Methodists in Jackson

Jackson, capital of Mississippi, birthplace of the Confederacy and scene of Jefferson Davis's last speech (1884), has a population of 48,282 souls. When members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, began planning their 22nd quadrennial conference, they were invited to think of Mississippi. They chose Jackson, smallest town in winch they had ever met. Last week Jackson's hotels were brimming with Southern Methodists, 708 delegates and alternates, male and female, laymen and churchmen. In best gown, business suit or frock coat they attended a reception at the Governor's mansion, motored about the surrounding countryside, shook hands with one another, chatted and lobbied for votes as churchmen will. Day & night the delegates converged upon Jackson's big, bare, steel-beamed, municipal auditorium dedicated to World War dead. There they prayed, transacted churchly business, spoke up in meeting, and on several occasions noted that official tabulations showed more votes cast than there were delegates. Among their problems:

Bishops, their elections, terms of office and retirements. Most prominent figure at the conference was Dr. John W. Perry of Tennessee, chairman of the potent Committee on Episcopacy. A lean, crisp-voiced, white-mustached, Virginia-born minister, Dr. Perry has long worked for home missions and Negro education, was once called by a well-meaning Negro pastor "a friend whose skin is white but whose heart is black."

When the Jackson conference opened last fortnight, many a delegate was anxious to elect Southern Methodist bishops henceforth for stated terms, instead of for life with retirement mandatory only on account of age (72) or infirmity. Also there are vacancies in the Methodist episcopacy: two because of death and three because of the pending retirement of three well-beloved prelates, Horace Mellard Du Bose, 75, of Nashville; Collins Denny, 79, of Richmond; and Warren A. Candler, 76, who, a member of Atlanta's Coca-Cola family, received newshawks one night last week in his oldtime white cotton nightgown. Would the conference elect five new bishops? Or for economy's sake would it leave their posts vacant? And would it, as some delegates desired, create a new vacancy by retiring Bishop James Cannon Jr. who had arrived triumphantly in Jackson from Washington where a court had acquitted him of corrupt political practices week before?

Dr. Perry's committee swung into action. A fighter who preferred defeat to compromise, he wished his fellow Virginian ousted. He got the committee to vote (43-to-28) to retire Bishop Cannon for "ill health" -- only grounds permissible under church discipline. But the conference, after two hours of debate in which the "Prohibishop" was pictured as a martyr to the machinations of the Wet Press and the Roman Catholic Church or as a man ''infirm" because of his "love of money and love of power," voted its confidence in him, 269-to-170.

Nevertheless Dr. Perry and his committee triumphed on three other points. The conference voted approval of their recommendations that no new bishops be elected, that the project of stated terms for bishops be abandoned, that bishops be removable for "inefficiency, unacceptability or worldliness." This last, the most drastic change in church law in 150 years of Methodism, was highly pleasing to advocates of reunion between the Northern and Southern churches.

Common Task, When Yankee Methodists in 1844 sought to oust Bishop James Osgood Andrew as a slave-owner. Southerners objected that under Methodist law that was no ground. The two branches shortly parted. Fortnight ago in the episcopal address delivered by Rt. Rev. John M. Moore of Dallas, representing the mind of the Southern Church's 14 living bishops, one passage read: "We cherish the hope that at some time we shall be wise enough to find a way whereby a united Methodist may with undivided energies and unwasted resources deliver her full strength upon the common task."

These matters disposed of, the Southern Methodists: 1) voted their faith in Prohibition; 2) elected a new council of nine which will supersede the bishops as a church court of appeals; 3) came out for peace and conscription of wealth as well as man power in wartime; 4) flayed immoral motion pictures; 5) changed the name "Sunday School'' to "Church School"; 6) approved a plan to seek 750,000 new members during the next quadrennium: 7) voted that admission requirements to the Southern Methodist ministry include four years in college; 8) denied women the right of ordination.

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