Common Ground

After ten days of Christian conference and patient protocol at Johnstown, Pa., 700 delegates from two churches last week went home as delegates from one. The United Brethren and the Evangelical Church had joined to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church--13th largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.*

The churches had shared an almost identical background and a history of unusually friendly relations, but their union had taken a long time. United Brethren and Evangelical representatives first gathered to talk it over in 1816; it was 1933 before they really got down to business.

Ecumenical Century. The new merger underscored a glacially slow but unmistakable trend in sect-ridden U.S. Protestantism. During the late 18th and first half of the 19th Centuries, Christianity in America tended to spatter in sectarian fragments like a spoonful of quicksilver dropped suddenly on marble. Now, in the 20th Century, U.S. Christians have begun to coalesce on their common Christian ground.

Firm foundations for Protestantism's new trend were laid at the Oxford and Edinburgh conferences of 1937, which gathered the most comprehensive assemblage of official church representatives in 400 years. In 1939 the three major denominations of U.S. Methodism merged into one church; in 1940 the Evangelical Synod of North America and the Reformed Church officially united. In 1942 the American and United Lutheran churches recognized a "fellowship of pulpit and altar," stopped just short of organic union. Recently the U.S. Quakers healed their 119-year-old Hicksite-Orthodox schism (TIME, Nov. 18). Negotiations are currently under way between Northern and Southern Presbyterians.

Now Is the Time. Only the much-discussed merger of Episcopalians and Presbyterians seemed as far off as ever (TIME, Sept. 23). But in last week's Christian Century, Methodist Pastor C. Stanley Lowell of Dover, Del., proposed a new and more promising church wedding for the Episcopalians. Wrote he:

"The next step in church union should be a merger of the Methodist and Protestant Episcopal churches. This merger would involve no violation of the fundamental principles of either church.

"It is logical, possible and desirable. It is timely. It should be attempted. . . .

"These two communions have a common origin, common articles of religion, a comparable form of government. That is a good deal. We could hardly ask for more as a basis of union. Some nine years ago, at the same time that the Episcopalians made overtures to the Presbyterian Church, a similar invitation was extended to the Methodists. Since the three branches of Methodism were busy consummating their own union, it seemed wise to postpone action. . . . But now that the Methodists are happily unified there can be no further reason for delay. . . .

"Obviously the main issue to be negotiated . . . is the succession. The validity of Methodist orders is denied by Anglicans, just as the validity of Anglican orders is denied by Roman Catholics. . . . Yet the Methodist movement has been used of God and God has been in it. There is a certain kind of validity here that is not easily gainsaid. . . .

"Let the issue be raised at all representative and authoritative gatherings. Let commissions be established and the necessary spadework proceed. Now is the time."

*The United Brethren's 454,000 and the Evangelical's 260,000 give the new church 714,000 members, rank it just below the African Methodist Episcopal Church for size.

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