What's Wrong?

Today's citizens love to ask themselves loaded questions--and then let bystanders pick up the pieces. Christians are no exception. One of their favorites is: "What is wrong with the Christian church today?" Put to 100 clergymen and laymen (mostly Protestant) throughout the U.S., this high-explosive question blew several Protestant tops. The current issue of Georgia's semiannual South Today, edited by Paula Snelling and Lillian (Strange Fruit) Smith, tried to piece churchmen's scattered replies (they were speaking as individuals) into a bill of particulars against the churches. Samples:

P: The Rev. Frank S. Persons II, Bastrop, La.: Church people "are worshipers of archaic patterns of thought. We have erected temples of the mind and enthroned on their altars certain banded-down ideas which we are as afraid to displace as any African tribesman his equally homemade and static wooden gods."

P: The Rev. Eugene Smathers, Big Lick, Tenn.: "The greatest weakness of the church is its institutional self-centeredness. [By] seeking to save its own life instead of losing its life in the service of men, it is gradually becoming impotent."

P: The Rev. William E. Roach, Radford, Va.: "Ignorance is one of the greatest sins of the church. . . . Many of our ministers are 100 years behind the times. . . . They are preaching a personalized sort of righteousness which is ... not Christianity."

P: Harold Ehrensperger, editor of the Motive, Nashville, Tenn.: "Too often [church leaders] are ugly, intolerant and unreasonable on minor vices because of their own starved lives. . . . They are oftentimes good because they haven't the courage to be bad. They are the masters of minor talents and the champions of inconsequential virtues."

P: Prof. Manmatha Nath Chatterjee, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio: "If Christ were present today, He of course would have been put in jail. What would the church do? It would say . . , 'We shall send a petition with 100,000 names on it. . . .'"

P: Nick Comfort, Dean of Oklahoma School of Religion: "Many [religious leaders] are waiting for Jesus to come and put an end to the whole damned mess. When that happens they expect to be on the job to sing the doxology. . . ."

In ragged sum, these church critics seemed to feel that the church should shed its parochialism, actually practice brotherhood, instead of merely preaching it, and concern itself with human life rather than with doctrines. Dean John M. Atwood, of St. Lawrence University's Theological School, Canton, N.Y., summed up the Protestant unease: "Ministers and others seem to think that they qualify as religious when they make ascriptions of praise to God . . . and piously go through their devotions. . . . [But] their first and great purpose is not formally to glorify or serve God--which is always orthodox and safe --but to serve their fellow men in their need, even the least of them. . . ."

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