Word: stringfellow
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...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...
...Stringfellow ("the most practical thing to do now is weep") and Campbell ("it is too late to establish harmonious relationships between the races") were but two of about 15 scheduled speakers in the four days of the meeting. Their pessimism was so far from being the dominant note that Mr. Stringfellow was loudly controverted in the auditorium and widely denounced in the corridors, while Mr. Campbell, so far as I could see, was ignored...
...prudently omitted from the spoken version, Campbell claimed that racial hatred has reached such a pitch that "in our generation white children will be marched into gas chambers by dark-skinned masters, clutching their little toys to their breasts in. Auschwitz fashion." In the same mood, Episcopal Layman William Stringfellow gloomed that "the most practical thing to do now is weep...