International Congregationalists

On the campus of Massachusetts' Wellesley College last week, 3,000,000 Christians were joined in a new world community. The decision was made by a thousand hot, hardworking delegates and visitors to the sixth International Council of Congregational Churches, the first gathering of worldwide Congregationalism in 19 years. The new community, called the International Congregational Council, will represent the denomination in 37 countries.

Canada is supplying the most churches --7,226--to the new group. The U.S. has the second greatest number, with 6,240, followed by India with 5,328*and the British Isles with 4,480.

"Fundamental Incompatibility." Elected moderator of the International Council was Dr. Douglas Horton, whose wife, the former Mildred McAfee, commanding officer of the WAVES during the war, retires this week after 14 years as president of Wellesley. Headquarters of the worldwide group will be in London. There, council affairs will be administered by Britain's genial Dr. Sidney M. Berry, whose new job as secretary of the organization carries a salary of $4,000 a year.

For eight days at Wellesley, Congregationalists debated resolutions and listened to speeches from their own and visiting churchmen. They heard New York's Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, railing against the Red-hunting temper of the times, urge that "Americans should call a halt before hysteria demands that sermons be submitted to Congressmen before delivery." They were reminded by Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that Christians "frequently wrongly and self-righteously" blame modern ills upon secularism without confessing that "some of the achievements of democratic society are secular in origin and were attained in the teeth of Christian opposition." They passed a hazy resolution citing the "fundamental incompatibility" between Christianity and "certain forms of communism."

Government by Discussion. They also provided the new Congregationalist International with a discerning statement of principles. "Our churchmanship," it read, "is inconsistent not only with any form of state totalitarianism but also government by the massman or the mere power of majorities. The rights of man as the child of God and the rights of minorities must be respected.

"We stand for political government by the discussion of free men and by fundamental consent. Because of this respect for the individual, which we learn from Christ and practice in our church meeting, we stand for political and religious freedom, for economic justice, for racial equality and for equality of the sexes. But we stand not less for the responsibility of every individual for the good of any fellowship of which he is a member."

*The large number of churches in Canada and India is accounted for by recent mergers of Congregationalists and other Protestant denominations to create the United Church of Canada and the Church of South India.

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