Word: rector
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Frederick W. Densham was a vigorous six-footer of 61 when he first arrived in.the Cornish village of Wairleggon in 1931 as the new Church of England rector. A graduate of London University and the Divinity School at Oxford, Rector Densham also proved vigorous, even radical, in his views on God, people and parishes. His 168 parishioners were Cornishmen, clannish and conservative, whose ideas on religion were as fixed and unchanging as the grey rocks that anchored the surface of the moor around them. So, in a way, it might have been predicted from the start that pastor and flock...
Warleggon soon decided that the new rector was, to say the least, standoffish. He refused to shake hands with his parishioners, explaining that he was offended by the old Cornish custom of spitting in the palms before hefting a pitchfork. He banned the traditional whist party in the parish house. "A whist drive," he said, "is an amusement, and amusements come from hell." He refused to conduct a Sunday school, because Sunday schools are unmentioned in the Bible. He wanted to get rid of the venerable church organ, since he disliked organ music-"a gabbled profanity" he called...
...Angry Council. There were no more genial Sunday teas on the lawn beneath the big trees of the rectory. Indeed, the rector put up a barbed-wire fence around his house. When he tried to sell not only the organ but the church's prized 13th century chalice-to get money for a parish sports program-the parish council refused to approve it. And Nick Bunt, the church warden, a testy-tempered farmer, shouted a plain warning: "If you touch that organ, I'll down...
Nick Bunt and the angry council asked the Bishop of Truro to remove Densham. Under the Church of England's constitution; however, the bishop was powerless, for the rector had committed no crime, and he was conducting the services acceptably. Stuck with their rector, the flock retaliated by refusing to go to church. Some went to other Anglican churches; others drifted off to Warleggon's Methodist chapel. After 1935, not a soul among Warleggon's parishioners entered the church for Sunday services again...
...William Wright, 48, rector of St. Clement's Protestant Episcopal Church in El Paso, lives in an area where Christian belief is strong and fundamental. Wright himself prefers a more intellectual approach toward religion, and says so. Recently, in a speech to the El Paso Bar Association, he declared that reason is as good a guide to religion as faith is. He denounced fundamentalist camp meetings, popular in West Texas, as "emotional whingdings that provide a vacation from thinking." Added Episcopalian Wright, attacking belief in Biblical accounts such as that of Jonah and the whale: "Who does believe those...