International Association for Religious Freedom

Max D. Gaebler

The IARF Congress in 1958 was held in Chicago, and with it began an association that has become a major part of my personal as well as my professional life. In those days Europe seemed to me more remote than Rwanda does today. So my eager curiosity reached a high pitch as I headed for Chicago with half a dozen other participants from Madison. We felt a special involvement since we were to host the IRF conference immediately following the Congress.

Though there had been three Congresses since the end of the war prior to Chicago, this one was planned on a scale to rival some of the great gatherings early in this century. Frederick May Eliot, President of the American Unitarian Association (AUA), had devoted all the resources at his command to assemble a stellar program and to attract as wide and varied participation as was then possible. Alas, he collapsed and died on the steps of All Souls Church in New York City only weeks before the Congress was scheduled to begin. By request of the Board of the AUA the Rev. Ernest Kuebler stepped into this gigantic void both as President of the AUA and as the designated candidate for the Presidency of the IARF.

Though Frederick Eliot’s absence cast a pall over the opening of the Congress, his careful planning produced an outstanding program indeed. Recalling the spirit of the memorable ‘World Parliament of Religions' held in conjunction with the Chicago ‘World’s Fair of 1893', the program had been designed to lift up the meeting of the world’s great religions. As religious liberals we felt it to be our unique opportunity — indeed our obligation — to get beyond the missionary mentality of earlier generations and to seek ways in which people standing in widely varied religious cultures might responsibly address the profound social, political and ethical issues raised by the experience of World War II.

We had the advantage of having within our own ranks members of the Brahmo Samaj, one of our founding groups, as well as the Japan Free Religious Association (JFRA), a small but remarkable organization under the energetic leadership of its founder, Dr. Shinichiro Imaoka. But for the Chicago Congress Frederick Eliot had searched far beyond our own limited ranks for inspiration.

Five major addresses had been scheduled, all of them to be held in the University of Chicago’s great Rockefeller Chapel. They were designed to be major public events, with the public at large invited to join the more than 700 Congress participants. These high anticipations were at least in some respects fulfilled.

Prof. Wilhelm Pauck, a distinguished church historian, opened the series, speaking eloquently from the perspective of liberal Protestantism. On the second evening the speaker was Mohammed Zafrulla Khan, a former head of the Pakistani delegation to the United Nations who by 1958 was a member of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. His presentation, as I recall it, was a very careful and modest description of Islamic resources for meeting the challenges of the contemporary world. I say "careful and modest" because he must have been aware that his presentation was likely to be observed closely by Muslims concerned lest his presumably more liberal interpretation of Islam be allowed to stand unchallenged. In the event, a number of young men did indeed ring the entrances to the Chapel handing out to all comers leaflets warning us not to be misled by liberal interpretations of their heritage. Well aware of the dangers in such a situation, Zafrullah Khan said little either to disturb his Muslim critics or to encourage his non-Muslim audience.

Third in this distinguished series was the Hindu Dr. Kalidas Nag, President of the Association for Adult Education in West Bengal. He was followed by the Burmese Buddhist scholar, U Chan Hoon. The final — and for me by far the most forceful and relevant — lecture was presented by Rabbi Solomon Freehof of Pittsburgh.

As a Unitarian I had long since come to regard Reformed Judaism as our closest religious neighbor. Moreover, I had heard Rabbi Freehof on an earlier occasion, an address I remember to this day, one in which he made the often remote figure of Jesus come vigorously alive in the context of the Judaism of his day.

These lectures, as already noted, had been planned by Frederick Eliot to build on the heritage of comity established at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Alas, the intervention of two World Wars and the consequent rise of Christian neo-orthodoxy and of similar revivals of exclusivity in other religious traditions made it evident that the goal of this Congress remained remote indeed. To affirm, in the words of the Congress theme, that "Today’s religions can meet the needs of our time" was, in 1958, evidence of wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, at the more modest level of creating an environment in which personal and even institutional friendships could be formed and strengthened on a world-wide basis, the Congress was, at least for me, enormously important. It was there, in Chicago, that we arranged for the patriarch of Scandinavian Unitarianism, the Rev. Thorvald Kierkegaard of Copenhagen, to speak one August Sunday morning at our Madison church. I shall never forget that visit from him and his daughter Gudrun, a visit I had the opportunity to reciprocate some six years later.

