Revolt in the Church

The new reformation of Christianity is already under way. It is bringing with it changes incomparably more sweeping and profound than those of the 16th Century. Both in America and abroad, churches have plunged into a tempest of theological innovation, liturgical experiment and social activism. Nuns infuriate religiously inclined bigots by carrying placards in racial demonstrations. Theologians formulate secular interpretations of the Bible. Trap drums and electric guitars pulsate in chancels. The former world capital of anticommunism, the Vatican, openly questions America's war in Vietnam. In dozens of American cities, churches organize poor people to battle city hall. What's going on? Will the new reformation bring a new division of Christendom?

Naturally, there are lots of people who do not like what is happening in the churches today. Those who prefer their religion straight and stagnant are purple with shock and exasperation. Even people who do not belong to churches are uneasy. No wonder. In a world of convulsive social change and evaporating absolutes, it was comforting to have one institution that stayed pretty much the same from millennium to millennium. Even if you loathed the Church personally, it somehow gave you a cozy feeling to realize that the object of your contempt would still be there long after old soldiers and this season's hemlines had faded away.

Religious reformations always run the risk of causing divisions. They threaten and confuse the people for whom faith, in order to be authentic, must remain inert. This happened during Luther's Reformation. But even before that, people were so vexed by Jesus when he kept putting down the Pharisees (the Church pillars of his day) that they finally lynched him. But the proponents of religious immobilism always lose in the end. Whenever religion goes through one of its periodic outbursts of change and renewal, the rebels are inevitably branded as schismatics. Years later they are canonized. Today's heretics are tomorrow's saints.

Today we are in another period of reformation. We are in it because the theological doctrines and religious forms we have inherited from the past have reached the end of their usefulness. Some traditional dogmas strike modern Christians as at best misleading, at worst as downright superstitions. Many people reject the idea of the Trinity as an outlandish three-headed specter. The notion that faith means believing without adequate evidence has lost all appeal. But the main complaint of most restless young Christians does not center principally on doctrine. People now realize that they can take doctrine as symbolically as they please. Rather, their complaint focuses on the failure of the Church to live up to its own stated ideals. Many people who drop out of the Church today do so not because they find its teachings unintelligible but because it has abandoned its role as the conscience troubler and moral avant-garde of society. "The reason I stopped going to Mass," a young Catholic told me during Martin Luther King's recent Chicago marches, "is not because I'm bothered by infallibility or the Immaculate Conception but because the Cardinal has done nothing to clamp down on those Mass-going Catholics who are clobbering Negroes with rocks and bottles." Other people have told me that whether they stay in the Church in the next few years will depend on whether it clearly opposes American intervention in Vietnam. If it hedges, or simply remains silent, as some claim Pope Pius XII did while Hitler murdered 6,000,000 Jews, there is sure to be a considerable exodus from the Church. But the people who leave will not do so because they have found the message of Jesus incredible. They will drop out because they believe the churches are no longer fitting representatives of that message.

This younger generation of Christians insists that the Church must now either live up to its words or get out of business. They see the present liturgical innovation and political engagement of the churches as signs of hope. For these new-breed Christians, man encounters God not just inside the walls of church buildings but in the complexity of everyday life in the world, with all its terror and delights. Faith has more to do with one's fondest hopes for this world than with saving one's soul in the next. This growing group of young churchmen includes not just laymen but an increasing number of ministers, priests and nuns bent on moving the Church toward a more direct role in inducing social change. Among Protestants, the inspiration for the "pro-world perspective" comes mainly from the German pastor-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, just before his execution by the Gestapo in 1945, called his fellow Christians to an affirmative view of the world and a secular interpretation of the Gospel. But a parallel trend is under way in Catholicism, too. Jesuit Thomas Clarke indicated the strength of revisionary Catholic sentiment when he wrote in America, the weekly publication of his order, that future historians might well remember the Second Vatican Council not for either religious freedom or collegiality but for what he called "Christian secularity." He was referring to the growing conviction of many Christians that their job is to work in the secular world, alongside anyone who will share the task, not to proselyte pagans but to establish elements of the Kingdom of God on earth.

