Church & Assembly Line

Forty-three student ministers quit their jobs last week. The jobs were at the mills and factory workbenches of such corporations as U.S. Steel, International Harvester and American Can. They quit them to return to their eschatology and homiletics, form criticism and patristics at ten theological seminaries around the country; but before they left they compared notes on a summer spent in investigating contacts between the church and the working man. Contacts, they decided, are pretty dim.

The seminarians' summer jobs reflected a trend that is belatedly gathering steam in U.S. Protestantism. Roman Catholic leaders have long made the working man a special concern; Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) was well known for his concern for the workers' cause. Except in mission work, most of the Protestant denominations have concentrated on the tending of middle-class flocks.

In 1950 Dean Marshal L. Scott of the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations started a ministers-in-industry course in Pittsburgh, and brought it last year to the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Since Dean Scott's course began, similar programs have been organized in Boston, New Haven and San Anselmo, Calif.

The Language Barrier. Dean Scott, 43, developed his work-study plan as a result of his own experience as pastor in Columbus, Ohio, from 1943 to 1945. "I was rudely awakened," he says, "to the need for ... a close-up understanding of how men in industry work, live and think."

A prime discovery of this summer's batch of seminarian-workers is the language barrier between pulpit and pew.

Early in the twelve-week course, at one of the three-times-a-week seminars in labor problems which they attended, a student asked a visiting labor leader: "What are the presuppositions on which your union policy is based?"

The union man looked blank. The seminarian innocently repeated his question in a somewhat louder voice. The man scratched his head. Then Dean Scott diplomatically asked the labor leader whether he understood the question. "Damned if I do," he replied.

Seminarian Stuart McLean of Yale Divinity School, who with Ed Bland of Princeton Theological Seminary worked in a steel plant, concluded that most of the men he met were far from understanding even such key words as "sin," "grace" and "redemption"--though he heard ministers glibly using the words to them as if they did.

The seminarians found a few heartening exceptions. One minister on Chicago's West Side enlivened his sermon by displaying two heroin needles; one dramatized the meaning of repentance by barking "Halt! Attention! About face! Forward March! Amen." Another likened the forgiveness of God to "the feeling of getting two or three machines off your back."

Rats & Dear Old Ladies. Many of the students felt that big-city Protestant churches were overdue for a change of attitude. "Fear of new groups seems to be the handicap to church expansion in some cases," said Paul Mehl, 25, of Union Theological Seminary. "Workingmen don't flock to support a church abounding with prejudices, traditions, and dear old ladies who call it 'their' church."

But the deficiency of the churches was not the only thing that Dean Scott's 43 young men (and twelve of their wives) took back with them from their summer's labor. Said one of them last week as he prepared to pack up for home: "I won't forget how tired a man gets after a day in the factory--or what it's like to go through an alley and see 3,000 rats."

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