The day before Labor Day 1969, what will the Lord say to His people in your congregation about their daily work and the coming of His Kingdom through that work? And what will he their communal heart-response that day in celebration, the next day on the job itself, the next work-week, the next year under the sun? Will those same People of God have to return one year later to say what they have always said, “On my job, it’s just the way it has been year in and year out.”

How exactly has it been these long years for Christians in factories, on construction sites, on large farms, in offices, at the steering wheels of the nation’s vehicles? Why have so many preachers, without fear of contradiction, intoned to their congregations, “Vanity of vanities, modern work is vanity.” It is due to the all-too-true experience of the workers themselves that industry is structured in such a way that its Creator and Unfolder is effectively banished from its life. He, the Almighty One, must sneak surreptitiously into the plant in the scandal-less guise of Safety First, Do a Full Day’s Work for a Full Day’s Pay, Everyone is Entitled to a Decent Wage. He Who alone gives to man these things in their only authentic meanings, as they come to function integrally in a totally new life in Jesus Christ, He must take, at best, an anonymous second place to them. Some such values as these which we have mentioned fundamentally organize, motivate, dominate the multitudinous elements of the modern work-relationships. He, the Lord of Work-relationship, by Whom it was created and through Whom it holds together, has been shoved aside in industry today.

The Reformed preacher will not be content with the naked admission that, on the job, man can get along without the Lord’s Word to guide industrial decision-making. The Reformed preacher will insist that God our Father through His Son our Savior and Lord claims all of life, every niggardly detail of it, transforming every infinitesimal element into a life-encompassing integrality within the day-to-day experience of each one of His own.

Vanity or Victory?

Yet, the non-Reformed preacher is actually closer to the truth of the concrete situation which workers face daily at 8 a.m. The job, despite annual Labor Day sermons to the contrary, is a heavy vanity instead of a holy victory. The job as the people in the pew go on experiencing it, year by year, is really cut off from its Source of life. A dichotomy, a heaven-or-hell gap is there between the job as actually structured and the Source of the job’s meaning. The non-Reformed solution to the problem of being a Christian at work in industry, thus, rings far more true to those daily engulfcd in the circumstances of our 1969 socioeconomy. The non-Reformed solution simply takes work as it is, without masking its Christless-ness, and says the redeemed man in industry should pray as he moves along at his mindless, monotonous task; he should be a model of decency, sobriety, and obedience to his foreman; he should carefully plan his lunch hour and coffee-breaks for passing on a tract to a fellow-worker. He should not so much entertain vague pointless goals of transforming his daily work in the power of Christ (whatever that would mean), as he should point up the difference between the secular hours devoted to the job and the sacred hours spent in prayer, meditation, converting persuasion, and worship. Indeed, secular work can become “Christian” to a certain small degree only when it is shown up to be what it inherently is: a distraction, perhaps unavoidable, from fellowship with God in the Highest. Once the job is shown up, then it can be efficiently invaded. Then moments of prayer can be infiltrated into the work-process, moments of conversion-aimed contact with unredeemed men can be smuggled into the time for which the boss pays, moment by moment the spiritual realm can leaven the secular and make it bearable for the Christian. Then too, the unreformed preacher may note, the paycheck can make all that godlessness worthwhile, in that it can help support financially the churches and the missions and the charities. By this means, the necessary evil of secular work, through Christian ingenuity, finally is squeezed for all the good it can possibly yield. Soon work will pass; only prayer, meditation, and persuasion will last. Our workaday work as such will not follow us into the Kingdom when it is fully come.

What the Reformed preacher had been saying, of course, was vastly different. The Reformed view and the unreformed view are really irreconcilable. But somehow the unreformed view meets the experience the workers actually live; the worker knows that the way work takes place today is alien to the way of life of the man in Christ.

Powerless Sloganeering

Over the years, Reformed preaching had accommodated itself to this unreformed preaching with which, in principle, it could not be reconciled. Reformed preaching had continued to trumpet the Goodnews: all of life in, through, and for Jesus Christ! But that preaching had found it necessary to add an unreformed provison the job, you Christian workers must busy yourselves at permeating the secular realm with the spiritual realm! Yes, all of life is new in Christ, but, life is new only insofar as you can bring work-life or economic-life or social-life to a momentary—perhaps, split-second—standstill and make it worship-life or conversion-experience. In such moments all of life truly was renewed by Jesus Christ; and if only we could stop forever in one such moment, we would fulfill our calling. Unfortunately, however, that has not yet been the case for anyone we know of.

