Word: merriams
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...stirred up a fuss that threatens to shake the entire church. By a vote of 73 to 27, the presbytery-exercising its power to intervene in hiring-firing matters that are normally left to congregations and their elders-voted to oust Broadway's minister, the Rev. Stuart Merriam, 38. Also removed from office were the church's ten pro-Merriam elders, who were replaced by a presbytery-appointed commission. Merriam was asked to remove his personal belongings from the church-and even to refrain from attending Sunday services there. A substitute preacher-Dr. Paul Franklin Hudson, formerly...
...theology seemed to be at the heart of the presbytery's action, the immediate cause was the personality of lean, intense Stuart Merriam. Born in Schenectady, Merriam, a bachelor, graduated from Toronto's Knox College and acquired a doctorate from New College in Edinburgh. His first call, in 1957, was to the First Presbyterian Church of Portsmouth, Va., a rundown, impoverished church with a congregation of 500. Merriam doubled the church's property, added 100 parishioners to the congregation, put on an impressive range of new youth activities-and began to create a reputation for unorthodoxy. Although...
...March 1961, after a two-year search for a minister, Broadway Presbyterian's congregation voted to "call" (invite) Merriam as their next pastor. Despite misgivings about his fundamentalism, the presbytery approved the choice and almost immediately found reasons to regret it. Merriam brought his huge German shepherd Blitz into the pulpit at a children's service. He earned a brief notoriety by tape-recording a telephone conversation with a State Department official about the problems of an exile from Iran, then playing the tape-including the official's off-the-cuff criticisms of Iranian corruption...
...report approved by the presbytery last week praised Merriam for adding to the congregation's membership and improving church property. But it charged him with intolerance of contemporary theology, unsuitable evangelical approach to the spiritual needs of the Columbia students, theatrical conduct of worship, ineptitude in the Iranian affair...
...scale ranging from James Thurber's dry comment on newspapers' tendency to merge ("One day there is going to be just one newspaper and the whole front page will have to be devoted to the name") to an exhaustive reprise of the recent press row over Merriam-Webster's new dictionary (which gives respectability to such vulgarisms...