So the debate within the Church rages on and the gap between the diehards and the innovators widens. Of course, these differences have always been there. But recently, the young turks in the churches have felt an increasing strength. The civil rights movement helped. It brought together people who agreed on a number of issues but whose churches were in different denominations or different cities--which had prevented them from getting to know one another. Just as the Greek slaves in Rome were forbidden to wear a distinctive garb--lest they recognize their number and revolt--this group had been kept unaware (continued on page 140)revolt in the church (continued from page 129) of its potential power by the sociology of Church division. Then came the march on Washington and the ecumenical convergence on Selma. "When I got to Brown Chapel in Selma," confessed one young Methodist minister, "I was shocked to see how many of us there were in the Church." In short, the "Christian underground" has surfaced. This rather amorphous, generally young, mostly urban group of clergy and laity has come onto the scene and is now learning its strength. The Church will never be the same again.

Under the leadership of these new militants, the churches have already begun to play an unprecedented role in some aspects of American society. Saul Alinsky, the controversial head of the Industrial Areas Foundation, said in a recent interview: "The labor unions are now the haves--they're part of the status quo. The Christian churches are now taking the leadership in social change." Alinsky has worked with priests and ministers to organize the poor in the ghettos and gray areas of a dozen American cities. He boasts years of experience, but recently conceded that he had never seen any equal of the "pure flame of passion for justice one finds in these ministers today." Although he admits that vast sections of the Church have sold out to assorted power structures, he still contends that the Church remains less compromised than most other institutions, maybe because it has a Gospel that constantly forces it to think about siding with the poor even when this goes against its own institutional interests.

Another community-organization expert, Milton Kotler of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C., claims that the Church is the only institution with the ideas, motivation and resources to restore real community to the neglected slums of inner-city America. Kotler's favorite example is the epic of the First English Lutheran Church in Columbus, Ohio. After years of wringing its hands about the "invasion" of its parish by poor Negroes, this congregation finally decided not only to erect a neighborhood center but to transfer the center legally, and with no strings attached, to the poor people of the community. This rare instance of the Christly injunction "Sell what you have and give it to the poor" was carried through under the leadership of the church's pastor, Leopold Bernhard, a refugee from Hitler's Germany. It was done by organizing a tax-exempt "community foundation," to which anyone in the neighborhood over 16 years of age could belong. Since then, the foundation has received a poverty grant and may now provide a base for self-government in a slum, representing the interests of the poor in decisions about the future of Columbus.

While Alinsky sees the Church picking up the baton of social change dropped by a faltering labor movement, Kotler sees churchmen replacing universities in keeping alive the historic images of democratic urban life. He believes the university political-science departments that once nourished these ideas have grown flaccid and fidgety, due in part at least to the widening chasm between the university and the poor in modern society. He speaks of academic social theorists and political philosophers with the same sharpness that Alinsky reserves for fat-cat labor unions. Churchmen, says Kotler, are the only ones who have both a continuing existential interest in human community plus a fund of images and ideas to draw upon. Hence he believes "we may be headed for a new golden age of Christian social philosophy."

Neither Alinsky nor Kotler is a churchman. Since their work exposes them mainly to the militant minority within the churches, their evaluations are undoubtedly too sanguine. There are elements in the Church today that are more sclerotic than any fossilized labor union and more removed from the hopes and hates of the urban poor than any university ivory tower. The Church has its share of fat cats and pedants, but Alinsky and Kotler have spotted an important trend. There is a new mood in the churches, and it is gaining ground quickly. A telling index of the shift can be seen in the radical metamorphosis the public image of the American clergyman has undergone in the past few years. A decade ago, the clergyman was depicted in cartoons and stories as a pompous bore, a disagreeable zealot or a genial incompetent. These images persist in some places. But the average man is now just as likely to think of nuns, priests and ministers leading protest marches, standing on picket lines or organizing debates on Vietnam. The new image may bewilder or even enrage him, but it is undeniable that the popular view of the clergy has undergone sweeping revision. The changing public stereotype has also affected the minister's self-image.

