Methodists at Work

The highest policymaking body of the Methodist Church is the General Conference, which meets every four years. Last week it was conference time again, and 720 clergymen and laymen assembled in San Francisco to determine the church's objectives between now and 1956.

Wearing identification badges (crimson and white for delegates, cardinal red for bishops), they filed into the Civic Auditorium to hear Nashville's Bishop Paul B. Kern make a keynote speech which reflected the views of the 70-man House of Bishops. Highlights: the bishops are against Communism, U.M.T., and "efforts [even among Methodists] to regiment thought and curb freedom of speech"; in favor of interracial brotherhood, the ecumenical movement, and a wider Christian social program. Said Bishop Kern: "Original Methodism was a bold and challenging defense of the rights of the underprivileged . . . This social concern is in our bloodstream."

Thereupon the delegates settled methodically to work in 16 committees, dealing with 1,500-odd recommendations that will occupy the conference. Among the more pressing and controversial subjects: P: A church survey commission, working with a firm of Chicago management engineers, has mapped out a radical streamlining of church agencies, suggested a coordinating council to make sense out of the welter of semi-autonomous church boards. P: A special commission has recommended that candidates for the ministry should no longer be obliged to sign a pledge against smoking.

P: Conservative Methodists are anxious to curb the unofficial Methodist Federation for Social Action, which has long taken an indulgent attitude toward Communism.

The Federation for Social Action is not likely to oblige gracefully. Two days before the conference opened, federation members held a conclave of their own. Said retired Bishop Francis McConnell, 80, the federation's longtime president, defending its sometime association with Communist-fronters: "How are we going to save the sinners without associating with them?" Continued Jack McMichael, 35, executive secretary and guiding spirit of the federation: "One of the biggest dangers in the world today is this passion for orthodoxy."

The federation presented resolutions of its own to the conference, 1) attacking the U.N. war effort in Korea as "a perversion" of its purpose as a peace instrument, and censuring the U.S. as "a permanent warfare state based upon a permanent war crisis"; and 2) suggesting that a Methodist "reconciliation commission" be sent to Soviet Russia.

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