Word: churches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...delegates to the annual conference of the National Committee of Black Churchmen, which was being held in the hotel. In protest against what they considered a racial slight, the 400 black ministers attending the meeting stalked out of the Gateway and finished their convention in an Episcopal church. The incident typified not only the touchy militancy of the conference but, in general, the mood of Negro Christian clergymen who enthusiastically support the contemporary secular demand for Black Power. Black caucuses have been formed within most of the major denominations to lobby for greater Negro participation in ecclesiastical decision making...
Many of the churches have tried hard to answer these demands. Last year, for example, the United Church of Christ elected the Rev. Joseph Evans of Chicago, a Negro, as its denominational secretary. The United Methodist Church has assigned black bishops to predominantly white areas of Iowa and New Jersey, and even to one district which encompasses parts of Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia. Last month the Rev. Richard Owens, pastor of the People's Baptist Church in the black ghetto of Boston's Roxbury area, was elected president of the Massachusetts Baptist Convention...
White Reluctance. Even so, the Black Power movement within the churches exists more in fancy than fulfillment. One reason for this is that Negroes constitute an extremely small minority within most denominations: despite its progressive policies on race, the 2,000,000-member United Church is only 2% black. Another problem, particularly for those churches which emphasize lay authority, is that the majority of white congregations still tend to be reluctant to accept a black minister in the pulpit, even when a well-qualified one is available. As a result, many Negro clergymen are turning away from the goal...
Honkified Deity. Dr Nathan Wright Jr., an Episcopal priest from Newark, told the meeting that blacks must get rid of the "honkified God" who, he charged, has been imposed on Negroes by white Christians. The Rev. Herbert Bell Shaw, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and president of the committee, called on the group to evolve "a message and a dynamic leadership for the peculiar and urgent needs of the black people." The present religious task, added the Rev. Melvin Talbert, a Methodist district superintendent in California, "is to help black people find themselves, to restore...
Pike and his son, as the bishop readily admits, had not been close for much of the boy's life. While his father kept busy with church affairs, young Jim as a teen-ager was turning on to the hippie way of life. In his freshman year at San Francisco State College, he moved out of the family home for a pad in the Hashbury, where he experimented with marijuana, peyote, LSD, and Romilar. In 1965, Pike was granted a six-month sabbatical to study theology and church history at Cambridge. He invited his son to accompany...