Twisting the Devil's Tail

The late John Roach Straton was a loud and somewhat lonely voice of protest against the "mechanized Gomorrah" of Manhattan's Roaring Twenties. In 1923, as pastor of Manhattan's Calvary Baptist Church, he set up a small radio station, WQAO, in the basement of his church, and took to the air with his evangelistic message. Said Pastor Straton: "I hope that our radio system will prove so efficient that when I twist the Devil's tail in New York, his squawk will be heard across the continent."

Last week, broadcasting a special Wednesday night service, Dr. Straton's lineal successor, the Rev. John S. Wimbish, celebrated the 30th anniversary of Calvary Baptist's "Radio Ministry." It is the oldest continuing religious broadcast on the air. Now using the facilities of Manhattan's station WMGM, Calvary broadcasts twice each Sunday to a radio audience clustered in half a dozen nearby states. Its programs are also picked up on short wave and relayed by Station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador. Last year Pastor Wimbish got 25,000 letters from his U.S. and foreign listeners, many of them from people who were converted by the program.

The distinctive thing about Pastor Wimbish's sermons and those of past Calvary pastors is that they are stoutly fundamentalist in a city generally associated with religious liberalism. The 107-year-old church is one of the oldest Baptist congregations in New York (present memberbership: 1,500). But Calvary members regard most Northern Baptists as modernists, and keep up strong ties with the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1931, two years after Evangelist Straton's death, Calvary moved to a new church building on the ground floor of a $2,500,000 17-story building on Manhattan's busy and prosperous 57th Street. The rest of the building, owned and operated by the church, is given over to the Salisbury Hotel, one of the few Manhattan hostelries where liquor is never served.

Pastor Wimbish, 37, a hustling Georgian, supervises a New York staff of 23 and keeps in touch with the 23 foreign and domestic missionaries the church supports in full. His popular Sunday sermons are still cut to the measure which Pastor Straton laid down when he began his broadcasts 30 years ago. "The people will not get any doubts or negations or question marks from the Calvary pulpit," Straton promised. "I shall try to continue to do my part, as the Bible expresses it, in tearing down the strongholds of Satan."

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