The freedom the clergyman now feels to use a salty vocabulary, if the occasion demands it, is more a symptom of his desire to escape the world of conventional piety than a sign that he has really arrived in the secular city. But it has made a significant impact on the Church's traditionally fastidious attitude toward what it called "obscenity." In what has now become a famous article published last year in Christianity and Crisis, the Reverend Howard Moody argued for a whole new definition of obscenity. "Vulgar and bawdy language may well be objected to on the basis of aesthetics and social manners," he wrote, "but it is hardly justifiable to make a moral or theological case against raw language as the Church has tended to do." He then went on to defend the late comedian Lenny Bruce, the "tragic shaman" who he claimed had been victimized by our culture's unwillingness to face up to what obscenity really is. "For Christians," he argued, "the truly obscene ought not to be slick-paper nudity, nor the vulgarities of dirty old or young literati. . . . What is obscene is that material, whether sexual or not, that has as its basic motivation and purpose the degradation, debasement and dehumanization of persons. The dirtiest word in the English language is not 'fuck' or 'shit' in the mouth of a tragic shaman, but the word 'nigger' from the sneering lips of a Bull Connor."

Still, the new tolerance of profanity remains peripheral. It is merely a superficial sign of a deeper debate, the struggle over how the Church should be involved in the controversial issues of the secular order. This debate has stirred things up in every area of Church life. The most crucial issue, for the future of the churches themselves, has to do with the nature of churchly authority. Naturally, it is in the Roman Catholic Church that the so-called "crisis of authority" is most severe, since Catholics have tended to emphasize such authority more than Protestants. Nowadays, however, even Catholic clergy sometimes seem to be getting away with murder. When the Roman Catholic archbishop of Birmingham and Mobile, Thomas J. Toolen, told the nuns and priests who were marching in Selma to go home and tend to "God's business," they not only refused to go but 300 of them signed a press statement spelling out their dissatisfaction with the archbishop and stating that they would return to Selma, or to other racial crisis spots, whenever Martin Luther King asked them to. Here is a situation without parallel in the history of the Church. Some 300 Roman Catholic clergy refuse to obey a bishop's request and, at the same time, pledge obedience to a Baptist minister who ironically bears the name of the main leader of the Protestant Reformation. (King became a de facto Catholic bishop in Selma.) Yet not one of these 300 was defrocked.

This growing restlessness with traditional notions of ecclesiastical authority has not gone unnoticed by the hierarchy. Not everyone escapes punishment. Recently, fames Francis Cardinal McIntyre, perhaps America's most inflexible prelate, quashed a controversial young priest named Father William H. DuBay. Two years ago DuBay, exasperated by McIntyre's inertness in face of the calamity that was soon to erupt in Watts, wrote directly to the Pope and (continued on page 206)revolt in the church(continued from page 140) asked him to remove McIntyre from office because of "gross malfeasance." Progressive circles in the Church held their breath and waited for DuBay's head to fall. It didn't. McIntyre was not removed, but neither was DuBay. His only punishment was to be exiled to a posh parish far from the Negroes and impoverished whites with whom he had identified. Then DuBay published a book entitled The Human Church that was at points highly critical of his Church and did not seek the customary nihil obstat. He has now been relieved of his priestly duties and at this writing is awaiting the results of an appeal to Rome, which may not be overly sympathetic to his appeal.

Although the clergy's effort to win the freedom to participate fully in controversial areas of social concern has gained ground, it has a long way to go before it is successful. Late last year Commonweal published a list of violations of freedom of conscience, both lay and clerical, all of which had come to the editor's attention within the previous two weeks. The article mentioned two Jesuits at St. Peter's College in New Jersey who were "ordered to shut up" after talking publicly about the immorality of America's position in Vietnam. The list included a brave Franciscan named Father Bonaventure O'Brien of Albany's Siena College, who was forbidden by his bishop to concern himself with the conditions of the Negro slums in Albany after he had said some things about them that that backward city's political leaders found disquieting. Commonweal told again the dreary story of St. John's University in New York, one of the nation's largest Roman Catholic universities, where faculty members, some of them priests, called a strike against a series of infringements on their academic freedom. Thirty-one were fired. It was an action by that inveterate silencer Cardinal McIntyre that topped the list, however: He had ordered the nuns of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to stop selling Christmas cards produced by the talented religious artist Sister Mary Corita, after Birchers had complained that the cards displayed "Communist art." Recipients of the cards looked again and agreed that the cards did say a lot about peace on earth--reason enough for suspicion.

