Critic from Within

To many young Protestant ministers, Christianity's newest and most challenging frontier is a mission to city slums--a proposition that often works out as putting aside the preaching of the Gospel for the sake of social work. To William Stringfellow, a Harvard-trained lawyer and Episcopal lay theologian, such ideas are anathema. In a newly published book called My People Is the Enemy (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $3.95), he labels the theory for what it is: sectarianism, "no less than it is where a church is established on grounds of class or race or language or any other secular criteria."

Stringfellow knows what he is criticizing. A former member of the group ministry at the famed East Harlem Protestant Parish, he lived and practiced law for more than six years in a $24.30-a-month flat in Spanish Harlem. In My People, he writes with vivid feeling and detail about what it means to exist in Manhattan's Puerto Rican ghetto, and how the slums are preserved by sloth, corruption and civic indifference-Mayor Robert Wagner, he notes, is a man of "extravagant apathy."

Gospel for the Hungry? But important as the urban mission is, Stringfellow writes, it is just one of many frontiers for the church--no more or less important than the university, the suburb or the technology lab. And on every frontier, the church faces the danger of conforming to the world "by accommodating the message and mission to the particular society in which the church happens to be, in the slums and in the suburbs, instead of honoring the integrity of the Gospel for all societies and for all sorts and conditions of men in all times and places."

If the Gospel cannot be preached to the hungry until they are fed, as the mission romantics claim, "then this is no Gospel with any saving power, this is no Word of God which has authority over the power of death. The Gospel is a Word which is exactly addressed to men in this world in their destitution and hunger and sickness and travail. The church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to apprehend and the courage to reveal the Word of God."

Unapologetic Jeremiads. Such trenchant comments have made Lawyer Stringfellow one of the most persuasive of Christianity's critics-from-within; Karl Earth, on his U.S. trip in 1962, referred to him as the man "who caught my attention more than any other." Now 36, Stringfellow gave up his street-corner practice in Harlem two years ago to form a midtown Manhattan law firm, but he still takes many cases on behalf of the poor. During the academic year he delivers about 20 lectures a month, most of them sharply critical of organized Christianity's pretensions. He is fond, for example, of calling the current church interest in race as "too little, too late and too lily-white." But Stringfellow makes no apologies for his jeremiads. "Protestantism has forgotten that it is a community, a nation," he says. "It has little sense of being God's people. The church suffers from guilt about its own infidelity, and from time to time it feels a need to hear criticism for its own sake."

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