Mueller for Miller

The National Council of Churches, having gone through a phase of innovation in picking a layman as president three years ago, last week swung back to an organization clergyman to run it for the next term. At its general assembly in Philadelphia, the 31-denomination council elected to the presidency Reuben Mueller, 66, presiding bishop of the 748,000-strong Evangelical United Brethren Church. Mueller re places (and pronounces his name like) Industrialist (Cummins Engine Co.) J. Irwin Miller, a Disciple of Christ.

Mueller suits the council's new needs in various ways. As has no previous president in the organization's 13-year history, he comes from one of the council's smaller churches. The Brethren call him "Mr. Ecumenicity," and he aptly symbolizes the council's current interest in church unity and building a more effective central machinery. Mueller has been in charge of the slow-paced but steady negotiations that will, hopefully by 1968, bring the E.U.B. into organic union with the Methodist Church. He has also been an active participant in the "Blake proposal" conversations, which may, in distant time, lead to a grand union of the Methodists, United Presbyterians, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ and the E.U.B.

Heavily concentrated in the upper Midwest, the Brethren are mostly German in national origin, differ in theology and polity from the Methodists only in small detail. Mueller, the son of an irnr migrant pastor, graduated from North Central College in Illinois, entered the ministry in 1921 after teaching high school in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He was made a bishop in 1954, and from the council's founding has been one of the guiding forces. He was its first recording secretary, and since 1957 has been a vice president and chairman of its Division of Christian Education. As a member of the council's general board, he served on its powerful policy and strategy committee.

Among the Brethren, Mueller is famed equally for his quiet jokes and his stem-winding sermons. But he is no innovator, and one council member predicted that "there will certainly be no revolutionary changes during his presidency." Mueller says that he is moved by the new "fraternal spirit" within Roman Catholicism, but that there is a long way to go before serious discussions of a broader Christian unity are possible. "Basically, this is God's business," he said. "We must endeavor to determine his will and fulfill it. But I do believe in miracles."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.