The problem is that Reformed preaching had not found its way toward fulfilling on the promise of its original proclamation about Christ’s universal lordship; and, thus, it had had to hedge on it. In hedging, the preaching had lost the reformational initiative. Consequently, in industry the working people of the Reformed churches have not become the industry-turning-upside-down People of God they are called there to be.

The proclamation, “Christ is the Lord and Savior of all of life!,” has remained as a holy slogan, but its driving, re-forming, re-structuring power is nowadays lost as soon as workers leave the sanctuary of their churches. The slogan is held onto, too often, by sheer dogmatic, formal exegesis, assent to which is proclaimed as necessary for anyone who would remain true to the teaching of Holy Scripture. And there the situation has been frozen.

The only way out of this lifelessness has seemed to be the path of the less Reformed—an exclusive emphasis on personal piety, inner experience, and intensive programs of persuasion—all unrelated to the structures of daily work and daily life.

What is True, Reformed Thinking?

Yet there is another way besides those of the sloganeering Reformed and the pietizing unreformed. Reformed preaching can re-discover its life-changing power for every aspect of modern living, just as the sixteenth-century Reformed discovered that very power for living Christianly in their times. It can only do this, though, by marshalling the courage once again and despite a tragic history in America of fruitless, mis-directed past attempts—to declare openly the irreconcilability between its view and the unrefonned view. It must declare: When we talk of Christ being Lord and Savior of all of life, we are not talking about increasing the number of prayers, tracts, in-plant evangelistic projects, or “industrial chaplaincies.” We must declare that Christ is Lord and Savior of life—not merely of pieties, blessed though they be! Rather, He is Lord add Savior, also, of equitable pay rates, job organization, work rhythm, technical inventiveness, employee-employer communication, collective bargaining, safety education and procedures, product and service quality, advertising methods, job opportunities for all races and individuals, a fair profit—all this in such a way that each element involved fits into a particular total pattern usable by Christ in His exclusive service. In that total pattern, then, as summer follows spring, pieties find their genuine place and vital meaning. Prayer becomes integral to a way of life worthy of being prayed about. Prayer for the job itself becomes as relevant as punching the time-card. The conversion of unredeemed fellow-workers becomes a concern with (concrete significance because it entails introducing them to a new way of life at work and everywhere, to a community of people everywhere in the service of Jesus Christ. Then, the worship of God in the churches also becomes integral to a life-pattern that cannot exist except as the people are fed from the Table of the Lord. Worship on Sunday becomes what everyone must do in order to work most meaningfully on Monday.

When we begin to preach the irreconcilability of the Reformed and the unreformed views of the relationship between Christ and the job, we risk setting in motion expectations which we may find ourselves unwilling to go on to meet. And that is the crux of the problem this day before Labor Day 1969. The Reformed pulpits mllst either turn back to pietism or they must go forward from the slogan of Christ’s universal lordship to the principle itself.

When the slogan at last should rouse itself from its bed of ice and take for itself, on the lips of the preacher, the inner character of a life-principle, it will have on-going consequences. Some in the congregations will prefer, out of their spiritual depths, the slogan to the principle; and these may be lost to a principled preaching. But others, the host of faith, will go out from the churches on the day before Labor Day 1969 to prepare for the world-transforming struggle for which Christ saved them and for which He empowers them through the Holy Spirit in the community of Cod’s People. They will go out from the churches on Sunday to re-group themselves appropriately for the various callings of the workaday week. They will begin to gather as workers in auto factories, as workers on farms, as bricklayers, as tellers, as truckers, as secretaries, as artists, as students, as lawyers, as athletes, as physicians, even as business managers. They will not come together to plan how to marshal an army, terrible with banners, to march into the industrial world to shake it upside-down, to turn it right-side-up.

And if preaching leaves them, as doers of the Word, any other option than Christian organization for Christian action in every sphere of life, then it is not Reformed preaching because it is not re-forming preaching.

What Has Been Going On?

The painful task today is to go beyond the slogan of Christ’s universal lordship to the spelling out of its concrete meaning for the Christian people as they face their work during the week. For the truth is that in the Reformed churches we face a concrete situation far from ideal. The slogan and not the life-principle has been preached didactically for years. Only formal abstract assent was necessary in order to feel safely in service to God.

