D C U
Three letters, meaning Dartmouth Christian Union, that have a pervasive influence not only on the College but on the whole Hanover region
GRADUATE SECRETARY
MANY students are touched by the work of the Dartmouth Christian Union but very few are aware of the great scope of its activity. In one sense its work is better known in the villages of Vermont and New Hampshire, and even, perhaps, back in the hills of some southern states or among students in the East and West Zones of Berlin, or as far away as South Korea and Viet Nam. The DCU has reached to all these places many times a year and yet, as often, has been involved in varied ways on the Dartmouth campus itself.
One student may know the DCU as the Sunday Evening Group, and another as the farm work trips, hospital program, or church deputation teams. But some twenty-six groups would have to be named if one were to delineate the DCU by its complete program. Nor can it be "seen" at work as a Christian Union, as many visitors have asked to see it, because its time and geography are so broadcast. Its officers and commission chairmen report in every day of the week to tell of their work, to keep each other informed, to receive new requests and instructions, and then go about their particular responsibilities. Most of these officers put in ten hours or more a week, some as many as forty hours, and members may be involved in only one or as many as twenty different DCU activities a year.
But it is not in program activities that an understanding of the Christian Union is to be found. The meaning of the DCU is to be found, rather, in its purpose and intention. As a fellowship of students, it wants to understand the Christian faith and to live the Christian life, entering into the fellowship of worship, thought, and service which is the heritage of the Christian Church. But, standing within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the Christian Union seeks fellowship with those students who want to understand the Jewish faith and to live the Jewish life, sharing together all thought and action, though celebrating the worship of God separately as respective traditions may require. Moreover, as standing ithin our particular history and culture, the Christian Union wants also, and perhaps especially, to enter into fellowship with students who acknowledge no church or other religious affiliation for themselves but who seek to know what is ultimately true and good, and who are persuaded to effect in deed what they may believe about God and man in the world.
In principle, the DCU recognizes itself as a constantly changing body of young people whose student generations are brief, and moving in cycles as have other student generations. There will be periods of concentration on the fundamentals of the Christian faith because students have lost their way in the multitude of interests they have engaged upon. There will be periods when they will take this faith out into action. And there will be periods of losing the way until they concentrate again upon the acts of God and the Scripture. So the Christian Union declares in every student generation its need for the understanding, sympathy, and patience of those whose responsibility it is to encourage its members' growth in spirit, mind, and body.
How earnestly the officers of the Christian Union take their responsibility can be learned from the words of a retiring DCU president to the incoming officers when he said to them at a retreat: "You are part of the movement of young men and women from every part of the world who have found themselves challenged to live responsibly, who for the most part have found that challenge put to them ultimately by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and who have found themselves together in his Name, working out in their contemporary situations the implications for all men of His coming into the world Every- where, men acting in responsibility to what they believe to be ultimately true find themselves in a struggle against much of the world.... Insofar as you hold in common the basic necessity of the search for the True, and the life which realizes responsibly the full extent of human freedom, you and Dartmouth College are found together.... You will often find true sympathy and common concern in quarters from which you least expect it. Search out and examine carefully; you are responsible to preserve what is true here and to stand against what is false, whoever or'whatever that may be.
IT is in the earnestness o£ such words that the clue to the genius of the Christian Union is to be found. It is a grass-roots association of students with minimum direction from either faculty or administration or Church. On the one hand, any who are devout and religious men are encouraged to turn outward where faith might become relevant at its intersection with the needs of men. On the other hand, special concern is directed to the unbeliever, the doubter, the agnostic, the skeptic, the uncertain, who are very simply invited to join together in common enterprise to live as responsible men in the world of our time.
Above all, it is held that no human concern or need is ever outside the responsibility of an association of Christian men and men who earnestly seek what is to be believed as true and good and meaningful. Student action such as social service, farm work trips, hospital work, deputations, community service, clothing and food and book collections for the needy of the world, and all like activity is the point at which faith becomes "real" for many young people. They participate readily in such actions as an expression of either confident or tentative faith, or as the only adequate present responsibility for "holding on" until faith may work itself out or be worked out in meaningful terms.