In conversation with Spencer Lavan, then President of the IRF, and his colleagues we completed plans for that group’s conference to be held in Madison immediately following the Congress. The Rev. Donald Harrington of New York’s famed Community Church was to be the principal speaker. And the Rev. Heije Faber of Wassenaar in Holland was to be the preacher Sunday morning. He had served a liberal congregation in that city for some fifteen years, but he had just accepted an appointment to the faculty of the University of Leyden. I remember asking him how it felt to pull up roots and to move after so long a time with one congregation, little realizing that I was myself destined to serve our Madison congregation for thirty—five years. What astonished me at the time was his response "But we’re not moving. Leyden is just a fifteen—minute drive away." Only when I visited the Fabers at their lovely home in Wassenaar a few years later did I come to appreciate the difference in scale between Western Europe and the open expanses of our own American Middle West.

Dr. Faber subsequently had a distinguished career, introducing the field of pastoral psychology in Holland (if not indeed in Europe). He and his family remain to this day our oldest European friends; we have visited each other several times over the years.

A highlight of the IRF conference was surely the party on Saturday evening, for which each national group prepared a skit. How easily the barriers of language and culture are overcome among young people! Language problems were in any case minimal, since even then most European students learned English in school and were far more accustomed to finding themselves in multi-lingual settings. I remember how impressed I was to discover that in Holland everyone was required to study French, German and English. Alter living in Germany for a time fifteen years later, my wife and I realized that even in the larger countries of Western Europe one hardly passed a day without hearing at least one foreign language being spoken. Such an experience would have been unimaginable in the American Middle West in 1958, though happily things have changed at least a little in recent years.

II

One consequence of the 1958 Congress was that a long-time member of our Madison congregation who had been among the participants was sufficiently impressed with my enthusiastic involvement both in the Congress and in the IRF conference in Madison so that he undertook to raise a fund among our church members to enable me to go to Europe for the Davos Congress in 1961. My generation had had less opportunity than our parents to travel abroad. The Great Depression of the 1930’s, followed by the war in the 1940’s, had virtually eliminated the possibility of foreign travel for us in those years of early adulthood during which, for example, my father had spent the summer of 1911 in Japan. So this generous initiative created a major opportunity for me.

It was clear, of course, that the fund thus raised was only one of two major gifts that made the trip possible. The other was my wife’s willingness to stay at home with four children between the ages of four and thirteen. As it turned out, this trip opened up new vistas, which eventually affected our whole family’s orientation to the world.

Though I had been fascinated with geography all my life, there still lurked in my innermost center of awareness some uncertainty as to whether there really was another continent on the other side of that endless expanse of water over which we flew. As the sunlight of the dawn gradually brightened, I was ecstatic to catch sight of the landfall ahead. As we neared the shore it became obvious that we were over the Emerald Isle en route to London’s Heathrow Airport. A few days of relentless sightseeing in London followed by a brief visit to Holland, where I was a guest of the Fabers, led to a quick tour of the lower Rhine, a few days in Paris, a train trip to Geneva, and finally my arrival in Davos.

The hotels in this famous resort still revealed their service in an earlier era as retreats for sufferers from tuberculosis. One could easily imagine the scenes of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The spacious rooms with their wide balconies, where once the patients lay to inhale the pure and healthful mountain air now housed our truly global assembly of more than six hundred religious liberals.

Most noteworthy was that for the first time since the end of the war colleagues from Eastern Europe were present in force. Bishop Novak of the Czechoslovak Church had been present in Chicago, but he had been the only representative of a religious body in any Warsaw Pact country permitted to leave his homeland. For Davos the Czech and Hungarian Unitarians had also been able to obtain exit visas. I recall vividly an afternoon stroll on a mountain path with Dusan Kafka, then leader of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia. He had attended Meadville Theological School in Chicago and spoke excellent English. It was from him that I first began to understand the conditions under which intellectual and religious life managed to survive in a totalitarian society. His experience gave moving substance to the descriptions in Czeslaw Milosz’s wonderful little book Captive Mind.

I have spoken two or three times of the linguistic skills exhibited by so many of the Europeans I met at Chicago and Davos. Never were such skills more brilliantly exhibited than in the instantaneous translations provided at Davos by Diether Gehrmann abd Rudy Gelsey, both of whom were born in Europe but had lived for years in America. At later Congresses, especially after the list of Asian member groups in the IARF had both grown and diversified, translation services at Congresses became more professionalized, with booths for translators and earphones for delegates.

