Clergy: A Reach for Young Rebels

No one looking for a spooky spot to open a nightclub in Paris could do better than the former mortuary chapel of the century-old Protestant American Church, a brick-vaulted cellar with a long flight of stairs leading up to street level. And a nightclub is just what the chapel is, under the Rev. Martin van Buren Sargent, 45, minister of the American Church for the past two years. But Sargent is more than an avant-garde impresario of coffeehouse Christianity. In the main church, he delivers serious, Bible-based sermons to Sunday throngs, worries deeply about the moral problems facing young Americans in Paris, and, as a pastoral counselor, faces a unique “diversity and abundance of personal dilemmas.”

Catacombs 65. Only 350 people are listed as members of his congregation; yet thousands of tourists jam the American Church on summer Sundays, and about 3,000 U.S. Parisians attend services at least intermittently. Sargent’s imaginative methods of evangelism have extended the church’s “outreach” to roughly half of the 20,000 Americans in the city, and to a goodly number of Frenchmen as well.

Many evenings there are lines outside his basement nightclub, “Catacombs 65” (from the church’s address, 65 Quai d’Orsay), waiting to drink coffee or lemonade and hear young singers and musicians. In another adjunct of the church, its 300-seat theater, the professional Paris Theater Workshop—whose advisers include Jean Seberg and William Saroyan—presents Sartre, Beckett and Albee as part of “Open End,” a freewheeling series of dramas, concerts and discussions.

Once Sargent invited the editor of Paris’ Communist daily L’Humanité to Catacombs 65. Two summers ago, he helped Novelist James Baldwin organize a miniature version of Washington’s civil rights march. Currently, the American Church has its own theologian-in-residence—Sydney Ahlstrom of Yale Divinity School—who teaches a weekly course to 80 adults of the congregation. Sargent occasionally appears on French television and at ecumenical conferences involving French Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy. He chain-smokes his way through an 18-hour day filled with the normal routine of pastors everywhere—teaching, counseling, sermon writing, negotiating with the church’s lay committees.

Old Ladies & Unwed Mothers. Son of a New Jersey coal-mine owner, Sargent studied for the Congregational ministry at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, where he met and married the artist daughter of Princeton Theologian Paul Scherer, then a Union professor. He served his student pastorship in New York slum parishes, preached to congregations in Illinois, Massachusetts and Maine before applying for the Paris church in 1962.

Sargent has tried to make the American Church a catalytic force in the life of the rebellious young people who arrive every year to mix paints in Montmartre or “study” at the Sorbonne. After sickbed visits to old ladies, Sargent occasionally has to soothe the fears of a girl suddenly facing unwed motherhood. His interest in youth has paid off, both in the number of troubled students who come to him for spiritual help and in the increase in young faces at his services.

The American Church, says Sargent, is “a local, ecumenical church”—Communion is open to all, and there are no denominational requirements for membership—and as such has a unique value to Christianity. “Every year,” he proudly says, “hundreds of persons whose lives have been touched in some way by this church return to the U.S. Usually they return to their own denominations, but with a difference. They bring with them a new willingness to express in new ways our eternal unity in Christ.”