Old New York Avenue

The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. is proud that its congregation put up the first building for Protestant worship in the young capital city. It is proud that seven Presidents of the U.S./- worshiped there. It is proud of its great growth during the years of World War II, when the late Peter Marshall,-- chaplain of the U.S. Senate, was pastor. When the congregation decided after the war to build a larger church, they decided to buck the trend toward residential areas and stay right where they were, about five minutes' walk from the White House.

Last week they overflowed their spanking new $1,250,000 church at its first Sunday service. In his own pulpit for the first time since he came to New York Avenue in March 1950 was 40-year-old Dr. George

M. Docherty. For 20 months, black-browed Dr. Docherty had preached in his soft Scottish burr in the modernistic Lisner Auditorium of George Washington University, and it was considered a measure of his success that even under this handicap, the church not only held its 1,700-odd members but even increased its rolls by about 100.

Glasgow-born George Docherty left school at 15 to go to work in a shipping office. Religion played no particular part in his life until one day, when he was not quite 20. "It was the 25th of March, 1931," he says, "at Charing Cross, while I was walking home from work on a spring evening, that I decided to become a minister. It was a quite clear decision . . . and no real conversion, or anything like that. I was a committed Christian. There was nothing supernatural about it, no flaming sun. But a decision."

George Docherty quit his job and went back to school so he could enter the University of Glasgow and prepare for his ministerial studies. During the war he joined the community movement centered on the Scottish island of lona (TIME, Feb. 3, 1947), and distinguished himself for his work with young people in the Glasgow slums.

In the summer of 1949, on a guest preaching tour of the U.S., he gave a series of sermons at the old New York Avenue Church. When the congregation sent a delegation to him in Aberdeen to call him to Washington, Docherty reports, they convinced him with the argument "that this strategic pulpit was where a Scotsman might make an abiding witness, not only for the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, but toward a greater understanding between our two great nations."

-?/-John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson.

-- Whose book of sermons. Mr. Jones, Meet the Master, was a 1950 bestseller, and whose biography, A Man Called Peter, is a current one.

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