Presbyterian Salt

Prospects seemed a bit brighter for reunion among the divided U.S. Presbyterians.* At the Northern Presbyterians' 163rd General Assembly in Cincinnati last week, the 880 "commissioners" (Presbyterian for delegates) voted for a nine-point program of cooperation among the three major bodies. The plan provides for "open forum" talks among the denominations, joint evangelistic projects, and "full and open discussion . . . among representatives of the three communions before any new work is opened, or any old church closed."

To head their church as moderator in the coming year, the Northern Presbyterians elected a longtime champion of denominational union, Kansas-born Dr. Harrison Ray Anderson, 58. A topnotch preacher who started out to be a sanitary engineer, then switched to the ministry and became a chaplain in World War I, he has served as pastor of Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church for the past 23 years. In his acceptance speech, Harrison Anderson denounced "the civic rottenness" that is blighting U.S. cities. "Let the Church of Jesus Christ become again the salt," he cried, "to be rubbed in--if necessary--until it smarts!"

In other actions, the assembly:

P:Received a report from a twelve-man special commission calling for a tightening of the marriage canon to require a candidate for remarriage to show evidence of 1) true penitence, and 2) a desire to do better.

P:Unanimously voted to ask Presbyterian congregations for a record-breaking budget of $13,429,210--a hike of $1,624,320 from last year.

P:Applauded Episcopal Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, president of the National Council of Churches, for a speech in which he declared that no single church body can, by itself, unravel the "disorder, chaos and confusion" of the times.

*U.S. Presbyterianism's three largest divisions are named to sound like the whole: the Northern Presbyterians officially call themselves the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (membership: about 2,500,000); the Southern Presbyterians are known as the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (membership: about 673,000); the United Presbyterian Church (membership: about 250,000) was formed in 1858 by a merger of two other Presbyterian bodies.

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