The nation’s major Protestant churches and theological seminaries will make a three-year study of methods of selections and training for tomorrow’s ministers. The project, announced jointly by the National Council of Churches and the Educational Testing Service, will cost an estimated $85,000. It will be financed by funds given by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana.
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In Princeton, New Jersey, the Very Rev. Dr. James A. Pike, dean of the Cathedral the Divine, in New York, has called for a hundredfold increase in the ministry. It looks as if the ministry is facing something of the same situation as the schools in regard to trained personnel, and it is difficult to see how this increase is going to come about unless conditions within the ministry are made attractive to young men and women who must invest years of their lives and a small fortune before they are ready to begin. The same goes for school teaching and teachers.
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Washington: Professional fundraisers this year will take over the traditional role of laymen in hundreds of American churches: the job of raising money. Authorities estimate that professional organizations will direct drives to raise more than $300 million among more than 2,000 churches. The efforts of the professionals will be directed chiefly in drives for new construction funds. However, some churches will also use them to raise funds for meeting regular operating budgets.
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Toledo, Ohio: Dr. Eugene Carson Blake says talks between American and visiting Russian church leaders are clearing up what he calls some very real misunderstanding between the churches of the two countries. Dr. Blake, who is president of the National Council of Churches, says there is clear progress in our mutual expression of what we agree are the Christian principles upon which peace must be based. However, some 250 members of the American Council of Churches have protested the visit of the eight Russian churchmen to the United States.
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Washington: The Senate has passed and sent to the House legislation which would allow airlines to give cut rates – or even free rides – to bona fide ministers of religion. Clergymen already receive such special advantages from railroads.
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Bogota, Colombia: The Evangelical Confederation of Columbia charges that there is a growing religious persecution against Protestant denominations throughout Columbia. The confederation says two additional churches recently have been closed and a Protestant pastor arrested. It quoted a Roman Catholic publication, Aurora, which accused Protestants of being fearful enemies of public peace, incubations of communism, assaulters of private property, and betrayers of the motherland. Well, there’s not much else they could accuse them of. We Protestants must be a pretty bad sort of citizen.
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Cairo, Egypt: Egypt has expelled two British missionaries for teaching the Christian faith to Moslem children. The expulsion orders were issued for the head mistress of a school for girls in Suez, and the headmaster of a school for boys at Ismalia. Egyptian state law forbids teaching Christianity to Moslem children.
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The so-called Defense Department, with the approval of the State Department, recently sent, almost secretly, arms to Saudi Arabia out of the obscure port of Sunny Point, North Carolina. It is difficult to think of more immoral behavior than supplying the means of killing human beings to any nation, Saudi Arabia or any other. Not many years ago it was held by apologists for the government that any laws prohibiting private manufacturers from shipping munitions of war abroad would be unconstitutional. Now our government itself, with the consent of Congress, is doing it. Thirty years ago the conscience of America would have welled up in protest that may well have swept those doing this out of office. Granted that we are living in a different world from that of 1926, it is amazing the emphasis that we can place on devising and distributing instruments of destruction, and how little effort, time, and money is spent in devising machinery which, once in operation, would make destruction less likely.
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Certainly a nation has a right to take measures to preserve itself. But that society is best that can induce a common idealism among its members, that provides for diversity without losing its unity, and that achieves a high degree of solidarity while preserving large areas of individual freedom.
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Not infrequently, considerable skepticism – not to say at times cynicism – is heard voiced regarding the practice of dedicating children, infants. Of course some denominations do not practice this, and that is all right if they choose it that way. However, it is just as well not to be superstitious about being superstitious. It is hardly likely that any informed person looks upon dedication of infants as casting out devils, or erasing original sin. Dedication is hardly a sacrament, for no metaphysical change is claimed. It has nothing to do with the state of the dead. And it is not even to be confused with “baptism unto salvation.” The new citizen, so dedicated, is presented formally to the church, identified as to the name and family, and placed in the religious care of the church and its parents. He is dedicated in the name of goodness, beauty, and truth to the service of man. And is there anything wrong with this?
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The Rev. Theodore Abell, of Sacramento, California, has written in an editorial some wisdom that seems well worth sharing with you. He says as follows:
There are none so blind as those who will not see. There are none so weak as those who will not walk. There are none so ignorant as those who will not think. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ is one of the most damming of all myths.
