MADISON AVENUE
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
921 Madison Avenue
(at East 73rd Street)
New York, NY 10021
Tel: 212- 288-8920
Fax: 212-249-1466
(at East 73rd Street)
New York, NY 10021
Tel: 212- 288-8920
Fax: 212-249-1466
Other Web Sites:
"The church in the swamp" it was called in 1834 on its establishment near the Lower East Side shipyards that prospered in those days. More formally designated the Manhattan Island Presbyterian Church, this struggling congregation had already planted the seeds of the future MAPC when it expired a few years later. In 1838 some of its erstwhile members united with a contingent from the old Seventh Presbyterian Church to form the Eleventh Presbyterian Church of the City of New York. Old church records indicate some of the tribulations it survived. A controversy was reported in the Mexican War era over the introduction of organ music, which some opposed as a dangerous theatrical diversion. During the Civil War a member was reportedly tried by Session for reading Sunday newspapers and for objecting to legal penalties for not attending church services (that case was dismissed with admonition). In 1864 the now vigorous church moved northward to 55th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, where it became the Memorial Presbyterian Church. To obtain larger facilities it next shifted to Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, and there assumed the name by which it has since been known, the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. One more move lay in store. In 1899 MAPC united with Phillips Church, which had evolved from the downtown Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church established in 1844 and had a house of worship built in 1858 under the leadership of James Lenox, a distinguished Presbyterian whose name now graces the residence just east of our church. It was on the foundation of that structure that our present church home was erected in 1899.
During the 19th century fifteen pastors served the Madison Avenue and Phillips churches and their predecessors. In the 20th century, by contrast, MAPC called only four senior pastors: Henry Sloane Coffin (1905-1926), George Arthur Buttrick (1927-1954), David H. C. Read (1956-1989) and Fred R. Anderson (since 1992). The century started poorly for our church. The Phillips and MAPC congregations did not meld well; members fell away until the merged church's rolls dropped below those of either of its constituents at the time of the union. But that changed dramatically with the arrival of the young Dr. Coffin, only five years out of the Union Theological Seminary (Some said that the church could not then afford a more established preacher).
The Coffin era at MAPC was one of remarkable growth and transformation. Dr. Coffin gained wide recognition as a liberal thinker and dynamic preacher. From under 500 in 1905 the membership rolls expanded to more than 2,000 in the 21 years before he left to take up the presidency of the Union Theological Seminary. In that period the Third Avenue elevated tracks effectively divided New York's Upper East Side between the more affluent neighborhoods westward to Central Park and the tenements to the east that were home to many immigrants. Dr. Coffin went beyond encouraging the MAPC-sponsored Good Will Chapel on 82nd Street; with his associates he intensively canvassed the tenement blocks and increasingly brought far-East Siders directly into the church community. The Sunday School attracted hundreds of children. When language proved a barrier for immigrant women, the church offered bible classes in German and Czech. The growing men's bible class became a permanent Men's Association. To meet the need for added activities space a devoted layman, Edward S. Harkness, who had been Dr. Coffin's college roommate, bought a garage (formerly a stable) next door to the church and had it converted to church use. But that was not enough for long. On the eve of World War I, Mr. Harkness gave the money to build the present Church House on that site. Soon it too was fully utilized, not only for church activities but opened to wartime servicemen for rest and recreation.
A surge in mission activity was another bright product of Dr. Coffin's time at MAPC. In 1910 the church undertook sponsorship of a missionary assigned to Hwai Yuan in central China. Successive workers in an outpost named Nansuchow included Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist and former husband of the writer Pearl Buck, and the Reverend Dr. George Hood, who later joined the MAPC pastoral staff. MAPC not only contributed to other foreign mission programs but during World War I provided clothing and medical supplies for the war effort and sent an automobile to France for a chaplain's use. In the summer of 1918 Dr. Coffin visited the French front and held services there. By the 1920s MAPC had set and nearly reached a goal of a fifty-fifty split between the operating and mission budgets.
Meanwhile many customs were changing. Like many churches, MAPC had long met a substantial portion of its budget from pew rentals, which often outran voluntary pledges. Questions grew about the justification for these charges with their elitist implications. Despite anxieties about how the church expenses could be met without them, the congregation, in a democratic mood, voted in 1917 to abolish pew rentals. The next year, to everyone's relief, voluntary pledges more than made up the difference.
Dr. Coffin provided national leadership in the 1920s as the Presbyterian Church struggled with the concept of "essential and necessary doctrines" -- particular interpretations of confessional standards which came to be known as the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy -- urging "the Christian principle of toleration." Under his leadership, the General Assembly of 1927 declared that no one, not even the Assembly itself, had the right to single out particular interpretations of scripture to be "essential and necessary" for all. Upon his return to New York, Coffin was chosen President of Union Theological Seminary and left MAPC to assume that position.
MAPC was fortunate to find a worthy successor in Dr. George Buttrick, a young English-born minister who was to become a prominent Reformed theologian and one of New York's leading Protestant preachers, teachers and writers. Early in Dr. Buttrick's tenure MAPC was affected by the Great Depression that swept across America. Despite a budget down by a third, the church developed support in the areas of food, clothing, housing and job resources for several hundred families having a hard time getting by, while maintaining its social programs for ethnic groups and people from tenement housing. When World War II ensued, Dr. Buttrick's outspoken pacifism rankled many. It is said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was so disturbed by this prominent preacher's position that he invited him to the White House for a talk; Dr. Buttrick did not change his position. Throughout the war years, church programs remained strong as MAPC organized a USO center as well as a similar program for conscientious objectors.
Dr. Buttrick's vigorous preaching attracted a growing membership that for a time made MAPC the largest Presbyterian church in the city with 2900 members. With activities for every age group and for associations of women, men, Boy Scouts and others, the Church House was crowded every day. Like those of some other prominent preachers, Dr. Buttrick's sermons were regularly published in Monday editions of the city's newspapers. He became known for not shying away from political or social issues of the day; to him they were indivisibly linked to matters of faith. He found it "irreconcilable with Christianity that 10 percent of the American people owned 95 percent of the nation's wealth" in 1932. In a recent survey Dr. Buttrick was named the third most influential preacher in 20th century America, after Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr. A prolific writer, he also enjoyed teaching courses at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1947 he was named general editor of the 12-volume Interpreter's Bible and the 4-volume Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, works that became definitive resources for a generation of Protestant preachers and teachers.
After 27 years at MAPC, Dr. Buttrick left to become the Minister to the Memorial Chapel and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University. This time the search committee hunting for a successor had the opportunity at another New York church to hear a visiting preacher of the Church of Scotland who was chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II in Scotland and chaplain of Edinburgh University. A World War II chaplain to the Highland Division, David H. C. Read and most of his division had been captured by the Germans at St. Valery en Caux in Normandy in 1940 and had spent the rest of that war in German prison camps. The MAPC committee, impressed by his preaching and his record, immediately approached him. Dr. Read had given no thought to migrating to America, but he listened. Recognizing a fresh challenge, he accepted the call to MAPC in 1956. Again MAPC had found an eloquent preacher.
After years of hard usage, the church facilities stood in need of substantial renovation and upgrading. Plans had been developed before Dr. Buttrick's departure for Harvard but had been laid aside for lack of pastoral leadership. Upon Dr. Read's arrival, one of his early responsibilities in the United States was to lead the capital campaign needed to finance the construction work. In the 1970s another campaign, the Forward Fund, helped the church further modernize worn facilities and meet its mission challenges.
American society in the second half of the twentieth century passed through profound changes that affected churches everywhere. In the age of television and of great pressures on family and other social institutions, mainline denominations, including Presbyterians, began to lose members. MAPC did not escape this trend, but with Dr. Read's vital preaching in the pulpit and in his radio ministry on the National Radio Pulpit and on New York's station WOR, along with his 28 books on the Christian message, our church continued as a beacon of inspiration on the Upper East Side. Many members recall with special affection Dr. Read's annual Christmas Sunday sermons, often in verse. Church School classes, youth groups, adult bible courses, the Day School, the Gateway School, programs for victims and their families of alcohol and cocaine dependency and other activities kept the Church House constantly busy. Mission projects were supported in the larger community at home and abroad. As co-founder of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, which promotes religious tolerance in countries where restrictions are intense, Dr. Read traveled with the Foundation's delegations to many parts of the world. His preaching and books of sermons became models for preachers and seminarians during the resurgence of preaching that took place in the last two decades of the twentieth century. So important was his work that in December 1979 Time magazine named him one of the ten "princes of the American pulpit."
Dr. Read retired on the last day of 1989, two days before his 80th birthday. The two-year interim that followed ended in a call to Dr. Fred R. Anderson, then serving the Pine Street Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg, PA. Dr. Anderson came with wide experience as a preacher, educator, liturgical theologian, administrator and hymn writer. A denominational leader, he is a Trustee of Princeton Theological Seminary and a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy. He served as Clerk and Writing Team member of the Task Force which developed the denomination's new Directory for Worship, as well as liturgist for the 1982 Assembly of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. His hymn texts appear in both Protestant and Roman Catholic hymnals in North America and Japan, with fifteen included in the current Presbyterian Hymnal.
Under Dr. Anderson's leadership MAPC has revitalized and expanded the Day School, developed a dedicated Christian Education hour for adults as well as children, instituted a mid-week children's program, established the Learning Enrichment Activities Program (L.E.A.P.) in East Harlem, and invigorated our stewardship commitments, while maintaining the church's vigorous pace of community-based ministries in and beyond the Church House. Addressing the decline in membership experienced in the last several decades, the church has taken up an innovative and aggressive program of evangelism, utilizing not only newspaper and radio, but also a church home page on the Internet, where Dr. Anderson's sermons appear weekly. In addition to his bible-based preaching in the Reformed tradition, Dr. Anderson regularly teaches courses on biblical and doctrinal topics. A member of the Appeal of Conscience, he has traveled with the Foundation to Switzerland and Cuba. Most recently, he has helped spark leadership for the Fund for Renewal campaign, whose fruits we are now experiencing in the renewed Sanctuary.
No account of the MAPC story would be adequate without recognition of this church's outstanding musical tradition. Going back to Seth Bingham, MAPC has been blessed with distinguished organists and music directors. Dr. John Weaver, who in 1999 celebrated his thirtieth anniversary at MAPC, is internationally recognized as an organist, church musician, composer, recitalist and teacher. Head of the organ departments at both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School of Music, Dr. Weaver was recently listed among the one hundred most important organists of the 20th century (as was Mr. Bingham). John Weaver's hymn tunes, arrangements and service music are prominent features of The Presbyterian Hymnal. A member and former President of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians and a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy, he served on the committee to develop The Presbyterian Hymnal (1990). With the St. Andrew's Music Society and Sunday afternoon recitals in the fall, winter and spring, MAPC offers rich musical fare to the wider community.
And so, as we joyfully celebrate the rededication of our 101-year-old sanctuary and look forward to new opportunities in the 21st century, we gratefully remember our pioneering forebears and their spiritual leaders whose faith, vision, fortitude and service through seventeen decades have brought us to this great day.