School for Country Parsons

Refreshed, reanimated and refurbished, 72 Southern country preachers last week went back home to work. For 16 days, at a unique new school at Emory (Ga.) Uni versity, they had mopped their brows in the clinging heat and studied agricultural problems, learned about agencies serving the rural South, got tips on church work.

The "School for Town and Country Ministers" was the twin brainchild of Dean Henry Burton Trimble of Emory's Candler School of Theology, and of the school's Field Work Director Emmett S.

Johnson. Fearful that steady migration to cities might doom the rural church, they decided that ministers could make country life more interesting if they knew more about its practical phases. Said Dean Trimble: "Since the church is the only institution in some [rural] communities, we should have men who would be able to wrestle not only with the religious problems but furnish some leadership for the community in all of its aspects." The school was nonsectarian, but most of the preacher-students were Methodists. Instructors skirted doctrinal mat ters, stressed the cold facts of soil conservation, health, education. Classes were highly informal, with the preachers lounging in overstuffed chairs and enthusiastically shouting "Amen!" when a speaker made a telling point. After two weeks of hard study, most of them took a night off to see the Atlanta Crackers baseball club wallop Nashville.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.