Report to the Churches

"There are some happy signs of a return to a more careful protection of human liberties." So said the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (30 denominations, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, with more than 35 million members). The council's third general assembly, which convened in Boston last week, was the first such gathering in a long while that did not profess to see "hysteria" rampant but found some satisfactory progress "within the framework of tested constitutional procedures." The council hailed evidence of "a spiritual seeking and hunger" in the U.S., but also sounded the churchmen's new blue note: we're-failing-because-we're-too-successful.

Shivers in the West? "We must guard against a confidence derived from prosperity as measured by the standards of contemporary society." a State of the Churches Report said. "When we consider how little it costs to be counted among church members in our country today, we are troubled. The average church member is not conspicuously different from the nonmember. The average church is so much conformed to the world that people are surprised if it sharply challenges the prevailing behavior of the community . . . 'Woe to them that are at ease in Zion.'"

Church building is booming, and membership is soaring. But, warned the report: "Our crime rate appears to rise alongside our membership increase . . . We can all remember when the major challenge to the tavern came from the Protestant churches. Today the challenge is from television."

Seated at long, white-clothed tables in the Hotel Statler ballroom, the delegates plowed through hundreds of thousands of words--a few of them angry. Stormed Dr. Arthur C. McGiffert Jr., president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, about the decision to keep the National Council headquarters in New York City instead of moving it to Chicago: "The decision . . . sent a shiver of dismay and apprehension through the Christian people who live west of the Alleghenies."

Concentration on Doing. The council decided: 1) to hold meetings every three years instead of two; 2) to urge members to make more use of the council's new aids to laymen faced with "difficult ethical problems"; 3) to encourage churches "to venture more courageously into racial and cultural inclusion"; 4) to "repudiate completely all forms of racial discrimination."

As its new president, the council unanimously elected the Stated Clerk (chief executive officer) of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Dr. Eugene Carson Blake. Hefty six-footer Blake, 48, played guard for Princeton in 1926 and 1927, ended on the All-East football list and graduated with honors in philosophy. After a missionary teaching year at Lahore, India, he studied at Edinburgh and went to Princeton Theological Seminary. He was assistant pastor in Manhattan, held parishes in Albany, N.Y., and Pasadena, Calif., and is considered by many to be the outstanding U.S. clergyman under 50, an expert in both theology and diplomacy. President Blake broke into one of the Boston sessions to announce "the illness, the serious illness of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII," and the delegates stood for one minute bowed in prayer to express their "sympathy for their Roman Catholic friends."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.