Religion: Church in the Asphalt Jungle

• Share

While commuter-country congregations are busy fund-raising for so-called plant expansion, their city cousins are trying to figure out how to use the plants they have. Sunday after Sunday, in thousands of soot-stained city churches, preachers look down on a mere scattering of worshipers: some big-city churches in the East report losing as many as 1,000 members a year. Last week 1,153 Methodist ministers and laymen gathered in Washington for a conference on the problem under the title, "Winning the Changing City for the Changeless Christ."

Churchmen should not be shy about showmanship, urged Psychologist Dr. James G. Ranck, lecturer in psychology and religion at Drew University. "The drive-in church, the mobile pulpit, the church in a restaurant, the nightclub for college students which conducts a lecture series on which theological school faculty and other clergy occasionally appear—all these and other psychological equivalents of the soapbox on the corner are suggestive of what can be done to take religion to marginal groups."

One thing wrong with many city churches. Dr. Ranck added, is that they are "ugly, dark and dirty ... In the city that never sleeps, lighting our churches is an important matter."

Some of the Methodist leaders wandered from the subject to such topics as segregation, anticlericalism and the growing religiosity of politicians. As usual, no one spoke more pungently than Methodism's old reliable baiter of capitalists. Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam of Washington. He is no more afraid of "creeping socialism." said Oxnam, than of "stumbling capitalism." Though Oxnam said he holds no brief for collective ownership, "I must face the fact that there is something radically wrong with so-called 'free enterprise.' The truth is that there are services that can be rendered more effectively by the people acting together. A few more eggheads in the automobile industry to supplant the blockheads who have designed our recent cars would be in our national interest. Who are the madmen who build cars so long they cannot be parked . . . and so powerful that no man dare use the horsepower available?"