New Rector for St. Paul's

For the members of the congregation who jammed the Sunday service at Atlanta's All Saints' Episcopal Church this week, the news came as a blow. In six years, they had come to have a warm affection for their 44-year-old rector, and now, he announced, he was about to leave them. Next June the Rev. Matthew Madison Warren will be heading north to train for an important job--the rectorship of St. Paul's School for boys in Concord, N.H.

Matthew Warren will not officially take over at St. Paul's until 1954, when Rector Henry C. Kittredge retires. But for the next two years he wants to study, first at Columbia and then in Concord, where he will learn his job at first hand. As rector of hockey-playing, uppercrusty Episcopal St. Paul's, he will become headmaster of one of the nation's top prep schools, and both he and his trustees want him to have plenty of time to get ready.

Matthew Warren's own education was not much like the sort he will preside over at St. Paul's. The son of a small-town banker in West Virginia, he went to the local high school and West Virginia University, and worked during the summer in a coal mine. By the time he graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary, he had decided that he wanted to be both teacher and minister in one. "When I left Virginia," says he, "I had a suitcase full of books on the teaching of religion and how it was learned." What he learned from those books, he carried wherever he went--from Macon, Ga. to St. Louis, where he headed the Episcopal education center, and finally to Atlanta.

There, parishioners found him a kindly, angular six-footer, who could play both Bach and boogie-woogie on the piano, and liked to give big coffee parties after church. He was also a man who could inspire faith whether in or out of the pulpit. Every Sunday before service, adults and children would flock to his classes at the church's school, and every Monday evening many would come back for more.

To Matthew Warren, religion and education have always been one. "Education," says he, "is organic to life, and not just pasted on life like a shin plaster." As far as he is concerned, there will be no shin plasters at St. Paul's. "A church school should be more than a school. I should like my contribution to be in the field of being a good pastor for the boys, teaching them to come to grips with their lives on the highest possible level. But I am not going to St. Paul's with any high-flown theories. It's been in the education business for 95 years and doing very handsomely. I expect to learn."

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