Pep Meet for Parsons

The ministers were requested to provide their own towels. Everything else was free: room, board, textbooks, tuition. On these liberal terms 100 small-town Pennsylvania pastors last week attended a novel School of Religion, where they got the theological equivalent of a salesmen's pep meeting, a stiff refresher course on church problems, and an exposure to ideas which under any other auspices they might have thought revolutionary.

The plan was Pastor Hugh Thomson Kerr's of Pittsburgh's prosperous Shadyside Presbyterian Church. He persuaded his church trustees to give him $4,000 for expenses, and then invited run-of-the-pulpit Presbyterian preachers to a week-long series of sessions at Pittsburgh's Western Theological Seminary.

Says Dr. Kerr: "I've always been impressed by the methods of big business organizations, say the H. J. Heinz Co., in keeping their salesmen on their toes. Every once in a while these salesmen are brought in from their territories. They're given up-to-the-minute information and news of developments, they discuss experiences with each other, and they're shown a good time. Then they go back to their territories-and they get results."

The parsons attended lectures religiously, listened intently, made reams of notes during morning, afternoon and evening lectures. They studied their texts in bare dormitory rooms or argued heatedly in little knots in the hallway.

Said a little, greying, bespectacled, small-town preacher: "This is the greatest treat I've had since I've been in the ministry." Dr. Kerr hopes to make the treat annual.

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