Call to Fifth Avenue

In 1807 New York City had but one Presbyterian church, the First, in Wall Street. Its congregation quarreled, among other things, over the new-fangled hymns of Isaac Watts. So the anti-Watts faction set up their own church in Cedar Street. Successively locating in Duane Street and lower Fifth Avenue, the congregation in 1875 built a big, brownstone Gothic church which still stands at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street among clubs, hotels and big shops. Associated at one time or another with such old New York names as Auchincloss, Sloane, Leeds, Agnew, Gracie, Varick and Aspinwall, the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church is famed for its sloping auditorium, its fine acoustics, its old gas brackets and reflectors. Instrumental in founding Princeton Theological Seminary, Presbyterian Hospital and many a mission church, this rich old house of God was once called the Cathedral of Presbyterianism.

Of Fifth Avenue's last two co-pastors, Dr. Henry Howard died in 1933 at 74 and Dr. Minot Canfield Morgan, 58, went that year to Greenwich (Conn.) First Presbyterian Church. To win back its prestige and fill once more its 2,000 seats, the Fifth Avenue Church knew it had to find pulsing new ministerial blood. Last week it thought it had done so when Dr. John Sutherland Bonnell, 40, of Winnipeg, Manitoba accepted the congregation's unanimous call.

A Wartime gunner in the 5th Canadian Siege Battery, Dr. Bonnell has held pastorates in Prince Edward Island, St. John, N. B. and Winnipeg where during the past six years he received 1,000 persons into Westminster United Church, drew overflow audiences in two lecture halls adjoining his church. Last year Dr. Bonnell was the youngest man ever to receive a D.D. from his alma mater, Dalhousie University in Halifax. Two sermons at Fifth Avenue Church one Sunday last month were enough to earn Dr. Bonnell the call, which involves $10,000 a year, a three-month vacation and "the equivalent of a manse"--his rent paid.

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