Word: burkhart
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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...
...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...
...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...
Clinics & Cars. Roy Burkhart's candor and his readiness to use clinical and psychiatric techniques in his church work have often shocked conservatives. He has been branded a cheap sensationalist for his birth-control discussions, marriage clinics and seminars on sex adjustment problems. But his methods seem to work. Out of the nearly 1,000 marriages he has performed during the past twelve years, only nine have ended in divorce...
...addition to marriage counseling, Dr. Burkhart has set up regular clinical sessions for parents (according to their children's ages), and for adolescents with personality problems. Church members are proud of the fact that of 634 of their boys in the armed forces not one was discharged for psychoneurotic reasons. Said Psychiatrist Karl Menninger after studying the mental hygiene setup of Dr. Burkhart's church: "It is the most constructive and comprehensive program I have seen carried out anywhere in America...