Bishop v. "Ecumaniacs"

A great debate is shaping up in U.S. Protestantism over the so-called Blake-Pike Proposal that the churches begin now to reunite, starting with an all-out merger of Methodists, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ (TIME, Dec. 19). Last week's contribution was a loud no, uttered in the Christian Century by Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy of Los Angeles.

Chilled Feet. Instead of deploring the fragmentation of American Protestants into 250-odd different denominations, Bishop Kennedy notes that U.S. church membership is at an alltime high. In addition to which, "I do not know a country in the world where the Christian churches are more vital and relevant than they are in the United States ... It just might be that our American pluralism is not our weakness but our strength."

Methodist Kennedy, whose own denomination merged its major branches in 1939 to become the largest U.S. Protestant body, feels that one big church would be no house of harmony. "Relatives who get along fine when they come together at Christmas often have a bad time of it when they all move into the same house. Some of the worst in-fighting I have observed was not between leaders of different denominations but between leaders of the same denomination."

The "ecumaniacs"--as Kennedy calls the extreme partisans of the ecumenical movement--overlook the fact that the bigger the church, the more ponderous the machinery. "It all sounds so spiritual and satisfying until a skeptic begins to think of all the administration involved. Then my feet get chilled. Let us face it: the only way an ecclesiastical institution the size of the Roman Catholic Church can function effectively is to be authoritarian. Is this our goal?"

Stimulation & Excitement. Bishop Kennedy cites the 1940 government-enforced merger of the Protestant churches in Japan and the formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925 to indicate that bigness bogged them down, while the church groups that stayed outside grew faster in the same territory and acted more effectively.

"I married a Presbyterian; I received my theological education in Congregational seminaries," says Bishop Kennedy. "My closest ministerial friends have been from other denominations as often as from my own. I do not feel that my church is religiously or theologically superior to other Christian churches. Indeed, there have been many times when Methodists were saved from being at ease in Zion because other churches were on the march.

"That the Christian church must be universal with doors open to all men is true. But the local fellowship will be made up of people who feel at home with one another, for religion is nothing if it is not personal . . . From where I sit, our present liberty and confusion is full of stimulation and excitement. I like it that way."

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