Methodist President Discusses Religious Approach To Politics

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27499, 5 November 1954, Page 10

Methodist President Discusses Religious Approach To Politics

PoUtici could not be eeparated from the Christian Church’s message, because politicians now touched lite at every point and made decisions Which a responsible community must watch and check, said the Bev. C. O. Hailwood in his presidential address at the opening of the annual conference of the Methodist Church in New Zealand at the Durham street Methodist Church last evening. The minister of the Christian church too often failed to be an expert in knowing the complex world; most ministers were only hack observers, because that was all they had time to be, he said. Mr Hailwood suggested that a social research bureau be set up i» the church so that ministers could be given more authentic information than they had time to acquire by themselves.

Strenuous thinking was specially needed in two fields—in breaking free' from prevailing self-righteousness and in considering war, which was now presenting the church with one of her most decisive tests, he said. “It is not easy to get outside selfrighteousness,” he said. “Keen religious insight and fine moral coprage are required to strip off the warm robes of illusion and to shiver under naked truth; Conscience easily becomes the Accomplice of self-interest; it takes a brave, man first to disillusion himself and then to disillusion others.

“Pressures of Opinion” “In a day when honest thinking is desperately needed, it is difficult to come by,” said Mr Hailwood. “The pressures of standardised opinion and of self-preservation are around us and within us all the time, and are all the more deadly when we are unconscious of their power. Selfknowledge and consequent repentance are a necessary condition of growth.” Mr Hailwood said Western nations

should remember—and it was part ot their self-righteousness that they did not often remember—that the world’s 19 richest countries had to keep only 16 per cent, of the world’s population on 66 per cent, of the world’s total income, while the 15 poorest countries kept 50 per cent, of the population on only 9 per cent, of the world’s total income. Because of these facts there was no need to wonder why communism existed. The sins and errors of communism needed exposing and it was part of the church; s task to do this, but it needed also to expose itself to certain shafts of truth that were in communism. , In 30 years, communism had achieved a transformation of the globe rarely equalled previously, and too often the church had spent more time than it should “doing chores ih the ecclesiastical kitchen,” he said. With the creation of the H-bomb and its diabolical companions, the church should conrider whether or not the terms ” a just war” and “a war of liberation” had now lost most of their meaning, he said. The practice of modern war created so many more and worse injustices than those which provoked the conflict, that these ). arises were very much a contradiction in terms. ”he church would have to consider the impasse in which the governments of the world found themselves, Mr Hailwood said. Governments were trapped between grim alternatives of appeasement and world suicide. Another war could send the welfare state, the Soviet system and th® American way of life into a common °“<2hristian conviction and enlightened self-interest are agreed on the need for a warless world. In this situation lie both perils and advantages, but for the church a special oppoi'tunity,” Mr Hailwood said.