STATEMENTS ‘NONSENSE’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31168, 19 September 1966, Page 1

STATEMENTS ‘NONSENSE’

(New Zealand Press Association/

DUNEDIN, September 18.

Statements made in Auckland by the Association of Presbyterian laymen were inaccurate, the Rev. D. W. Storkey said in a sermon in Knox Church, Dunedin, today.

The charge by the breakaway body that the Presbyterian Church was controlled by a hierarchy biased towards unbelief” was pure nonsense, Mr Storkey said.

“To suggest that an ununbelieving hierarchy runs

our church is an insult to a great number of godly men and women who have given the church they love the utmost devotion of their lives, and from all walks of life and shades of theological opinion have administered its affairs,” he said. In an advertisement appearing in newspapers throughout New Zealand, the association says that its first objective will be “the aiding of the church in restoring confidence in its theological training and in maintaining sound doctrine.” It says also that the association “will continue in existence as a permanent rallying point for lay opinion and Christian enterprise by men of the church.”

Mr Storkey said nobody who had attended a General Assembly could fail to have noted that if any group seemed to have been acting as a pressure group, its Cause was endangered from the start. “The description of assembly elders as satellites with no real doctrinal knowledge is a cruel falsehood,” he said. “I welcome the increasing interest laymen are taking in the church’s faith and witness and can envisage a laymen’s association as playing an important role in the church’s life. “Doubtless there are in the ranks of the Auckland group fine Christian men whose one desire is to defend truth. I am as concerned as the most dyed-in-the-wool conservatives that in our endeavours to express the gospel in ways and words intelligible to modern man, we must not offer him a substitute for it.”