Matters had to be kept on an abstract, ideological, theological level; because as a life-principle, Christ’s lordship was already proving too much of an embarrassment. Some warm-hearted people had acted on it, gone out on a limb because of it, and once out there found themselves with no communal support. “If you can’t send up spiritual ammunition, at least send someone on up with spiritual food,” they cried down to those below. Have you ever eaten fish salted down with stone-chips?

Church synods actually declared that Christian communal action at work was merely a matter of strategy, a pragmat(ist)ic consideration. The Christian task at work in the modern socioeconomy could just as well be fulfilled in nice, clean, decent, dollar-motivated, Christless, creational-law-structure-ignorant unions. In doing this, the synods with all their abstract theological expertise threw aside the meaning of Christian action itself. Distinctive organization for Christian action (in labor, for instance) was not a necessary response of the whole Body of Christ to our organized world of today, through its members in every sphere, supported, cheered on, cherished, ministered to by the whole Body, including the churches. No, distinctive Christian organization was just a risky decision or strategy, probably a mistaken one, an embarrassment, a going-out on a limb.

The good people of the Christian Labor Association-USA are still out on such a limb, the stunted Christian limb of organized labor in America. These good people responded years ago in the turbulent and dangerous Thirties when Marxists were riding high in labor, to the preaching of the Word that Christ is lord of all of life. But the support from the Reformed churches was, we shall put it mildly, halfhearted. And it devolved from there. Unwilling to see the life-re-ordering implications of their own preaching, Reformed pulpits subtly braked the driving force of the message itself, blunted the edges of the Spirit’s sword, lost the promised blessing that comes to all in any society where the Thesis is lived out over against the Antithesis, and discovered themselves holding on to a shivering slogan. To such a sad state had the proclamation of Christ’s lordship over labor life and all of life now come.

And not only the churches have been remiss. The thinkers and the theoreticians of the Christian community did not come forward to aid CLA-USA in understanding both the nature, place, and task of the labor organization in society and the vast changes in the American socioeconomy into which any vital union must fit if it would come to grips with that socioeconomy in order to transform and re-structure it Christianly.

Besides CLA-USA, the Reformed Christians in business and management, also, suffered from the failures of the churches and the scholastics. No radically Christian business movement, at the same time free of statist socialism and free of humanistic capitalism, has developed in America. So, the CLA-USA stood alone. Alone, it simply could not become a Christian social force. The Body of Christ, thus, was broken by schism of neglect, glossed over by that cold slogan.

The chill winds hit the CLA-USA. Spiritually starved, it became financially starved. It was drained of its sense of mission to re-form the labor structure in accord with the social law-order of Christ. It had little choice but to gear over into a holding operation, organizing and maintaining locals only in businesses where by chance the majority of employees belonged to one select circle of churches. It ghettoized. Instead of distinctive Christian organization living reformationally to bless the whole American socioeconomy by bringing it under Christ’s rule, it became separate ethnic organization. It had to retreat before the onslaught of the pragmatistic unions. It found itself surrendering the principle of voluntary membership and adopting the secular principle of one union to a plant, the majority’s union no matter what the convictions of the minority were. This bad significant internal effects on CLA-USA itself. Now, an unbeliever, consciously and dynamically opposed to the very Christian social principles by which CLAUSA wanted to live, was to be coerced to acknowledge it as his representative in order to retain a job in a CLA-USA-organized enterprise. But that meant: an unbeliever who chose to keep his job had every right to arise, as a full member in CLA-USA meetings to argue, out of anti-christian life-principles, on the matters vital to the life of the union. Democracy now demanded that everyone forced to belong to CLA-USA should now stand on equal ground, arguing out of any standpoint whatsoever, in helping CLA-USA locals to decide how they would approach employers.

Don’t fault CLA-USA. Its leaders and many members still struggle on to do as best they can in an extremely difficult situation. They stand alone in the United States, weather-beaten and brow-beaten, holding onto an enclave, a ghetto not dominated by the pragmatistic religion of the AFL-CIO, UAW, and Teamsters. They feed on the apocopated slogans of Christ’s universal lordship as these are still rationed out by the Reformed churches.

