THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26719, 13 March 1948, Page 2

THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

NEWS OF THE CHURCHES

By A. L. Haddon

In Wichita, Kansas, the Roman Catholic Bishop and five of his clergy meet at a monthly dinner a similar number of Protestant ministers. The group is made up to about 20 men by inviting laymen from each group. Areas of possible co-operation and possible friction are frankly discussed and those concerned are very pleased with the results so far achieved. “If God Gives Us Time ”

The churches are not alone in preaching the need of moral renewal and religious realism. Three notable utterances of national leaders are worth bringing together as lay sermons on a common theme. Sir Carl Berendsen, New Zealand Minister to the United States said concerning the United Nations and world peace: “ Given time, if God gives us time, we can get a proper organisation if men will reason and not fiddle. It may well be that we are approaching a new climacteric in the affairs of men. I believe ihe problem to be solved is a moral one. Twice democracy was unready (fcr the aggressor’s raid) and had to buy time with the flower of its youth. That cannot happen again in these atomic days, when the first blow may well be the last. In our trembling hands to-day we hold nothing less than the fate of man. You and I can, if we will, determine whether the cloth of a man’s destiny will be the cloth of gold or a shroud. Preaching last Sunday evening in St. Paul’s, Wellington, to a congregation composed largely of university students, Sir Patrick Duff, High Commissioner for the United Kingdom, insisted that each one as a citizen of a community, needed a spiritual basis to fulfil that citizenship. “Civilisation isn’t merely a high standard of material comfort—though many people misguidedly think so,” Sir Patrick said. “All this sickness of the world to-day is at bottom spiritual, and in the things of the spirit we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. One of the mistakes of the modern age seems to lie in hoping to produce through political action the results that can be achieved only by moral action. We have been concentrating our attention on economics and politics instead of on morals and on what is the basis of all morals—religion. There is a definite danger to-day, as Sir Stafford Cripps recently said, that democracy will die out because we are failing to give it the soul without which it cannot survive. We have been trading on our reserves accumulated by centuries of Christian learning and Christian teaching which is still a guiding light in matters of morality. But we have come to the point where the source of energy to supply it is in danger of giving out, We are allowing the spiritual basis of our civilisation to perish. Many educational institutions are content to be places where minds are filled but souls are starved.” Telephones without receivers and cars without steering wheels were unsuccessful and unsafe, the speaker continued. “The trouble about the present age is not that it has got too little knowledge, but that il has got too little morals. Guided by knowledge alone, humanity has stumbled to the very brink of irrevocable catastrophe. Scientific achievements have brought us through chemistry into the possibility of wholesale poisoning by gas; through biology and biochemistry into the even greater horrors of artificially induced pestilence; through physics into the presence of the atomic bomb. All our progress in knowledge drives us on faster and faster to an increasing delirium of insecurity. Why? What Is missing in civilisation’s latest 1948 model mosthighly streamlined, most high-powered car? Can it be—the steering wheel? Think where you are going.' For the sake of your own personality, for the sake of your fellowship in a community, remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.” In Denmark Too

Copenhagen Church leaders have presented to Parliament an appeal for action to relieve the housing shortage. The ministers state that in their daily work they see much of the distress and unhappiness brought on the people by the desperate housing conditions. In particular, overcrowding into small flats results in a moral and spiritual burden.* Lack of space at home obliges young people to spend their leisure hours in the streets and in public houses. Young couples must marry with prospect of no better accommodation than a room in an already overcrowded flat. Such conditions, the ministers declare, constitute a destructive attack on the core of the life of the community, the home, and the family. Into All the World Last month the well-known Dutch missionary leader, Professor H. Kraemer, took up his duties as director of the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, Geneva, after many years of fruitful service at the venerable university of Leyden. The task of the institute is to train Christians for work all over the world. It is pioneer work of ecumenical education and renewal. Dr Visser’t Hooft, secretary of the World Council of Churches, said that no branch of work has such opportunities as that of planned training for evangelism, for which it is essential to have “an intellectual, theological, and ecumenical conscience.”