by James H. Moorhead and Frederick J. Heuser, Jr.

From Journal of Presbyterian History, Volume 81, No. 4, Winter 2003

Today few people know much, if anything, about the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, a group spawned in Wales by the revivals of the eighteenth century and brought to America by immigrants in the nineteenth. A small but vibrant religious body in the United States, the Calvinistic Methodists, theologically closer akin to Presbyterian than to the better-known Wesleyan Methodists, contributed important figures to Presbyterianism—for example, William Henry Roberts, who held the office of Stated Clerk of the General Assembly in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A for over thirty-five years. The group ultimately merged with the PCUSA in 1920. D. Densil Morgan surveys the life and career of Llewelyn Evans, one of Wales’s gifts to the American church and a professor in Presbyterian Lane Seminary for many years. Through the lens of this one life, Morgan shows how the theological issues that were rending American Presbyterianism in the late nineteenth century found echo among the Calvinistic Methodists.

Jill K. Gill likewise uses a single life to illumine larger questions. She examines the career of Robert Bilheimer, a Presbyterian ecumenist who from 1966 to 1974 directed the International Affairs Commission at the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC). The NCC is sometimes caricatured as an activist organization unambiguously liberal in theology and politics. The NCC, Gill notes, is “often cited as an example of a liberal organization that injured itself by alienating and insulting conservative laity through its activity on sociopolitical issues.” The point missed by that description—but supplied in Gill’s case study of Bilheimer—is that the so-called liberalism of the NCC was far from monolithic and was riven by disagreements over the extent to which it should engage in issue advocacy or emphasize the building of theological understanding. Thus the story of Bilheimer helps place in historical perspective some of the difficulties that have plagued the Council in recent decades.

This issue presents two brief historical sketches. R. James Henderson tells of two Elias Boudinots—the one a noted statesman and philanthropist in the early republic, the other a leader in the Cherokee nation—and shows the relationship between the two. Harold F. Smith recounts how Missouri’s Park College (now University) and its president, William L. Young, withstood great public pressure to receive as students a handful of the Japanese Americans whom the government had relocated in the early 1940s.

This issue provides several other useful features. “Celebrating a Church’s Anniversary” is a practical guide to the preparations for an observance of a church anniversary. “Our Documentary Heritage” highlights the Presbyterian Historical Society’s rich holdings of various translations and editions of the Bible. We observe also a significant milestone from forty years ago. In 1963 as the civil rights movement attained new visibility with the March on Washington, the United Presbyterian Church committed itself more deeply to the solution of America’s racial dilemma when its General Assembly established the Commission on Race and Religion and when Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake was arrested on the Fourth of July with a group attempting to integrate a “whites only” amusement park.

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