The Worldly Parish

Judging from the way they have been talking, it seems that a lot of Protestant ministers consider the local church as obsolete as the village well. Now, however, there is new vitality in many parishes. Its source: the idea of the servant church. At some cost to formal worship, usually quite candidly acknowledged, hundreds of churches are turning more and more to work in the world.

Many of these parishes have come alive only after having faced up to the specter of death. The Episcopal Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C., for example, was founded in 1928 to serve a white, prosperous neighborhood. By 1960, when Father William Wendt, a onetime fighter pilot, took over as rector, the area was 90% Negro and had the highest crime rate in the city; most of St. Stephen's old parishioners had drifted away. Persuading his remaining white communicants to stay and help him rebuild, Wendt junked the traditional parish societies--bridge clubs, ladies' guilds and the like--and set up new ones aimed at neighborhood needs.

Now a seven-day-a-week church, St. Stephen's sponsors a preschool nursery, an emergency food bank and clothing center, a men's club that works for better relations with the police, an after-school tutoring program, a young adults' coffeehouse. Another idea is a club where periodic dialogues take place between "the losers"--neighborhood down-and-outers--and "the thrivers," a group of more affluent parishioners.

Boston Brahmins. Practicing brotherhood is not the exclusive province of slum churches. One rich parish with a high sense of social responsibility is the nondenominational Dover Church in a suburb of Boston. Founded in 1762 as a Congregational meeting house, the Dover Church has a quota of New England Brahmins on its membership rolls, and until recently was a classic example of a genteel Christian parish.

When Harvard-educated Congregationalist Deene Clark took over as minister in 1964, he warned parishioners that he was committed to a ministry "of witness in the world." He got a number of parishioners to invite Negro children from South Boston's Roxbury slum to be their guests. When Clark decided to join the Selma march, parishioners chipped in to help pay his expenses; after he returned, they took the lead in setting up a Fair Housing Committee in Dover to prepare for the day when Negroes might afford to live there. Clark is "a very up and doing young man," says Miss Amelia Peabody, 76, the town's social leader. "I think he's just fine."

Staggered Sabbath. The Rev. William Steel, pastor of seven-year-old Woodland Hills Methodist Church in a suburb of Los Angeles, also has a well-to-do congregation: professional men, business executives and aerospace technicians and their families. Instead of going into debt to build a bigger church for the rapidly growing congregation, Woodland Hills has tried a "staggered Sabbath," with services on weekday nights. Steel encourages parishioners to argue back after sermons, while trying to instill in them the need for a Christian response to what he calls "the challenge of the real."

For Woodland Hills, reality came with the Watts riots last August. The church was the first in the Los Angeles area to organize a food drive for riot victims, has since set up, in cooperation with Brother James Mims's Fundamentalist Negro Bible church near Watts, the Willowbrook Job Corporation, which has found jobs for 177 people and opened up communication between members of the two parishes. Steel, says one parishioner, "showed us that the church is only a place where we go for an hour to rehearse for a meeting with God in the world the other 167 hours a week."

Many other churchmen also believe that Christianity can draw from the secular present as well as from the sacred past. The 74-year-old Judson Memorial Church, in New York's Greenwich Village, has avant-garde movies, a dance theater, a theater, and an art gallery that was one of the first to display pop and happenings. Some of this esthetic interest has spilled over into the worship at Judson Memorial, most of whose 140 parishioners are not bearded beats but middle-class Manhattanites. Encouraged by Pastor Howard Moody, a Baptist, the congregants composed their own Thanksgiving Day jazz service, and one Ash Wednesday service featured a dancer who, to the accompaniment of Negro blues, doused himself in paint as a sign of mortification. Judson's theology, sums up Assistant Minister Al Carmines, a Methodist, is simple: "What is God about? God is about people and their needs."

Service v. Services. If the church is essentially God's people, why does a parish need a church building at all? The parishioners of Cherry Knolls United Church near Denver do not think they do, and have done surprisingly well without one. Organized into three colonies, the parishioners conduct their worship services in the evenings at congregants' homes. On Sundays, some of the parishioners do show up for services at what they call "Colony House"--the double garage of Pastor S. Macon Cowles's house converted into a chapel. To carry out the mission, parishioners are organized into task forces to do such things as help unwed mothers and underprivileged children in the Denver area.

Worship-directed churches, which seek God in traditional prayer, still form the majority in the U.S. The new kind of man-directed church, which finds God by ministering to daily problems, still has to persuade millions of its rightness in putting service before services. "This is the only way to practice Christianity," argues Cherry Knolls Parishioner Tim Ronzio. "It is only when you help your fellow man that you are walking in the way of God."

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