Religion: Trumpets in the Morning

At 6:15 each weekday morning and often earlier on Sundays, the red-and-cream Nash convertible cuts out from a modest house in Hollywood Hills and hums along Santa Monica Boulevard. The wiry, 52-year-old cleric behind the wheel of what he calls an "old man's sports car" is a Methodist bishop. He is so much of a bishop, in fact—and so far from being an old man—that this month he takes over the top job in his ten-million-member denomination. Gerald Hamilton Kennedy's new post: president of the Methodist Council of Bishops. In this office, the term of which is limited to one year, he succeeds Mississippi's Bishop Marvin A.

Franklin (G. Bromley Oxnam held the post in 1958).

For the past eight years, as spiritual shepherd of Methodists in Southern California, Arizona and Hawaii, Bishop Kennedy has proved himself a tireless circuit rider. His 403 churches span 2,500 miles, embrace 225,000 members. He visits them all (he once dropped in on 23 parishes in one month) and averages seven sermons or speeches a week. Amid all his momentum, Bishop Kennedy can be pungently articulate. Examples: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: "It simply doesn't work. Look at the crime rates." AMERICAN EDUCATION : "A kind of state-supported baby-sitting service." SOUTH AFRICA: "The foundation of law has been destroyed. I am reminded of the old proverb: 'Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.' " TV COMMERCIALS: "Why should an actress, no matter how beautiful or talented, know more about an icebox than my wife?" RELIGIOUS PUBLICATIONS: "Most of the so-called devotional material is shallow and meaningless tripe that makes me sick to my stomach." THEOLOGIANS: "Many influential theologians of our day have moved from the ruins of a devastated Europe to the libraries of the theological schools and have carried defeatism into these sacred precincts—locking themselves up in their little cells with their egos, their textbooks, their jargon and their pessimism." Spiritual Ovaltine. Son of a lay preacher who settled in California, Kennedy was born in Benzonia, Mich. With no doubts about his calling ("I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't sure I would become a clergyman"), he sailed through the College of the Pacific, the Pacific School of Religion, and the Hartford Theological Seminary. Ordained in 1932, he spent the next 16 years as pastor of four different churches, taught at the Pacific School of Religion and Nebraska Wesleyan. He was elected Bishop of the Portland (Ore.) area at 40, the youngest bishop in the history of the Methodist Church.