“We can take up any handful of the world’s good things -- knowledge, fraternity, honors, pleasure, beauty, possessions, security, -- and apply to each of them the rule-of-thumb, ‘we want to be in the world, but not of it.’”

This was the theme of the first session of a two day Clergy Conference for the Episcopalian Diocese of Atlanta. Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan was invited by Bishop Randolph Clairborne and his clergy committee to lead the conference May 25-26 at Camp Michael’s, Georgia.

In his first session, “Prospects of the Church,” the archbishop outlined the Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church. Speaking of the rule-of-thumb, he added, “Our concessions to the world will destroy us. Underneath each worldly benefit lies a moral danger. There can be vanity in knowledge and beauty, greed in possessions, lust in pleasure and sloth in security.”

“Yet the Church cannot stand apart from the world it must save; it cannot remain, in Suhard’s phrase, ‘absent from the city.’” The Church has something to say, especially to a world exploring Bonhoeffer’s “no religion at all” and Altizer’s “Gospel of Christian Atheism.” The God at whose funeral they are presiding is God-the-villain or God-the-hero, “It really does not matter. If their theology postulates a god so false they may be unwitting allies in Christianity’s constant effort to preach the God of creation, redemption and love,” the archbishop said.

The speaker outlined the conciliar decree by looking at the Church in seven ways: in history, in her own incarnation, in her inner self, in the human family, in the world, in the destiny of her glory, and in her reality as the People of God.

The second session was called “Prospects of Unity,” and was built on the decree on ecumenism. Calling the audience’s attention to the point that the Council speaks of the Anglican Communion as “occupying a special place,” the archbishop explained the decree as “historical and unique.”

“The new spirit, evident today, is enkindled, under God, by the earnest desires of good men for unity in Christ, and of all men for harmony of individuals and nations. With us, as with conscientious men of other faiths. This is not a spirit of rejection or disruption, compromise or easy accommodation. The change, as Pope John said, is in the way the substance of Christianity is presented.”

“Can we study our past when men acted less honorably than Christ called for? Our present needs in the warmth of His compassion? Our dream of the future in the abundance of His words the night before He died? ‘that all may be one...that the world may believe.’”

“Prospects of Worship” was the theme of the final discussion. The archbishop explained the progress of this first completed document, the conciliar and post-conciliar Commissions, the U.S. Bishops’ Commissions on Liturgical Affairs, and the Atlanta Diocesan Liturgy Commission, in all of which he has had a part. He also described the “common market” of 10 English-speaking nations which have formed an International Committee.

“The Church’s Liturgy,” the Atlanta archbishop said, “is a treasure-house, ‘giving forth things of old and new, stamping on her own, as time required it, a deeper impress of the face of Christ.’” The process of experimentation, participation, adaptation will not be easy. But as Cardinal Newman said of theology, there must be a “slow anxious, painful taking up” of the new into the familiar, a “patient, diligent working out of one doctrine from many materials.”