The Words of the Devlin Family
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The Words of the Devlin Family |
Dr.
Sills calls on the ministers to write letters to the President in
support of Father.
It's time to take to our pulpits, take out our sermon outlines, and get involved. I believe the church is a place where we have to give some education to our congregations. CAUSA has been an eye-opener for me, and if I am going to be any help to my congregation, I must know more about what CAUSA means. --
Rev. Jerry Gordon
Church of God,
Louisville, Kentucky
This spontaneous comment by a young black minister during a group discussion was descriptive of the effect the First Annual CAUSA USA National Convention in San Francisco had on its 400 participants.
Ministers have declared themselves ready to learn, to take responsibility and to get results.
The atmosphere was at its peak on the second evening of the March 4-8 convention when Dr. Donald Sills, executive director of the National Coalition for Religious Freedom, spoke unexpectedly on behalf of Father. "[The Unification Church members] have done everything in their power, ladies and gentlemen, to stir this nation. To no avail," he said. "Well, I for one have come to that state where 1 am mad as hell about it."
Dr. Sills, without the prior knowledge of Dr. Bo Hi Pak or the CAUSA staff, called for the assembled ministers to generate 100,000 letters of support for Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to be sent to his Washington office by March 31. Dr. Sills said he will then personally bring the collected letters to the President, or to Congress.
"It's about time you and I began to pay the price on this thing," he said. "What happened to our righteous anger, what happened to our commitment for one another? If you went to jail tonight, would you want us at your front door? You bet you would.
"I say to you on behalf of the coalition it's time we begin to stir up this nation and begin to move forward."
The coalition has received several hundred letters in the first week after the convention, and has found these early returns encouraging. "We are pushing the campaign at every engagement we are speaking at and are hoping for a balloon effect," says Mr. Sam Leming, field representative for the coalition.
"We have been wronged as a Christian community throughout the United States," says Mr. Leming. "If Rev. Moon serves his full time, we don't believe this is a victory for religion, but an encroachment on religion."
The main purpose of the San Francisco convention was to educate ministers to become proficient CAUSA lecturers or to enable them to use the material effectively in their sermons. The CAUSA lectures by Dr. Pak, Bill Lay, and Tom Ward have reached a high degree of professionalism. Their presentations were enhanced by a sophisticated visual display system that projected the material on a theater-size screen, and at one point made use of 18 different slide projectors controlled by a computer to present an overview of Father's life. A minority of the ministers objected to the presentation as proselytizing, but Dr. Pak defended it. "There is no way of separating the man from the movement," he said.
The system worked almost to perfection, except for one incident when technical difficulties held up the proceedings for an uncomfortable half hour. The lecturer discovered that he could continue by the old-fashioned method of lecturing from his notes. But participants generally agreed that the presentation was first-class. "I learned more in five days than I did in eight years in the university," said Rev. Homer Brown of Milwaukee.
The ministers also got a chance to hear from many of the outstanding conservative thinkers of the day during the lunch and dinner speeches. Dr. Joseph Churba, of the Washington-based Center for International Security, painted an ominous picture of the Soviet Union's recent successes in Latin America and the Middle Fast due to their superiority in strategic nuclear weapons. A more optimistic appraisal was taken by Dr. Jack Wheeler, president of the Freedom Research Foundation, who has lived with several groups of anti-communist guerrillas. He believes that the communist "wars of liberation" have lost their appeal, and there are currently eight active rebellions in the communist- controlled nations of Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
Other noted speakers were author Arnaud de Borchgrave, who was recently installed as editor-in-chief of The Washington Times; Dr. Everett Sileven, who received national attention as the target of efforts by the state of Nebraska to close his church school; and the grandfatherly Dr. Cleon Skousen, whose speech on the development of the Constitution v. as considered by many to be the highlight of the convention.
Said Rev. Jerry Gordon of Kentucky, "I think it's like going to the grocery store: you can find a lot there if you are buying."
A common difficulty with previous CAUSA conferences, according to Rev. George Raybold, an interdenominational minister from Pennsylvania, was that there was no time for group discussion and participation. "I was in one group session which included four expatriates from communist regimes, and they never had a chance to make their comments," he said.
Not so with the San Francisco convention. The agenda included two afternoon workshops with prominent moderators, such as former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver; Dr. Khalid Akram, spokesman for the Afghan freedom fighters; Washington Times syndicated columnist John Lofton Jr.; and Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media. The workshops gave the opportunity for the ministers to open a wide range of issues for discussion, and they were generally not shy about sharing their opinions with their fellow clergymen.
The convention also provided two meetings for each of the 13 CAUSA regions of the United States. And when two dozen church leaders get together to discuss a subject of common interest, something like Pentecost is likely to happen.
This is not to say that the convention was not without its traces of discord. There was almost no visible disharmony between members of the Unification Church and those of other Christian denominations. However, there was some disagreement between the liberal and conservative elements. A minority of ministers, while disavowing Soviet communism, viewed poverty and racism as a greater evil than Marxism-Leninism, and a very small fringe supported the Sandinista regime of Nicaragua and so- called liberation theology.
Yet this was a minor sidelight in what was otherwise an overwhelmingly solid united front against communism. "Your founder was right when he named your church, because I see unification here tonight," former Congressman George Hansen of Idaho, a Mormon, told the highly responsive dinner audience on the second night of the convention.
The one remaining question at the close of the convention seemed to be, "Where do we go from here:" When this question was brought up by one participant in the final meeting of Region One (New England), the Unification Church moderator suggested involvement in International Christianity United through Shared Action (ICUSA), but said that it was up to the participants themselves to come up with a viable formula.
Said Bento Leal, CAUSA regional coordinator, "I feel that we have reached a peak for national level activities. We now must go back and expand the grass roots. Many ministers are ready to go back and want to teach, and all the people here are adept at teaching two or three CAUSA lectures."
The Christian ministers seem to be willing and able to come up to the challenge. Most of the participating ministers pledged to bring their colleagues to the CAUSA conference in Chicago, which followed the San Francisco convention by only ten days. The Chicago conference in fact drew 350 participants -- about 50 more than the CAUSA staff had anticipated, according to CAUSA National Conference Coordinator Peter Steeghs.
The general feeling is that the CAUSA Ministerial Alliance is working, and working well. The ministers took home an expanded awareness of the dangers of communism, and an understanding that a movement united under Godism is advancing to defeat it. They were almost unanimous in signing a proclamation pledging their lives to the "noble imperative" of ending communism.
"It is not for CAUSA to return hate for hate; that is too simple. Anyone can do that," said Dr. Osborne Scott of the City College of New York. "Let us bring back the God of all -- including the God of the Russian people. As Jesus quoted from Isaiah, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives... to set at liberty those who are oppressed.