Left and Right

Two major appointments

After lengthy searches, new leaders have been chosen by a major church of the American Protestant left and by the leading organ of the Protestant right.

Learning from failure Like many a city congregation, New York's interdenominational Riverside Church, where Harry Emerson Fosdick once held forth, has suffered a slow membership decline, from 3,300 to 2,600 over the past decade. To turn things around, the church has hired flamboyant Presbyterian William Sloane Coffin, 53, who during 17 years as chaplain of Yale led many civil rights and antiwar rallies and twice went to jail.

Coffin has a social background that should appeal to Riverside's wealthy supporters (the building is maintained by a $40 million endowment), and his social crusading should appeal to its growing black and Hispanic constituency. The main hesitation about Coffin was the fact that he is divorced from his first wife and separated from his second--still rare even for ministers in liberal churches. Asked about this at the congregational meeting, Coffin responded, "We don't learn from success. We learn from failures."

Without error Christianity Today (circ. 142,000) was founded in 1956 by Billy Graham and friends in order to provide much-needed intellectual guidance for Evangelical Protestants. The magazine's urbane image suffered this year when it moved from downtown Washington, D.C., to Carol Stream, Ill., in part to be closer to the conservative Protestant heartland. Nonetheless, it has just chosen a new editor, Kenneth S. Kantzer, who comes equipped with a Harvard Ph.D. Says he: "Great ideas don't have to be incomprehensible."

Kantzer, 60, an Evangelical Free Church clergyman, has led Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois as it has grown from 35 to 450 full-time students. He staunchly defends the idea that the Bible is wholly without error. Thi tenet is included in a creed that the magazine's board adopted last year, and retiring Editor Harold Lindsell has written a controversial book (TIME, May 10, 1976) assailing Evangelicals with less rigorous views.

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