One could easily make a similar list of Protestant ministers demoted or dismissed for taking unpopular positions or spending too much time in "nonreligious" activities. Reading these lists of fellow clergymen who have been put down for speaking up could be a fairly discouraging experience for the cadres of the emerging Christian underground. But somehow it is not. The reason is that these "silencings" are being noticed, publicized and openly opposed. Father Robert Hovda, a director of the Roman Catholic National Liturgical Conference, says: "The real news is the fact that all of this is now news."

A good illustration of why the young turks are not discouraged is the now-famous case of a Jesuit priest named Daniel Berrigan, who last year became the Galahad of the new militants among clergy and laity. Father Berrigan's style was bound to commend him to the new-breed churchmen. His short hair, large woolly sweaters and canvas field jacket project a decidedly nonauthoritarian air. His whole bearing seems to belie the spit-and-polish precision so often associated with the Jesuits, the elite guard and intellectual aristocracy of the Catholic Church. But Father Berrigan's easy manner is deceptive. He is a competent theologian who once taught theology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, a Jesuit institution, and his diffident style masks a restless dedication to the new society. He is also a poet with a genuine lyrical gift and a longtime civil rights picketer--a veteran of Selma. But his most energetic work recently has been in support of a negotiated peace in Vietnam. In these touchy times, this undisguised dedication to peace turned out to be the straw that broke the back of his religious superior's patience. Berrigan was spirited out of New York, but his jet-borne auto-da-fé broke a lot more backs in turn. It happened like this: Last fall Father Berrigan, who worked in New York as an editor of the magazine Jesuit Missions, joined Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel and a Lutheran pastor, Richard J. Neuhaus of Brooklyn, as co-chairman of a group called Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. Father Berrigan's complicity with these two brothers in faith, and his work with the Clergy Concerned group, was too strong a dose for New York Catholic hierarchs. They have learned over the years not only to trim their sails to ultraconservative Francis Cardinal Spellman's superpatriotic spasms but even to anticipate them. So Berrigan was shipped out. How it happened will probably always be something of a back-hall chancery mystery, but he was suddenly ordered to make a prolonged "study tour" of missions in Latin America. He was out of town in a matter of hours, without even time to say goodbye to his friends. Berrigan's exile was followed by a wave of shock and then by an avalanche of indignant complaints from thousands of angry Catholics, many of whom were still glowing with justified satisfaction over the climax of the Vatican Council, with its promise of fresh air and new freedom in the Church. Fordham University students picketed the New York chancery office. Commonweal called Berrigan's removal "a shame and a scandal, a disgustingly blind, totalitarian act." The baroque corridors of the New York chancery echoed with denials and rationalizations. But it soon became clear that since the surfacing of the Christian underground, the hierarchy could not deal with l'affaire Berrigan in the manner of previous clerical banishments, simply by clamming up. When some chancery officials denied that his peace work had any connection with Father Berrigan's new assignment, Berrigan himself sedately replied that his excursion "was arranged mainly to remove me from the movement of protest against the war in Vietnam." Then more than 1000 Catholics signed an open letter to the chancery protesting Berrigan's banishment and inserted it as an ad in The New York Times. Many of the signers were priests, nuns, seminary teachers and seminarians. Some were members of Berrigan's own Jesuit order, sometimes noted in the past for their unswerving obedience to authority. Finally, Berrigan came back from banishment. Now everyone knows what many had long suspected: The day when the outrageous misuse of authority in the Catholic Church would be met by silence and deference is gone forever. Although the conservative grip on the hierarchy is still firm, the "loyal opposition" is now confident and articulate.

