Crunch at the Council

Is the National Council of Churches an anachronism? Founded in a flush of enthusiasm 19 years ago to promote ecumenism and cooperative social action among Christian churches, the council has come under increasing fire lately. Critics--many of them inside the N.C.C. --argue that its cumbersome bureaucracy can do little more than issue position papers on current problems, and that practical accomplishments like its controversial Delta Ministry, which works among poor Mississippi Negroes, are rare exceptions. During preparations for this month's triennial general assembly in Detroit, Christian Century predicted that the N.C.C. would see "a crunch of intense feelings and an unleashing of the urge to tell it like it is." The crunch came last week in Detroit's Cobo Hall. In its meetings, at least, the N.C.C. was clearly in tune with the national mood: the air was filled with accusations, polemics, threats, name-calling and disruption. For all that, the assembly still elected the full slate of official nominees, including its first woman president, Cynthia Wedel, 61. A brief rebellion, opposing her and incumbent General Secretary R. H. Edwin Espy with black candidates, failed.

Black Jesus. The reform program that some rebel councilmen had prepared for the meeting seemed reasonable enough. As shaped by Massachusetts Clergyman Stephen C. Rose, the program proposed, among other things, that the council become more of a lay organization engaged in specific social and religious tasks and that its white denominations turn over mission resources to the black and the poor. As a measure of its concern, Rose said, the council should also elect a black general secretary. Yet the insurgents never presented the proposals coherently at the assembly. And when the chance came to nominate a candidate, they threw their support behind the unlikely choice of the National Committee of Black Churchmen: Leon Watts, 34, an articulate but little-known minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Even more unrealistic was the rebels' choice for president--the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., 58, pastor of Detroit's Shrine of the Black Madonna and author of a book (The Black Messiah) that contends that Jesus was black.

Red Paint. Beyond racial harangues (including a shrill appearance by Black Manifesto Author James Forman), the more than 500 delegates heard a long, high-pitched debate on the war and the draft. After the assembly decided not to "accept custody" of the draft card of a 20-year-old delegate, Episcopal Priest Dick York of the Berkeley Free Church told the council that it had blood on its hands. York walked along the officers' table, splashing red paint on their papers. Next day, however, delegates voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution defending critics of the Viet Nam War, and urged that the U.S. withdraw all troops by the end of 1970, with or without the blessing of the Thieu government.

In the two contested elections for high office, Challenger Leon Watts was defeated by General Secretary Espy, 382-100, and Mrs. Wedel outdrew Albert Cleage for president, 387-93. A former vice president of the N.C.C. and wife of Episcopal Canon Theodore O. Wedel, Mrs. Wedel will succeed Arthur S. Flemming, former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

The new leaders now hope to push ahead with a plan to expand the council into a wider ecumenical group embracing both conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics. Whether they can succeed is open to question. For one thing, contributions to the N.C.C. are down half a million dollars (4%) from last year. For another, conservative Protestants may be less than enthusiastic about the trends that became apparent during the Detroit meeting.

Worst of all, suggested a Roman Catholic observer at the meeting, the N.C.C. may be losing its constituency. Dutch Catholic Priest Leo G. M. Alting von Geusau, secretary-general of Rome's International Documentation Center, which does research for the council, warned the delegates that institutional ecumenism is becoming the province of "a smaller and smaller group of ecumenists, meeting and meeting again in endless commissions, running behind the facts." In the meantime, as von Geusau and other critics noted, the young and the disaffected are moving away from churchly institutions, seeking to rediscover the radical meaning of the Gospel in communities and movements that have nothing to do with such established organizations as the National Council of Churches.

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