Presbyterians: Dr. Wednesday

One way to make a Sunday sermon attractive is to deliver it on Wednesday. In big cities, midday in midweek finds thousands of office workers hungering in the spirit as much as in the body. The foremost respondent to this need is St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Sydney, Australia, filled every Wednesday noon to its 1,000-seat capacity, while an overflow crowd of 300 or more watches from an adjoining hall on closed-circuit television. All have come to hear the “Wednesday tonics” of the Rev. Gordon Powell, 53.

Take a Deep Breath. Powell started preaching Wednesdays in St. Stephen’s twelve years ago, at the suggestion of a secretary from a nearby government office. Within a year, attendance at the yellowing sandstone church more than trebled, while collection-plate revenue soared from $6,750 a year to $2,250 a week. The services are also broadcast on 21 radio stations, reaching hundreds of thousands of Australians. Last week a record crowd was on hand at the church as Australian Runner Betty Cuthbert and Yachtsman Bill Northam placed their Olympic gold medals on a table before St. Stephen’s pulpit, in Powell’s version of a ceremony observed by ancient Olympic heroes, who placed their wreaths of victory on altars dedicated to the gods.

A dentist’s son who was an air force chaplain in wartime, Powell served churches in Scotland and Port Adelaide before his call to St. Stephen’s in 1952.

No fire breather, he begins his 25-minute sermon by telling a few mild, clerical jokes and asking the congregation to take a deep, tension-easing breath: “Relax-give yourself over to God.” Like Norman Vincent Peale, he spends more time analyzing modern ills than expounding theology, his chatty sermons are lightened by references to such contemporary phenomena as booing cricket umpires, which he deplores, and cosmetics, which he endorses (“God made women beautiful, and they should develop this talent”). When he recently took his text from the Sermon on the Mountain”Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”-Powell turned it into a homily on how to live with an inferiority complex.

Free Sundays. “Dr. Wednesday,” as Powell is called, estimates that only about a fourth of his listeners are Presbyterians, takes pride in the fact that six denominations are represented in his 80-voice volunteer choir. Some worshipers admittedly go to St. Stephen’s, as one girl explained to Powell, in order to “get church over in half an hour on Wednesday, and then have all Sunday free.” Most Wednesday regulars are devout Christians who loyally attend their neighborhood churches on Sunday, but find at St. Stephen’s a spiritual pickup available nowhere else. “I’ve got a large number of Anglicans at my Wednesday services,” says Powell, who gets along fine with other pastors, and has never been accused of congregation stealing. “The Anglican archbishop knows that I’m not taking them away from any of his services.”