Meanwhile, Father Berrigan himself had enjoyed a rather pleasant exile. Latin-American Catholicism is seething in a fermento of Hispanic dissatisfaction The ancient alliance between the Catholic Church and the landlords is trembling. The Catholic "left" is growing stronger among students and intellectuals. One of the main centers of ferment is called the Center for Intercultural Formation, located at Cuernavaca, just outside Mexico City. The Center's official assignment is to prepare missionaries for work in Latin America, but its leaders feel that such preparation should include adequate doses of education in political organization and action. This "nest of Catholic revolution," as it has been called, was where Berrigan turned up after his precipitous departure from New York. It seemed fitting. In fact, when news came that he was there, someone observed that "sending Dan Berrigan to Cuernavaca is like tossing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch!"

But despite their new strength, the progressive Catholics are not sanguine about the future. Anyone who looks around can see that considerable conservative Catholic backlash is already gathering steam. The backlashers have found their hero so far in the rather unlikely figure of a mild-mannered professor of canon law at tiny Mount Saint Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. His name is Gommar Albert DePauw, and lie leads something called the Catholic Traditionalist Movement. Presumably this group was organized mainly to oppose liturgical reforms in the Catholic Church and to fight what its members call the "protestantizing" of their Church. But the Movement doubtless represents a growing apprehensiveness among conservative Catholics about the number of progressive trends that to them appear quite ominous. Recently, its representatives picketed at the National Liturgical Conference in Baltimore, carrying signs that extolled Father DePauw and denounced the "novelties" now being introduced into worship life (vernacular Masses in English, congregational participation in the liturgy, etc.). At this writing, Father DePauw has not been heard from for some time, and the future of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement, at least under his leadership, does not look auspicious.

But even if Father DePauw's seriocomic Movement founders, Catholic Cro-Magnons will never suffer for want of a rallying point. Not as long as erstwhile New York mayoralty candidate William Buckley is still around. Buckley, editor of the right-wing journal The National Review, once carried a brightly burning torch for the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, a fellow Catholic. No narrow sectarian, he later beat the drums for Episcopalian Barry Goldwater. Buckley's life has been filled with disappointments, but none so demeaning as his recent ill-starred foray into New York City politics. Buckley entered the contest mainly to steal Republican votes from John Lindsay, who tops his all-time hit parade of pet hates. What happened, however, was that his ill-tempered campaign drew votes from Lindsay's opponent and clinched the election for the man he set out to sabotage. But the New York election, after all, was only an incident. It is the whole direction of history that bugs Buckley. He is especially sick about the way things have been going recently in his own Church. In fact, ever since the accession of Pope John XXIII, his unease has been deepening. Last spring he announced the publication of a book entitled What in the Name of God Is Going On in the Catholic Church?, a collection of sour sentiments penned by himself and like-minded bitter-enders. The title of the book eloquently expresses the anxiety felt these days not only by Catholic conservatives but also by non-Catholics who have long relied on Rome and its minions to provide dependable support for the status quo.

Will there be a split in the Catholic Church between the left and the right wings? I do not think so. Though potent here and there, the real reactionaries in the Catholic Church add up to a tiny band on the world scene. The progressives, on the other hand, are doing fairly well. If they cannot get conservative archbishops and cardinals sacked, at least they keep themselves from getting excommunicated. Here and there in Catholic interracial councils, in ecumenical action groups and in a variety of lay apostolates, the Catholic underground keeps pushing: and the general climate of the Church is, if not wildly responsive, at least not inquisitional. Besides, the uncanny flexibility of the Roman Catholic Church, its almost unerring capacity to make room for diversity and inner tension, will probably pull it through the coming crisis relatively united.

But how is the newly emergent underground doing among Protestants? Will it produce a schism? Whatever happens to Protestantism will happen to a religious community that is already badly fragmented. Though "Protestants" are usually mentioned along with Catholics, Jews and agnostics as one of the four socioreligious groups in America, the classification is misleading. Despite much talk and some action about church union in recent years, and despite considerable interchurch cooperation, Protestants are still wastefully and catastrophically divided--into more than 200 denominations and sects. Furthermore, there has been a historical tendency among them to separate rather than to preserve unity at the price of conviction.

