This Week in Texas Methodist History January 3

 

Bishops Announce Mass Meetings to Promote New World Order, January 1944

 

 

There were still months of brutal warfare ahead when Methodist bishops announced mass meetings throughout the United States to promote a New World Order.  Today, the phrase “New World Order” has been appropriated by fringe conspiracy theorists, but to the Methodist bishops the phrase meant the evangelization of the entire world.  They foresaw a chance to create a Christian New World Order with the defeat of the Axis Powers if the peace terms were based on the Gospels rather than a punitive isolationism as had occurred after World War I.  The rallies, given the name, “The Coming Peace and the Prince of Peace,” had been authorized at the meeting of the College of Bishops in Princeton, New Jersey, held in December 1943.  The idea was promoted by the Secretary of the College of Bishops, G. Bromley Oxnam, widely known for his liberal idealism. 

 

The mass rallies were scheduled for the most prominent churches in each of the conferences and would be presided over by the area bishop. 

 

The designated churches for the January meetings  in Texas were

 

Trinity, El Paso

Polk Street, Amarillo,

First Houston

First Dallas

First Fort Worth

Travis Park, San Antonio

 

 

Each of rallies had speakers on the same four topics:

 

A Christian America

A Christian World

The Coming Peace

The Prince of Peace.

 

Speaker teams consisting of laity, bishops, and denominational staff provided the four speeches at each rally.  In Texas the visiting speakers included Bishop Edwin Lee (Singapore and Manila), Dr. Y. C. Yang (President of Soochow University in China).  Lee and Yang were both refugees who had experienced war in their homelands. 

 

 

The editor of the Southwestern Advocate wrote

 

The aim of the Crusade is to arouse eight million Methodists in the United States to a crusading fervor in behalf of a righteous peace and a Christian world.

 

The place of Methodists is, of course, not at the Peace Table.  Our place is at the mourner’s bench;  we are all sinners.    

 

All the rallies included a call for attendees to write their congressional representatives and urge them to support a peace based on the model of the Prince of Peace.