OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

Since our last report Ouida has had a bout with the respiratory infection that she has periodically, but she is now well. It may be that this perennial problem is an allergy, so we will soon be checking that out. Since Mother Pitts left us we have begun to do things about the house that we had long postponed. We have repainted and recarpeted the upstairs, and we have moved back into our master bedroom which we had given to Mother Pitts. Ouida is now shopping for new curtains, bedspreads, the works. Moving the furniture for the carpet layers was the big job. We have now begun redecorating our kitchen, including new cabinets. We’ll soon be ready for you to come to see us, so long as you do not all come at the same time. I am as busy as I’ve ever been, and I love every minute of it. Apart from the usual routine with this paper, which is a full-time job itself, I am teaching two courses at our congregation, one course at Dallas Christian College, and I’ve just finished doing the study guide for the World Convention of Churches of Christ to be held in Long Beach in August. I am also revising my history on the Stone-Campbell Movement, which is now out of print. Ouida and I hope to get in some travel this year, together, which will be a welcomed change.

Research on the unchurched in our society by the Barna Research Group yielded some interesting facts: 70% of those who never go to church have a favorable impression of Christianity; 83% said there was a time in their lives when they went to church regularly; the unchurched are better educated, with one-third being college graduates; when asked why they did not go to church, the reasons were not strong, such as “no particular reason” or “uninterested.” The conclusion was that the unchurched are not interested because they don’t see enough value in church attendance to justify the commitment.

The Quaker Ave. Church of Christ in Lubbock, Tx., which is of the non-Sunday School persuasion recently hosted the city-wide Sunday evening service which the Churches of Christ of that city have twice a year. This kind of fellowship between Sunday School and non-SS churches could not have happened a few years back. The Quaker Ave. church is also reaching out to the poor and jobless of their city. Already burdened financially, it appeared that they could do little, but they decided on a special collection strictly “for the poor.” The first collection was $1200.00. After a report was made on how that money was used, the next offering was $1800.00 The leaders concluded that folk will sacrifice when they see that the money goes to a good cause and not simply to pay preachers and build buildings.

Harvard recently installed a new president, Neil Rudenstein. In a recent address he said, “If there ever was a time when certain kinds of human values, certain moral values, some spiritual values that transcend individual self-interest and group self-interest were needed, this surely must be such a time.” I spent several years at Harvard, but I never saw, heard, or met the president, but I always presumed he existed. But I don’t think the president back then, who as an agnostic scientist was barely tolerant toward his superstitious colleagues at the Divinity School where I studied, would have said what President Rudenstein said.

We sympathize with our sisters and brothers in the Disciples of Christ who went through a traumatic experience in the election of their General Minister and President (GMP) at their recent convention in Tulsa, which one leading Disciple described as “painful and conflictual.” To be elected GMP one must receive two-thirds of the delegate votes. Michael Kinnamon, an able seminary dean and a devoted brother with whom I have worked with delight, was the nominee of the church’s governing board, but he fell about one percentage point short of the necessary majority, receiving 3600 delegate votes or 65%. This was very disappointing to the majority who saw in Kinnamon a new beginning for the Disciples—“the hard and narrow way for the sake of Christ” as one pastor put it. Others fear “takeover politics” due to vigorous opposition to Kinnamon by the Disciple Renewal, a conservative movement within the church who were accused of busing in people to vote against the nominee (Would it have been OK to bus folk in to vote for the nominee?). Kinnamon was opposed mainly because of his liberal views on homosexuality, an issue that has now disturbed virtually every main-line denomination. An interim GMP, C. William Nichols, pastor of the First Christian Church in Decatur, IL., will serve until the General Assembly elects a full-term GMP at its next gathering in 1993. His first act was to send out a prayer that he hopes will be prayed in all the churches, which I will join the Disciples in praying, part of which is, “Help us always to remember that the church is yours—not ours—and that if your gracious spirit governs the church, that spirit will bear in us the fruit of love, joy, and peace.” The new moderator of the Disciples of Christ is a woman, Marilyn Moffett, a farmer from Waynetown, Indiana, who apparently presides without controversy.