Methodists at Work

"I look upon the world," said Methodism founder John Wesley, "as my parish." If John Wesley had been in Springfield, Mass, last week, he would have been pleased to see how well his parish was represented. Assembled for the Seventh Ecumenical Methodist Conference were 500-odd delegates from 16 independent Methodist groups on five continents.

The sobersided, dark-clad delegates met morning, afternoon and evening to hear and discuss the news and views of world Methodism.

Magnanimity Gone? Some of the views were pessimistic. Said stocky, grey-haired Rev. Paul Hutchinson, editor of the Christian Century: "Men as individuals give the impression of being in almost complete mental and moral--and hence in physical--confusion. For the past 50 years they have not known for what they were dying; today they do not know for what they are living. . . .

"What can be said about the refusal of the United States, at a period of peak employment, to open its doors even to the 400,000 carefully screened refugees for whom the Stratton bill would provide, or of our callous refusal to do more for the harried Jews than tell the Arabs and the British that they should immediately make room for them in little Palestine? Who can read the reports of the terms in which organizations like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars . . . turned thumbs down on the Stratton bill without perceiving that something morally precious has gone out of American life --something the ancients called magnanimity of soul? . . ."

Good Will Lost? Cried New York's Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: "It is easier to summon us to a holy war against Russia than to solve the problems involved in establishing economic justice and world order. ... An ideology cannot be suffocated by poison gas nor demolished by atom bombs. Ideas are conquered by better ideas whose truth has been revealed in practices that enrich personality. . . .

"We are in danger of losing the good will of the people of Europe by our failure to make it clear that it is the free state we stand for as against the police state. We have nearly convinced them that our bread is not for the starving but for the hungry who will accept our economic way of life."

But some of the news was good. The Rev. William Warren Sweet of the University of Chicago cheerfully reported that "American Methodism is growing richer & richer. Never have our churches and colleges and universities been so prosperous, never have endowments mounted so high. There have been more church debts paid off in the past few years than ever before in Methodist history."

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