World Church - In Brief
Diocesan Press Service. August 1, 1968 [67-9]
Ecumenically Speaking
The Episcopal Dioceses of New York and Long Island are among the 14 religious bodies participating in the Metropolitan New York Project Equality. Launched July 2, this largest effort by the nationwide, interreligious effort to increase fair employment practices through the hiring and purchasing policies of religious institutions and the use of religious economic power, involves metropolitan area Roman Catholic, Protestant, Anglican and Jewish bodies.
Community Now, which claims to be the first local interreligious weekly newspaper in the United States, begins publication in Kansas City, Mo. during the middle of August. Its editor is Albert de Zutter, until recently editor of the New People, a Roman Catholic diocesan newspaper which is now suspended. The new publication, which is the result of the efforts of a task force formed by the Metropolitan Inter-Church Assembly, is designed to foster dialogue for action between the religious community and the general community, among religious bodies, and within the various religious bodies.
The Roman Catholic Church has the largest team of observers at the Lambeth Conference. They are followed by Lutherans and Methodists. Eastern Orthodoxy is represented by 10 observers but the observers represent a number of national Churches. The observers, as the Archbishop of Canterbury told the press, are there "in order to participate and not just to watch . . . . "
Deaconesses from nine Protestant and Anglican churches in Canada, Mexico and the United States will hold the first North American Deaconess Conference, Aug. 19 - 22 in Racine, Wisconsin. Included are the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Methodist Deaconess Conference of Mexico, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Lutheran Church in America and the United Methodist Church. Also present will be participants from the Roman Catholic Church, and from deaconesses organizations in England, Germany and the Philippines.
Dr. Paul A. Crow, professor of church history at Lexington (Ky.) Theological Seminary and a Disciples of Christ minister, has been named full-time general secretary of the Consultation on Church Union. He will be the first full-time staff officer for the nine-denomination Consultation.
The Student Christian Movement in the university town of Leyden, Netherlands has decided to hold joint communion services for Protestants and Roman Catholics within its own group. Authorities of both confessions are aware of the decision.
Agreed norms for joint Roman Catholic-Protestant Bible translations have been issued by the United Bible Societies in conjunction with the Vatican's Secretariat for Christian Unity. The retiring Methodist leader of Northern California and Nevada, Bishop Donald Harvey Tippett, has been installed as an honorary canon of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.
Sister Ann Patrick Ware, S.L., the first Roman Catholic nun to join the permanent staff of the National Council of Churches, has been appointed theological consultant to Church Women United.
Elected president of the University Christian Movement was Miss Nell Sale, a recent graduate of DePauw University, Greencastle, Ind. Also named by the 400 delegates during the UCM's annual assembly were four secretaries and six regional coordinators. Among the secretaries were David Banks of Louisville, Ky., past president of the National Episcopal Students Committee, and the Rev. Edwin G. Bennett, of the Executive Council staff.
OVERSEAS
Petitions signed by 4300 Americans have been sent to South African Prime Minister Balthazar J. Vorster. The petitions are part of a protest movement, sponsored by the Episcopal Churchmen for South Africa, in response to the Republic of South Africa's refusal to permit the Rt. Rev. Robert H. Mize to remain in his diocese in South West Africa.
Meeting in London, delegates to the worldwide conference of the Mothers Union, worlds largest organization of Anglican women, voted to continue the existing bar on membership of divorced women. A resolution which would have made their membership possible was defeated by a two-thirds majority vote.
Mrs. Marian H. Steed, who served as an appointed missionary of the Episcopal Church in Japan from 1915 to 1938, died recently at her home in Winter Park, Fla.
