mayor, overruled Rubin.
“Don’t let the Jesus freaks take over!” shouted one youth who ran through the crowd spreading the alarm as the Reverend Richard Bryant, director of missions for the Miami Baptist Association, handed out an underground tabloid version of the Gospel of John. Bryant had organized “Demo 72,” in which about 500 Jesus people and straight Christians were involved (see July 7 issue, page 38). They witnessed to the 2,000 non-delegates from such groups as Students for a Democratic Society, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, the Welfare Rights Organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Youth International Party (Yippies and Zippies), and the Gay Liberation Front.
Later some Yippies jumped on the stage where a Baptist rock group from Burlington, North Carolina, was performing. The Yippies unplugged the microphone, ripped out cords and wires to the amplifiers, pushed the performers out of the way, and shouted into a battery-operated megaphone: “Jesus freaks, go home! This is a political gathering, not a rock concert!”
Four members of SCLC, acting as marshals, restored order. One of the black men told the Yippies, “You’re always yelling about freedom of assembly and speech for everyone, and now you’re trying to deny it for groups that anger you.”
Rubin, spitting profanities, replied that force was sometimes necessary to remove “insurgents who don’t have a place here.” When asked by a Baptist reporter about his contact with the Jesus people, Rubin retorted, “I don’t believe in what they’re saying. None of them has talked with me, and I wouldn’t talk with them even if they tried. Jesus was a junkie. I don’t want to be bothered by … those … questions.”
Camping among the non-delegates were Jack Sparks, leader of the Christian World Liberation Front, and some followers from Berkeley, California. They helped feed other campers, distributing as many as 500 tunafish sandwiches and 3,500 doughnuts a day. Although they were not affiliated with Demo 72, the CWLFers also handed out contemporary Christian literature and talked with members of “the Chicago Seven” and Dr. Benjamin Spock, none of whom responded with any interest in the message of the Gospel. But, reported Sparks, as many as fifteen non-delegates a day made decisions for Christ as the result of the group’s witness. The CWLFers also sponsored “The People’s Church of Flamingo Park” and afternoon sing-alongs.
Sammy Tippitt, Leo Humphrey, and Bob Phillips, street preachers from Chicago, New Orleans, and Titusville, Florida, respectively, carried crosses at the demonstration areas as well as at the headquarters of each major presidential candidate. Tippitt and others managed to get onto the convention floor with words and posters. Humphrey led a prayer service for a Gay Liberation member who asked that the Christians help get “the devil of homosexuality” off his back. He then joined the Christians in giving out literature.
Two “straight” young people—Johnny Barber, 20-year-old business-administration student at Troy State University in Alabama, and Hank Erwin, 23-year-old ministerial student at Southeast Bible College in Birmingham—bicycled 860 miles in eighteen days to take part in the witnessing. They remarked about the apparent openness on the part of many of the youth delegates (particularly McGovern workers from San Francisco) and several of the more than 7,000 newsmen covering the convention.
Most of the radical demonstrators plan to be on hand for the Republican Convention later this month. The Christians plan to be there too.
ADON TAFT
The Candidates
Some oldtimers around Diamondlake Methodist Church in Illinois remember Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. For one year McGovern served as student pastor of the small congregation, which grew from 133 to 170 under his leadership. Members of the congregation recall that he preached “good, noncontroversial” sermons, knew his congregation well, and took seriously his role of pastor, particularly visitation duties, fulfilling that role in his own way. Mrs. Vivienne Umbdenstock reminisces that McGovern baptized her and her five children in her living room, using a kitchen bowl as a baptismal font.
Although McGovern soon decided he wasn’t “temperamentally suited” for the pastorate, he said he had learned some valuable things, “like how to work with diverse people of all kinds in both happy and trying moments.”
The senator’s father, Joseph McGovern, who was a staunchly evangelical Wesleyan Methodist preacher (he built six churches), instilled in his son, in Eleanor McGovern’s words, “high ethical values.” But McGovern learned more than ethics from his pious father. The family held daily devotions, and McGovern owned his own Bible and could read it before he reached school age. On Sundays he attended Sunday school, worship service, an afternoon children’s service, and evening prayer meeting, and he never missed special revival services. McGovern still loves the Bible deeply and can recite many verses from memory, says biographer Robert Anson.
Shortly before his death in 1944, Joseph McGovern wrote to his son: “These are awful times in which we are living and you will need to let Christ have first place in your life and trust Him to help you to fit into all his blessed will for your life. Jesus said [in] John 15:15 ‘Without me you can do nothing.’ Read that chapter of St. John and think on those words. Read the 23 Psalm often, and meditate on it.”
Earlier, as a seminarian, McGovern said he embraced “the social gospel.” Although he holds no strong ties to any particular congregation today and doesn’t espouse his father’s evangelical Christianity, he is still active in United Methodist circles. The senator in 1968 was a United Methodist delegate to the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Uppsala, Sweden). And in 1969 he was a national committee member of the first U. S. Congress on Evangelism, held in Minneapolis. (Evangelist Billy Graham and CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S Carl F. H. Henry—then editor and now editor-at-large—were leaders of that follow-up to the World Congress on Evangelism, held earlier in Berlin.) The late Robert Kennedy called McGovern “the most decent man in the senate.”
