Homosexual churchmen won recognition from the National Council of Churches last month. They got the NCC’s Governing Board to approve plans for dialogue with a group sympathetic to the gay cause. But it wasn’t smooth sailing. An increasingly vocal Orthodox bloc opposed the action, taken during a semi-annual meeting of the board held in New York. The Orthodox members of the board argued strongly that homosexual behavior is “contrary to Christian belief.” Proponents of the measure pointed out that dialogue does not imply approval of the gay life-style but might provide opportunity for witness.

The controversy suggested that an old problem is following the NCC into a new era: how to manifest unity in matters on which Christians are divided.

The board meeting, second since a recent reorganization, was the last for the current general secretary, Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy. He retires December 31, to be succeeded by Ms. Claire Randall, currently a staff executive of Church Women United (see October 26 issue, page 68). Ms. Randall, 54, was elected by the board at its New York meeting in a 110–61 vote over the Reverend Albert M. Pennybacker, an Ohio pastor. She had been recommended by a special search committee. Pennybacker, 42, was nominated from the floor by members of his denomination, the Disciples of Christ.

Opposition to Ms. Randall came primarily from the Orthodox and the Disciples. The Orthodox reportedly voted against her in part because of her role in the preparation of an abortion-on-demand paper. She served as chairman of an NCC task force on abortion that produced the statement, currently in limbo.

Growing uneasiness of the Orthodox in the NCC will probably be the biggest challenge for Ms. Randall in her new job. The problem will be to keep “mission” activists happy without alienating the more conservative Orthodox. (The board voted approval of a formal suggestion that she and/or Espy invite the heads of all the Orthodox churches “to discuss Orthodox participation in the NCC.”)

The underlying issue has been part and parcel of the ecumenical movement since its inception. Optimists had hoped that NCC restructure might somehow alleviate the tension and even attract Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Missouri Synod Lutherans into the fold.

That dream seems to have faded. An advisory committee to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded that NCC membership would be “neither desirable nor feasible at this time.” Southern Baptists could not even bring themselves to any substantial participation in Key 73. A conservative trend in the Missouri Synod leaves little room for the NCC.

Article continues below

Indeed, the NCC may have all it can do to hold on to the denominations it already has.The National Council of Churches currently has thirty-one member denominations with a total constituency numbering about 41,614,000. Espy, who succeeded in bringing the council through the controversial Viet Nam war years with no defections, mourned at some length the NCC’s recent loss of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. (The 5,300-member denomination voted withdrawal at its annual meeting in August.) In his final report to the board Espy said,

I am told unofficially that the opposition centered chiefly on the position of the National Council on advocacy. If this be true, this is at least a clear issue on which to differ. It is also a legitimate issue in the sense that enlightened and dedicated Christians hold varying views on the role of the corporate church or certainly a council of churches in taking a public stand on social questions. I am glad the withdrawal apparently was not on the spurious ground sometimes adduced that the National Council is under Communist influence, that it is trying to be a super-church, or that it is based on a washed-out theological indifferentism.

SUNDAY

Professional football teams and churches have a lot in common, Minneapolis United Church of Christ pastor Phillip W. Sarles pointed out in an “open letter” to President Jim Finks of the Minnesota Vikings. Both are troubled by “no shows,” he said, but when the team is in town for a Sunday game the attendance problem is proportionately greater for the churches. Congress may have put the football teams in a bind with its lifting of the TV blackout for home games, but it “did us dirt, also,” said Sarles, by putting all the holidays on Mondays.

Money problems? “It’s an old story with me,” commented the minister. “The thing with me is that I don’t get the same ‘take’ from each ‘customer’ that you do. Boy, if I could, we would do a lot of good for many people. I just let each one’s conscience be his guide. You’d go broke in a hurry that way, Jim.”

Whatever ecumenical spirit is left in North America seems to be much more visible at local and regional levels. This has certainly been true for Key 73, and Espy’s report noted that full Roman Catholic membership in ecumenical agencies increased in the last five years as follows: state ecumenical agencies, from two to thirteen, with thirty-nine dioceses involved; metropolitan agencies, from one to six, involving eight dioceses; city and county agencies, from twenty-three to more than a hundred. Nineteen dioceses are involved in the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, a regional agency. In citing statistics on less-than-full Roman Catholic membership in ecumenical agencies, Espy said almost all state, county, and city church councils now have cooperative activity with Roman Catholics. For state councils, this is a 50 per cent gain since 1967.

Article continues below

Espy is not overjoyed with the trend. He warned that the acknowledged resurgence of localism and regionalism in American churches “unless it is matched by a comparable commitment to the national and the world dimensions … could be disastrous for our country, for our churches and for the world.”

Espy, who was honored at a formal dinner at Riverside Church, is leaving his successor with a financial headache. During each of the last several years the NCC has had to reduce its overall budget. Earlier this year the council’s Division of Church and Society had its budget cut by two-thirds, necessitating reduction of its elected staff from fifteen to seven (among those dropped was a black Episcopal priest whose exit sparked a controversy).

