Failing “Both God and Man”

In his first sermon as rector of Calvary Protestant Episcopal Church in New York city, cleric Albert Brown Buchanan declared that Christendom’s Christianity “has become respectable and largely sterile.” Calling New York “the greatest missionary area on the face of the earth,” the clergyman explained that the churches have failed, so much so that “practitioners of psychiatry are doing more to save souls than are Christian churches.” Continuing, Buchanan said: “Christianity has compromised in the attempt to gain acceptance and broad success. . . . We feel more and more overwhelmed by the sense of our own puniness, our own impotence. . . . The church has failed both God and man in New York.”—New York Times, September 14, 1959.