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...

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