Morehouse Urges Increased Work
Diocesan Press Service. May 10, 1963 [X-26]
NEW YORK, --- A leading Episcopal layman said recently that Episcopalians are not doing enough on the mission front.
"The Pentecostals and other groups of Christians whom we are likely to call sects and to look down upon far outstrip us in missionary zeal, " Clifford P. Morehouse of New York, president of the House of Deputies, told delegates May 7 at the Georgia Diocesan Convention in Savannah.
He warned that too many are "Content to putter around our own parishes, concerned only with the music and the altar furnishings and the stained glass windows, rather than with the increasingly pagan world around us."
He urged a revival of the "fervent zeal that spread Christianity throughout the Roman Empire during the first three centuries of the Christian era, when to be a Christian was to risk one's very life."
This, he said, is "the only kind of Christianity that can survive, or that deserves to survive, in a world threatened with a paganism worse than that of the Roman Empire and with the overhanging threat of self-destruction."
Mr. Morehouse added that it is not the fear of communism, other religious or of nationalism that should frighten Christians but the nominal Christian who "betrays the Church."
He pointed to the fact that "after more than 100 years of missionary endeavor the Episcopal Church has only some 250, 000 baptized members outside the U.S."
"We like to think, " he said, "that our missionary work is highly effective and we constantly receive glowing reports of it in the Church press and through publications of the National Council. Certainly our missionaries are doing a magnificent job, sometimes under great difficulties, and we honor them for it."
"Nevertheless, it is a fact that after more than 100 years of missionary endeavor the Episcopal Church today has only some 250, 000 baptized members outside the U. S."
He took issue with the Episcopal Church's tendency toward "ecclesiastical colonialism," which, he said, "makes it virtually impossible for a national Church to become self-governing."
He contrasted the Episcopal Church's system of making overseas dioceses dependent upon the General Convention and the National Council with the Anglican Communion's policy of making its overseas churches independent and self-governing while still receiving aid from the Mother Church.
"With the strong feeling of nationalism throughout the world, this can be a very great source of irritation," he warned.
He did, however, note two exceptions to the Episcopal Church's overseas missionary policy--the Churches in Japan and China "where independence was forced upon them by political considerations."
Mr. Morehouse suggested that Episcopalians now have the basis for a national Church of the Philippines that "would be the largest non-Roman Church in the Orient and a strong bastion of freedom in that troubled part of the world."
He referred to the Philippine Independent Church which has more than 2,000, 000 baptized persons in 20 dioceses and the Philippine Episcopal Church, which has 48, 000 members in one missionary district with an American bishop and two Filipino suffragans "still fully oriented to the United States."
"Our Church in the Philippines alone is larger than the Church in Japan, which has 10 dioceses and its own Presiding Bishop and is self-governing," he said.
Other cases in point, he said, are the missionary districts in Liberia (9,600 members), the West Indies (125,000 members ), and Brazil (31,000 members).
Mr. Morehouse added that "making these churches self-governing would not mean that they would no longer need financial aid from the Church at home."
"They would indeed for many years need a great deal of such help and the sending of missionaries also, but they would be truly national churches and the Church (would be) free to determine its own program and policies, " he said.
He suggested that this venture would mean a great increase in strength almost immediately.
"This has proved to be the case in many other churches where the apron strings to the Home Church have been cut and the responsibility placed upon national leadership," he said.
Turning to the home mission front, Mr. Morehouse questioned the validity of the Church's continuing to make distinctions between dioceses and missionary districts.
Missionary districts are made "a sort of second-class partner in the work of the Church, " he said, because their bishops are elected by the House of Bishops rather than by the dioceses themselves and they have reduced representation in the House of Deputies, only one clerical and one lay deputy instead of four of each.
"It is a fact," he said, "that the difference between an aided dioceses and a missionary district is an increasingly artificial one."
He continued, "It seems to me that the time has come when every jurisdiction of the Episcopal Church in the U. S. should be given the status of a diocese, with the ability to elect its own bishops and with full representation in the House of Deputies."
He acknowledged that they should become self-supporting as soon as possible, but "their first class status as dioceses should no longer be dependent upon their ability to carry on their work unaided."
"It is one Church and we are members one of another," he said. Mr. Morehouse also charged that lay representatives in the House of Deputies should not be confined to members of the male sex.
"The practice of segregation by sex is no more admirable than of segregation by race or color," he stated.
He expressed the hope that his fellow-deputies "will have the courtesy, the chivalry, and the sound judgment to take steps to amend the Constitution so that women may sit in the House of Deputies," when this question arises at the 1964 General Convention in St. Louis.
It has been on the agenda at every General Convention for the past 20 years.
In conclusion Mr. Morehouse urged Episcopalians to "do some earnest and deep re-thinking of these subjects, not only at the Anglican Congress and at the General Convention but in every parish church throughout the land. "