Riverside Church, whose Gothic sanctuary was modeled on the Cathedral at Chartres and built with money from John D. Rockefeller Jr., has had only five senior ministers. Under each of them, it has been a center of activism, open debate and dissent.
The Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., who will retire next year, said political leaders should speak with religious leaders of the right and left.
The first, the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, had already established himself as a prominent voice among liberal Protestants in the squabble against fundamentalists when he preached his first sermon at Riverside in 1930. The fourth, the Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr., arrived in 1977 after crusading against the war in Vietnam inhis previous post, as chaplain of Yale University.
Dr. Coffin’s successor, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., took the pulpit in 1989. Since then, he has welcomed Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, and the church has held memorial services for Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, and Paul McCartney’s first wife, Linda.
But his years at Riverside, located at 119th Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan, have also been marked by disagreements so deep that at one point a professional mediator had to be called in, and by allegations of financial mismanagement leveled by some members of the congregation.
Dr. Forbes told that congregation yesterday that he planned to retire in June after 18 years as senior minister. He said in an interview that he wanted to concentrate on a new ministry aimed at “maximizing the witness for spiritual revitalization and the nation’s spiritual revitalization.”
“Having finally reached the age of 70 last year and now I’m 71, it feels like, O.K., that’s long enough for congregational leadership, let’s see if the congregation wants to give me to the nation, somewhat as a minister to the nation, out of the values that together we have been promoting here at this church,” Dr. Forbes said in the interview.
He said he had not determined how he would do that. He said he would begin a six-month sabbatical in January, and would decide during that time whether to set up a nonprofit organization or become affiliated with an institution that “affirms what I’m about.” To some extent, the role he has in mind for himself would expand on what he did in 2004, when he delivered lectures in more than 40 cities. He also spoke out for John Kerry and was critical of the Bush administration. In the pulpit yesterday, he mentioned his program on Air America, the talk-radio network that favors liberal or progressive points of view.
Dr. Forbes received a prolonged ovation after announcing his retirement. But there has also been criticism of the way he has run the church. Earlier in the year, a group of church members went to court, charging that its finances were in disarray. They demanded that a judge appoint a receiver to go through its accounts. Among other things, they alleged that $10 million had “simply disappeared.”
The church denied the allegations, and Justice Richard F. Braun of State Supreme Court in Manhattan dismissed the case in August.
In the interview, Dr. Forbes said Riverside had had “our share of congregational squabbles and conflicts.”
“My approach has been to believe that I am here by divine appointment and that I should expect that I would be challenged sometimes with merit and sometimes perhaps without,” he said
But one of the church members who filed the lawsuit, George Bynoe, asserted yesterday that Dr. Forbes had “purposely misled the flock.”
“How do I feel about him leaving?” Mr. Bynoe asked. “God bless him. His 18 years here have shown no accomplishment. He has preferred to get in with the left wing of the Democratic Party and do their bidding.”
Other members said after the service yesterday that the disputes had taken their toll. “In the last year or so, there’s been a lot of tension,” said Leroy Minors, an usher. “There are some who are 100 percent with him and some who don’t care if he goes.”
Another longtime member, Elizabeth Kennedy, said Dr. Forbes’s retirement would be a loss for the church.
“He’s an ideas guy, and you have to have a really great lieutenant, and I’m not sure he did,” she said, adding that he had “a real strong spiritual vision for the church” but sometimes seemed short on “concrete steps” for translating that vision into action.
The lawsuit was the latest in a string of disputes dating back to Dr. Forbes’s early years at the church. In 1992, amid complaints that membership was down, a mediator was called in after he moved to dismiss the No. 2 minister, the Rev. David Dyson. A former labor organizer who had been the executiveminister, Mr. Dyson later left Riverside.
Dr. Forbes said “the Dyson affair,” as he called it, had been important in establishing his relationship with the congregation. A moment after he said that, he added, “People who fight against me can be used by God, and that’s a hard lesson to learn.”
Some in the congregation said they had had to come to terms with Dr. Forbes and his passionate, personal style of preaching. “It’s not my way of describing my relationship to God, but it’s his, it’s his style, it’s credible because of that and the congregation understands that, and I’ve benefited a lot,” said Geoffrey Martin, the co-chairman of the Sharing Fund, which distributes 10 percent of the money contributed by the congregation.
Dr. Forbes said the church now has 2,700 members, up from 2,400 when he was hired, though he added, “I don’t know whether that’s true — a preacher never knows.” Financially, he said, “I think Riverside is in pretty good shape.”
Dr. Forbes was the first black senior minister at the church, which has a history of civil rights activism. When asked about that, he said, “Cornel West says, race matters. It sure does. Does that answer yourquestion?”
He also said he wished he could have a conversation in which he would tell President Bush: “You experienced a conversion, but the people who interpreted to you what true Christian conversion looked like, they only gave you half of the perspective. Are you open to hearing another way, perhaps from a more progressive perspective?”
“Maybe that can’t happen until after he’s no longer president,” Dr. Forbes said, “but I do think that top political leaders need to have conversations with people on both the right and the left, and I think that the left has probably been so contemptuous of those who had conservative leanings that we did not pressure or push to have that dialogue. I think that’s necessary. That’s part of the work I want to do.”
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