Word: layman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...made not through humility but to persuade. They sound a little too much coached, perfected to the point where they seem artificial. ... At the same time, I found more good at Caux than critics had led me to expect. M.R.A. has cut away the theological language which repels the layman. If it falls into the inanities and dangers of mass propaganda, it does appreciate the need of using words that people can understand and respect...
...Murray H. Leiffer of Garrett Biblical Institute at Northwestern made a two-year survey. To all district lay leaders,* plus samplings of Methodist women and youth, Dr. Leiffer's Bureau of Social Research sent a formidable questionnaire. The result, published this week in book form and titled The Layman Looks at the Minister (Abingdon-Cokesbury; $1.50), makes 160 pages of required reading for theological students. Laymen will find it an absorbing composite of the country's largest Protestant church body...
...Methodists like sermons; they like them biblical and they like them preached, not read. Wrote an Oklahoma county clerk: "Most preachers . . . that I listen to talk too much about what they have done, or make too many personal references, follow notes too closely, giving the Average thinking layman the impression of not enough time spent praying over the message to be delivered to hungry people...
...Layman and Lay Reader. Britons knew Sir Richard as a Liberal M.P. who had founded, with J. B. Priestley, the shortlived, socialist Common Wealth Party, later resigned to join the Labor Party. Sir Richard, who describes himself as "a recent convert" to Anglicanism, now serves as lay reader* in his village church near Exeter. He believes that his Mirror column may enable him to cover the field of applied Christianity in "20 or 30 articles," happily anticipates some hot controversy over such questions as whether Jonah ever really lived in the whale. Says he: "I hope we shall be interrupted...
...welcome this important significant departure from precedent in electing a layman as president of the Federal Council as a recognition ... of the obvious fact that the men and women of the congregations, the blessed company of all faithful people, make the Christian church. Its weakness is their weakness and its strength is their strength.... The world cries for the effective and universal Christian ministry of all believers...