Mr. Protestant

To the Rev. Franklin Clark Fry, it was unthinkable that God's business should be carried out with less professional dispatch than man's. Gavel in hand, he presided over ecumenical gatherings or sessions of his Lutheran Church in America with the cool parliamentary aplomb of a Speaker of the House--a job for which many of his clerical admirers thought him well-suited. Yet he was also a man of deep faith who saw the unification of divided Christendom as a divine imperative for the twentieth century. When he died of cancer last week at the age of 67, seven days after offering his resignation as president of the L.C.A., he was still known to many of his fellow churchmen as "Mr. Protestant."

The son and grandson of Lutheran ministers, Fry was born in Bethlehem, Pa., and attended Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mount Airy, Pa., where he proved to be something of a campus rebel by leading a student protest for curriculum reform. Ordained in 1925, he spent 15 years as pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Akron, resigning in 1944 to become president of the United Lutheran Church, a predecessor of the L.C.A.

Squirting Grease. "I would much rather have a pastorate," Fry once said, "than have to squirt grease into ecclesiastical machinery." Yet at the job of making churches run he had no peer. He served for six years as president of the Lutheran World Federation, which has 72 million members in 43 countries, and was also a founder--and lifetime president--of Lutheran World Relief, which last year sent $3,000,000 to aid victims of disaster and poverty around the world. In addition to governing his own denomination, he served for the last 14 years as chairman of the World Council of Churches' executive and central committees.

One reason for Fry's executive success was a phenomenal memory; he knew parliamentary procedure by heart and never found a Double-Crostic puzzle that he could not solve. "He is not exactly the warmhearted shepherd," a colleague explained. "He has a tendency to kick the rumps of the sheep, rather than lead them." At one church convention, Fry was explaining a complicated motion when one delegate said: I'm not quite clear. I'm afraid I fell off at the last turn." "That's all right," Fry answered imperturbably, "I'll pick you up right after this vote."

Fry's great ambition was to help unite the Christian denominations, and he worked tirelessly for the World Council of Churches, which he felt exists "to keep the means of communication open." Luther, he always felt, would have agreed with him. "The spirit of the ecumenical movement," Fry once aid, "is the spirit of Luther to the extent that it is a movement back toward the center of the Christian faith."

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