A further adventure, more impressive even than the Congress itself, was yet to follow. Through some happy chance I had signed up months earlier for a post-Congress trip to Hungary and Romania under the leadership of the Revs. Vilma and Donald Harrington. Vilma was a birthright Unitarian born and educated in Transylvania. She and Donald had been married in a Unitarian chapel in Budapest, and many of her family still lived in Transylvania. The Rev. Voltan Nagy and his wife, also native Transylvanians and birthright Unitarians, were in our party, too, though for very good reason they were with us only in Hungary, fearful that crossing the border into Romania would be too risky in their particular situation.

This is not the place to tell the story of that truly historic visit, the first by an organized group from the West to visit those oldest of all Unitarian churches since before World War II, a lapse of twenty-five years. Our reception everywhere touched our hearts and left us with warm memories of spirited and heroic people.

At that time, in 1961, the openness of our present relationships with our friends in Transylvania through the Partner Church Council would have been inconceivable. The Transylvanian churches then were limited to the holding of formal religious services. No religious education classes for children, no women s groups, no youth groups, no church newsletters or journals, no summer camps or conferences — nothing was permitted. As it turned out, our visit heralded a relaxation of political pressures sufficient to permit the Unitarians of Transylvania to send representatives to all subsequent IARF Congresses, a participation which has surely been enriching for all of us.

III

One thing seems always to lead to another. As my participation in the Chicago Congress had led to my trip to Davos, so that excursion into Hungary and Romania resulted in an invitation from Dana Greeley, then President of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and a member of the Harrington party visiting Eastern Europe, to join his staff as Director of Overseas and Interfaith Relations. My wife and I were unwilling to leave the parish ministry, but we agreed to take a year’s leave of absence while I undertook to organize the program Dana Greeley had envisioned. It turned out to be a fascinating and, I hope, productive year.

We had scarcely settled in our rented house in Arlington, Massachusetts, when I learned that I was scheduled to set out with Dana Greeley on a round-the-world trip within the month. We began by helping to dedicate the recently acquired church home of the Honolulu congregation, then continued on to Tokyo. There at the airport to greet us was Dr. Shinichiro Imaoka. As we drove to our hotel, he outlined the program he had arranged for our three-day visit. It began with a dinner that evening. Given the time lag between Honolulu and Tokyo, we were dining at what, by Honolulu time was after midnight. Fortunately both Dana Greeley and I had hardy constitutions.

Following that meal a distinguished Japanese scholar addressed the gathering of some seventy or eighty people in perfect English. He was followed by an address in equally fluent Japanese by Dr. Charles Fahs, son of Sophia Lyon Fahs and at that time serving as cultural attaché at the U. S. Embassy.

In addition to visits to the Universalist Church in Tokyo, to Seisoku High School (a private school for boys of which Dr. Imaoka had been headmaster for many years, and where headquarters of the JFRA were maintained), to the American embassy, and an evening at the Kabuki theater, we had meetings with the officers of the JFRA and with representatives of two groups Dr. Imaoka was eager to introduce to the IARF. One was Konkokyo, one of the older so-called "new religions" in Japan; the other, one of the newer "new religions was described simply as a laymen’s Buddhist Association. Only later did I realize that this was Rissho Kosei Kai, which has now become one of the pillars of the IARF. At any rate, those meetings were the seed-bed from which emerged the major roles played by our Japanese friends in the decades since that visit.

The next stop on our trip was the Philippines, where we met with all three of the member groups then affiliated with the IARF. My most moving memory is the long evening I spent with the Rev. Toribio Quemada, founder and leader of the Universalist Church of the Philippines. He had translated our entire American hymnal and was eager for help in publishing it for use among his members, scattered through rural villages on the southern island of Negros. This meeting, it turned out, was the occasion for his very first visit to Manila. We kept in touch over the years, and I count myself fortunate to have had opportunity for extended conversations with him during the 1987 Congress at Stanford. He took sick during that Congress and entered the University hospital, where I visited him. Not long after his return to the Philippines he was attacked and murdered in his own home. In my mind he remains one of the true heroes of religious freedom in our time.

