Lay Leadership

The trend toward administering church affairs from the pew, rather than the pulpit, was marked again last week. Meeting in Grand Rapids, Mich. for the 159th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern), 850-odd delegates elected Washington Lawyer Wilbur LaRoe Jr. as their new moderator. Dapper, sandy-haired Church Elder LaRoe, 58, is the fourth lay moderator elected by the Presbyterians since church law was amended 39 years ago to make elders eligible. He joins the ranks of such other top Protestant lay leaders as Charles P. Taft, president of the Federal Council of Churches, John Foster Dulles, head of the Council's potent Commission on a Just & Durable Peace, and ex-Justice Owen J. Roberts, first layman president of the Episcopal General Convention's House of Deputies.

Under new Moderator LaRoe, the Assembly:

P: Heard that their church had raised 84% of its $27 million restoration fund (for rehabilitation of church life in Europe and Asia) in only two years instead of three.

P: Proposed a "budget for benevolence" of more than $17 million--33 1/3% more than last year's.

P: Approved a plan aimed at healing by 1950 the 85-year-old schism with Southern Presbyterians.

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