Roy Abram Burkhart's farmer-father wanted his son to be a fertilizer salesman. His Mennonite mother prayed that he would enter the ministry. For the Burkhart family of Cumberland County, Pa. the issue was decided once & for all during World War I, when one of young Soldier Burkhart's best friends, who had hoped to be a minister, was killed. Roy made up his mind to enter the church. Today Dr. Roy Burkhart, pastor of the First Community Church of Columbus, Ohio, is the whirring dynamo of the growing community-church movement and an outstanding U.S. churchman.
Published this week, Dr. Burkhart's newest book, How the Church Grows (Harper, $2), will give both detractors and admirers a clear picture of what he is trying to do. Dr. Burkhart writes of his dream of "the True Church," which "is to help each individual to come alive with God in his soul."
The ideal church Burkhart writes about is at once as modern as science, sociology and psychiatry can make it and as all-pervasive in the community as the church of the Middle Ages. In the "beloved fellowship" of Christians living, working and playing together, he sees the all-important matrix of spiritual life, and within this group relationship he apportions the church's liturgy, recreation, social work, preaching and prayer. His blueprint for his True Church is not mere speculation; many of the specifications have been met in his own grey limestone, suburban First Community Church of Columbus.
Exuberant Statistics. In 1935, when husky, black-haired Roy Burkhart went to Columbus, the First Community Church had about 225 active members and a debt of $147,000. The minister's staff consisted of a secretary, a janitor, a part-time choir director and a part-time organist. Today the church has 3,670 active members, a 1947 budget of $108,838 and a full-time staff of 17.
In 1935 the church had no energy or funds to spend for missions; now it supports one missionary each in China, India and England. But of all First Community's exuberant statistics, none is more meaningful than the support it gets from the jukebox-and-Coca-Cola set. At nearby Upper Arlington High School 90% of the seniors and 96% of the student body as a whole are active members of the church.
Dr. Burkhart wins such hard-to-get parishioners with his regular-guy sincerity and his easy scorn of cant or ecclesiastical primness. Once, when a high-school audience began to settle back in boredom at being addressed by a pastor, he told them the story of the girl who called her boyfriend "Pilgrim" because every time he came over he made progress. The principal never asked him back, but the audience listened hard after that.
Last winter, a group of high-school and college students who had banded together for informal bull sessions at the church decided to form a "prayer-cell." One discipline to which they bound themselves was to ask a stranger each day, "Do you believe in prayer?" One night when Pastor Burkhart was eating alone in a restaurant, he fell into conversation with the waitress and suddenly sprang his day's query on prayer. "Well, big boy," she said, visibly shaken, "I must say that's the most unusual approach I've ever heard!"