Two or Three

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

--Matthew 18:20

The season of Protestant get-togethers was in full swing last week. Everywhere there was talk about church mergers. Protestants showed an increasing awareness of how much they have in common; they also displayed a stubborn, but understandable, concern over what they held precious in their own creeds.

In Seattle, representatives of the northern Presbyterian church (called the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) met for their 160th General Assembly. Church union was the principal subject--not with the Episcopalians (that is at present virtually a dead letter), but with the Presbyterians south of the Mason & Dixon line who broke away from the northern body during the Civil War. Assemblies of both churches will not vote on union until next year. Then if it is approved by three-fourths of the constituent presbyteries and ratified by both assemblies in 1950, a reunited General Assembly may be held in 1951. Elected Moderator of the northern church: the Rev. Jesse Hays Baird, 59, president of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, third largest seminary in his church.

In Atlanta, the Southern Presbyterians debated a proposal to withdraw from the Federal Council of Churches. This resolution (supported to a considerable extent by textile industrialists who are not happy about the Federal Council's liberal labor policies) was defeated in a poll of Southern presbyteries during the year by a vote of 62 to 23. New Moderator of the Southern Presbyterians is the Rev. Charles Darby Fulton, 55, onetime missionary to Japan and secretary of his church's Committee of Foreign Missions since 1932.

In Milwaukee, the 5,000 delegates of the Northern Baptist Convention discussed proposals (but took no action) for church reunion--with the Southern Baptists and with the 1,693,807-member Disciples of Christ. Dr. Culbert G. Rutenber of Philadelphia's Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary warned the delegates that U.S. churches are "fearful, humiliated and frustrated."

"The Church," he said, "was reduced to an institution whose function it was to comfort the aged and to wipe the eyes of those who couldn't take it in the struggle of life. Now all our compromises, our sins, our apostasy are coming back to roost in one awful tide of judgment. And we are afraid of the Communists, afraid of the atomic bomb, afraid of a depression, afraid of Catholics, afraid of anything and everything fearful, afraid of God." Dr. Rutenber's remedy: to "return to God and the raw Christianity of our origins . . ."

In Edinburgh, delegates to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the established church of Scotland, wound up their annual meeting. They discussed liberalizing their divorce canon (to permit remarriage of repentant adulterers at the minister's discretion), but decided to think about it again next year.

In Scotland, too, the most important concern seemed to be Christian unity. Said Moderator Alexander Macdonald, in his closing address: "Today we feel strongly -- more strongly than ever before -- that the supreme issue for the churches throughout the world is to unite . . . We need combined operations. The things which divide us are small and trivial and indefensible, and almost absurd in view of the world situation . . . The tactics of the 19th Century have to be abandoned."

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