From the Philippines we went on to Calcutta, where the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj welcomed us with high celebration and warm hospitality. From there we proceeded to the Khasi Hills, where the Unitarian Union provided dramatic contrast. Founded in 1887 by a remarkable Khasi, Hajom Kissor Singh, the Khasi Unitarian Union had profited enormously from the life-work of Margaret Barr, a British Unitarian minister whom we had met at our UUA General Assembly in Chicago the preceding Spring. She was off on a long planned trip to England when Dana Greeley and I were in the Khasi Hills, but she had prepared everything for our arrival.

The Khasi Unitarians were largely rural people, some two thousand of them in sixteen congregations at that time. I remember their then President, Devison Marbaniang, telling us that their ranks included no one with a college degree and only twenty-five or thirty people who had finished secondary school. I mention this because when I had the opportunity to revisit the Khasi Hills with Kenneth MacLean in 1995, their numbers had more than quadrupled, the number of churches more than doubled, and there were among them a substantial number of college-educated, culturally sophisticated, and extremely able young men and women.

A major reason for this dramatic change was Margaret Barr’s suggestion in 1963 that we, together with the British Unitarians, undertake to make it possible for Devison Marbaniang to resign his government job and devote full time as a Church Visitor. One of our missions when we visited the Khasi Hills later that year was to follow up on that suggestion. From that modest beginning, thanks particularly to the devoted and inspiring leadership of Mr. Marbaniang, the Unitarian Union now has five ministers, three of them full-time, and ten church visitors, two of whom are full-time.

The Executive Secretary of the Union, Mr. Carley Lyngdoh, was President of the youth group when we visited there in 1963. I have shared many happy times with friends from the Khasi Hills at IARF Congresses and even had the opportunity to share in welcoming Devison Marbaniang to Germany and to entertain a young lady from the Khasi Hills at our home in Madison.

Leaving India, we headed for Rome and the second session of the Second Vatican Council. The IARF had been invited to send two observers, one European and one American. Most of the time during all four sessions of the Council these seats were occupied by religious scholars: Prof. 1. J. van Holk of Leyden and Profs. James Luther Adams and George H. Williams of the Harvard Divinity School. But for one week early in the second session, the first presided over by the new Pope, Paul VI, the American seat was occupied by Dana Greeley as President of the ULTA. Though I was simply tagging along, I was welcomed into the midst of the official observers. Richard Cardinal Cushing, who had known Dana Greeley back home in Boston, had brought a young faculty member from the diocesan seminary to serve as his theological advisor. So when I turned up with Dana Greeley, he assumed I must have been fulfilling a similar function. I have ever since maintained that on no less an authority than that of Cardinal Cushing I qualify as a theologian.

It is impossible to convey in a few brief sentences the spirit that infused those remarkable days. Renewal, complete openness in discussion, camaraderie across all sectarian lines, high hope for the future of the world and for organized religion as a significan and constructive factor in the world, the healing of ancient wounds and a genuine commitment to religious freedom -— all this had a profound influence not only in Catholic circles but in the whole world of religious discourse. Though the present Pope, John Paul II, has moved ever farther from the commitment to religious freedom he advocated so eloquently as head of the Polish hierarchy, the "fresh air" Pope John XXIII invited into the Church cannot be entirely expelled. Relations between the Church of Rome and the rest of the Judaeo-Christian world were almost non-existent prior to the Council. Once the genie of renewal was out of the bottle, however, it became impossible ever to stuff it completely back in. As a result, for example, I enjoy relationships with the Catholic college and the Benedictine ecumenical center in my home city of Madison as well as close and cordial personal relationships with numerous Catholic clergy and religious. All this would simply have been impossible before Vatican II. For me, attending the Council was one of the most valuable opportunities I have ever had; it could not have happened without the IARF.

From Rome we flew to Holland for a meeting with the Secretariat and principal officers of the IARF. From that moment on I was heavily engaged with the three Dutch Remonstrant clergy who then constituted the Secretariat. These were Wim Cramer, Joost Wery and Jan van Goudoever. In addition, the President and Treasurer of the IARF were both Dutch and the office, under the devoted leadership of Bertha van Gennep, was located in The Hague. Sharing with this strong Dutch contingent in preparing for the upcoming Congress in The Hague that next summer became a large part of my work during my year on the UUA staff.