Where, then, do the strains appear in Protestantism? Protestants in America have not been troubled recently by excessive clerical control over their activities in the secular realm. The battle, therefore, is in no sense a battle for the freedom of laymen and activist clergy against a dominating hierarchy. In Protestantism, activist ministers must often contend with the socially conservative laymen who sit on the boards that rule the churches. This is particularly interesting in view of the vocal demands among Catholic laymen today for a wider responsibility in the governance of their Church. Protestantism in America, at least in its main-line denominations, is far from being completely lay controlled, but it is often where lay control is most powerful that the opposition to social action has been most vociferous. Ministers who do not serve a local parish, and hence are somewhat more insulated from direct lay control, are much more likely to become involved in social action than pastors of local churches. Of the hundreds of clergymen who flew to Selma, a disproportionate number were denominational and interdenominational staff people, college and university chaplains, and ministers of mission churches not directly dependent on a congregation for financial support. It is worth noting that not one of the three Protestant ministers who have lost their lives in the civil rights struggle in the past three years was a parish minister. Bruce Klunder, who was killed by a bulldozer in Cleveland, was on the staff of the Student Christian Union. James Reeb was working for the American Friends Service Committee in Boston when he went to Selma. Jonathan Daniels, murdered in Alabama, was a theology student.

Still, in the South and also in Northern metropolitan areas, the parish minister now finds himself on the firing line whether he chooses to be or not. The denominational executive can fly to Selma or Hattiesburg for a couple of weeks and then return to his office. The minister in a city parish lives every day with the tensions of race and social change swirling around him and forcing him to make costly decisions. Although the suburban minister has not had to face this kind of pressure as steadily, he soon will. As Negroes move to the suburbs, as fair-housing committees accelerate their activities, as groups try to modify zoning laws to bring lower-income families to the suburbs, the minister will find himself just as inescapably involved as his inner-city colleagues. The next decade may see scores of ministers from Northern suburban churches join the hundreds of Southern ministers who have been forced from their pulpits by stand-pat congregations angered by their liberal attitudes toward race and the social involvement of Christians.

The crisis in city and suburb, North and South, usually emerges over an issue that may at first seem minor. It usually has more to do with what the minister does than with what he says in his sermons. Even deep-South congregations have been known to accept large doses of brotherhood in sermons. The burning point comes, however, when a group asks for permission to use the church building, or the minister participates in a community organization of which his congregation does not approve. The issue of use of the building varies between North and South. In Dixie, some ministers were ousted by angry congregations when they opposed using church buildings as private white schools to evade the Supreme Court desegregation decision. In the North, ministers reap the wrath of conservative laymen when they permit the church building to be used by groups the deacons consider radical or disruptive. In the South, a parish minister may court forced retirement by agreeing to serve on a community relations council or a biracial committee. In the North, the same tiling happens when he joins a group protesting de facto segregation or supports the picketing of a discriminatory real-estate agent.

In almost all instances, ministers who can avoid retaliation by boards controlled by laymen are the ones willing to take larger risks. Ministers of mission churches are the clearest example. Such churches are frequently located in slum areas and usually receive only a small part of their income from the local congregation. The rest comes from city, state or national mission boards. The minister of a small mission congregation can therefore move with much less hesitation into controversial community and national issues.

Supralocal church agencies also play a crucial role. Often they not only support staff involvement in controversy but even initiate action projects no local church would undertake, such as the Mississippi. Delta Ministry sponsored by the National Council of Churches. Begun in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 as an effort to help train and orient volunteers, the program was continued at the end of the summer and is now one of the most decisive forces at work in Mississippi. Besides its summer volunteers, the Delta Ministry now has a permanent staff of more than a dozen seasoned veterans of pioneer activity in civil rights. It works in projects all over the state, using an abandoned college campus at Mt. Beulah in Edwards as its headquarters. When the cotton choppers in Leland went on strike late last spring, The New York Times rightly singled out Reverend Laurice Walker of the Delta Ministry staff as a key figure in the unprecedented walkout by one of the most exploited worker groups in America.

