Word: churches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Because they disagree with their parent churches over matters as varied as theology, politics and civil rights, some Protestant congregations in the South would like to divorce themselves from their national organizations. It is not easy. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the arguments of two breakaway congregations in Savannah, Ga., that claimed ownership of their church property. The congregations had held that property in trust for the Presbyterian Church of the U.S., but a Georgia judge had declared that such trusts may be broken if the parent church "substantially departs" from the theology that it professed...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...