There were other dimensions of my year at the UUA that also involved the IARF. Indeed most of what I was doing related in one way or another to the program and purposes of our international organization. For example, at the invitation of the Green Street Friends Meeting in Philadelphia I attended the biennial gathering of the Friends General Conference at Cape May, New Jersey. There I spoke on the IARF and expressed a widely shared hope that the Conference itself would join the IARF. Their Executive Secretary, Lawrence Miller, attended two or three of our Congresses and strongly supported this invitation. Alas, the reliance of Friends on a unanimous "sense of the meeting" doomed the proposal to failure by default. Getting all the eight yearly meetings that comprised the Friends General Conference to agree simply proved too daunting.

Then there was the initiative of the Rev. Richard Boeke, then minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church in St. Petersburg, Florida, which led to the organization of what has become our American chapter of the IARF, a prototype for other national organizations within our worldwide membership. And there were opportunities to meet many interesting visitors from far and wide. Two I particularly remember are Robert Steyn and his wife from Capetown. Then a distinguished and courageous newspaperman in South Africa, Mr. Steyn was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. A leading member of the Capetown Unitarian congregation, he later attended theological school in England and became that church’s minister. We met again at later Congresses, and the Steyns were very generous to one of our daughters during an extended visit in South Africa.

Another memorable moment was my visit, along with Joseph Fisher, then a member of the UUA Board and later the Congressman from his Virginia district, to the Hon. Petre Bàlâceanu, Romanian Legate (relations between Romania and the United States were not yet on an ambassadorial level). Our purpose was to press the case for release of the sixteen Unitarian ministers still held in Romanian prisons. We were received cordially by Mr. Bàlâceanu, who had done his homework and knew in detail the cases that concerned us. He presented his government’s position clearly, but he also listened attentively to our case. There is no evidence whatever that our intervention had any effect, but all sixteen prisoners were indeed released within the ensuing year. I concluded then and there that if the IARF did nothing else but maintain our contacts with friends behind the Iron Curtain it would far more than justify its existence. Nothing was more important for our colleagues than the knowledge in official circles that they had friends in the West who were watching.

IV

The 1964 Congress met in Scheveningen, the beautiful seaside suburb of The Hague. The opening service, at which my friend and mentor Duncan Howlett, then minister of the vibrant All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and whose wife, Carolyn Howlett, later served as President of the IARF, was the preacher, was held in a most impressive Remonstrant church. Equally memorable was the so-called "theologians’ luncheon." A Congress fixture, this was in fact a gathering of all the clergy in attendance at the Congress. On this occasion the speaker was Prof. G. J. Hoenderdaal of the University of Leyden. His perceptive and eloquent account of the situation of liberal Protestantism evoked animated discussion. The most sensitive issue had to do with the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of the name of our organization: International Association for Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom.

As I have previously noted, the Brahmo Samaj was among the groups that organized the Association in 1900. And the Japan Free Religious Association had been a member since 1952. But the base of the Association, both in membership and support, had always been in Europe and North America among groups firmly rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. With growing participation from other parts of the world and other religious traditions, and with new currents rising among many of our long-time European and American members as well, the question of identity surfaced as an increasingly cogent and sometimes contentious issue. The discussion following Prof. Hoenderdaal’s address at that meeting in Scheveningen remains in my memory as the occasion when this matter moved prominently onto our Association’s agenda.

Another feature of the 1964 Congress that remains fresh in my memory is the presence of official observers from the World Council of Churches and the Vatican, as well as several other smaller religious bodies. There had been observers at earlier Congresses, but the role of such fraternal delegations took on fresh meaning against the backdrop of the Vatican Council, then in mid-stream. I recall particularly the Vatican observer’s humorous comment that it was his experience, having attended many ecumenical meetings, that when a meeting was held in Germany the focus was on theology; when it took place in France the emphasis was prayer; in England, he said, we simply have a jolly good time; but in Holland we organize.

During the business meeting in Scheveningen Bishop Kiss, head of the Transylvanian Unitarian churches, surprised all of us (no one more than his Transylvanian colleagues) by inviting us to hold a Congress in Koloszvar in 1968, the four hundredth anniversary of these, the oldest Unitarian churches in the world. The Congress enthusiastically accepted this invitation, though Bishop Kiss and his colleagues indicated that it would be necessary to clear all arrangements with the Romanian government’s Ministry of Cults.