Ultimately, however, social service is something less than adequate. The possibility for worship, special discussion, group study, individual consultation, private or group examination of perplexing religious questions, attention to Scripture, concern over moral and ethical issues - these are the a priori of meaningful action. In the college community of learning there needs to be heard in the Christian association, as in other departments, new and even unorthodox expression of the issues that concern students who are working out the terms of their faith. The Christian Union seeks to meet this need.
There is encouraged a consciousness of direction and of being on a way, so toarrive at (1) an adequate extracurricular program of religion, Christian and Jewish, (2) a responsible social service program, (3) a serious citizenship program of political and economic concern, both campus and extra-campus, (4) cooperation with the Department of Religion and the Chapel program, (5) generous faculty participation in the program, (6) full participation in the international Student Christian Movement, and (7) an awareness of the vital nature of membership in the visible community of faith: the Church or Synagogue.
The Christian Union has not only grown out of the uniquely Dartmouth situation, never looking to similar groups for its direction, nor to the past excepting in respect of tradition, but it has been a Christian" student group'with its vitalities resident in the faith of the student members who themselves create and sustain its program. Counsel is always sought, but consequent working out of activity and program always remains the student members' own initiative and responsibility. The College administration has allowed nothing less than a remarkable, absolute freedom within responsibility in all the work and worship of the Christian Union.
Experience throughout the World Student Christian Movement clearly demonstrates how singularly fortunate it is that the Dartmouth Christian Union is responsible o the College administration precisely hrough the Council on Student Organizations, as are all other student groups at Dartmouth, and not to the Department of Religion, the Chapel, or church denominational organizations. This is guarantee always that the DCU will remain part of the genuine student activity of the College, retaining more certainly the character of a "movement" over against an "organization." This preserves for each student generation the grass-roots nature of the contemporary student group in every time, and this is guarantee also of vigor and freedom under the judgment of prophetic-apostolic faith alone rather than that of denominational or other formal institutions.
UNDER the persuasion that no human concern or need is ever outside the responsibility of an association of Christian men, and of men who earnestly seek what is true and good and meaningful, the DCU rarely serves itself but, rather, looks to its responsibility on the campus, in the local and state regions, in the country and abroad. Its work on the campus is usually quite evident and shared in by many students but there are also less obvious and subtle ways in which the DCU has found itself responsible to the campus. This may only be in the accepted dictum that, if a good member must choose between holding office in the DCU and, perhaps, the DCAC or DOC or WDBS, he is encouraged rather to take office in the other campus organizations and, as also a good member of the DCU, to serve them responsibly.
But now and again there comes a unique possibility for the DCU to serve the campus. About six years ago the College Chest was in difficulty and support of it was less than enthusiastic. On its own the DCU formed a committee which for months worked on a critique of methods used by the Undergraduate Council Chest Committee. The campus never learned of this report that was given to the Chest Committee, which acted on the report and never again came far from achieving its goal. This was the origin of the present Chest method, though the origin has long since been forgotten. Again, when racial and religious discrimination became an issue, the DCU formed a committee which worked for a whole year on the question. Because fraternities were particularly involved, the committee was formed with seven DCU fraternity men, one non-fra-ternity man, and one freshman. When the fraternities, feeling themselves under pressure issued a statement on the values of a fraternity, the DCU committee, believing it could prepare a far better statement on fraternity values, prepared such a statement but included also a section on disvalues. In modified form this statement has been issued each year to prospective pledges so they may form their own judgments. To this day the DCU, whose membership is about half fraternity men, thinks no better statement of fraternity values or disvalues has been drawn. It was also out of this committee that there came the proposal that, since the campus had voted to abolish discriminatory clauses by 1960, the Board of Trustees should be asked to enforce the abolition, and it was so voted by the Undergraduate Council.
There is a sense in which "memory" thus runs through a student Christian group (the DCU is 155 years old!). It was foreseen that by i960 with a new student generation little different essentially from the earlier one, the whole struggle might have to be fought over again and nothing ever accomplished. It was also out of this sense of history that the DCU saw, time and again, student liberal political groups spontaneously forming and acting and dying out. These were not always particularly responsible groups and some DCU men, on the ground that what one believes about God and man in the world has social, economic and political implications, always sought membership in these groups in the interest of orderly and responsible liberalism. Ultimately a Political Action Commission was formed within the structure of the DCU and over the years it has a good history of presenting to the campus responsible men of liberal and even radical thought. This Commission is presently meeting with other colleges, Wellesley and Smith included, to work out a Biblical ground for Christian social and political action.
