Soft Berth to Hard

To be called to a big city church, to have a good house and an automobile, to preach on Sunday to a well-washed, pleasant-smelling congregation--such is the ambition of many a U. S. pastor. He may hope that such a post may prove a stepping stone to a bishopric, a moderatorship or a place on an important committee. Noteworthy is a pastor who reverses the process, leaves a big church to minister to a poor small one.

That was precisely what Rev. Dwight Jacques Bradley of Newton, Mass, was making ready to do last week. Four years ago he went to Boston's smart, pleasant suburb to be pastor of. First Church, Congregationalist, which in 265 years has had only twelve pastors. First Church has 1,013 well-fed worshippers. Next month Dr. Bradley is leaving it to take charge of Union Church in Boston's down-at-heel South End, on the wrong side of the New York, New Haven & Hartford tracks.

A social-minded churchman who was born 44 years ago in South Dakota, Dwight Bradley studied at Oberlin College and the Pacific School of Religion. After holding four pastorates scattered from California to Ohio he went to Boston, became president of the city's Federation of Churches, rescued it from doldrums. At Union Church he will try much the same thing. Though it has had such able pastors as Rev. Dr. Ernest Graham Guthrie (now of Chicago) and the late Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Boynton, Union Church has but 389 enrolled members. Surrounded by lodging houses, it draws polyglot congregations; one Sunday School class is in Chinese. Calling it "a strategic city situation," Dr. Bradley plans to bring in students from Andover Newton Theological School where he will be professor of Applied Christianity this year. Said he to a Christian Century correspondent:

"I am undertaking the task of trying to help define and change the relation between the church and the political-economic setup that now prevails. The church must reassert her independence, or wither and die. . . . I hope to get a hearing from the 40,000 students that throng Boston, from victims of unemployment and from radicals. . . ."

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