Young Methodists

There were moments last week when downtown Cleveland looked like a high-school holiday. For four days the city played host to more than 10,000 exuberant 15-to-23-year-olds in babushkas and bob-by-sox, sharp slacks and open shirts. The Methodist Youth Fellowship was holding its first international conference.

Thirty-six hundred boys bunked in a wartime bomber plant and commuted to conference sessions in a fleet of 60 buses. The basement of Cleveland's massive Public Auditorium housed 1,600 girls (a minor crisis developed when they found only one mirror to every ten young ladies). Twenty-five Methodist bishops turned out for the occasion, as well as a couple of hundred foreign delegates.

Most gawked-at conferee: 21-year-old Barbara Jo Walker, a Memphis Sunday-school teacher who also happens to be Miss America of 1947. Fellow delegates hung on her every good word. Typical was a freckle-faced Kentuckian who fell into step beside her as she was leaving one of the meetings. "You're so important and all," he said, "I was wondering what you think is the big job we boys and girls have to face up to." Replied beautiful Barbara Jo: "I think we've got to find a way to lasting peace. I don't know how. . . . But it's got to be done."

Instead of spending a tin-horn-paper-hat New Year's Eve, delegates held a midnight communion service--perhaps the largest in Methodist history--at which 10,900 tiny paper cups of grape juice and pieces of bread were distributed. Later boys & girls signed "Dedication Cards," on which they could check off any number of twelve "decisions for Christ" printed on the back. Sample: "I will choose my lifework, not for personal profit, but in accordance with . . . God's will. . . ."

Some of the delegates may make religion their lifework. But even for backsliders, such gatherings are useful. In his message of greeting to the conference, Baptist Harry Truman took note of this fact with a quote from the worldly-wise old author of Ecclesiastes: Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.

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