Methodists: The Challenge of Fortune

(8 of 11)

Kennedy began preaching when still in high school; at 15, he was licensed as a lay preacher, and during his college years he spent his weekends as a supply pastor. "The church can stand anything," he wrote about his first charges. "When I think of those sophomoric ser mons, I marvel at human endurance and at Christian forbearance." After high school, Kennedy went on to the College of the Pacific where, as a junior, he married his high school sweetheart, Mary Grace Leeper. He was 20, and she 18; today, Mrs. Kennedy notes, "we have a hard time advising young people against early marriage." Eventually, Kennedy's round-the-clock schedule caught up with him, and he got a resounding F in an Old Testament class —"which makes me the only bishop in the Methodist Church to have failed a Bible course in college," he says.

Kennedy made up for lost grades, and in 1932 started work on his Ph.D. at the Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut. Methodist churches in that part of the country were in short supply, so Kennedy accepted the pastorate of a nearby Congregational church. "But Methodism was in my blood," he recalls, "and I began to miss the organization, the quotas, the pressures, the programs." Returning to California in 1936, Kennedy was assigned to pastorates in San Jose and Palo Alto be fore moving outside the Western Jurisdiction to the St. Paul Methodist Church in Lincoln, Neb.

No Trade. During his years in the parish ministry, Kennedy earned church-wide fame as one of Methodism's finest young preachers. "If you keep on talking like that, young man," said Bromley Oxnam after hearing a Kennedy sermon, "you'll end up as a bishop." The prophecy was fulfilled one day in July 1948, when Kennedy was elected one of the four bishops in the Western Jurisdiction. At 40, he was the youngest member of the hierarchy and the first white Methodist bishop ever picked by one jurisdiction from another.

Kennedy spent four years as Bishop of Portland before moving to Los Angeles. He enjoys preaching so much that twice after his election he briefly contemplated resigning his office to accept pastorates; eventually he decided that being a bishop was not so bad after all. "I find it difficult to feel sorry for myself," he says. "I would trade salaries with some men I know, but I would not trade jobs with any man."