Pilgrim's Progress

Last week St. Andrew's Chapel at Hartsdale, N.Y., and its minister celebrated their birthdays together. For St. Andrew's it was a rebirthday. Just a year had passed since the Rev. George William Edwards saved the minuscule mission from folding. For Mr. Edwards it was his 53rd birthday and a milestone in an unusual religious experience, a kind of modern Pilgrim's Progress. Says Union Theological Seminary's President Henry Sloane Coffin: "Mr. Edwards' case is unique."

Three years ago Mr. Edwards used to commute between the College of the City of New York (where he is chairman of the Economics Department) and Wall Street (where at one time or another he was economic adviser to the American Bankers Association, Investment Bankers Association, Stone, Webster & Blodget, and other high-powered financial outfits). But as he hurried through downtown Manhattan's chasmlike streets and talked financial organization and investments in bankers' streamlined, soundproof offices, Mr. Edwards sometimes felt an overwhelming need for a few minutes of complete withdrawal from the world. He took to dropping in at downtown churches. For Mr. Edwards, who in an age of religious myopia can see beyond his own nose, saw that the world in general, and Christendom in particular, had reached one of history's great divides. He concluded that the problems of our time are so great that they can never be solved by human minds alone.

A Call. One night Mr. Edwards went home and told his wife: "I am going to study for the ministry." She answered: "That is fine. I expected it."

Few months later he enrolled as a theological student at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary for its stepped-up winter and summer courses. As a theological student, he says, he "had to dig plenty hard." Instead of riding subways to Wall Street, he kept taxis shuttling back & forth between the Seminary and C.C.N.Y. where he continued to teach. Later he added courses at General Theological Seminary where study schedules fitted in better with his heavy professorial duties.

There is nothing rapt or perfervid about Mr. Edwards. He says quite simply: "That first year the Seminary simply did not click." But he did not think of quitting. The second year went better.

A Church. "Then," says Mr. Edwards, "one of those things happened." The little Episcopal mission of St. Andrew's near the Edwards home at suburban Scarsdale had never been big enough to rank as a parish. It had long dragged out a flickering life as a mission. In 1942 St. Andrew's threatened to flicker out for good. Mr. Edwards, then only a lay reader, decided that he had found his charge. He took over the pulpit at St. Andrew's Chapel.

His first services were pretty spotty, but he kept at it. Soon he increased St. Andrew's vanishing congregation to an average attendance of 40. He also dug the mission out of its mountain of debt (only a first mortgage remains). He had observed that people who almost never go to church themselves nevertheless want their children to go. So he built up St. Andrew's Sunday School into an enthusiastic group of young people, reports that the children are now bringing their parents back into the church. In another year he expects that St. Andrew's will become a full-fledged parish.

A Priest. Last December Mr. Edwards was ordained a deacon (an Episcopal deacon is a junior priest). Next May he will receive his degree of bachelor of divinity from Union Theological Seminary. Next June he expects to be ordained a full priest in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He has given up all other business activities, but he cannot give up teaching at C.C.N.Y. for two or three years. When he does, he will become full-time priest at St. Andrew's. He does not want a bigger parish. "I did not go into the church," he says, "to exchange one kind of administrative job for another." But Mr. Edwards has even stronger reasons for staying with St. Andrew's. He predicts that World War II will be followed by social chaos comparable to the early Dark Ages. He believes that Christianity, if it survives at all, will survive among small groups of believers at the bottom of society--and that survival will depend in great measure on what men like himself are able to do in basic parishes like St. Andrew's.

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