Federal Council

Meeting in Indianapolis last week, the Federal Council of The Churches of Christ in America settled its affairs with calm and dispatch. After electing Rev. Dr. Albert William Beaven, evangelical Baptist, its new president (TIME, Dec. 12), the Council gave its vice-presidency, a new office, to Rev. Dr. Lewis Seymour Mudge, Presbyterian moderator. The Council's structure was tightened up, its meeting times changed from quadrennial to biennial, in accordance with committee recommendations which were practically all approved. Deferred until 1934 was a proposal to let the Federal Council administer for its constituents such activities as they may commit to it. Methodist Bishop Francis John McConnell, retiring president, addressed the delegates on Christian Unity, which, said he, "you can't get ... among churches simply by passing resolutions. . . . You have to think together, you have to live together in terms of Christian fellowship, and the first thing you know, union is simply a ratification of a condition that already exists." Dr. Mary Emma Woolley of Mt. Holyoke College, delegate to last year's stalled Disarmament Conference, spoke on "The Church and World Peace." The Federal Council blenched a bit when its old bogey, Birth Control, bobbed up in a committee report, revised during the past four years, on Social Ideals. One passage favored repeal of legislation against "physicians and other qualified persons" disseminating contraceptive information. Another passage said guardedly that the subject should be "re-examined dispassionately." Presbyterian Rev. Dr. David de Forest Burrell moved to strike out both passages. In their defense, Presbyterian Dr. William Oxley Thompson, president emeritus of Ohio State University, said: "Presbyterians practice birth control more than they practice anything else. In our universities there are thousands of young people who are discussing this important problem far more seriously than we. . . ." Methodist Bishop James Cannon Jr. objected to the phrase "and other qualified persons," declaring that only physicians should be allowed to give information and then only when directly consulted. In the end the first passage was stricken out, the second left in. Into the Federal Council's "social ideals creed" was inserted a resolution against gambling, and at Bishop Cannon's behest a pledge of support for the 18th Amendment. Another section read: "Divorce or separation may be and often is preferable to the enforced continuance of a relation which has no true basis in mutual respect. . ." The delegates voted to delete "and often is." Liberal on the whole, the Council's creed further favored such things as unemployment insurance, collective bargaining, social planning, penal reform, shorter working hours, wider distribution of wealth, repudiation of war, "spiritual comfort and sympathy" to conscientious objectors, opposition to compulsory military training.

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