For the Defense

"The enemies of the National Council of the Churches of Christ are highly visible and extremely vocal." So the current issue of the Christian Century begins its lead editorial--a spirited defense of the National Council that quotes liberally from another defense of the N.C.C., in the July issue of the Southern California Presbyterian.

So much defending bespeaks a lot of attacking, and the N.C.C. has indeed become a prime target of the stepped-up offensive of such ultraconservative fringers as the John Birch Society and the Circuit Riders, who accuse the National Council of 1) being a kind of superchurch run by a clerical coterie of fuzzy-minded pinkos and Red infiltrators, 2) speaking for its members without consulting them, and 3) making pronouncements in favor of admitting Red China to the U.N., opposing the Bricker Amendment, and abolishing the House Un-American Activities Committee.

All these charges are untrue.* The National Council of Churches is a federation of 34 Protestant and Orthodox communions with a total membership of some 39 million. At the community level, the N.C.C. is represented by 954 local and state councils of churches. Member denominations elect their representatives on the N.C.C.--clerical and lay--according to their own procedures. Council policies are established by the General Assembly, consisting of 443 clergymen and 251 laymen, meeting every three years, and the General Board, composed of 166 clergymen and 90 laymen, meeting three times a year. Through these bodies, the council speaks to, rather than for, its membership "on matters of ethical, moral or religious concern."

The stands that the N.C.C. has actually taken on such matters sound more like the work of political platform writers than of revolutionaries: against segregation; against "the evils, the violence and the violation of human rights by communist and other tyrannies"; in favor of international aid and trade, collective bargaining, the United Nations, freedom of speech, and religious instruction outside the public schools.

Mission to Millionaires. To put the National Council's case to conservatives, N.C.C. leaders rejoice in their first layman president, Columbus-born Industrialist Irwin Miller, 52, elected last winter (TIME, Dec. 19) for a three-year term.

A member of the Disciples of Christ and onetime graduate student at Oxford who reads his Bible in Greek, Miller is also a moneymaking tycoon with a personal fortune that tops $100 million, the owner of a company (Cummins Engine) that builds more truck diesels than any other on earth, plus a bank, a cornstarch company and a chain of supermarkets. When he speaks to businessmen, they listen. Currently conducting his own mission to millionaires. Miller has spoken with effect to groups in Manhattan, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Phoenix and Amarillo.

Miller's mission is apparently long overdue. In Phoeni, when he sat down recently for dinner with 20 top Phoenicians, the atmosphere, says Mayor Sam Mardian, "was antagonistic." But when the evening was over, the climate was noticeably warmer. Not that everyone was convinced. Says State Republican Chairman Stephen Shadegg, strategist and speechwriter for Senator Barry Goldwater: "I still think that the church should not apply itself to political situations that have merit on both sides." But Mayor Mardian summed up the consensus: "If Miller is head of the N.C.C., it can't be as bad as it's been looking in the press. He's active in politics, a conservative, and has evidently been raising money for the Republican Party."

Fighting Fire with Fire. Miller prefers to base his arguments not on respectability by association but on hard Christian reasoning. Speaking to a group of business leaders in Chicago last month, he said: "There exists in this nation today a state of mind, a state of fear, which advocates fighting our great threat by spreading distrust, by setting man against man, by abandoning our ancient foundation of freedom, the presumption of innocence, and by substituting in its place the wild assertion, 'fighting fire with fire' . . . There is another way to fght. too. The church proposes to fight our great enemy by pursuing her ancient course, by attacking and eliminating our own evils and our remaining imperfections, by perfecting our society, by encouraging men and women to trust each other, to behave responsibly toward each other and toward the world, by bringing to pass here and now a way of life that will not have to be 'sold,' a way of life so incomparably superior and happier and more just that the alien virus cannot possibly establish itself within us."

To that end, said Miller, "the most important institution which can ever exist in this state or nation is the church of Jesus Christ--active, not asleep; courageous, not intimidated; vocal, not silent on sensitive matters; concerned with the whole of man's life--personal, family, business, community, national."

* Toughest to refute is the charge on Red China,, which is based on a 1958 meeting of the Fifth World Order Study Conference, a body that meets under the auspices of the N.C.C. but does not necessarily represent its views. At this Study Conference meeting, a resolution was passed urging the U.S. Government to reconsider the recognition of Red China and its admission to the U.N.

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