"Beloved Fellowship"

Roy Abram Burkhart's farmer-father wanted his son to be a fertilizer salesman. His Mennonite mother prayed that he would enter the ministry. For the Burkhart family of Cumberland County, Pa. the issue was decided once & for all during World War I, when one of young Soldier Burkhart's best friends, who had hoped to be a minister, was killed. Roy made up his mind to enter the church. Today Dr. Roy Burkhart, pastor of the First Community Church of Columbus, Ohio, is the whirring dynamo of the growing community-church movement and an outstanding U.S. churchman.

Published this week, Dr. Burkhart's newest book, How the Church Grows (Harper, $2), will give both detractors and admirers a clear picture of what he is trying to do. Dr. Burkhart writes of his dream of "the True Church," which "is to help each individual to come alive with God in his soul."

The ideal church Burkhart writes about is at once as modern as science, sociology and psychiatry can make it and as all-pervasive in the community as the church of the Middle Ages. In the "beloved fellowship" of Christians living, working and playing together, he sees the all-important matrix of spiritual life, and within this group relationship he apportions the church's liturgy, recreation, social work, preaching and prayer. His blueprint for his True Church is not mere speculation; many of the specifications have been met in his own grey limestone, suburban First Community Church of Columbus.

Exuberant Statistics. In 1935, when husky, black-haired Roy Burkhart went to Columbus, the First Community Church had about 225 active members and a debt of $147,000. The minister's staff consisted of a secretary, a janitor, a part-time choir director and a part-time organist. Today the church has 3,670 active members, a 1947 budget of $108,838 and a full-time staff of 17.

In 1935 the church had no energy or funds to spend for missions; now it supports one missionary each in China, India and England. But of all First Community's exuberant statistics, none is more meaningful than the support it gets from the jukebox-and-Coca-Cola set. At nearby Upper Arlington High School 90% of the seniors and 96% of the student body as a whole are active members of the church.

Dr. Burkhart wins such hard-to-get parishioners with his regular-guy sincerity and his easy scorn of cant or ecclesiastical primness. Once, when a high-school audience began to settle back in boredom at being addressed by a pastor, he told them the story of the girl who called her boyfriend "Pilgrim" because every time he came over he made progress. The principal never asked him back, but the audience listened hard after that.

Last winter, a group of high-school and college students who had banded together for informal bull sessions at the church decided to form a "prayer-cell." One discipline to which they bound themselves was to ask a stranger each day, "Do you believe in prayer?" One night when Pastor Burkhart was eating alone in a restaurant, he fell into conversation with the waitress and suddenly sprang his day's query on prayer. "Well, big boy," she said, visibly shaken, "I must say that's the most unusual approach I've ever heard!"

Clinics & Cars. Roy Burkhart's candor and his readiness to use clinical and psychiatric techniques in his church work have often shocked conservatives. He has been branded a cheap sensationalist for his birth-control discussions, marriage clinics and seminars on sex adjustment problems. But his methods seem to work. Out of the nearly 1,000 marriages he has performed during the past twelve years, only nine have ended in divorce.

In addition to marriage counseling, Dr. Burkhart has set up regular clinical sessions for parents (according to their children's ages), and for adolescents with personality problems. Church members are proud of the fact that of 634 of their boys in the armed forces not one was discharged for psychoneurotic reasons. Said Psychiatrist Karl Menninger after studying the mental hygiene setup of Dr. Burkhart's church: "It is the most constructive and comprehensive program I have seen carried out anywhere in America."

Grateful parishioners often send him presents--sometimes even new cars. Once, when given a Chris-Craft speedboat, he decided that it was too far above his station and sold it to buy an outboard, turning the extra money into church work.

Daily Directives. Harddriving, 51-year-old Roy Burkhart gets his directive for each day's work in an hour of meditation right after breakfast each morning. During this hour he ruminates upon "who I am, why I'm here and where I'm going." Then he begins a round of activity so strenuous that he often breaks off for a half hour's nap. While he was on a recent trip to New York City, the janitor of Manhattan's Riverside Church was amazed to come upon him stretched out, dead to the world, on one of the pews.

His influence, as well as his aspirations, extend far beyond Columbus. In 1944 he helped form the Ohio Association for Community-Centered Churches; in 1946 the National Council of Community Churches was founded (he is now its president).

So dynamic and aggressive is the community-church movement that some conservative clerics fear that Burkhart and his colleagues are trying to form a separate denomination. Church Builder Burkhart replies that he would be the first to advocate disbanding the community-church groups when Protestantism as a whole shows itself ready to accept the larger objectives which are its challenge. Says he: "The community church is not the final word. The final word is for Protestant organization and union; and until that time comes, the community church will be the mighty groundswell movement for union."

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