Confrontation in Tulsa

"Have the butchers of Budapest left yet?" asked an irate matron after Sunday services at Tulsa's big grey Gothic First Presbyterian Church. "I don't know what you mean, ma'am," replied a local cleric impishly. "There's nobody here but us Christians." That seemed to be the case in the Oklahoma oil capital last week. For the first time in its history, the executive committee of the World Council of Churches held one of its semiannual meetings near the buckle of what used to be known as the Bible Belt.

Since the committee includes, as the woman churchgoer noted, Russia's Archbishop Nikodim, the bearded Orthodox Metropolitan of Leningrad and Ladoga, fundamentalist Protestant leaders also descended on Tulsa for a headon, pulpit-pounding, old-time religious confrontation.

The fervently anti-Communist evangelist Billy James Hargis flew back from a crusade in Rhodesia to meet the invasion of his theological turf with a series of Christian-leadership meetings at which he roundly denounced the World Council as far left and ungodly. Despite a freezing rain, the Rev. Carl Mclntire of Collingswood, N.J., head of the extreme-right-wing International Council of Christian Churches, personally picketed Nikodim while he was delivering a sermon at Tulsa's First Christian Church. Another veteran anti-Red, the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, a Rumanian Lutheran pastor who spent 18 years in Communist prisons, interrupted a World Council press conference. When the organization's general secretary, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, tried to still him, Wurmbrand shouted: "Call the police if you like; the Communists called the police against me."

Even though Blake and his colleagues occasionally looked like beleaguered Daniels in a fundamentalist's lions' den, their choice of Tulsa was a deliberate one. "We saw it not as a way of taking on Hargis," said a council spokesman, Faith Pomponio, "but as a way of communication with his people." In fact, most of Tulsa's Protestant clergymen were cordial, and Republican Mayor James Hewgley was almost lyrical in his welcome: "The Lord sent them here." Even Hargis paid the council a backhanded compliment. "The cause of religious fundamentalism," he complained, has been "set back ten years in Tulsa."

Democratic Touch. The visiting churchmen had more important issues to face than Hargis-style hostility. In its two decades of existence, the World Council has grown into an organization of 232 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches with a total constituency of more than 300 million people. Yet its ecumenical mission of Christian unity is increasingly taking second place to more pressing problems: the demands for social and economic justice by underdeveloped countries; the rising ,clamor of young churchmen for a greater voice in ecclesiastical policymaking; the drift of many dissident believers into "underground" worship, imperiling the very foundations of the institutional church.

In response to these pressures, the World Council is already changing its style and philosophy, largely as a result of Blake's prodding during his two years as its chief officer. He is a far more hard-driving administrator than his predecessor, Dutch Theologian Willem Visser 't Hooft. In Geneva, Blake, 62, presides over the council's starkly modern, three-story ecumenical center with all the dispatch of a top business executive. His brisk ways may occasionally irritate some Europeans (who make up a majority of the center's 336-man staff), but he also displays a democratic touch. He consults with his colleagues more than "Visser" did, has worked hard to improve his French, often casually takes lunch with other employees in the center cafeteria.

The contrast between the two men goes considerably beyond personality. In his 18 years as secretary-general, Visser 't Hooft was interested more in theological questions than day-to-day administration. Blake, the former Stated Clerk of the United Presbyterian Church, sees his duties as primarily pastoral. To give young church dissidents a greater sense of participation in council affairs, he recently invited 75 staff members to a two-day get-together near Montreux. Told they could speak their minds freely, they proceeded to tear apart everything from the way the council organizes its assemblies to the management of its worldwide programs.

One of Blake's most significant moves so far has been to cultivate young, revolution-minded churchmen from the Third World. Among his major appointments is the Rev. Philip Potter, a West Indian Methodist, as director of the Division of World Missions and Evangelism. Echoing the dissatisfaction of other ecclesiastics from Asia, Africa and Latin America, Potter said in Tulsa last week: "Both the capitalist countries and the Socialist countries have serious weakness. Under our freedom in the West, the minority has the freedom to rot. We in the Third World don't want to be faced with either/or. We want to find our own way." Within the council it is generally felt that a cleric from a developing country--such as Potter or Indian-born Central Committee Chairman

M. M. Thomas, 52--may succeed Blake, who plans to retire as secretary-general before the next council assembly.

Council leaders are considering sweeping organizational changes in response to the demands of African and Asian "young churches." One action approved in Tulsa last week was the creation of a 16-man committee, led by Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews of Boston, to study ways of reorganizing the council itself. Among the proposals the group will consider is whether to turn over some of the Geneva secretariat's functions to regional or national offices. Other decisions taken were to send Blake on a peace mission to the Middle East and to hold meetings later this year on how the church can do more to fight racism, poverty and disease around the world. To Blake, such enlightened concern seems ample evidence of the organized church's contemporary relevance. Despite currents of anti-institutionalism sweeping the globe, he finds more people than ever before turning to the comfort of the church. "Religion," he says, "is not a problem but an answer."

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