Religious News Service said Ms. Randall, a Presbyterian, is known as an efficient and “tough” administrator. In an interview prior to her election, she told RNS that her interest in ecumenism dates back to the 1940s. She was especially inspired, she said, by the writings of the late Bishop Otto Dibelius of Germany on the importance of Christian unity. Asked about her assessment of the current ecumenical scene, she said, “We are obviously at a point of reassessment, of redirection. It is not clear where we go next. There is no question about our oneness; there are questions about how we express that oneness.” She said she hopes that organized ecumenism can draw on new experiences in worship, service, and fellowship taking place in informal, local groups of Christians.

The new Governing Board seems intent on copying the old-style NCC practice of issuing pronouncements on selected social issues. In addition to approving dialogue with the gay churchmen, the board passed proposals for a religious observance of the U. S. bicentennial in 1976, a North American conference on philanthropy the same year, and a meeting next June to study alternatives to incarceration. Also adopted were resolutions (1) supporting principles embodied in Senate Resolution 67, which seeks an end to nuclear weapons testing, (2) calling attention to current violations of human rights in Chile and the Soviet Union, in that order, (3) commending the forthcoming World Population Conference in Bucharest next year, noting that U. S. consumption of meat products “is based upon a prodigal use of the protein indispensable to humanity’s good health yet in short supply worldwide,” (4) urging full restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, and (5) promising not to buy Farah slacks until the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America lift a boycott against the El Paso firm. The board ordered the drafting of a resolution opposing “deprogramming” (abduction and detention and the psychological pressuring of religious converts) as a threat to religious liberty.

Article continues below

In contrast to its straightforwardness on these issues, the board carefully avoided choosing sides in a resolution on the Middle East war. The statement merely urges the U. S. government to do what it can to bring an early end to the conflict, including an immediate mutual (with the Soviet Union) cessation of military aid. Representatives of the American Jewish Committee promptly criticized the resolution because it failed to support Israel.

The board got a report on the NCC presence at Wounded Knee and called for fund-raising efforts in behalf of Indians jailed as a result of the seventy-one day occupation. Several weeks earlier, the NCC withdrew a $25,000 bond it had provided for Carter Camp, chairman of the American Indian Movement, who had been arrested in the shooting of another AIM leader.

NCC president W. Sterling Cary warned at the outset there was “no assurance” that board decisions calling for new interchurch programs and the money to pay for them “will be taken seriously” by the member churches whose representatives make the decisions. This was another problem that restructure was supposed to solve.

A tip-off to the way things are going in the NCC may have been the board’s disposition of a $14,452 program whose initially stated goal was to develop “a new definition of ecumenism which provides the basis for broad inter-Christian and inter-religious participation.” After a brief study by one of its five sections, the board adopted a recommendation “that it approve the proposal with the following reformulation of its goal: ‘To explore the current trends in inter-Christian and inter-religious cooperation nationally and in local areas and to examine their implications for the National Council of Churches and its member bodies in their relations with other religious groups.’ ”

Article continues below
Service No. 41

“We are ‘God’s almost chosen people,’ ” said the congressman-clergyman, “the word ‘almost’ being necessary to save us from … fanatical nationalism … the word ‘chosen’ being useful to indicate our special role in history, our special calling in the world.”

The scene was the East Room of the White House, the occasion the forty-first worship service held there since President Nixon took office but the first in six months, and the speaker Republican William H. Hudnut, who pastored a United Presbyterian church in Indianapolis before being elected to Congress.

In the front row sat Vice President-designate Gerald Ford—nominated only thirty-six hours before—his wife, and two of their four children. The older two are away at school—including a son at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.

Hudnut’s sermon theme was the faith of Abraham Lincoln, and he used it to make some astute comments on the much-discussed topic of civil religion. He said that Lincoln’s concept, “This nation under God,” supplies “a corrective to the tendency to idolize the nation.… Lincoln was always conscious, as every truly religious person is, that his own country must stand before the Almighty’s bar of judgment.”

“I have heard democracy equated with Christianity and God’s cause with America’s,” Hudnut continued. He went on to speak of a series of “great differences”: “between worshiping God and domesticating him”; “between looking upon him as the Lord of all nations, and regarding him as the ally of one”; “between affirming ‘My country for God’ and boasting ‘God for my country’ ”; “between making ours a nation ‘under God’ and making a god of our nation”; “between humbly praying, as Lincoln did, that we may be on God’s side, and self-righteously asserting that he is on ours.”

Before preaching, Hudnut read portions of the twelfth chapter of Romans from the New English Bible. The thirty-five-minute service also included choral selections by an Episcopal youth group from Richmond, Virginia. Tom Lee, a Marine musician, played a Gulbransen organ owned by the White House.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

National Prayer Rally

In a long-planned—and timely—move, Campus Crusade’s Great Commission Prayer Crusade will hold a National Prayer Rally for women in Washington’s Constitution Hall November 14, with President Nixon’s wife as honorary chairman. So far, about 50,000 have attended prayer rallies in twenty other cities.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.

Our digital archives are a work in progress. Let us know if corrections need to be made.

Tags:
Issue: