Religion: Church for the Inner City

The average young minister lately out of theological seminary does not, as a rule, look for assignment to a rundown church in the midst of an urban slum. But that was just what Robert W. Castle Jr. had in mind. Graduating from New Haven's Berkeley Divinity School, crew-cut Episcopalian Castle put in five years at two suburban New Jersey parishes, chafed all the while for a city mission. Then he was asked to take over St. John's in Jersey City, a crumbling brownstone and granite edifice which the Episcopal diocese of Newark had thought of shutting down for lack of parishioners.

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