Religion: No Blacks for Bethel

U. S. churchmen who listened to the buzz last September when Rev. William St. John Blackshear, Brooklyn Episcopalian, discouraged the attendance of Negroes in his church, noted that Parson Blackshear did not actually disbar any Negro from his congregation (TIME, Sept. 30). Last week a more pointed incident of the same sort gave churchmen something more to buzz about. Pastor Adelbert J. Helm of Detroit’s Bethel Evangelical Church announced his resignation. Reason: his church council’s refusal of membership to a Negro man, a Negro woman.

Pastor Helm’s letter of resignation to the council said: “I doubt whether any church in the United States has a better background for the appreciation of the practical significance of the religion of Jesus than has Bethel. The first premise of Christianity and its most perfect synonym is brotherhood. To refuse brotherhood to any Christian is the oldest and most heretical blasphemy conceivable. American Christianity is . . . compromised and enmeshed. . . To refuse church membership to anyone not of the same race is to deny the most obvious teaching of Jesus and to give the ethical sanctions of Christianity to race prejudice.”

Bethel Church’s director of education. Orville Brummer, resigned with Pastor Helm. Said he: “Since it is finally impossible to teach children much more at any given time than their seniors will practice, I despair of any large scale success in teaching children principles of brotherhood in an exclusive church.”

Pastor Helm trained for the ministry at Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis and the Cathedral Seminary in Berlin. He is young (28), blond, foxy-faced, married. Pastor Helm resigned once before: in 1923, when pastor of the Royalton, Wis. Congregational Church he preached a sermon “debunking” the late Warren Gamaliel Harding, and was asked to leave.