No. I Layman

For the first time in its ten-year history, the National Council of Churches last week elected a layman as its president.* At its fifth general assembly in San Francisco, the council chose Joseph Irwin Miller, 51, a rich man (his personal fortune is estimated at about $50 million) who has dedicated his life to putting the camel through the needle's eye.

Bach on the Strad. In Columbus, Ind. (pop. 20,658), Miller is a substitute Sunday school teacher at the 350-member North Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He is also a Rotarian, a faithful worker in the local Chamber of Commerce, a Republican. Before Businessman Miller turned to his family enterprises, he first earned a Phi Beta Kappa key in Greek and Latin at Yale, took his master's at Oxford, served as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War II. He also learned to play the violin, manages fair Bach on his Stradivarius.

Miller's businesses (the Cummins Engine Co., which makes diesels, a bank, a starch and corn-syrup company, plus a 48% interest in a California chain of supermarkets) employ 7,500 people and gross nearly $300 million a year, but there is plenty of Christianity in the executive suite. Among numerous good works, he was for years sole angel of the Christian Century, still meets most of the magazine's deficit. Miller has also turned his home town of Columbus into something of a Christian Utopia, helps finance public school building, is contributing a new campus to nearby Butler University's theological seminary.

Clamps off the Stool. Last week Miller patiently labored on his acceptance speech, in which he recalled how as a child he had made a footstool in the school shop, glued and clamped the pieces together, and then had been surprised and pleased that it supported his 200-lb. instructor.

"Now our own National Council was first assembled ten years ago, and glued together out of pieces very different in shape and size and function ... I feel that the most important accomplishment of these first years may well have been that the council has stayed together--that the glue has had a chance to set. At the same time it is true--both with the foot stool and with the National Council-that there comes a time when the clamps must be taken off and we must have the courage to put the instrument to the full use for which it was fashioned."

* Previous presidents: Episcopal Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, Methodist Bishop William C. Martin, Presbyterian Minister Eugene Carson Blake, Baptist Minister Edwin T. Dahlberg.

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