While no official press releases mention McGovern’s religious background, the senator does publicize the numerous religious leaders who have endorsed his candidacy. And, at pastors’ invitations, he has campaigned from pulpits in several churches (mostly black) during Sunday-morning worship services.
McGovern’s running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family. His father supported the church financially, but Eagleton received most of his spiritual training from his mother, reported Religious News Service. Although he never attended a Catholic school, he got private religious education from a priest who was a family friend.
Eagleton and his family attend Little Flower Church in Spring Hill, a Maryland suburb. When he was state attorney general “his religion was reflected mainly in the character and integrity of his administration rather than wearing his religion on his shirt-sleeves,” commented a former aide. In that respect, affirm McGovern associates, the two candidates are alike.
Free Will Baptists Sever Nae Link
Delegates to the annual meeting of the National Association of Free Will Baptists voted last month to leave the National Association of Evangelicals.
The Free Will Baptists had been NAE members for twenty-six years. As reasons for withdrawal, the resolution cited the principle of local autonomy, insufficient financial support for NAE, and the right of individual Free Will Baptists to belong to the NAE. It carried by a vote of 257 to 225.
The resolution was not critical of NAE, nor did it mention Key 73, thought to be a bone of contention. Eighteen of the NAE’s member denominations are Key 73 participants; the NAE itself has voted not to join.
The move from the NAE is the result of a growing separatist influence in the 200,000-member movement that began about fifteen years ago, says an insider. Free Will Baptists had previously been cooperating with other evangelical groups quite extensively, and two of their leaders, W. Stanley Mooneyham and Billy A. Melvin, had moved into key NAE posts. Melvin, former executive secretary of the Free Will Baptists, is now the NAE’s executive director.
Methodists As Stewards
Methodists don’t immerse, so the pollution of Lake Junaluska has no immediate ecclesiastical consequences. But delegates to the quadrennial Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference at their North Carolina assembly grounds were concerned about the lake anyway, because the conference owns it. A social-concerns committee reported: “This assembly has been a good steward of the banks and shores of Lake Junaluska, but we are poor stewards of the lake.” With that, delegates set aside $230,000 for dredging the lake and $200,000 for improving the sewage system. The lake has long been a favorite meeting place for Methodists in the Southeast. It is near Asheville.
The meeting at Junaluska was one of five jurisdictional conferences held last month, out of which came nineteen new bishops. Eleven are from the parish ministry, four from seminary posts, three from national denominational boards, and only one from regional administration. Two of the new leaders are black (a campaign to elect a black at Junaluska failed). There was a scattering of votes for women, and Methodism’s supreme court is being asked to decide whether a layman can be elected bishop. Also, the first Asian-American bishop in U.S. Methodist history was elected.
Here is a listing:
ATLANTA—Bishop William R. Cannon, transferred from Raleigh, N.C. BIRMINGHAM, ALA.—Carl Sanders, 60, pastor in Arlington, Va. BOSTON—Edward G. Carroll, 61, black pastor in Silver Spring, Md. CHICAGO—Bishop Paul Washburn, transferred from Minneapolis. COLUMBIA, S.C.—Edward L. Tullis, 55, pastor in Ashland, Ky. DALLAS—Bishop W. McFerrin Stowe, transferred from Topeka, Kans. DENVER—Melvin E. Wheatley, 57, pastor in Los Angeles. HARRISBURG, PA.—John B. Warman, 56, pastor in Pittsburgh area. INDIANAPOLIS—Bishop Ralph T. Alton, transferred from Madison, Wis. JACKSON, MISS.—Mack B. Stokes, 60, Asbury College graduate who has been associate dean at Candler School of Theology. LAKELAND, FLA.—Joel D. McDavid, 56, pastor in Mobile, Ala. LINCOLN, NEBR.—Don W. Holder, 66, president of St. Paul School of Theology. LITTLE ROCK, ARK.—Bishop Eugene Frank, transferred from St. Louis. LOS ANGELES—Bishop Charles Golden, transferred from San Francisco. LOUISVILLE, KY.—Frank L. Robertson, 55, pastor in Valdosta, Ga. MADISON, WIS.—Jesse R. DeWitt, 54, head of the section of church extension of the Board of Missions’ National Division. MINNEAPOLIS—Wayne K. Clymer, 54, president of Evangelical Theological Seminary, former Evangelical United Brethren school. NEW ORLEANS—Finis A. Crutchfield, 55, pastor in Tulsa, Okla. NEW YORK CITY—Bishop W. Ralph Ward, transferred from Syracuse. PHILADELPHIA—James Ault, dean at Drew University Theological Seminary. PORTLAND, ORE.—Jack M. Tuell, 48, pastor in Vancouver, Wash. RALEIGH, N.C.—Robert M. Blackburn, 52, pastor in Orlando, Fla. RICHMOND, VA.—Bishop W. Kenneth Goodson, transferred from Birmingham, Ala. ST. LOUIS—Robert E. Goodrich, 63, pastor in Dallas. SEATTLE—Wilbur W. Y. Choy, 54, superintendent of the Bay View district in Berkeley, the son of Chinese immigrants. SYRACUSE, N. Y.—Joseph H. Yeakel, 43, general secretary of the United Methodist Board of Evangelism. TOPEKA, KANS.—Ernest T. Dixon, 49, a black who has been assistant general secretary of the United Methodist Program Council. WASHINGTON, D. C.—Bishop James K. Mathews, transferred from Boston.