In admiring them, however, we cannot accept their situation as normative. The free-blowing wind of the Holy Spirit still sweeps the land. He nourishes workers here and there across America. He swells their vision. And He fires their tongues. There is fertile soil of which the Reformed churches seem unaware where effective Christian labor organization is at this hour possible. In various places in the United States, there are large enterprises unorganized by secular unions, some employing thousands of workers, including huge blocs of men and women who believe the Bible is God’s Holy Word.

The CLAC

Not only that. Now there is on the continent, in Canada, a Christian Labour Association -nurtured years ago by CLA-USA and the Christelijke Nationaal Vakverbond of the Netherlands -which is not caught in the slogan-trap. CLAC is young, hardy, driven by the life-principle of Christ’s universal transformative redeeming power over all of life, from a single man’s insides on out into his widest relationships in every social sphere. CLAC struggles to know what the changes in the socioeconomy mean, so that it can plan to come to grips with them in their unfolding over the years ahead. It is now organized chiefly in smaller corporations, but its vision has not been dulled by that circumstance. It has been graciously given the strength to withstand the enormous—sometimes violent—pressures of the secular unions, thus far. It has not only fought for the right of the employee not to join a union against his fundamental religious motivation; but it has offered and is constantly refining specific proposals to re-structure the relationship of workers to unions and of unions to employers, so that a plurality of unions can work out equitably one contract with a given employer. It has been given support by many of the Reformed churches in Canada and by many evangelical leaders in the Presbyterian, Anglican, United, and Baptist churches. Persons of all faiths have embraced its work, under the barrier-breaking power of the Holy Spirit. It has a Christian civil rights organization, the Committee for Justice and Liberty, helping it defend Christian workers who lose their jobs for refusing to join Christless unions. It consults regularly on critical theoretical problems relating to labor structure with the scholars of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. It has a growing circle of friends on the economics and political-economics faculties of Canadian universities. It has admirers among the editors and radio and TV commentators of the secular mass-communications media. Its witness has encouraged infant parallel movements among Christian businessmen and Christian farmers. And, at last count, its staff of full-time labor representatives had grown to six with an equalsized secretarial staff supporting it. CLAC has not found itself out on a limb and it has riot been forced to introvert Christ’s lordship into an inner experience and a cold slogan only.

What is more, workers in industry, scholars, and Reformed preachers in the United States have found it an inspiration. CLAC’s life breaks down the bondage to the slogan and encourages people on this side of the border, too, to dream that up-side-down-turning dream again. Most important, perhaps, as CLAC publishes its 16-page monthly magazine, The Guide (100 Rexdale Boulevard, Rexdale, Ontario) the message leaks out wherever subscribers are. The Guide shows month after month how, in the most explicit way, the lordship of Christ has concrete meaning right down to the very smallest details of workaday life and of union participation.

Needless to say, that very reformational spirit of CLAC has produced some tension between it and its older brother, CLA-USA. And it is true, as CLAC knows, one member of the Body of Christ cannot presume upon the other. Thus, CLAC has held back from responding to the plaintive calls from workers in American industry to organize them Christianly. And so, no new reformational development has yet taken place on the American labor scene.

Now it seems that those pulpits which search for excuses can use the faulty communication between the CLAs and the lack of reformational development in the USA to rid themselves of responsibility to preach the Goodnews for labor on Labor Sunday 1969. Or can they? Perhaps not so easily.

A Sound in the Wind!

For there is a new factor to consider quite aside from CLAC and from churchly lethargy. There has been, for the last five years, a Goodnews-leak into the consciousness of the Christian industrial worker in America. There is a growing leaderless legion, inching toward one another across the nation. If you listen carefully, you can hear their agonized whispers. “King of Kings, Lord of Lords,” they whisper. “Lord of political lords, financial lords, industrial lords, war lords, slum lords, labor lords?” they ask. “What does it mean for Jesus to be Lord? Tell us what it means. How is Jesus both Lord and Savior of all things, having reconciled the structures of His entire creational order back to Himself? Before we pick up our lunch boxes, our briefcases, our notebooks, our tools, tell us what it means today in 1969 for Jesus to be lord of our work-hours, our job-relationships, our union-memberships, of us as we are structured to live in Cod’s world today.”

Those whispers will become a clamor and the Reformed churches will have to tell the workers like it is—or they will have to renege on their pious slogan that Christ Jesus is the universal lord of life.