Many of us realized that there would be genuine problems in holding an official international meeting in Romania. Indeed, it turned out that Bishop Kiss and his associates were able to organize a great celebration of this important anniversary, and some five hundred visitors from Western Europe and North America did in fact attend as guests. But it was not — indeed, could not have been — a formal meeting of the IARF.

At that time, of course, despite uncertainty as to whether it could in fact be a Congress, we had to adjust our schedule to accommodate that possibility. So we decided to change, at least temporarily, from triennial to biennial Congresses, the next to be held in 1966 in London, with the potential Koloszvar Congress to follow in 1968. Since that celebration turned out not to be a Congress, we later reverted to the triennial schedule with the 1969 gathering set for Boston.

After the Schevening Congress I stayed on in Europe for several weeks. Once again I joined a party led by the Harringtons, this time visiting not only ‘Hungary and Romania but Czechoslovakia as well. Prof. Miloslav Kaak of the Hussite church, a distinguished church historian, led us on a tour of the old city of Prague that I shall never forget. He knew the story behind every stone in the city. Some years later my wife and I were guests at the home of the Kanyaks, and Prof. Kanyak himself visited us in Madison during the course of a quarter he spent as a guest lecturer at the Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago. It was on that 1964 visit to Prague that we also met Bohdana Hasplova, daughter of Norbert Capek, and her husband, Karel Haspl, Dr. Capek’s successor as leader of the Czech Unitarian churches.

Perhaps the most memorable of those post-Congress weeks was the one I spent as a guest lecturer as the Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, Switzerland. My roommate and fellow lecturer was Bruce Findlow, then minister of St. Mark’s Unitarian Church in Edinburgh and later Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. Albert Schweitzer College, a project initiated and supported chiefly by our Swiss IARF member group, served for several years as a magnet for young people from our affiliates in many countries. Its contribution to the experience of many young religious liberals was significant. Its subsequent history, however, was complex and unfortunate. But this is not the place to tell that story.

V

I have spoken above of the impact of the so-called "theologians’ meeting" at the Scheveningen Congress. Such meetings had often consisted simply of a luncheon followed by a speaker. But in 1964 the discussion had raised issues that many of us thought needed to be lifted up and addressed more comprehensively. After the Congress the three Dutch members of the Secretariat, with whom I was then meeting as an unofficial American representative, began making plans for the London Congress in 1966.

We decided that a longer time was needed to provide opportunity for extended discussion among our religious professionals so that all of us could discover more adequately where our colleagues from other countries were coming from. After all, useful interchange can take place only if we know something about the differing contexts, in which we live and work.

A second concern was to engage more of the younger ministers from all member groups in active IARF participation. The older generation had earned the admiration and gratitude of all of us. They had persevered, many of them under wartime hardships we from America could scarcely imagine, and had brought the Association back to life after the war. But the time had come when we needed to reach out to involve actively the younger leaders and potential leaders of our member groups. The result was to replace the "theologians’ luncheon" with a two—day conference of theologians preceding the Congress. Many of today’s IARF leaders were among the group that gathered at the Dutch Church in London in 1966.

A further consequence of those plans was that Dr. Peter Dalbert, the Swiss theologian who was elected President of the IARF at the London Congress, proposed dividing the work of the Association among three (ultimately four) Commissions. These were designed to reflect the variety of concerns our various individual and member groups brought to our agenda.

During the Congress itself the identity and question of purpose were central both in the principal addresses and in the group discussions, especially those surrounding the establishment of the Commissions. The closing service, held at London’s historic Essex Church, gave moving expression in its liturgy to the renewed and expanded sense of purpose widely felt among the delegates.

The Commissions did indeed get to work. Their correspondence and occasional reports culminated in the Boston Congress, where they provided both the structure and substance for the program. That Congress, in 1969, was held, on Dana Greeley’s invitation, in conjunction with the annual General Assembly of the UUA. In 1966 no one could possibly have predicted the turmoil and disarray which marked that General Assembly. Profound division over the appropriate ways to deal with the wider issues of race relations in American society, together with efforts of a newly formed Youth Caucus to establish itself so occupied the attention of American Unitarian Universalists that they scarcely noticed the IARF delegates from abroad who were among us. The issues confronting the General Assembly were substantive, but it was the highly confrontational tactics employed by some that made the whole occasion so emotionally difficult for many Americans that we were far from being the gracious hosts and hostesses we would wish to have been. Fortunately, our attention was at least briefly lifted to the heavens by that almost unimaginable event, the first human landing on the moon.

