Word: pastorate
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...church. They are not the congregation, but merely the staff of deacons, teachers, janitors, ushers, singers, pianists and parking-lot attendants. Once on the job and in uniform-choir in their Sunday best, car hustlers in white-they are ready to receive the crowds who come to hear their pastor...
Mark Twain wrote the thing in a letter to his minister. The Reverend Joseph Twichell, pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford, Conn. (the "Church of the Holy Speculators," as Twain called it, in honor of the wealth of its worshipers), was very much "one of the boys." Unable to carry over into the Gilded Age the intellectual prestige which Horace Bushnell had lent to the Hartford ministry a generation before, Twichell sought the approval of his congregation through demonstrations of manliness, not of mind. He was a forceful speaker and an exuberant athlete, and whenever the males...
...Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and a covey of ladies including the Queen was to be recorded in all the coarseness and candor that Twain liked to believe was typical of aristocratic talk of the period, he should write it out in a letter to Twichell. The good pastor, predictably, laughed his head off. After keeping the letter in his pocket for four years so that he could refer to it in moments of despondency (memories of Bushnell, possibly?), he sent it along to John Hay. When Hay recovered from hilarious convulsions he had the parody published--anonymously...
...Charged Pastor Merle G. Franke of Chicago in a recent issue of the Lutheran magazine Ecclesia Plantanda: "One of the most disturbing elements in the church today is the deterioration in the art of preaching." But Dr. Kyle Haselden, who reads as many as 50 sermons a week as editor of the nondenominational magazine The Pulpit, defends his contemporaries. Says he: "The level of preaching in Protestant churches is higher than in the past." Squirming in the Pews. The standout preachers of the past, says the Rev. Walfred Erickson, of suburban Seattle's Clyde Hill Baptist Church...
...make your own decisions.' I could talk principles, but the difficulty in these discussions lies in the fantastically complex set of concrete circumstances to which the principle must be applied. In the knowledge of these circumstances, the President would be expert, not the confessor. No one-bishop, pastor or confessor-can free him from the responsibility for making his own decision on matters of this kind. I know of no wise confessor who would dare impose an obligation in such matters except in the most clear-cut cases of dishonesty." Since President Kennedy has taken some public positions which...