Trumpets in the Morning

At 6:15 each weekday morning and often earlier on Sundays, the red-and-cream Nash convertible cuts out from a modest house in Hollywood Hills and hums along Santa Monica Boulevard. The wiry, 52-year-old cleric behind the wheel of what he calls an "old man's sports car" is a Methodist bishop. He is so much of a bishop, in fact--and so far from being an old man--that this month he takes over the top job in his ten-million-member denomination. Gerald Hamilton Kennedy's new post: president of the Methodist Council of Bishops. In this office, the term of which is limited to one year, he succeeds Mississippi's Bishop Marvin A.

Franklin (G. Bromley Oxnam held the post in 1958).

For the past eight years, as spiritual shepherd of Methodists in Southern California, Arizona and Hawaii, Bishop Kennedy has proved himself a tireless circuit rider. His 403 churches span 2,500 miles, embrace 225,000 members. He visits them all (he once dropped in on 23 parishes in one month) and averages seven sermons or speeches a week. Amid all his momentum, Bishop Kennedy can be pungently articulate. Examples: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: "It simply doesn't work. Look at the crime rates." AMERICAN EDUCATION : "A kind of state-supported baby-sitting service." SOUTH AFRICA: "The foundation of law has been destroyed. I am reminded of the old proverb: 'Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.' " TV COMMERCIALS: "Why should an actress, no matter how beautiful or talented, know more about an icebox than my wife?" RELIGIOUS PUBLICATIONS: "Most of the so-called devotional material is shallow and meaningless tripe that makes me sick to my stomach." THEOLOGIANS: "Many influential theologians of our day have moved from the ruins of a devastated Europe to the libraries of the theological schools and have carried defeatism into these sacred precincts--locking themselves up in their little cells with their egos, their textbooks, their jargon and their pessimism." Spiritual Ovaltine. Son of a lay preacher who settled in California, Kennedy was born in Benzonia, Mich. With no doubts about his calling ("I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't sure I would become a clergyman"), he sailed through the College of the Pacific, the Pacific School of Religion, and the Hartford Theological Seminary. Ordained in 1932, he spent the next 16 years as pastor of four different churches, taught at the Pacific School of Religion and Nebraska Wesleyan. He was elected Bishop of the Portland (Ore.) area at 40, the youngest bishop in the history of the Methodist Church.

Today Kennedy considers himself simply a "Wesleyan," after Methodism's spellbinding, peripatetic founder, John Wesley. But, recalls Kennedy, there are some zigzags in his spiritual development. In the 19305 he went through a strong neo-orthodox phase: "I took to neo-orthodoxy the way Methodists take to organization." The theology of Niebuhr and Barth "rescued me from the tranquilizing theory of inevitable evolutionary progress and restored the sense of God's majesty. But as the years went by, my ardor was cooled by the tendency of so many of the brethren to state extreme positions in order to be noticed. A professor of mine once commented that his definition of a good religious educator was a fellow who had had a bad case of John Dewey and gotten over it. I now feel somewhat the same way about neo-orthodoxy."

But Kennedy is still no partisan of the overoptimistic, positive-thinking branch of Protestantism, which he describes as "a spiritual aspirin tablet, a spiritual glass of Ovaltine." He adds: "Any church that starts out to be a success in the world's eyes is doomed to failure."

Mystery Man. Author of 13 books (God's Good News, The Christian and His America), Kennedy reviews four novels a month for the Methodist magazine, Together, confesses that mysteries are his favorite fare among the six books he reads a week. Ranging the world as energetically as he does his diocese, he has traveled in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and last year led a delegation to Russia. On the subject of Communism he is about as tough as any U.S. churchman. "I don't like to talk about coexistence. I don't mean we have to go to war, but we are up against a religion. The only way you can destroy a religion is with a greater religion. This is a fight which will not be a spectacular one for many of us, but I believe that the way you live, day by day, the kind of character you build, the kind of morality you live up to, will decide this struggle. What the church has lacked, what America has lacked, what we are lacking in the new generation coming up is 'the sound of trumpets in the morning.' "

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