Meetings of Many

In the Protestant churches, warm weather brings conferences and assemblies. Ministers meet, talk, elect officers, pass resolutions, shake hands, go home with new pious zeal. Last week met the following church groups: Dunkers or Dunkards are so named because they dunk. Descended from German pietists of the 18th Century, they believe not only in baptism by immersion but in strict Biblical interpretation, passive resistance to force, rigid avoidance of tobacco, spirits, musical instruments and, until recently, electricity, automobiles and telephones. Last week on the Brubaker Farm near Eaton, Ohio gathered 8,000 Dunkers, the men in black coats and broad-brimmed hats, the women in poke bonnets and long capes. Watched by 12,000 spectators, they held mass communion in a big tent, first washing their feet, then sitting at long tables to break bread and pass the wine goblet from hand to hand. By the tenets of their faith, sinful Dunkers refrained from partaking. Later all dined on ten head of cattle. Unitarians of the American Unitarian Association and allied societies met in the centre of their stronghold--Boston. From Rev. Maxwell Savage of Worcester, Mass. they heard that their sect, "made up of separatist ministers and isolationist churches," is too individualistic. From Professor Reinhold Niebuhr they heard praise of sane optimism which comes after despair and suffering. From Rev. John Haynes Holmes they heard that contemporary civilization is collapsing, although it has produced four great men: Einstein, Freud, Lenin, Gandhi. Northern Baptists numbering 3,500 met in Rochester, N. Y. As their new president they elected Dr. Avery Albert Shaw, president of Denison University in Granville, Ohio and president of the Baptist Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board. The convention voted to merge its diffuse budgets and to combine separate education boards, but it rejected a proposal to unify four foreign missions societies, fearing that Modernists might get control and send out Modernist missionaries. The Baptists favored a progressive social program, temperance education, Prohibition legislation, Sabbath observance, a "clean-up" of radio programs. They commended pledges to be signed by individuals against joining any aggressive war. Church of God. In Jamaica, N. Y. last week arrived a bluff, hearty evangelist named Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson. Bishop and Overseer of the Church of God which claims 500,000 followers, 2,000 churches throughout the U. S. Once a colporteur of tracts in the North Carolina mountains, Bishop Tomlinson says he was driven out by his enemies amid shots and showers of stones. He founded the Church of God in Tennessee, was ousted ten years ago for alleged mismanagement of funds, is still under injunction (which he ignores) against retaining the church's name for his followers. Now 70, Bishop Tomlinson bustles from state to state holding conventions, ordaining ministers, preaching with Fundamentalist fervor. In Jamaica Tabernacle, decorated last week to resemble the Ship of Zion, gathered 4,000 persons to hear their bishop's exhortations. They sang, shouted, wept, sometimes wriggled and danced in exuberant piety. This week the Church of God's convention was to end in a "Grand Climax Service, with the General Overseer and Monster Water Baptismal Service."

Presbyterian Church in the U. S. is the name of the Southern branch which last week met at Montreat, a staid resort in the mountains of North Carolina. The 400 delegates elected as moderator U. S. Circuit Judge Samuel Hale Sibley of Marietta, Ga. Graduated from the University of Georgia where he roomed with Eugene Black (now Governor of the Federal Reserve), Judge Sibley teaches Sunday School, is an able amateur carpenter.

Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. (Northern) met in Cleveland. Its official host was the 114-year-okl Old Stone Presbyterian Church on the Public Square, but the 2,000 laymen and clerical commissioners held their meetings in Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Fundamentalists went to Cleveland brandishing threats. Liberals and moderate conservatives squelched them in electing a moderator, in dealing with their "Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions," and this week were expected to trounce them in voting a merger with the United Presbyterian Church. Out of a field of three, Dr. William Chalmers Covert of Philadelphia was elected moderator on the second ballot. A conservative, he has specialized in religious education, is to retire at 70 this year from the secretaryship of the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education which he assumed a decade ago. When William Covert was born on an Indiana farm, his 93-year-old grandfather carried him to a window, peered through his spectacles at the babe and pronounced: "This is the minister we have been praying for.'' Ordained at 23, Covert asked a Minnesota missions superintendent for "the hardest field in the State," was assigned to an industrial suburb of St. Paul. He soon became the youngest synod moderator ever elected in Minnesota. Today Dr. Covert is called a "pastor to pastors" because he has sympathetically heard the woes of thousands of his fellows. Tall and stocky, he dresses well, has twinkling eyes and a stubborn shock of white hair, has spoken before 297 local presbyteries. The Philadelphia fundamentalists who founded the ''rebel'' missions board (TIME, April 23), complained loudly before the Cleveland assembly because the General Council of the Church had issued a pamphlet detailing how illegal the board is. Last week, after three hours of clamorous debate, the assembly voted that members of the independent board must sever their connections with it, desist from soliciting funds and cease from usurping official authority--or else be disciplined by their presbyteries. Confident of increased prosperity this year, the Presbyterian Finance Committee upped its benevolence budget to $8,000,000 in expectation of $2,000,000 more than was received last year. Star guest speaker at the Presbyterian assembly was Secretary of the Interior Ickes, a good Presbyterian, who reviewed the social objectives of the New Deal, pictured them as identical with those of Christianity, and asked: "Will the leaders in the Church follow the banner which has been boldly raised by President Roosevelt --. . . wholeheartedly or only reluctantly?"

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