Youth to Have Voice in Executive Council
Diocesan Press Service. June 5, 1968 [66-4]
GREENWICH, CONN.-- The young people asked for the right to be heard in the Episcopal Church -- and they got it.
Meeting in Greenwich, Conn., May 21 - 23, members of Executive Council voted the Presiding Bishop authority to invite from two to four persons under the age of 25 to attend meetings of the Council. They will act as observers and participate in debates, although they will have no vote.
The action was an obvious response to the appeal of two graduate students who participated in a presentation of the Episcopal Church's ministry to higher education, John Dillon, of Princeton University, and David Banks, of the University of Louisville, who asked that young people be given the right to participate in the Church's decision-making.
Mr. Dillon told the Council that half the population now is under 26 and that they have different experiences and different expectations than those who are older.
"Unless young people have a recognized power base the Church will remain the Church of the day before yesterday, " he told Council members.
Mr. Banks also spoke of the need for American young people to have a "power base."
"Like Jesus," he said, "we are taken up to high places and shown the riches of the world, and told these are yours if you don't ask to be free, if you don't raise any basic questions about America."
Mr. Dillon and Mr. Banks both expressed the need of students to have a power-base, whether within the Church or the University, and said it was a reflection of their concern about society and the need to change it.
As Mr. Dillon expressed it:
"To democratize any hierarchical institution, the 'input' -- those people at the bottom -- need a voice and a power-base from which to raise that voice. "
He also said he believed that "a Christian is to act in concert with the disenfranchised, helping them to obtain power in the structure or if that is impossible, to remake the structure. "
Both of the young men spoke on two pressing international questions, which they said were of concern to young people -- the war in Vietnam and the apartheid of South Africa.
"The Church should encourage young people to face the moral question of Vietnam and military service head-on," Mr. Dillon said. "To talk of the validity of the conscientious objector and to suggest alternative service is not enough. "
Mr. Banks challenged the Council to disengage itself from those banks involved in the consortium which lends money to the government of South Africa.
The question has been raised at other meetings of the Council, but no action has been taken.
Others who participated in the presentation on college work were:
The Rt. Rev. Robert L. DeWitt, Bishop of Pennsylvania; James L. Bugg, chancellor of the University of Missouri, St. Louis campus; the Rev. Scott M. Jones, chaplain at Northwestern; and the Rev. Myron B. Bloy, Jr., of the Church Society for College Work.