Later, when some of the striking families and some others who had been forced off the plantations by technology moved onto an abandoned Air Force base in Greenville, they were dragged out by the military. Delta Ministry leaders immediately supported the strikers and invited some of them to move onto its Mt. Beulah property. The Delta Ministry is a ground-breaking mission of direct participation in social change. It proceeds, however, only in the teeth of the bitter opposition of many of the white Church leaders and probably the majority of the churchgoing laymen in Mississippi. Efforts have been made to persuade the National Council to call off the Delta Ministry, to force the Delta staff to confine their efforts to relief work and literacy, or to turn the whole program over to Mississippi churches, but to date all these attempts have been resisted. The Delta Ministry is a dramatic symbol of national Church "presence," persisting despite determined local opposition. The fact is that national mission agencies not only tolerate but encourage controversial activities by their staffs, while the average local lay board opposes such involvement. Why?

The reason is that a growing number of people on the national mission staffs has come from a formative experience in inner-city slum churches. For ten years following World War II, some of the most capable and militant young ministers avoided suburban congregations and went into the Harlems and West Chicagos of America. There they quickly saw the futility of a strictly "spiritual" ministry and also learned how to deal with institutional politics and structural problems. Many had their baptism of fire fighting slum lords and dope peddlers.

During the past ten years, these men have moved into the hierarchies of the Protestant churches and agencies. They bring with them a strong determination to lead the Church into a large-scale political struggle around the issues they once faced locally. By now their period of apprenticeship is over. They are no longer really "young" turks. They are assuming the reins of power in some parts of the Church; and although they are still a minority, they are no longer a battered one. Their influence will probably continue to expand; and since they are all inside the structure of the Church, this diminishes the possibility of the rupture some predict. The new breed has no intention of pulling out of the Church when they have a real chance of taking it over.

But this still does not preclude the possibility of a schism. Since there was a rather wide, if somewhat grudging, consensus in the churches on the moral aspects of the civil rights movement, the insurgents found themselves fighting on an ideal battlefield. But what will happen when the focus shifts, as has already happened to some extent, from race as a narrow issue to in justice and the need for decisive social change in the North and all over the world?

Also, how can the new leaders within Protestantism succeed unless they can develop a new kind of institutional Church? Individual religious pioneers never create a reformation. Christianity is a highly corporate religion and any real change will come only as new forms begin to appear on all levels of Church life. But this is beginning to happen, too. The writers grouped around Renewal, a monthly journal related to the Chicago City Mission Society, have recently challenged the Protestant churches of America to a thorough institutional reformation. If even a few of their ideas materialize, it will result in a major breakthrough in the "new reformation." They suggest that national denominational organizations be disbanded and that the churches regroup around metropolitan areas; that building construction be minimized and the money saved be used for a massive peace effort; that the structure of the foreign missionary system be transformed into a network of communications for building world community. The authors of these ideas are not anarchists. They appreciate the importance of institutional structure and power in an urban world. With this manifesto, the battle for the eventual control of the Church's huge and far-flung apparatus is on in earnest.

But what about Church life at the "grass-roots level," where the average layman has his principal contact with Christianity? Here, too, one can begin to detect the signs of something new emerging. A new type of congregational life, free from the hypocrisy and torpor of previous types, is appearing. In almost every city of America now, one can find at least one congregation that is described either as "off-beat" or "real"--depending on which side it is viewed from. Judson Memorial Church in New York City's Greenwich Village runs an art gallery, encourages the production of experimental plays in its chancel, has a widely admired avant-garde modern-dance group and holds monthly "agape feasts," a kind of Communion service in which Jewish rye bread, Chianti wine and bagels provided the sacramental elements. In 1961, members of the congregation led the successful fight to unseat district leader Carmine de Sapio. The premise on which Judson operates is that the Church has as much to learn from the world as vice versa. Despite occasional pressures from nervous ecclesiastical authorities, Judson Church insists it is open to believers and nonbelievers alike.

