Underground Manifesto

"The Church is struggling, sacrificing even its own integrity, to sustain its organic life recognized in terms of buildings, stained glass, real estate, and homiletical whoredom."

The accusation takes on added impact because it comes from an ordained Episcopal priest, the Rev. Layton P. Zimmer. And it sets a tone that is echoed by other clerics and laymen in The Underground Church (Sheed & Ward; $4.95), a new book that amounts to an angry manifesto from the most radical movement in U.S. Christendom. Edited by self-appointed "Nightclub Chaplain" Malcolm Boyd (Are You Running with Me, Jesus?), who is a leading spokesman for the underground, the volume contains essays by 14 fellow members of the movement. One after another, they explain the motives of the growing number of Christians, both Roman Catholics and Protestants, who are gathering in clandestine and semiclandestine underground cells for worship and fellowship.

Philadelphia to Fiji. Amorphous and autonomous, the groups range from a cell in Philadelphia that includes Presbyterians, Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers, and conducts rural retreats, to a group of Catholic, Episcopal and Presbyterian clerics in Manhattan's Harlem, who hold monthly "love feasts" with Negroes and Puerto Ricans. Whatever the differences in the underground groups, the tie that binds them is dissatisfaction with what they consider the glacial pace of the institutional church as it seeks to renew itself and attack the ills of modern society.

In a commentary, Boyd charges that "the Establishment Church seems to be a chaplain of the status quo, standing against the dispossessed and suffering victims of this status quo." In another entry, Milwaukee Civil Rights Agitator Father James null indicts traditional Christianity for "lack of commitment to the Black man's struggle." Says Groppi: "We must follow the most radical civil rights leader who has ever lived. Christ was a revolutionary." Adds Zimmer: "The Underground Church is made up of men and women aware of a greater calling than their old denominational structures can seem to grasp." Following a new calling of his own, Zimmer left his Philadelphia ministry last August to become a Peace Corpsman in the Fiji Islands.

Though at most underground meetings liturgy is limited to prayers and Communion, the book reports that some groups are performing weddings and baptisms and even composing their own liturgies for the services. The manifesto offers a "Litany from the Under ground," written by the Rev. Robert W. Castle Jr.:

O God, whose name is spik, nigger,

ginny, and kike,

Helps us to know you...

O God, who is children in the grave,

burned in the tenement fire,

Help us to hear your cry . . .

O God, who is tired of His church

and its ministers and priests, irrelevant

and unbloody,

Help us to join you.

For all their criticism of "churchianity," leaders of the underground deny that they are out to destroy the church as a central community of faith. What they really want to do is reform it drastically, divest it of rigid structure, authoritarianism, senseless dogma and suffocating ritual, which the dissidents feel bear little relation to true Christianity. What the rebels are seeking, says Boyd, is a church that "will be seen less and less as a building on a corner, to be visited to indulge in a period of 'magic'. Smaller Christian communities will replace larger ones; clergy will be employed in 'the world,' with only distant memories of a priestly mystique."

The Rev. John Pairman Brown, a West Coast underground activist and professor at Berkeley's Episcopal Church Divinity School, foresees the day when the underground will come completely out in the open, as a unified new grouping to further its aims. Ultimately, Brown concludes in the manifesto, "we intend to surface as a nucleus of Church union and renewal, in the hope that what we represent will melt the denominations from the bottom up."

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