C. & C. v. Goodwin Plan

The Congregational & Christian Church is a three-year-old merger of a stout body which stems from the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620, and a small left-wing Methodist sect formed in 1792. With a million-odd members in 6,000 churches, the C. & C. Church has a moderator but no ponderous machinery to run things from the top. With New England firmness the individual churches do their own thinking and talking. This church last week was the first to come out against the scheme of Chicago's Adolph Oettinger Goodwin to gear piety with business in such a way that church folk would get rebates for buying selected merchandise (TIME, Dec. 4).

In Evanston, Ill. met 250 C. & C. secretaries, State superintendents, mission board members, committee men and women. Dr. Charles Emerson Burton, general secretary, told them how income had gone down, how all the churches seemed prostrate with a "spirit of defeatism." The delegates voted to start a coin-box campaign for "a penny-a-meal-for-missions." But raising money, no matter how much needed, by helping businessmen sell their products, they could not go. The C. & C. church club women voted their protest against "exploitation of the women of the churches" by the Goodwin Plan or any other.

Most of the secular Press has ignored the Goodwin Plan. But the church Press has been explanatory and denunciatory, with the liberal Christian Century the most vigilant. Seizing upon the list of churchmen who endorsed the Goodwin Plan, the Christian Century got Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle of Evanston and Dr. Ralph Washington Sockman of Manhattan, both famed Methodists, to recant. Not to be shamed out of their support for this temple & trade hookup, however, were Episcopal Bishops George Craig Stewart (Chicago) and James Matthew Maxon (Tennessee); Methodist Bishops Francis John McConnell (New York) and Ernest Lynn Waldorf (Chicago).

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