In Boston's Negro ghetto of Roxbury, the Blue Hill Community Church brings together people from a wide spectrum of racial, religious and class lines into a congregation where, on a given Sunday, "anything can happen." An impromptu discussion on some pressing local issue may replace the sermon; the anthem might be a pentecostal tune on the muted trumpet of a member who makes an irregular living playing gigs with a small combo. The congregation sings a mixture of spirituals, freedom songs and traditional hymns. Once a month the congregation celebrates a Negro equivalent of the Jewish Passover, dining on collard greens and fat back, reliving some chapter in the long struggle for equality and celebrating the "story of freedom from Moses to Meredith." The atmosphere is relaxed and open. A white coed studying at a ritzy nearby women's college often attends with her Negro boyfriend. She says of Blue Hill that "it's the only place we go together where I don't feel stared at."

The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D. C., differs from both Judson and Blue Hill, but it is a pioneer in its own way. Founded by Newton G. Cosby, a former Southern Baptist Army chaplain who survived the battle of Bastogne, the Church of the Saviour is famous for its coffeehouse, "The Potter's House," where part of the congregation worships weekly over espresso and muffins, using a give-and-take discussion format. Since its establishment, over 100 similar coffeehouses, sponsored by churches, have sprung up across the country.

There are numerous other pilot congregations in various cities. They vary widely from one another, but what they seem to have in common is a zest for experimentation in forms of worship, a zeal for social change in their communities and a lively openness to the secular world. As a rule they also share common experience of tension with parent ecclesiastical bodies. Some accept the misunderstanding and suspicion philosophically; others finally make the decision to go it on their own. Thus Judson Church has had a history of stormy relationships with its parent group, the Baptists, but it remains affiliated. Blue Hill is not officially recognized as a bona fide congregation by anyone. The Church of the Saviour has no interest in casting its lot with any denomination.

There is no doubt that we are living through the first stages of a new reformation of Christianity. This time the axis of altercation is not an internal Church affair, as it was in the 16th Century, but the vexing question of the proper relationship between the Church and the secular world. Only in terms of this epochal upheaval in the whole Church can the widely publicized "death-of-God" movement be understood. My own observation is that not many of today's radical Christian activists are very much interested in the movement. Some dismiss it as a seminary squabble blown up out of all proportion by the mass media. Others fear that tossing out the transcendent dimension to life that the idea of God implies leads to the loss of critical perspective on society and soon collapses into conservatism. Some Christian social radicals are annoyed by the God-is-dead movement because they believe it is playing into the hands of the mossbacks by diverting energy from Christianity's real job of struggling for peace and human freedom in the world.

My own view is that the death-of-God movement is at once an indictment of theology for its failure to evolve a credible theism for today and a symptom of the disintegration of a particular form of corporate religious life. Doctrines of God always reflect the hopes and self-images of particular societies. When social change erodes a traditional society, its gods either evolve so that they can order and inspire the new situation or they decay and make way for new images of hope and mystery. Is the God of Christianity dead? I think a judgment is premature. In the several millennia of its history, Biblical religion has shown a phenomenal capacity to develop and to adapt itself to extremely divergent cultures. The God-is-dead theologians are right when they tell us that all our existing images of God must go. But if they mean that man's resilient imagination can never come up with a new doctrine of God, then their position is unwarranted and even a trifle arrogant. From my point of view, whether we produce a new doctrine of God depends on whether Christians decide to live fully and unreservedly in the modern secular world, not on its edges. Whether God is dead or not is thus a question of action and not one of theoretical disputation.

The current vigorous movement of Christians out of cultic withdrawal and into energetic participation in the political and intellectual currents of the day will certainly call for reinterpretation of many traditional doctrines. People still have plenty of questions they would like to ask, if they thought there was anywhere to ask them. How and where do men come to terms with what is most important in life? Does the puny human enterprise have any significance in the bewildering vastness of celestial space? Is there anything beyond the sum total of our human strivings for which the name "God" is still applicable?

For me, the answers to these questions will not come from those who fearfully cling to archaic formulations the way little Linus clutches his security blanket. But neither will they come from those who trumpet the dissolution of deity and the extinction of faith. If they come at all, it will be from those who take the perilous risk of reconstruction and innovation, even in those matters that affect the deepest hopes and fears of man.