Ball Out

In Chicago last week the Conference of Methodist Laymen chalked up its first substantial victory since it organized last summer to combat "radicalism" in the churches (TIME, Sept. 23). Though it refrained from publicly taking credit for the deed, the Conference had succeeded in easing a Methodist minister named Rev Dr. Archey D. Ball out of the pulpit he had held for four years in First Church Englewood, N. J.

Famed as the home of Mrs. Dwight Whitney Morrow, Englewood is a solid suburban community whose weekly News lately editorialized in favor of a town incinerator which would prevent Englewood's poor from eating their fellow-citizen's garbage. Englewood's First M. E. Church, not the swankest in town but the largest and richest of the denomination in Bergen County, got its white-thatched black-browed Dr. Ball in 1931 by the usual Methodist method: accepting the man assigned by the local conference. With increasing apprehension Dr. Ball's congregation listened to Sunday sermons out of a liberal's bag of tricks--against "economic greed," against armament appropriations, against restrictions of civil liberties, in favor of all manner of social legislation. Preacher Ball also went outside to lecture for the American Civil Liberties Union, the American League Against War & Fascism. Church members who deplored all this lately obtained outside encouragement when the Chicago laymen's group got to spreading its illiberal ideas. Last week, with Dr. Ball's term about to expire and his reappointment by the conference likely unless something was done about it, the church's committee on pastoral relations voted to ask Bishop Francis John McConnell of Manhattan to assign First Church a minister who would confine his sermonizing to the Gospel.

Dr. Ball gracefully stepped out. Of his antagonists in First Church, Dr. Ball magnanimously observed: "They are not really reactionary. They are just victims of heredity and environment, and perhaps habit. ... I heard Robert La Follette make a stirring summation once and it fired me with liberalism. Now I am more than just a liberal. A liberal has come to mean a man who wavers from left to right and right to left. I am a radical."

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