The Congress and the UUA General Assembly overlapped but did not precisely coincide. The major program sessions of the Congress came toward the end of the General Assembly and were scheduled so as to permit maximum attendance. The General Meeting of the IARF came at the end. I remember that meeting well, because our President, Dr. Peter Dalbert, feeling insecure in English, asked me to preside in his stead.

The reports of the three Commissions formed the main business of the Congress and a fourth Commission was added. It was clear that we were moving in new directions, and there was high hope that the IARF was indeed finding its way into the new religious environment of the late twentieth century.

VI

One consequence of the Boston Congress for me personally was an invitation to join Commission III, whose area of concern was "The Dialogue among the World’s Religions." As a result, when the Commissions gathered at Burg Stettenfels near Heilbronn late in the summer of 1971, I was there as a participant. The conversations within our Commission and among all four Commissions constituted the most focussed deliberation I have experienced within the aegis of the IARF.

The major importance of the Burg Stettenfels meeting for me, however, lay elsewhere. The Free Religious Congregations of Baden were to host the Heidelberg Congress in 1972, 50 it was only natural that their Senior Minister, Dr. Heinz Schldtermann, should make the arrangements for us at Burg Stettenfels the preceding summer. After all, our work was intended to prepare the way for the agenda at the Heidelberg Congress. So it was at Burg Stettenfels that I really got to know Dr. Schlötermann and to meet his young colleage Dr. Eckhart Pilick.

This turned out to be important for me and for my family. In the winter of 1972 Dr. Schlötermann, as Vice President of the IARF and host for the upcoming Congress, made a brief visit to the United States and Canada to stimulate interest and attendance at Heidelberg. We eagerly welcomed him to Madison and to the nearby town of Sauk City, where the last surviving German Free Religious Congregation on our side of the Atlantic continues to this day.

In the course of that visit Dr. Schlötermann raised the possibility of my coming to Germany for a year to serve as a minister with the Free Religious Congregations of Baden. To make a long story short, my wife and I discussed this fascinating but demanding opportunity, I again arranged for a year’s leave of absence from the Madison church, and we (my wife and I and our two youngest children, then aged eleven and sixteen) spent the academic year 1973-74 in Emmendingen, a city just north of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. This turned out to be one of the decisive experiences of my career, and it could not have happened without the IARF.

In between, of course, came the Heidelberg Congress. Indeed it was during the Congress that I was interviewed by Herr Peterson, President of the Free Religious Congregations of Baden, as a result of which I was formally offered the position in Germany. The Congress itself was notable in a variety of ways. For one thing the program focussed entirely on the reports of the four Commissions. There were no formal lectures; instead, maximum opportunity was afforded for small group discussions, person-to-person conversation, and a variety of recreational and cultural activities. Once again I was asked to preside at the business meeting, this time by President Dana Greeley, who felt unable to use German.

Most important of all was the decision to entrust leadership of the day-to-day work of the Association to a full-time General Secretary. The Rev. Diether Gehrmann, who had served congregations both in Germany and the United States, was named to this post. His leadership and the subsequent move of IARF headquarters from The Hague to Frankfurt initiated a new era in the life of the IARF. Membership in Asia among religious groups wholly outside the Judaeo-Christian world grew rapidly. More ambitious social service programs were launched, providing opportunities for many individuals and organizations within our ranks to become directly involved with member groups in other parts of the world. Indeed, in more recent years three Congresses have been held in Asia, the first ever convened outside of Europe and North America.

These more recent accomplishments will, I am sure, be dealt with by other contributors to this Centennial volume. Though I have attended five of the eight Congresses since Heidelberg and expect to be at Vancouver in 1999, it is the experiences and the personal contacts of the years from Chicago in 1958 to Heidelberg in 1972 that have been most important in my own life. And since my part in this volume is, by design, a very personal one, I have chosen to focus on the people and events that have most profoundly affected my life. Attending the Vatican Council, spending a year (plus a three-month return engagement two years later) in Germany, forming enduring friendships with such people as the Fabers, the Kanyaks, the Schlötermanns, the Pilicks, Lajos Kovacs and his wife, Ben Downing and Devison Marbaniang and Toribio Quemada and so many others — these have constituted the wonderful part the IARF has played in my life. I rejoice to have this opportunity to express my enduring gratitude.