Religion: Pastor’s Ordeal

Robert B. McNeill was on the way through law school at the University of Alabama when he switched to Richmond’s Union Theological Seminary. But for Alabama-born Seminarian McNeill, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth had separate entrances marked WHITE and COLORED; as a member of the basketball team he refused to play against Richmond’s Negro College, Virginia Union, and at an inter-seminary conference he balked at sitting down to lunch with the Negro delegates.

But he did sit down with them and thereafter began an intensive study of race relations, which he kept up at the First Presbyterian Church of Columbus, Ga., where he went 6½ years ago. In 1957 and 1958 he was chosen to draft the Southern Presbyterian reports on race, and they were noted as the most liberal statements on the subject to have been issued by a predominantly Southern denomination.

Imperative Demand. Two years ago, McNeill upset some 50 members of his influential, 1,200-member First Presbyterian Church by writing a magazine article calling for “creative contact” between whites and Negroes in the South—”representation of both groups on city councils, grand juries, school boards, medical societies, ministerial associations and other public agencies.” Fortnight ago, he wrote a note in the church bulletin urging parishioners to read without prejudgment an article by a Columbus newspaperman saying how much better the racial situation had become in Columbus.

Last week, after 44-year-old Presbyterian McNeill had finished his Sunday sermon, the Rev. Frank C. King of Valdosta, Ga. rose to read the decision of a commission appointed by the Presbytery of Southwest Georgia to study reports of dissension within Pastor McNeill’s church. The decision : Robert McNeill must go: “The interests of religion imperatively demand it.”

Emotional Flames. The congregation was stunned. Some women in the choir burst into tears. Several parishioners rose from their pews to denounce Commissioner King. “You have been listening to the wrong people,” said one. “If we kick a Christian man and his family out like this, what hope have we?” asked another. Valdosta’s King shook his head. Said he, with notable irrelevance: “The commission feels that the voice of the pulpit should be the voice of the congregation.”

At the evening service, the real voice of the congregation was still heard: parishioners wept again as they heard Bob McNeill preach a blistering farewell sermon. “We in the South can no longer speak in terms of democracy or justice without making a parenthetical exception for an entire people. When we make this exception time after time in everything we do, we have lost the capacity to reason logically. I have grown to despise a particular word. That word is ‘compromise.’ Have you noticed how everybody is a moderate these days? Everybody is rushing toward the middle ground. We’ll have to revise our terminology now. We’ll have to refer to left moderates, right moderates and middle moderates. This type of so-called moderate will be caught up and squeezed in the very middle he has created for himself.”

As all Columbus went up in emotional flames over his dismissal. Pastor McNeill began to feel the strain. “Some folks have got me on a spit,” he said. “They’re working me over on the air, every hour on the hour.” Last week, while bowling with two of his three children, Pastor McNeill collapsed with a heart attack.