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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
The Languages of Science
Monday, December 11, 1967
Singing minister gets involved at KU
By Pamela Peck Kansan Staff Reporter
The Rev. Mr. Dunagan, minister, singer, and Lawrence graduate student, is "in" with the 500 members—many of them college students, instructors and business people of the First Southern Baptist Church. He's down to earth—on their level. He's involved.
Southern Baptists? Aren't they those strict fundamentalists?
Not Rev. Dunagan. Last spring the Rev. Ronald Sunbye, pastor of the First Methodist Church, and Dunagan presented a dialogue in the Kansas Union. In the course of the evening, Sundbye told Rev. Dunagan. "You're certainly not a typical Southern Baptist."
Rev. Dunagan is well read in modern theology. On his book-shelves are the works of some of the more liberal theologians, like Bonhoeffer, Altizer and the Neibuhrs.
He applies modern and creative techniques. He thinks nothing of traveling 300 miles a night to and from college campuses to sing. This past summer as pastor-adviser for Baptist students in Kansas and Nebraska, he helped form the Pilgrim 20 Singers because he thinks they're a modern way of explaining Christianity.
Even though most of the members of the Pilgrim 20 are in their late teens and early twenties, Rev. Dunangan, 34, bespectacled and balding, is among them when they bound onto a stage, wearing old gold blazers and slacks, and yelling "Let's have a meetin' tonight."
Using psychedelic lights and electric guitars, the group swings through numbers like "Don't Let the Rain Come Down," "For What It's Worth," "You Were on My
Mind," and religious folk songs like "Seek and Ye Shall Find" and "He's Everything to Me."
Results: 10 campus appearances and several trips to youth conventions, an invitation from a Lincoln, Neb., TV station to tape the group for nationwide broadcasting, and an invitation to attend the International Youth Congress in Switzerland.
Rev. Dunagan tells most acquaintances he has learned that a person who uses all of himself has a greater chance for success and happiness.
"A person half involved finds life difficult," he said. As a student, working on a doctorate in philosophy, he said he gets "great satisfaction out of aceing a single test."
At Baylor University, where he was graduated cum laude with a major in Greek in 1955 and lacked only 10 hours for a double major in philosophy, he was known as the fellow who wasn't satisfied if he didn't make an A every time. Later, in seminary, he majored in Biblical interpretation and graduated with an A average.
While preparing and presenting his sermons, the young clergyman sees himself as an artist who paints, stands back to admire and then tingles inside with satisfaction.
"A sermon to me is like a work of art. I have a feeling much akin to ecstasy if a sense of real communication is there," he said.
Behind the pulpit, Rev. Dunagan is intent and serious; deep wrinkles carve his forehead as he emphasizes an important point. He uses few notes (a 3-by-5-inch outline card if anything). His sermons seem to follow a certain pattern—statement of the problem, relation to individuals, and a plan for attacking the problem.
Rev. Dunagan said he counsels at least five persons per week on major problems: a person contemplating suicide, an alcoholic, a student about to quit school, a parolee trying to relate back to life.
At 14, "outside of the church," he was tape recording a church service one day when the idea of becoming a minister came to him. His decision to preach, he says, was a sovereign act of God, without previous consideration on his part. Soon he began his ministry
"Picture me, a skinny, callow kid, standing on an 18-inch platform in a 'cowboy church' at
places like Tarzan, Flory and Penwell in west Texas. Gasoline lanterns hanging from the ceiling, tough men slouching on wooden benches, women in simple cotton dresses, and children scrambling up and down the aisles. That's how I started.
Once Rev. Dunagan rambled over the poverty pocket hills of North Carolina, knocking on the doors of one-room shacks. Another time, he was chapain at a mental hospital. In college he was pastor of a student mission in a tense multi-racial slum district.
College students fascinate Rev. Dunagan, which may be why he came to Lawrence three years ago. His ministry here allows him to communicate with a generation he likes.
The Rev. Dunagan
"This generation cares about being involved in changing the world. They have courage, independence," he said. "They're just a great group of people."
He doesn't envy the younger generation because he realizes there have never been so many devastating means of destruction in the world as today.
He tells them, "If you give in to fear, you'll make yourself constantly unhappy. The best thing to do is to search for ways to make the world better and then pitch in and help."
As others struggle, he struggles too, over the perplexing problem which made him start work on a doctorate.
The problem to him is that current theories of knowledge tend to accept only sense knowledge as verifiable. Even areas like psychology, ethics, religion and aesthetics have to operate under these limitations or be considered "unscientific."
"Many theologians are shrinking God to the system and reducing the grandeur of a revealed religion to humanism," he said.
Rev. Dunagan is searching for a theory of knowing which is broader than the existing theory based on sense knowledge.
"It may be presumptuous to even work in an area where so many really great minds have worked, but perhaps it is the time to build on what has been done," he said.
PUBLIC MEETING
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION Lawrence Chapter
LEONARD TINKER of the American Friends Service Committee
CIVIL LIBERTIES AND THE DRAFT
7:30 p.m. Parish House of the Episcopal Church Tuesday, December 12 1011 Vermont St.
EUROPE '68
Travel Information Forum Tomorrow Night, Dec.12 7:00 p.m., Big Eight Room
Travel Films, Information, Questions answered by last year's trip members.
TWO MONTH FLIGHT NEW YORK TO PARIS
ONE MONTH FLIGHT NEW YORK TO LONDON
June 13-Aug.14 $270
Aug. 6-Sept. 5
$305
($255 for fifty or more)
Flights Are Open To All KU Students, Staff Faculty, And Their Families. Sign up now for SUA Summer Flights. Contracts and information are available in the SUA office.