Peace in the Council

In such peace and concord that newsmen and even its own space-hungry publicity men were disappointed, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. met for its fourth triennial General Assembly in St. Louis last week. Eight hundred delegates from 30 denominations gathered in Kiel Auditorium with some 2,000 consultants, observers and visitors to pass the usual resolutions (against racial segregation, an arms race, corruption in labor unions). Even the new president they unanimously elected, to succeed Presbyterian Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, is notably ecumenical, notably withdrawn from intergroup disputes.

The first Midwesterner and the first Baptist to hold the position, the Rev. Dr. Edwin Theodore Dahlberg is pastor of St. Louis' Delmar Baptist Church, which belongs both to the ecumenically-minded American Baptist Convention (Northern) and to the separatist Southern Baptist Convention (the Southern Baptists shun the National Council as an entangling alliance of doctrinal liberals and superchurch promoters). Says Dahlberg: "It's a church with a Southern accent and a Northern exposure."

Minnesota-born Pastor Dahlberg, 64, whose grandparents migrated to the U.S. from Sweden, graduated from the University of Minnesota and Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y., has held pastorates in Buffalo, St. Paul and Syracuse. He was president of the American Baptist Convention (1946-48), and served six years (1948-54) on the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. A nonsmoker and ardent enemy of alcohol, Minister Dahlberg is fond of hiking and mountain climbing, likes to be alone. "For 30 years," he says, "I have made it a practice to spend an entire nigh of each vacation in solitary prayer anc communion with God. I've done this in the Mojave Desert, in the mountains, on the plains and by the sea. Three times I've spent a night of prayer in a rowboat on a lake."

During the next three years, his tenure as National Council president, Dahlberg foresees a new Protestant emphasis on theology. "Even children are asking theological questions as a result of the man-made satellites," he said last week, "and our exploration of the incredible cosmic order opening up before us should result in a powerful awakening of religion. The possibility of other inhabited worlds must inevitably expand our concept of God. We believe as Christians that Christ is the Lord and Redeemer of those worlds as well as our own. For He Himself said that all authority in Heaven and on earth had been given to Him."

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