Witness in Washington

Under a neat blue letterhead, a publication called Memo went out from Washington last week to 4,000 leaders of U.S. denominations affiliated with the National Council of Churches. Its significance was not in the subject matter (the "educational crisis") but in the fact that it was evidence of a new "organized Protestant witness in Washington."

The National Council has been publishing Memo sporadically for about seven years, but last week the publication and its sponsor were moving into high gear. Everyone connected with the project was quick to say that it would not be a Protestant lobby. "We represent too many denominations with too wide a range of interests to be a lobby even if we wanted to," says the Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre Jr., Dean of the Episcopal Washington Cathedral. "What we are going to try to do is to throw into the discussion of national and world affairs down here what might be called the ethical dimension."

The new project arose from three high-level discussions held last year under the auspices of the cathedral and attended by such laymen as White House Economist Gabriel Hauge, Journalists Walter Lippmann and James Reston, Industrialist Paul Hoffman, and such clergymen as Washington's Episcopalian Bishop Angus Dun and Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam. Behind closed doors, they discussed Christian responsibility in economics, international affairs and nuclear energy. Out of their meetings grew the idea that Protestantism should set up a permanent organization in the capital. Selected to head the new project was the Rev. Dr. Fred S. Buschmeyer, 58, a California-born Congregational minister who served from 1939 to 1949 as pastor of Washington's Mount Pleasant Congregational Church, has since been active in church administration. Dr. Buschmeyer currently has a staff of five working on the second floor of the mansion on Maryland Avenue once owned by Senator Hiram Johnson.

In addition to beefing up Memo's content and publishing it regularly each fortnight. Pastor Buschmeyer plans to see as much as possible of Congressmen and officials to answer questions and air views. Says he: "Nine-tenths of all Americans want to be good citizens. But eight-tenths don't see any connection between religious and moral convictions and economic and political convictions."

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