Cathedral of Nonconformism

The jostling crowds on London's Holborn Viaduct last Sunday might have been on their way to a soccer game, but they were actually going to hear a new minister preach at London's most popular church. At a time when most British churches are all but empty, City Temple, the "Cathedral of Nonconformism," often has overflow crowds. Said one temple official last week: "In nearby St. Paul's Cathedral, which holds 3,000, there are seldom more than 30 people at Evensong. If we have less than 1,500, we wonder what is the matter."

What draws congregations to City Temple is not chiefly its freedom from dogmatism or its open communion, but its high standard of preaching. In its zeal to get the best for its pulpit, the church has not confined itself to Englishmen (City Temple has had four U.S. ministers and one Australian) or to Baptists and Methodists, Britain's chief nonconformist denominations; in 1917 its minister was an Anglican woman, Dr. Maude Royden.

"God Damn the Sultan!" No one knows when City Temple began, but in 1640 Dissenter Thomas Goodwin, later chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, was holding regular services. It was not until 1873 that it began to attract its biggest audiences. To hear the "pulpit genius," Dr. Joseph Parker, actors, authors, artists and bohemians pressed into City Temple alongside primmer Victorians. Preacher Parker often rewarded them with a shocker; when, during the Turkish-Armenian hostilities, he thundered. "I say God damn the Sultan!'', the newspapers headlined: DR. PARKER LETS HIMSELF GO.

Perhaps the temple's greatest preacher, Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, 65, retired last week after 24 years of urging that religion should work in alliance with medicine and psychiatry. Under Dr. Weatherhead the church kept a staff of ten psychiatrists ("Good religion is never bad psychology, and good psychology is never bad religion").

"Return to Orthodoxy." Weather-head's successor, Dr. Leonard Griffith. 40, last week sounded a new and sterner note. Lancashire-born Preacher Griffith was taken to Canada by his opera-singer parents when he was eight, joined the ministry 15 years ago, served Ottawa's fashionable United Church for the past eleven years. He accepts the Bible as divinely inspired, is not a whit interested in psychiatry. In a church whose tradition is liberal, he is perhaps the true nonconformist: a conservative.

What the church needs, Griffith announced in his first sermon, is a "return to orthodoxy." And what he intends to preach is "sin and redemption . . . historic gospel, timeless, Bible-centered messages which the church and only the church is capable of speaking."

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