For two decades beginning in the early 1950s, John McCandlish Phillips composed elegant newspaper stories under grueling deadline pressure for the New York Times, earning a reputation as one of his generation’s great reporters. In his 2003 memoirs, Arthur Gelb, a longtime editor at the paper, described him as “the most original stylist I’d ever edited….”
Mr. Phillips stunned the staff when he decided to leave full-time employment in 1973 at the age of 46. The New Yorker magazine much later called him “The Man Who Disappeared” and wondered why a figure with so much talent would “walk away from it.”
But Mr. Phillips did not disappear. He channeled his imagination into the church he had co-founded with Hannah Lowe a decade or so earlier, the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small Pentecostal congregation. His dream was to spur a massive evangelizing campaign in New York City that would result in waves of born-again Christians.
“What everyone in this city needs, with scarcely anyone knowing of it, is the one salvation that God has provided in His son, Jesus Christ,” he told me in a recent interview. “My life was changed in a moment of time, permanently, by an act of evangelism [in 1950]. I know its power. And I have no chiefer desire than to see as many individuals as possible come to that same threshold and cross it.”
This is an excellent article, Kendall. Thank you for it. This quote spoke to me: “In 2005 he took on columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich for heaping “fear and loathing” on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. “I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, . . . in a ghastly arcade mirror lately,” he wrote.” It amazes me that 99.9% of the Christians I know and have always known are kind, loving, balanced and decent people, but you’d never EVER know it by reading or watching the general media.