Preacher on Park Avenue

"Fifty years ago this month, a young student began attending this parish. His plans for life were unsettled. In December 1911. he joined this church as a layman. Two years later he entered Union Theological Seminary to study for the ministry. Thereupon he became a student assistant on the staff. On the first Sunday of April 1917 he was called to the pastorate of this parish. Now, after 50 years as a member and 44 1/2 years as minister, I am announcing my retirement, to take effect December 31st next.''

So last week, on the eve of his 72nd birthday, one of the top clergymen in the U.S., the Rev. Dr. Ralph W. Sockman, announced to his congregation his resignation from the pulpit of famed Christ Church, at Manhattan's 60th Street and Park Avenue, which is often called "a cathedral of Methodism."

The Octopus. One of his parishioners once said that Dr. Sockman "looks like Adolph Menjou and acts like John Wesley." The urbane six-footer, in his Homburg and pinstripe, and the warmly moving preacher who crowds his church with 1,500 people of a Sunday, are both a far cry from the farm boy in Mount Vernon, Ohio, whose first speaking experience was when he used to bring cows in at night from a dark wood, and "to keep up my courage, I talked out loud to them." That was not necessarily the road to eloquence; some years later he made some speeches for the Anti-Saloon League, "and every county I spoke in went wet."

Ralph Washington Sockman moved from his one-room country schoolhouse to Ohio Wesleyan University, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and the nickname of "Octopus" for his numerous activities. He courted Zellah Endly, violin-playing daughter of a Methodist minister, and married her in 1916. When at 27 he became pastor of what was then called the Madison Avenue Methodist

Episcopal Church, the aging congregation and "disintegrating" neighborhood gave the church a life expectancy of five years. Sockman built up a new, young congregation; real estate breaks reversed the neighborhood's disintegration. When the congregation sold the church in 1929 to move to Park Avenue, the 90-ft. by 100-ft. plot brought $2,200,000.

A Shot in the Head. Preaching has always been Ralph Sockman's special ministry; he is generally acknowledged as the best Protestant preacher in the U.S. He is one of the alltime veterans of the air waves; for 33 years his voice has been heard on the National Radio Pulpit at 10 a.m. Sundays. Shunning the emotionalism of Evangelist Billy Graham, his lucid sermons -- many of them published in his 20-odd books -- are designed to teach as well as inspire. "You've got to put something in people's heads," he told a friend last week, "rather than just give them a shot in the arm."

His schedule is crowded with speaking engagements all over the U.S. and abroad, but he has not slighted his own congregation, whose size forces him to preach two identical Sunday sermons, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Once, in order not to break a 44-year record of never having missed a sermon because of illness, he preached in a laryngitic whisper into a microphone held against his lips.

Dr. Sockman is much concerned with the decline of preaching in the churches today, and plans to spend much of his retirement visiting seminaries to stimulate interest in the pulpit among fledgling ministers preoccupied with pastoral counseling and group activities. Says he: "The churches today are better organized than they are pulpitized. The greatest need of the contemporary church is the strengthening of the local pulpits. I just happen to think that there's more need for strong preaching than for administration."

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