Clergy: He Couldn’t Say No

When he retired in 1962 as pastor of Manhattan’s modish, 157-year-old Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the Rev. John Sutherland Bonnell found a fitting maxim for the occasion, a line from an old temperance song that admonished, “Have courage, my boy, to say no.” It was high time, he said, for an old preacher to go dry fly-fishing in the streams of his native Prince Edward Island. Last week, at 73, Bonnell unexpectedly turned no into yes and accepted the presidency of Manhattan’s little interdenominational New York Theological Seminary (enrollment: 180). For the occasion, he produced another appropriate phrase: “When one sees a great work to be done and gets into it, that’s the greatest happiness.”

The urgent work, as he sees it, is the training of more pastors for the ministry in cities. Bonnell fears that within the next five years a dozen Protestant churches in New York City will be forced to close because of dwindling congregations. “This is a terrific challenge for me,” says he. “I want to pass to young people training for the ministry some of the things I have learned about city preaching.”

During his 27-year Manhattan ministry, Bonnell preached to 3,000,000 listeners weekly over his radio program, which he inherited from Harry Emerson Fosdick. He was also one of the first to apply science to salvation through “Dial-a-Prayer,” whereby callers can phone a number (Circle 6-4200) and listen to a 30-second recorded inspirational message.

New York Theological Seminary, founded in 1900 to train seminarians for the pastoral and missionary ministry, is, in Bonnell’s opinion, uniquely suited now to specialize in urban ministry. It has on its staff such experts as the Rev. George W. Webber, who has led a program of community and spiritual renewal in East Harlem. As a condition for accepting the seminary’s presidency, Bonnell has been given a free hand in overhauling the curriculum, which will soon offer new masters’ degrees in pastoral counseling and urban ministry, complete with on-the-job training in slum parishes.