Word: methodists
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...More devils can be routed by a little laughter than by a carload of humorless piety," writes Methodist Pastor Charles Merrill Smith in How to Be come a Bishop Without Being Religious (Doubleday; $3.50). The devils that Smith wants to exorcise are the phony pietism and the trivial hypocrisy that many a Protestant pastor has to indulge in if he intends to climb the hierarchical ladder of his church...
Glory & Dedication. At 46, Iconoclast Smith has climbed up the "professional progress chart" he offers in his book just as fast as the mythical Conformist Goodfellow. The pastor of the 2,200-member Wesley Methodist Church in Bloomington, Ill., Smith is a trustee of Illinois Wesleyan University, has a rich cherry-red rug in his office, drives a red Dodge convertible and aspires to own a Jaguar sedan. A few times a year he takes his blonde wife Betty, whom he married for "irrelevant reasons," to New York for a round of Broadway shows and dinner at Lu-chow...
...brother, and grandson of Methodist preachers, Smith wrote his book late nights, sitting at the kitchen table. What motivated him was a lover's quarrel with the church. For he believes that "it behooves us who love the church to do what we can to eliminate the ridiculous and the trivial so that the glory, the dedication and the relevance may be seen unobscured...
...must move with slow and special care if they are to influence their flocks at all. Perhaps, they can add, the committee's acts of good will have already begun to change the climate in the state. A fortnight ago, the president of the Mississippi Bankers Association, a Methodist, called on citizens "to obey the law, keep in step with the times." Last fall the Mississippi Baptist Convention appealed for an end to "injustices heaped upon Negroes...
Grand Avenue Methodist Church McAlester, Okla...