In ignorance men of ancient times allowed themselves to be hitched like horses and whipped to labor until they dropped from exhaustion; in ignorance, men and women threw their first born into the sacrificial fires to placate a supposedly angry God; in ignorance men opine they can establish a just social order by force of arms; in ignorance men are led to believe that mankind is altogether evil and corrupt and can of itself do no good; in ignorance people are led to believe that all the troubles of the world today came about because men dared think about the origin and nature of the universe as a result gave up their allegiance to medieval doctrines and institutions. Ignorance is never blissful; it is slavery.
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And, after such an editorial excoriating ignorance, what about our ignorance of existing circumstances regarding our present rate of growth, diminishing resources, and volume of resources being used daily? It would appear that in this connection, science and reason are our only hope. Within half a century, it is entirely conceivable that the U.S. will be the most acutely have-not nation in the world. Our rate of population growth is a good percentage above any other country. Yet, we have so far depleted our resources that we, who account for less than seven percent of the world’s population, now consume half of the world’s raw material supply. What can we do when we are even more dependent upon foreign resources, and are also in competition with the rest of the people of the world who are now industrializing at a rapid rate?
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In a recent article in the Woman’s Home Companion, historian Arnold Toynbee, in discussing the power of American women, goes on to discuss something quite different in a way. After pointing out that women generally approach politics and other public subjects with more of an emotional tinge than men, he goes on to say that we are entering a new age in which the historic world religions will be much more in intimate contact with another than ever before. Each will have to take account of the other’s principles and points of view. It is hoped, he says, that the women of the world will not set their faces against this necessary task of stocktaking. They would be doing a disservice to the human race if they were to try to perpetuate the old and outworn hostilities that the respective followers of the different world religions felt toward one another in the past, and with such terrible consequences.
Here is a real challenge, not only to women, but to men also. Here in our own country we have many hundreds of denominations and cults. After much quarreling as to the rightness of each, we have settled down to what looks to be something of a long truce. Methodist and Baptist, Catholic and Jew, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unitarians – all build churches in the same town. But while we insist that we believe each person should have the right to worship the way he chooses, Mr. Toynbee would go beyond the churches that have either as the center of their teaching the Hebraic-Christian ethic or are closely related to it, and points out that we should show the same measure of tolerance for other world religions.
Few sincere and objective people could honestly disagree with this. To far too many of us, to mention the word “religion” is to bring to our mind our particular denomination, not realizing that this denomination is only a very small portion of religions generally throughout the world, for religion is a universal phenomenon among all people. Religious zeal in the future must be tempered with such tolerance as Dr. Toynbee advises, or we may wreck rather than save the world. Without such tolerance, it is doubtful if there can ever be the much-talked-about “Peace on Earth.”
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Alarm is expressed in Holston Methodist Conference circles over a membership decrease reported at minus 3,235 members during the closing conference year. This alarm was expressed Friday by Bishop Roy H. Short, presiding bishop of the conference, now meeting in Chattanooga. Quoting the bishop’s concern about it, we find these views: “It is inexcusable for ministers to let church records fall into such shape that members go away and are lost. We are the shepherds of men’s souls and it is our duty to follow the member if he leaves our church, into another Methodist church or a church of some faith.”
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Not long ago when Queen Elizabeth passed out birthday honors, she awarded the Order of the British Empire to a flying angel. This was to the Rev. Cyril Brown, 52, a minister who sports no wings and is reported to look more like a gray-haired Pat O’Brien than a member of the heavenly host. But the organization he heads is better known in the seaports and ship lanes of the world by its nickname, the Flying Angels, than by its official title, “Missions to Seamen.” The idea for such an organization began all of 120 years ago when a young vacationing Anglican minister stood looking over the Bristol Channel. His little boy, pointing to two lonely islands, asked, “How can those people go to church?” Next day the man, John Ashley, put off in a boat to find out. He found that the inhabitants of these islands – fisherman, lighthouse keepers, farmers, and such – had no church at all. So Ashley began visiting them from time to time. Sometimes he called on ships that were anchored in the channel and held services on them. For the next 13 years he built up a unique service, and in 1856, upon Ashley’s retirement, the British government gave it official recognition and named it “Mission to Seamen,” which is now one of the 12 main missionary societies of the Church of England, having 53 chaplains and 25 laymen to operate in some 80 seaports around the world. A short time ago, on a ship moored in the Thames, Missions to Seamen held its annual meeting and observed its centenary. The Rev. Cyril Brown added up last year’s achievements of the organization, which amounted to visits 57,000 ships, 5,300 hospital calls, some 12,500 entertainment programs, and nearly 13,500 religious services. Which is a record of which any organization may well be proud.