Words & Works

P: Seventh-Day Adventists, meeting in fall council in Washington, listened with pride to reports of fresh church growth and activity. Adventists now have some 900,000 baptized members throughout the world, who contributed $56 million in offerings last year, helped support 2,000 foreign missionaries. The fall council's main business: approving a new foreign missions budget of $21 million. P: The Cape Town Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church officially viewed with alarm a report that Roman Catholics had dedicated "South Africa and its people" to the "Blessed Virgin Mary Assumed into Heaven." Also alarmed at Catholic growth in South Africa (e.g., 170,000 Catholics of white or mixed race, 660,000 Negroes, 60 hospitals which recognize no color bar), the synod instructed church members to "withhold all support of Roman Catholic hospitals and other institutions for the sake of maintaining the Protestant faith in South Africa."

P: The Arizona Synod of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern) faced up to a ticklish question after Governor J. Howard Pyle requested Presbyterian views: Should Arizona remove the state ban on the sale of liquor to Indians, as a step in establishing full civil rights for them? "I don't see how any Christian can say anything to the liquor traffic but 'No!' " cried the Rev. E. P. Smith, missionary from the Navaho reservation. But after short, sharp debate (and a score of abstentions), the synod recommended lifting the ban. Vote: 27 to 21.

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