Methodist President

A tiger hunter is the new President of the Methodist Church's Council of Bishops. This week some 40 members of the Council, who met at Princeton, N.J., put finishing touches on the forthcoming Bishops' Crusade (TIME, Nov. 22), mapped the Episcopal Visitation Plan (assigning Bishops to preside over the Church's 114 annual conferences in 1944), discussed how many millions of dollars to raise for Methodism's postwar reconstruction program, and chose their new President, highest honor in U.S. Methodism. Because the presidency alternates annually between a Southerner and a Northerner (a courtesy dating from 1939, when the Southern and Northern Churches were united), the Council's outgoing president, Richmond's Bishop William Walter Peele, was succeeded by Cincinnati's Bishop H. (for Harry) Lester Smith. Cincinnati is Methodism's biggest Area (510,810 church members).

Like his father, genial, rugged Bishop Smith, 67, was once an oil operator in his native Pennsylvania. Although he had a wife to support, he later turned to the ministry. "I don't know why," he says. "It is just one of those things." After 23 years of pastoral work (chiefly at Buffalo's fashionable Delaware Avenue Church, Detroit's big Central Church), he was chosen a Bishop, assigned to far-off Bangalore, India. There Bishop Smith diversified his episcopal duties by shooting tigers. The skin of the first tiger that glared back at Bangalore's Bishop now reposes in rug form on Bishop Smith's living-room floor in Cincinnati's outlying Linwood section. Bishop Smith drilled the beast with one clean shot.

Methodists rate the Bishop high as a preacher, consider him as a middle-of-the-roader on theological and social questions. His four years in India made him missionary-minded. Under his eleven-year leadership the Cincinnati Area has topped all others in gifts for "World Service," Methodism's benevolence program.

The Bishop's new post carries with it two important tasks. He will open the Church's General Conference at Kansas City, Mo., next April. He will guide his brother Bishops in drafting the Episcopal Address, an official message to U.S. Methodism, which Atlanta's Bishop Arthur J. Moore will deliver at the conference.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.