Prickly Preacher

To the businessmen-trustees who controlled it, Indianapolis' Second Presbyterian Church was long on status, short on liturgical demands, spare on social and educational sidelights--an only-on-Sundays kind of church whose minister preached soothing sermons. But all that was before the stormy ministry of Dr. Paul Franklin Hudson, 47, who came from Pittsburgh in July of 1960 to take over.

In Dr. Hudson's view, Second Church had strayed from the narrow and uncomfortable Calvinistic path. It did not observe Lent or Advent. The service included no processional, no responsive reading--rarely even the Apostles' Creed. Most of the members had no part in running the church. Says Hudson: "It was a class church, controlled by the money forces of a few people who held the purse strings, held the offices, masterminded all."

They Are Sinners. In taking the ministry, Hudson inherited a new $2,000,000 building in the suburbs, and he lost no time filling it with his brand of Presbyterianism. He brought the liturgy in line with strict Presbyterian doctrine, started full observance of the church calendar.

He founded a club for the church's 400 unmarried men and women, began a church newspaper, added more choirs, held classes in theology.

Hudson also brought a concentration on "religious consciousness"--the stern Calvinist doctrine that makes a minister duty-bound to remind members that they are sinners. In place of tranquilizing theology he gave sermons on "Who Owns Your Soul?" ("Is it an insurance company, a bank, a labor union or an industry?"), on "The Church in Our World" ("It neither disturbs nor comforts"), and on the pricklier passages of the Sermon on the Mount. "My contention," he says, "is that the Gospel applies not to 1st century man but to 20th century man."

Presbyterian authority is based on control of a local church by its session of elected elders. The minister--a teaching elder rather than a ruling elder--is the nonvoting moderator of the session, but technically works for the regional presbytery. Interpreting this chain of command literally, the session of Second Church had always been firmly in control. It was opposed not only to the way Hudson ran the church but to his running it at all. Says one elder, Attorney Louis Lowe: "We realized within a month or two after Dr. Hudson was here that he wasn't going to do--not at all."

Plus Politics. Hudson's politics provided another irritant. He encouraged UNICEF collections, delivered lectures on "Christianity and Communism," ("I think people should know what they are combatting") and arranged a testimonial dinner for Irwin Miller, president of the liberal National Council of Churches. He proposed that the congregation offer charity to anti-Castro Cuban refugees who have settled in Indianapolis--only to be asked, "How can we be sure they aren't Communists?"

Last spring--with Second Church fragmented by gossip and bitterness--the Indianapolis Presbytery appointed an administrative commission to settle the dispute. After several attempts to bring the disputants together, the commission finally recommended that Dr. Hudson and ten members of the session resign. Dr. Hudson will leave Second Church at the end of this year, and the new elders will grapple with the still unsolved problem of how soothing their religion should be.

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