Atlanta Daily World

Launch Movement To Mobilize Church Men

NEW YORK - A nationwide interdenominational movement to mobilize 10,000,000 men in Christian service to church and community has been formally launched with high hopes of its leaders that it may become a vitally significant development in America's religious history.

Nine months of planning and preparation was brought to fruition at Cincinnati, Oct 6-7 with the formal inauguration of United Church Men of America, dedicated to uniting men of many denominations in giving practical expression of their allegiance to Jesus Christ.

Many laymen's movements have been launched in America but never before has any had the sponsorship that has created United Church Men. First church sponsored movement of its kind aims to enlist rank and file church members across denominational lines in a lay ministry to assist pastors in 147,000 churches. It has the backing of virtually all the major Protestant churches and four Eastern Orthodox communions.

United Church Men of America.

under the lay leadership of Chairman Lem T. Jones, Kansas City candy manufacturer, and a board of managers of 262 churchmen from virtually every state in the union-will operate as a general department of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

The church men's organization is the "opposite number" to another general department of the National Council-United Church Women. The latter, now more than 1800 local councils of church women, had been operating for ten years as a separate interdenominational organization when its program was merged in the National Council of Churches. The blue-print for United Church Men was written into the constitution of the National Council when it was constituted at Cleveland last November by 29 Christian churches, embracing more than 31,000,000 church members.

In mobilizing laymen, a start will be made in 1952 at mass meetings in 18 key U. S. cities. Plans for the meetings, designed to help laymen organize local councils of church men, were approved by the Board of Managers of the United Church Men in two-day business sessions in Cincinnati. The sessions were climaxed by a colorful dedicatory service in Taft Auditorium Sunday night attended by 1,500 church people from Cincinnati and nearby cities.

The interdenominational church men's movement starts off with the backing of the 29 communions, 16 church-sponsored laymen's organizations and the best wishes of the nation's top church, government and military leaders.

To the 80 members of the Board of Managers who came to Cincinnati from 26 states and the district of Columbia, messages were sent by Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, president of the National Council. President Truman, General Matthew B. Ridgway, American commander of United Nations forces in Korea, and many others.

Bishop Sherrill, who also is presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, expressed hope that "the deliberations in Cincinnati will bear great fruit in the spiritual life of the Christian Church."

President Truman, who attends a Baptist Church in Washington, urged United Church Men to "turn the hearts and souls of men from rancor and hatred to love and the spirit of brotherhood."