For a Coherent Pattern

Regional planning for Protestant churches got its first big boost last week. The starting point: two able reports on population shifts and religious needs around Philadelphia, made at Allentown, Pa. to the annual Methodist Conference for the Philadelphia area. Impressed, the delegates from the conference's 322 churches and missions voted a ten-year, $250,000 program by way of starter.

What the program aims to accomplish:

1) Start new churches in growing areas.

2) Help small, strategically located parishes, already started, to grow faster.

3) Close or merge many a church in run-down residential districts, moving some to better spots "while there is equity remaining in their property" and salvaging the assets of others for new centres.

4) Build up scattered rural charges, discouraged by short-term pastorates, by subsidizing able young ministers to stay put three years or more.

5) Vitalize weak downtown and country churches by a "big brother" movement in which the stronger churches in the conference will share surplus leaders "who have grown portly from lack of spiritual exercise."

The reports were authored by the Rev. W. Vernon Middleton, pastor of Philadelphia's Covenant Methodist Church and secretary of the Philadelphia Missionary and Church Extension Society, and Dr. W. Galloway Tyson, who spoke for the conference's four district superintendents. Keynote--that oldtime revival-service vangelism is not enough--was struck by Minister Middleton. Said he:

"The churches of America must evangeize or die. There isn't any group in the city of Philadelphia which is adequately caching the multitudes for Christ. We must admit that the holding of evangeistic services in our churches will not meet his problem. Even such a united effort as he National Christian Mission, as valuable as that was, did not reach the masses if our population. . . . Sporadic efforts at revival services will no longer suffice--our efforts must be wider and more sustained. In the meantime, we recommend to our churches the absolute necessity of renewed effort to secure the absolute commitment of our members to Jesus Christ. In mathematics one-half plus one-half may equal one, but this formula will not obtain in religion. We cannot add two half Christians to make one effective Christian. When our churches have paid this price, then the wind of God will begin to blow again."

For a generation Protestant denominations in every big city have faced the problem of what to do with old churches in blighted neighborhoods and how to get new churches built in growing suburbs. Heretofore, congregations have had to meet the problem separately. Many a church has closed its doors or followed its flock elsewhere, but Mr. Middleton knows no previous instance of regional planning such as Philadelphia's Methodists now contemplate. Recommendations for merging or transferring a dozen churches are being studied, but the final decision in each case will still rest with the individual parishes.

"The church must study the city as a total picture and plan accordingly," said Dr. Tyson. Primarily urban and suburban in scope, the plan will also cover the country districts. Dr. Tyson reminded the 700 conference delegates that 76% of U. S. Methodist pastors and 65% of the 8,000,000 Methodist membership are in rural charges.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.