Fellowship Church

One day four years ago, Dr. Howard Thurman, dean of the chapel and professor of Christian theology at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, got an unusually challenging letter. It was an invitation to help start an interracial, interdenominational church in San Francisco. There was no assurance that the colored people would take to the idea, or that white San Franciscans would approve. The pay would be negligible. Before long, Thurman had left Howard, where he had been twelve years, and was on his way to the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples.

"The Strangest Thing . . ." In San Francisco last week some 250 men & women crowded into Fellowship Church's rented meeting hall. Half were white, more than a third were Negro, the rest Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos. Their religious backgrounds were also multicolored: Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians and many who claimed no church at all. The service last week was divided into two parts--half an hour of meditation, then 40 minutes of preaching and hymns.

Broad-chested Pastor Thurman spoke quietly in his rich baritone. "There is in each of us an innermost center," he began. "When we are concerned with our business and the details of living, this is difficult to discover . . . During these half hours together, let us enter into this experience and quiet . . ."

The silence seemed vibrant. From the street outside came the occasional voices of pedestrians. A cable car clanged at the corner. An air compressor muttered in the distance. A plane growled overhead. When the half hour was over, newcomers moved into empty seats for the second part of the service. Said one of them: "It was the strangest thing, the quiet when I came in . . . like coming into a cathedral."

No Dumping Ground. The church's first congregation numbered a scant 25 souls and was located in a section crammed with Negro war workers. Thurman persuaded them to move. "Until we became strong enough to have a character of our own, I thought we'd better get out of the atmosphere," he explains. The last thing he wanted was for the experiment to develop a settlement-house aura or become "a dumping ground for do-gooders who would get an uplift once a week by coming into the Negro community and helping a struggling interracial activity. I wanted people to come because of the contribution it makes to their lives."

During its first two years, Fellowship Church was sustained by an annual grant of $3,600 from the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church (Northern). Now one-third of its $19,000 yearly budget is contributed by the congregation, the rest by friends and 185 "national associates" (who include such kindly lights as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the United Council of Church Women). In addition to his white Co-Pastor Robert Meyners, Thurman is assisted by a Nisei Methodist who preaches once a month.

Last winter, Thurman feels, the experiment really came of age. With some misgivings he had gone to serve as visiting lecturer in philosophy and religion at the University of Iowa. When he returned he found that the congregation had stopped calling it "Fellowship Church" or "the church" and had begun to call it "our church." Says he: "Now comes the temptation to say, 'We have a very nice atmosphere here--let's freeze it.' "

No Buttons. Busy Dr. Thurman works night & day to keep it thawed out. He spends half his time in counseling, has conducted ten seven-week study groups during the past four years--mostly on mysticism as a dynamic source of action.

"Our hardest job," he says, "has been to keep our church from becoming a social whip. The radicals bear down, saying we are not in there fighting. Others want us to become an organization, a placement bureau, a mission that gets people jobs and gives away shoes." Thurman recently approved the decision of a member not to wear his Wallace button while welcoming people to church. "We are a religious group," he insists. "It is important that we give strength to people working on interracial problems, but the interracial character of our own group is becoming the least significant part of it ... We have remained a church."

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