Word: presbyterian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theoretically at least, these are all spare-time activities. Dr. Blake's regular job for the past ten years has been Stated Clerk-permanent executive officer-of the Presbyterian General Assembly, an elected body that is the heart of the government of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterians), who number 3,259,011. Last week and this, in Buffalo, as Dr. Blake took charge for the tenth year of the General Assembly, the prime item on the agenda represented the highest ambition of his career-the "Blake Proposal" for the creation of a new, still-unnamed...
...Presbyterian Blake launched his sensation, appropriately enough, in an Episcopal church: San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. The occasion was the Sunday sermon at the beginning of the annual meeting of the National Council of Churches. A congregation that included some of the biggest wigs in Protestantism filed out 90 minutes later, whispering excitedly. For Presbyterian Blake had made a bold proposal-that the Episcopal Church and Northern Presbyterians together invite the Methodists and the United Church of Christ to form a new Christian church...
Hatfield & McCoy. Blake had chosen his nuclear churches cannily. The Methodists are an earthier offshoot of the Episcopalians, just as the United Church is a more freewheeling version of Calvinism than the Presbyterian. He purposely omitted the Lutherans and the Baptists, though he hopes they will eventually come in. The Baptists are too jealous of their congregational autonomy and are intransigent against infant baptism. The Lutherans in the U.S. are in the throes of pulling themselves together with mergers of their own (there have been 16 major Lutheran unions since...
...today tend to take their faiths with them, but they switch them easily under a variety of influences. This may betoken the decline of Protestantism, or it may be a kind of built-in unity movement on the grass-roots level. For if U.S. Protestants think of themselves as Presbyterians or Methodists, they tend more and more to pick their churches because they are within walking distance, or because their friends go there, or because they like the preacher-all too few care passionately about doctrinal differences between the limestone church with stained glass, the spired white clapboard...
Blake was born the son of a salesman for the Inland Steel Co. in St. Louis. "My father always taught a Sunday school class," he recalls. "Even when we moved around-to Winnetka or Bronxville-it was never more than a month before we were members of the local Presbyterian church. We had morning prayer each day at home, and of course we said grace at meals...