Is Relief Enough?

Hours after Hurricane Fifi slammed into Honduras, a crew met at a New Windsor, Md., warehouse and assembled 1,000 Ibs. of children's clothing, 3,000 blankets, and enough water-purification tablets and drugs to protect a good-sized city against epidemic. The goods were airlifted at once to Miami, then flown to Honduras.

Such emergency aid, along with a variety of regular relief and economic-development projects, has made Church World Service by far the most popular and best-funded ($9 million a year) program of the National Council of Churches. This fall C.W.S. is for the first time soliciting gifts from the general public via ads on 20 TV stations and in Reader's Digest.

C.W.S. is winning another sort of fame, however, as the latest agency to be swept up in the battle within Protestantism over social-action methods. According to one combat-fatigued C.W.S. staffer, the issue is "whether the National Council is going to radicalize us out of existence."

The behind-the-scenes struggle burst into public view last June when the Rev. Eugene Stockwell, head of the council's overseas division, suddenly removed C.W.S. Director James Mac-Cracken, 52, a respected, tough-minded Presbyterian layman, who had held the post for nine years. Personalities and bureaucratic infighting played a major role in the MacCracken firing with three days' notice, but a basic dispute over philosophy brought things to a head. The day before he acted, Stockwell had met with the committee of denominational officials that oversees C.W.S. and in effect accused MacCracken of foot dragging on new policies for C.W.S.

What Stockwell wants and MacCracken resisted is the addition of political emphases to traditional relief work. Using the latest ecumenical Newspeak, Stockwell urges a major commitment to "justice/liberation/systemic change concerns" and also "education/ conscientization programs" aimed at U.S. churchgoers. Behind the impasto of jargon is the basic idea that traditional relief and development programs serve as a mere "Band-Aid" and fail to remove the political causes of poverty.

In the past, such sticky problems have been the task of other agencies. Those familiar with recent ecumenical trends assume that Stockwell, who was a Methodist missionary to Uruguay when political "liberation" theology first arose there, wants to get C.W.S. involved in direct political and intelligence work overseas, including support for armed revolutionaries, if necessary. Stockwell denies this. As for "conscientization," he thinks that C.W.S. should consider going beyond standard promotion of its work and also expose grass-roots Protestants to "liberation" thinking.

Pull Out. The denominational overseers so far appear to have stonewalled all pressures to change C.W.S., but the debates continue as they seek a successor to MacCracken. There is even talk that C.W.S. might leave Stockwell's department or pull out of the National Council in order to preserve its longstanding strategy.

The dispute has flared anew with the publication in the Christian Century of an article by two young Methodist activists endorsing what they understand to be the Stockwellian approach. They argue that C.W.S. has an implicit political bias of its own, "reinforcing" U.S.

foreign policy and preserving the political status quo in countries where it operates. Since C.W.S. funds are limited, they think that money should be used to help poor people acquire power and change the systems that created their poverty--even though this new policy is likely to result in "lower income, criticism, even ostracism" for C.W.S.

Traditionalists respond that such a tack would not only cut C.W.S. income from the local offering plate but also cause governments to kill desperately needed programs, and even endanger the lives of C.W.S. field workers. MacCracken, the sixth top official ousted by the National Council this year, thinks that social-action Protestants want to politicize C.W.S. because their own programs are floundering and ill-financed.

Such pressures on C.W.S. will persist, he predicts, and spread to Roman Catholic and World Council of Churches relief agencies. If so, the politics of hunger could become as big a problem for the churches as hunger itself.

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