Across the land workers are agonizing to know just what it means to be a Christian when they get to work each day. They have dreaded the death of the ice-cold slogan that demanded assent but issued into nothing of consequence. They have asked until hoarse, “Lord, what do you want me to do as a member of your Body at the Fairless steelplant in Levittown, Pennsylvania? You are lord of the blast furnace and the production schedule and the wage scale and the polluted air and the racial favoritism in hiring and the war purposes of our products and the way the union goes about its task and the college kid lifted by his shovel into the grinder; but how does YOUR lordship begin to change things? If it is through me, how can I become your instrument here in this plant in your redeeming of all things? I don’t even know how to think Christianly about the questions yet, without falling aside into some ‘ism’ or other. Lord, how can I be a Christian here? Won’t you send a leader to show me the way, along with others here who believe in your Holy Word and in the salvation you have wrung out for us on the Cross, for our lives lived on the job, too?”

Many of these perplexed Christians are from outside the Reformed churches. They ask Reformed people, “What churches teach this truth we have been missing?” Take the industrial worker who regularly goes to his Arminian Baptist church, who began reading The Guide and declared, “That’s for me; now I can start to do something in the Name of Christ for the black fellows I work with. When I witnessed to them before, they always laughed me off. They said my Biblical Christian faith just wasn’t in touch with today’s realities -prejudice, poverty, middle-class materialism, dehumanizing work-relations. I had nothing to say for Christ at Westinghouse until now. Now I’ve got a redemptive vision of all of life -labor, too!”

Or take the Pentecostal brother who organized, for an AFL-CIO union, the employees of a tremendous bakery business (owned by a fellow evangelical) but who quit soon afterward, saying, “I love union work; but the unions just don’t care when things start getting violent, and I ended up contradicting my religion. A Christian union would have to be different from top to bottom.”

All over America, Reformed and unreformed Christians are already being prepared by the Lord of Life for that authentic preaching which will go beyond slogans, which will point the way toward concrete organization and action in industrial relations, and which will begin to develop a truly reformational labor movement in America.

The burdens of CLA-USA are no reason for the Reformed churches to neglect further their own calling, if they see it clearly from Scripture. If slogan~ about Christ’s lordship indeed are not enough, as they ought to affirm, then upon them -the preachers of thp. R~formed churches -falls the task of going beyond those slogans on Labor Sunday 1969, They should take up the reformational Jabor cause, without sniping at CLA-USA, perhaps showing those brothers in time that all the victories have not been in the past. A new situation has arrived with new undreamed-of possibilities for Christian witness in industry, Preaching which excuses itself because of CLA-USA’s troubles really makes a decision against the reformation of industrial life and really means, no matter what it says, that Christ is not lord of all things. Such preaching decides for a holding operation at best. Such preaching decides to turn deaf-mutely away from those restive Christians in industry whom the Lord Himself is preparing for a uniquely reformational communal witness, undergirded by rigorous theoretical and devotional work.

The Time is Now!

The truth is that because of the pioneering efforts of CLAC, the present circumstance of the American socioeconomy, the self-interest of the secular unions, and the new awareness of the social Significance of the Goodnews among evangelicals the time has never been more ripe than it is now for the organization of the Body of Christ in the labor sphere. The one problem is; only the Reformed churches can, through their preaching, develop the sensitive commitment necessary to launch such a movement if it is to unfold in an authentically reformational direction.

So it becomes crucial what the Reformed man who works in industry experiences in the gathering of the congregation to worship the Lord the day before Labor Day 1969.

The preaching of the Reformed churches to their people is crucial not because the Reformed churches have some hegemony on the work of the Holy Spirit, nor because the Reformed church-confessions are uniquely correct in their doctrines applicable to labor relations as such. Rather, the Reformed churches are uniquely obligated to take up this task because they know that the churches themselves do not swallow up the responsibilities, the life, and the witness of the Christian in his whole-hearted service to Jesus Christ. What today too often has been dehydrated down to a mere slogan still retains as its kernel the whole uniqueness of the Reformed churches: “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness of it.” According to this insight, which has come into its own only in the Reformed Christian experience, the churches nourish an integral Christian life, a life that cannot be absorbed by the churches without shriveling, distorting, narrowing, and impoverishing it. The Christian life is seen as the full life of man lived normatively, according to its historical unfolding at any given time in history. The Christian life in 1969 is the life of modern mass-communications, of universal education, of rapid transport and space travel, of refined organizational methods, of specialization and technique, of global interdependence. This is the world the Reformed churches know its people are called to serve God in; this world is our Father’s world just as much as the world ever was or ever shall be. This world, in all its unfolding, differentiating, enriching structuration is God’s. All in it is created by Him and for Him, no matter when it first appears on the historical scene.

