Methodists Convened

In cavernous Minneapolis Auditorium one day last week, the 766 delegates to the Quadrennial General Conference of the Methodist Church, representing more than 9,000,000 Methodists, stood up and applauded. Reason for their enthusiasm: the convention's solution of the most indigestible problem with which they had been faced. The problem: what to do about the Methodists' Central Jurisdiction, a nongeographical division which contains only Negroes, and thus represents a sort of segregation within the church. The solution: a constitutional amendment which will allow the Central Jurisdiction to be dissolved gradually. The conference also created a commission to study other ways of promoting greater interracial brotherhood within the church, and elected U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor J. Ernest Wilkins, a Negro, as new president of the church's powerful Judicial Council, so-called "supreme court" of U.S. Methodism. Other conference actions:

P:Adopted a report condemning discrimination as "unfair and un-Christian."

P:Voted (389 to 297) to grant full rights of the clergy to women. Until now, women have been limited to Methodist ordination (there are currently some 350 women ministers); ministerial membership in annual conferences and assured appointments to churches have been denied them.

P:Called for a return to prohibition and applied a rhetorical axe to the liquor trade: there is "a growing practice of permitting the sale of alcoholic beverages through drug and grocery stores, in a deliberate attempt to win the housewife as a customer"; liquor "impairs tenderness of conscience."

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