Religion: Trumpets in the Morning

At 6:15 each weekday morning and often earlier on Sundays, the red-and-cream Nash convertible cuts out from a modest house in Hollywood Hills and hums along Santa Monica Boulevard. The wiry, 52-year-old cleric behind the wheel of what he calls an "old man's sports car" is a Methodist bishop. He is so much of a bishop, in fact—and so far from being an old man—that this month he takes over the top job in his ten-million-member denomination. Gerald Hamilton Kennedy's new post: president of the Methodist Council of Bishops. In this office, the...