Methodists: The Challenge of Fortune

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Integration-now Methodists regard Kennedy as a reactionary on the racial issue because he shudders at the thought of Northern Methodists picketing churches in Jackson. Kennedy believes that men's hearts as well as church law must be changed if integration is to work—and he has quietly managed to do some of both in his own area.

Last year he appointed a Negro pastor to a white congregation in Tucson, and he has pledges from more than 50 churches that they will accept any minister he assigns, regardless of color.

The Reluctant Caboose. Kennedy agrees that "the church has many weaknesses," but he also believes that the church has many strengths, and among them is the rules-laden organization that so many younger ministers complain about. To Kennedy, the right use of organization can foster successful evolution instead of schism-creating revolution. Methodism, he says, is a "strange combination of discipline and freedom—and it is the discipline that makes the freedom possible." Wesley's instinct for order was wise, he argues, "because nobody stands alone. We're a connectional church—and you just can't be a Christian standing alone."

In their actions, if not in their words, many of Methodism's modern rebels are halfway willing to concede Kennedy's point. "We look to the church to lead and often find it a reluctant caboose to the train of history," says the Rev. John Russell Jr., a chaplain at M.I.T. "The amazing thing, in the face of all that we have seen to be wrong, is the stark fact that we have not quit." And instead of abandoning the church, they have stayed to set it on a rightful course.

Serious Theology. It was Asbury's stern belief that "the saddlebags are the best schooling for traveling preachers." Today, says the Rev. Walter Vernon of the church's Board of Education, Methodism is "taking theology more seriously." The Methodists have no Tillich or Barth, but they have seldom before had so many competent and respected thinkers to boast about. Among them: Ecumenist Albert Outler, a Methodist observer at the Vatican Council last year, and radical young (37) Systematic Theologian Schubert Ogden.

Methodist seminaries—notably Drew in New Jersey, Southern Methodist's Perkins, and Claremont in California —are almost interdenominational in faculty and student membership, and are wide open to the study of fresh currents in modern theology. Last month, for example, Drew imported a number of ranking European thinkers for a seminar on hermeneutics—the science of reinterpreting the Bible's message for contemporary man. Out of this environment is emerging a new generation of preachers who sometimes annoy their elders by their contempt for church routine, but please them by their sense of commitment. "If they stay in the church," says one seminary professor, "at least they know why they are there."