Sin docs not alter that structural claim of God over all creation, in any regard. True, sin is present at the elbow of every historical development—insinuating, deceiving, distorting—just as in the Garden. But every demonic tum of human life has at its base the irrepressible urge of the creation—and of man as its developed—to become what it ought to be, to fill itself out, to bring each of its treasures into its own, that through the total ever-on-going kaleidoscope God may be imaged ever-more-fully and His glory magnified!

Reformational Preaching Demanded

The Reformed churches flee the Devil—and his continuing corruption of life—but they do not flee God’s wonderful creation. They love it, and they preach for living life in it and over it to God’s full glory alone.

The Reformed churches know that things are not haphazard, that they are ordered, that even through the smog of sin in history all things together reveal an immutable varied-but-integral law-structure and, thus, all creation declares man inexcusable before the revealed glory of the Law-giver.

The churches which see the continuity between the Apostles and, for instance, John Calvin, thus, see the continuity between the Garden, the Genesis Mandate, the Goodnews, the Great Commission, and the Great Kingdom which is here already and is yet fully to come. These Reformed churches are the churches from which alone we may expect—and demand! the corollary insight into the continuity between the not-then-unfolded law-structures of Adam’s day and the much-more-revealed law-structures by which Christ holds society together in 1969. From the Reformed churches, at least, we may expect—and again demand, if they would be consistent! -a spiritual sensitivity to the created sphere of daily work which God in Christ built right into the creation and the normative fulfillment of which alone leads to a healthy and holy work-life integrable into the full new life of the redeemed man. The labor union, consequently, must be seen clearly by the Reformed churches as a particular unavoidable working out of the creation law-structure. Its existence since the Industrial Revolution comes as a creation-revelation from God; and its nurture and development in a normative form comes as a command from God. The Christian labor organization, thus, must become a communal project of the whole People of God as they struggle with the idolatries around them, those idolatries unavoidably also responding to the creation’s law-structure in developing their idolatrous unions. The Reformed churches must see that the labor organization can no more be set aside than can the churches themselves or the state or the marriage or the family or the enterprise, even though each of these may first appear, as a distinguishable institution, at a different time in the unfolding of history. And even though none of these now may yet have achieved the nonnative form toward which all spheres of life in our sin-darkened history nevertheless are moving by the grace of God.

Not to stand up on the day before Labor Day 1969, happily declaring the Goodnews for labor, has dark implications for Reformed preaching. For, in truth, it means that Reformed preaching must, to be consistent, turn upon some of its most fundamental and, certainly, its most distinctive insights. To neglect to preach for communal Christian organization in the special sphere of labor is not merely to miss a strategic occasion, determined pragmat{ist)ically, it is rather to retreat from the Goodnews—as a universal life-principle which motivates God’s People to go out from the churches into the labor sphere also—to sloganeering in an icy stained-glass igloo.

Needless to say, rhetorical passion does not take into account all the niggling but path-blocking exigencies of each congregation with its possible tensions, obsessions, wearinesses, historical boundness—to be sure! Yet, if the Reformed preacher really cannot begin to begin in such a reformational direction as outlined, he must soon ask himself whether he dare stay on in the pulpit of such a hardened congregation.

Preaching for authentic Christian organization toward distinctly Christian action in every sphere of life is nothing more than preaching the Christian life—holiness! To preach for a Christian labor organization, reformationally directed toward re-structuring normatively labor life, is simply to preach for the holiness of the People of God in America in 1969.

The day before Labor Day 1969, with what words will the pulpits of the Reformed churches ring? After calculating the lethargy, the ignorance, the risks, nevertheless the Reformed churches retain the responsibility of facing God with their deeds. To the churches alone is the task of preaching assigned and they mllst answer for what they do in response.

And when the People of God walk out of the churches on the day before Labor Day 1969, into another week of work, will their teeth be worn down on slogan-stone-chips or their bellies full of good things from God, so that they may take up their daily tasks in the Spirit of Christ and in the community of His People?