There is a campus program set up to meet the needs of "religious" students and designed also for the doubters and those who are out around the periphery of religious concerns. Every Sunday evening a member of the faculty speaks for a short time and out of his particular field of interest tries to draw the student out from his religious ground. The students in turn try to draw the speaker off his ground with questions which, if they are not about religion, are nevertheless religious questions. On this middle ground are discussed such subjects as: What Does the Existentialist Answer to Faithless Anxiety, An Ethic of the Absurd, The Basis of Moral Action, The Artist in Religious Exile, The Non-rational in Human Experience, Religion and the Theatre, The Problem of Doubt, and many others.
Many prominent leaders in the Church speak during the year and an annual Theological Lecture Series was instituted recently. In the first of this series, Dr. H.A. Johnson, eminent Kierkegaard scholar, spoke twice on "Kierkegaard and/or Sartre, the Difference Between Christian and Atheistic Existentialism." In the second, Dr. Paul Lehmann, a theologian, spoke on "Christianity and Ethics, the Christian Challenge to an Absolute Ethic.
Apre-theological group within the DCU . counts about forty members, at least twelve of whom will enter theological seminaries in the fall. This group, The Wheelock Group, is organized only informally lest it become a self-conscious group of "preachers" rather than ordinary undergraduates having campus interests in common with all other students. All student leaders of Chapel are called through the DCU Religious Life Commission, which also sponsors study and discussion croups, and which, for eight years has directed carol singing in Thayer Hall for the three nights preceding Christmas vacation. On any one night of - up to six hundred men may join in the singing. The same Commission is responsible for DCU participation in intercollegiate conferences. Four of these were held this year at Amherst, Green Mountain, Smith, and at Northfield, Mass. Forty-five Dartmouth students attended the latter, a regional conference of the Student Christian Movement; and among the DCU delegation were Protestants, Catholics, Jews, a Moslem, and men of several races. Always, for such a conference, the DCU invited men who would not ordinarily be caught dead in a religious conference, and never has one of these regretted participating - they often give a peppery clue to their presence at any Christian student conference!
Best known, perhaps, of all DCU programs is the work carried on in the surrounding region. There are sometimes as many as fifteen trips a week when members go out as farm hands, hospital workers, deputation teams, school and grange speakers, or as a choir, a band, or an entertaining group helping to raise funds for a school or church or a whole village. Calling at the Veterans Hospital twice a week, students bring nothing with them but the desire to visit and to talk, and there is usually a waiting list of veterans who want a student to stop by at his bedside. The list of students wanting to visit the children's ward at the local hospital is filled a week in advance for the four trips each week; and the dullness and chagrin of a student's Saturday night confined to Dick's House is somewhat overcome by the "DCU Flicks," first-rate movies shown every Saturday by DCU men.
It may surprise many a Dartmouth graduate that in the first thirty weeks of this school year, 110 different trips have been made by men of the Deputations Commission. Most of their work is with church youth groups, Sunday Schools, and churches. About forty students are involved in this program which reaches out some fifty miles from Hanover. Trips are made every week to Plainfield and West Lebanon in New Hampshire and to Wilder and White River in Vermont. A DCU choir substitutes for some village church choirs - sometimes to the expressed relief of parishioners even if for the sole reason that the choir's voices are all male. Almost all requests can be filled whether for a Bible School teacher, a student from Africa to speak on his homeland, a student to play Santa Claus, or one to preach. But one request could not be filled this year: an American Indian to speak at Woodstock. This is 1956, not 1769! The DCU can supply a Latin-American instrumental and singing trio for a little snowed-in village, and it can send a magician, or a Moslem, or a refugee, or even, as one request had it, "a foreign convert" - but no Indian!