St. Paul's Cathedral, London will begin a three-month youth festival, "St. Paul's Today" this October. Major festival plans include Caribbean calypso musicians and singing and dancing. In the Cathedral's crypt there will be a coffee bar. The Cathedral's dean, the Very Rev. Martin Sullivan, stated that the festival is "a serious attempt by myself and my colleagues in the chapter to get young people to take more of a part in church life. "
The Rt. Rev. Trevor Huddleston, Bishop of Masasi, has recently announced that he is leaving his diocese in Tanzania and will accept a new assignment as Suffragan Bishop of Stepney in the London Diocese. Bishop Huddleston, who has served in Masasi for eight years, is well-known for his opposition to South Africa's apartheid policy and was expelled from that country in 1956.
The annual synod of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto reduced the minimum age of lay delegates from 21 to 18. The change, which was among recommendations from a special "youth synod" held last March, will have to be ratified in 1969.
AT HOME
The Urban Crisis Fund of the Diocese of New York is now halfway to the $50, 000 goal approved by the diocesan convention. Six grants have already been made. They include the Urban Crisis Ecumenical Task Force, All Saints Valley Cottage for participants in Nyack Head Start summer program, and Tremont-Concourse Summer Youth program.
Shown for the first time at Judson Memorial Church, New York City was an experimental film, "Another Pilgrim, " produced by the Church's assistant minister, the Rev. Al Carmines. A unique feature of the film, commissioned and produced for the World Council of Churches' 4th General Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden, is the total disrobing of the minister at the close of the film. In black and white, the production attempts to portray the gulf between a local parish at worship and the "real world" outside. The disrobing represents the final attempt by the minister to be totally honest.
The Lutheran Church in America at its fourth biennial convention in Atlanta late in June became the first major Protestant body to uphold selective conscientious objection.
During the 61st annual meeting of the American Baptist Convention held in Boston, May 29 - June 2, delegates approved a resolution on abortion allowing for termination of pregnancy prior to the 12th week as a personal decision, provided that after that period of time the termination shall be performed for one of the reasons prescribed in the Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute, a) where there is danger to the physical health of the mother; b) where the conceptus has a physical or mental defect; and c) where the pregnancy results from rape, incest or other felonious act.
The first National Black Sisters' Conference will be held at Mt. Mercy College, Pittsburgh, Pa., during August. The conference, which is sponsored by a group of Roman Catholic religious, will be restricted to Negro nuns, although a session centering around the topic "Educating Black Youth" will be open to all nuns and priests of the Pittsburgh area.
The Rev. John B. Coburn has resigned as head of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass. and will teach next year as a member of the staff of the Street Academies of the Urban League in New York City. In a letter to trustees, faculty, students, staff and alumni, Dean Coburn, who is president of the House of Deputies, cited his increasing concern about the social crisis in American life, and the dangers in easy assumption of the privileged status granted clergy and students preparing for the ministry under Selective Service as prime factors in his decision. Dean Coburn, along with others, has been urging the "moral equivalent" of the draft for theological students.
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, and the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., were among 31 church-related colleges to receive Ford Foundation grants totaling $1,349,530 to assist their humanities programs. Individual grants range from $10,000 to $85,000. Those colleges involved will be required to match the grant over four years and to continue the program from the fifth year on by an amount equal to half the grant.
The Board of Trustees of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., at a meeting following the University's 100th Commencement, voted to admit qualified women students in the fall of 1969.
Dr. Leo Sowerby, 73, Director of Music of the College of Church Musicians at Washington Cathedral, died July 7 in Port Clinton Hospital, Ohio. The noted composer served as head of the Composition Department of the American Conservatory of Music and as organist and choirmaster at St. James' Cathedral, both in Chicago, prior to accepting his position with the College of Church Musicians when it opened in 1962. He was the recipient of many awards, among them a Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 1946 for his composition "Canticle of the Sun."
A third National Conference on Black Power will be held in Philadelphia from Aug. 29 - Sept. 1 to consider black self-determination and unity through direct action. Dr. Nathan Wright, who is Executive Director of the Department of Urban Work for the Diocese of Newark and chairman of the Conference's continuation committee, stated that the conference "will deal with methods, techniques, and strategy to forge a black nation in thought, experience and commitment."