OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

The Christian Chronicle, one of our media out of Nashville, announces that the office of public information of the United Nations has approved the Church of Christ as a non-government organization of that body. It is no particularly big deal, but it does allow some of our workers access to the UN facility in New York. I noted that in this particular news item we were referred to consistently as Churches of Christ with the capital “C”, while the rest of the news stories just as consistently reverted to the more kosher small “c”. The small “c” is the rule with us because of our claim to be undenominational. I presume that in the United Nations application we were suddenly transformed from churches of Christ to Churches of Christ, a kind of flirtation with denominational status. Logic would have it that if a group bears a distinctive name and is indeed named, then it has to be a denomination, for that is what the term means. If we choose to be undenominational, then we have to be unnamed. I am not nearly as interested in our being undenominational, which is probably well nigh impossible, as I am in our being nonsectarian, which is certainly ours for the asking.

In the Houston Post of July 16 an Associated Press story told of how Mr. and Mrs. A. A. Boone, of Nashville, were withdrawn from by the Granny White Church of Christ over a year ago, but only now made public. They are the parents of Pat Boone, who sometime earlier was excluded from the fellowship of the Inglewood congregation in California, along with his wife Shirley. The news release said the reason for Mr. and Mrs. Boone’s exclusion was that they “strayed from the plain teachings of the Bible,” according to the church. Archie Boone was a lifetime member of the Granny White church, serving as deacon 24 of his 60 years of membership. The press may not yet know that Margie Corlew, Pat’s sister who lives in Dyersburg, Tenn., has also been withdrawn from by the Church of Christ where she has been a member, along with her husband. Margie must be an alert gal, for when the elders approached her with a list of questions to be answered, she responded with, “What grade do I have to make to pass?” All the Boones are convinced that the family is being driven from the church for one basic reason: sympathy for Pat and Shirley. And if you want to get a divorce, whether from your wife or a brother in the Lord, you can always find a reason. I view all this as sheer ecclesiastical madness, an insanity that is not even mentioned among Baptists and Methodists. The way our people have treated the Boones is a disgrace that makes Watergate look like a fifth grade spit-wad fight.

Canon Leonard Schiff of Birmingham, England has written in Expository Times of how Mahatma Gandhi has changed our thinking in the twentieth century. His approach to life was a simple one and yet he became a vital part of some of the weightiest issues of our age. Impressed by the Sermon on the Mount and the role of Jesus as an aggressive non-violent reformer, he moved close to Christianity, though he always looked to Hinduism as his faith. Yet there is that religion that transcends all systems, he said, and this is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself and its Maker. But religion can never be a private matter, for to purify ourselves we must purify our surroundings. So he involved himself in politics though at heart he was non-political. In these days of Watergate these words from Gandhi take on special meaning: “If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake, from which one cannot get out, no matter how much he tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake. I have been experimenting with introducing religion into politics.”

He was a man of humor. A female devotee tried to touch his garment. He responded by boyishly pulling her nose, assuring her that he was no god, but adding, “If the truth were known I am tempted more than most men, but perhaps less than those who are sinners.” He was touched by Newman’s hymn Lead Kindly Light and thought that line “One step enough for me” to be his rule of life. Schiff thinks he changed our century mainly in terms of social pluralism, religious diversity and race-prejudice. His insistence on detachment and non-possession is also a positive challenge to our acquisitive society.