Perhaps most deeply moving of all calls that come to the Christian Union are those from aged farmers, or farmers who are victims of polio or accident or fire. With a fine tool-shed and even a good power-saw DCU men must work sometimes three times a week especially when firewood is low, or crops have to be brought in, or the barn roof leaks. Students spent two months digging through fields for a farmer's "lost" waterpipe, and with the ground's freezing the effort had to be abandoned until spring. Meanwhile this very old farmer, a very sick man whose wife died this winter, must carry water by hand from a distant spring. Water departments from as far away as Boston were called upon for modern pipe-finding instruments, but they insisted on providing divining rods instead and, the DCU notes with mixed relief, these were no more successful than more scientific efforts. Such efforts on behalf of farmers is a delicate matter because of their New England pride. They prefer to think that DCU men need the exercise rather than that they need the firewood. Once, only to give two old DOC jackets to a farmer and his wife, who had little clothing on their backs, a whole work crew had to be dressed in similar jackets and to solemnly declare they had so many they did not know what to do with them. The jackets were accepted, but reluctantly even then. With hard work, these students can lay in a three-month supply of wood for a farmer in just an afternoon or two.
For the students who are war victims around the world, tons of books and tons of clothing are sent every year. A "Hanover-Dartmouth" log cabin library is constantly supplied with books in one of the poorer school districts of a southern state. Students who escape from the East Zone of Berlin are given clothing and a little temporary cash by the DCU in cooperation with a Christian Association at the University of Berlin. Several pastors behind the Iron Curtain have food and clothing carried to them for themselves and for students by several anonymous friends of the DCU in West Germany. Many hundreds of pounds of food are sent through CARE. Some of the money for this work comes from the College Chest, but much of it is given, without its being asked for, by the officers and members of the Christian Union. The officers themselves have been supporting a War Orphan in Europe for seven years and once sent a German pastor, who had been in the anti-Nazi underground and there suffered physical disabilities, for one year of convalescence to Switzerland where he might have dairy foods and good climate.
The Christian Union does not welcome public speaking about this part of its program, and some of its members may be unhappy to see it spelled out even in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. But Dartmouth alumni will want to know of this work of Dartmouth students, a work that is seldom publicly discussed and rarely, in the breadth of its program, recognized even by many students now at Dartmouth. In this sense, the work of the Dartmouth Christian Union is rather taken for granted by students, but this is not particularly unwelcome because it is in the nature of such work that the one hand need not know what the other is doing; and certainly there are not many within the Christian Union itself who can tell all that it is up to at any one time.
The executive committee of the CU Cabinet, which directs a 26-part program, is made up of (l to r) Stephen D. Hibbs '57, President James P. Breeden '56, Stafford H. Krause '57,1. Richard Rubottom '56 and Thomas R. Davis '56.
Visits are made to cheer up patients in the children's ward of the Hanover hospital (left) and in the Veterans Hospital at White River Junction.
Visits are made to cheer up patients in the children's ward of the Hanover hospital (left) and in the Veterans Hospital at White River Junction.
Mr. Kalbfleisch, graduate secretary of the Dartmouth Christian Union and author of this article, shown chatting with students at Rollins after morning chapel service.
A DCU work trip sawing and splitting firewood for an aged farmer near Hanover.
Sunday evening discussion, with a faculty leader, in the DCU's College Hall quarters.
The DCU choir, which sings at services in small village churches, practicing in Rollins Chapel. Behind organist Bruce Maline '57 are Vincent Sawyer, Barry Davis, Roger Condit, Robert Wat son, Wallace Berry, Robert Weston and John Coffin, all members of the Class of 1959.
The "Hanover-Dartmouth" log cabin library maintained in a southern school district.
About the Author: The Rev. George H. Kalbfleisch in January 1948 joined the College staff in the newly created post of Graduate Secretary of the Dartmouth Christian Union. He had formerly been with the Presbyterian Church's Board of Christian Education as Assistant Director of the Department of Young People's Work. A graduate of Elmhurst (Ill.) College in 1937, Mr. Kalbfleisch in 1940 received the B.D. degree from Eden Theological Seminary, Webster Groves, Mo. Following his ordination, he was Dean of Chapel and Student Pastor at Elmhurst College for two years before entering the Navy as Chaplain in 1942. Overseas with the Marine Corps, he served in the Solomon Islands and the Philippines. Upon discharge in 1946, he held the rank of lieutenant commander. At Dartmouth, Mr. Kalbfleisch's work extends well beyond the organizational lines of the DCU, and a great many students seek his counsel on personal as well as religious matters.
