How to Become a Bishop

"More devils can be routed by a little laughter than by a carload of humorless piety," writes Methodist Pastor Charles Merrill Smith in How to Be come a Bishop Without Being Religious (Doubleday; $3.50). The devils that Smith wants to exorcise are the phony pietism and the trivial hypocrisy that many a Protestant pastor has to indulge in if he intends to climb the hierarchical ladder of his church.

Success in the ministry, says Smith, comes from meticulous conformity to "the right professional stance." A clergyman must never even think, for example, of driving a red Corvette convertible. For beginning preachers, a black, two-door Falcon is ideal; a dark green Chevy II with automatic transmission is "safe" for the pastor of a small congregation. But a substantial urban congregation may expect its minister to drive something a bit larger and less austere, such as a blue Mercury Comet or a Pontiac Tempest.

The Personal Pronoun. "The most important one piece of equipment the aspiring clergyman will acquire," says Smith, "is a wife. She must not be beautiful, stylish or sexy. The best approach to the problem of clerical mate selection is to imagine that you are planning to employ an assistant pastor."

The rising clergyman can win a reputation for wisdom in his sermons by using such phrases as "Christ-centered" and "faith of our fathers." Another favorite phrase is "holiness unto the Lord. No one has a clue to what this means, but it is one of the most soul-satisfying phrases in the lexicon." References to sin and sinners are always welcome, for they conjure up "images of orgies and black lingerie." Nothing makes the congregation feel so good as singing hymns like C. Austin Miles's In the Garden, which mentions the first personal pronoun 27 times:

And He walks with me.

And He talks with me.

And He tells me I am His own.

Most important of all is to cultivate the right people. The rule of thumb, Smith suggests, is to assign each individual a numerical value--a member of the old aristocracy ten points, any millionaire eight, a corporation lawyer six, an obscure artist two, a clerk 0, a factory worker minus one, a Japanese (except in California) minus three--then allot each a proportionate amount of attention. Add to this a "respectful, alert, eager to learn and anxious to serve" demeanor toward ecclesiastical superiors, and eventually someone will tell the powers that be, "Jim Goodfellow is the man you are looking for."

Glory & Dedication. At 46, Iconoclast Smith has climbed up the "professional progress chart" he offers in his book just as fast as the mythical Conformist Goodfellow. The pastor of the 2,200-member Wesley Methodist Church in Bloomington, Ill., Smith is a trustee of Illinois Wesleyan University, has a rich cherry-red rug in his office, drives a red Dodge convertible and aspires to own a Jaguar sedan. A few times a year he takes his blonde wife Betty, whom he married for "irrelevant reasons," to New York for a round of Broadway shows and dinner at Lu-chow's. The Smiths subscribe to Gourmet, "the magazine we dream by."

The son, brother, and grandson of Methodist preachers, Smith wrote his book late nights, sitting at the kitchen table. What motivated him was a lover's quarrel with the church. For he believes that "it behooves us who love the church to do what we can to eliminate the ridiculous and the trivial so that the glory, the dedication and the relevance may be seen unobscured."

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