On November 11, 1944, three officers of Potomac Presbytery attended a congregational supper at Laurel Presbyterian Church, urged the church to take immediate steps towards securing a new pastor, and recommended the Rev. Joseph H. Cudlipp, a retired Richmond pastor. A congregational meeting in January 1945 voted to accept their recommendation, and Cudlipp began his duties as stated supply at Laurel on September 1. Just a month later the church ordained Mr. Elmer Brown, a man who would play an important role in the church over the next two decades, and Lt. Com. James C. Hargreaves elders. Cudlipp took hold administratively immediately, and by the end of the year Session reorganized its committees to include a New Membership Committee headed by Mrs. Remington and Mrs. Lanahan working with Hargreaves and a Building Committee headed by Brown. Under Cudlipp's leadership, the church began looking again for ways to respond to the demographic growth taking place in and around Laurel .

Cudlipp, a strong preacher and a strong personality known as 'Colonel' Cudlipp because he once had organized a boys' brigade, performed his pastoral duties in a manner quite different from Baker. His pastoral style, in fact, provided a good bridge between the Laurel Presbyterian Church of 1940 and that of a decade later. While he preached what some might style 'old time religion' with an emphasis on the Bible on one hand, he also displayed a real interest in youth and a genuine openness to new people moving into the Laurel area on the other hand. He organized an inter-church youth fellowship in which the youth of the Berwyn Baptist, Laurel Methodist, Mt. Zion Methodist, and Beltsville Methodist churches along with the Laurel Church met monthly for fellowship and study. He turned the Sunday School building into a gym and had the youth doing gymnastics and playing basketball. He started a church drill team and headed up a very good youth program aided by Doris Bowie (nee Lanahan), Lucy Voris, and others. Cudlipp brought new energy and a sense of urgency to the life of the church, things missing for some time.

Under the pressure of World War II, the greater Washington area including Laurel grew rapidly, and the church entered an era of modest but still unprecedented growth . The minutes of Potomac Presbytery for April 1946 described what this population growth meant for the Laurel Church when it observed that, 'Not in a generation has this church moved so fast in accessions and other activities.' Among its most immediate benefits, this growth began finally and permanently to improve the financial condition of the church. Historically, financial limitations had always restricted the church's prospects and program. By late 1946, however, the financial situation showed marked improvement, the church found itself able to meet all of its expenses regularly, and actually requested that presbytery reduce the amount of its support of the church's budget. In November 1946, the church committed itself in principle to achieve self-support as soon as possible, and the next year it raised Cudlipp's salary to the newly established presbytery minimum of $2400 per year while presbytery further reduced its support of the church's budget. Finally, in 1949 the Laurel Presbyterian Church, along with three other churches, received official congratulations from presbytery for achieving full self-support.

Even as this new era in financial self-sufficiency dawned, another serious issue, the question of an improved facility, loomed large in the life of the church. The increased membership forced the church to look more closely at its need to maintain and improve its physical plant which became increasingly inadequate as the church grew. The election in October 1948, of two long-time members of the church, Mr. William B. Anderson and Dr. Jesse A. Remington, to the Session planted the seeds of another issue. Their election meant, in effect, that three 'old' church members, including Elder Lanahan, sat on the Session with only Elmer Brown, the fourth member, a representative for the newer, younger members. This seeming imbalance on the Session and the emergence of the church building as a problem slowly melded into a major crisis in the next decade.

From the perspective of later years the figures may not be impressive, but in 1950 a church membership of 125 seemed very large indeed to the Laurel Presbyterian Church. Cudlipp's leadership and the growth in membership, taken together, increased church activities to their highest level in 25 years. The Session organized a men's group. Cudlipp held a series of special services in October 1950 to deepen the spiritual awareness of the growing church. By 1952 the church held its first Vacation Bible School . Still, this expansion of the church's activities did not satisfy Cudlipp. Aware that LPC had to compete for the attention of the new people in town, Cudlipp encouraged the church to be more publicly visible and more active in the community. Sessional minutes show that the membership did begin to give greater attention to the activities of the church, and the Session went so far as to appoint a publicity representative.

Underneath it all, however, the question of facilities continued to fester, and the church began to split into two sides. The growing agitation for change came from the newer, younger members who questioned how the church could conduct an adequate Christian education program in a Sunday School building so appallingly inadequate. The pattern for future discord emerged as the Session's Committee on Religious Education tried, without any success, to formulate plans that entailed no major change but still allowed for the better physical arrangement of the Sunday School.

In the midst of these concerns, Col. Cudlipp resigned in the Fall of 1952 to take up a stated supply position in Virginia, and the church entered a unique period of a year when the Session governed the church almost entirely without an ordained moderator, interim pastor, or stated supply. Elder Walter Lanahan normally moderated the Session, and his voice more than any other influenced the course of church policy. While the Pulpit Nominating Committee worked, the youth program expanded to include Junior and intermediate groups. The Church Improvement Committee continued to prepare recommendations for the church, but it postponed final action on building matters until the church called a new pastor.

On February 15, 1953, the church called John W. Eckerson, a 26 year-old Floridian and recent graduate of Union Theological Seminary. Presbytery ordained and installed him in June. Eckerson's ministry began, as had most others, with a flurry of activity marked particularly by an improvement in the church's statistics. Although membership did not increase, giving rose substantially from an average of just over $6,700 per year in the period 1950 through 1953 to $11,384 in 1954, Eckerson's first full year. Furthermore, the church also went through a brief period of organizational renewal. It increased the Board of Trustees membership to nine. It reconstituted the Board of Deacons and limited the deacon's term of office to three years on a rotating basis. The Board of Deacons took responsibility for the church's physical plant and property and soon became an important body in its life. The Session also approved Eckerson's proposals to establish a men's group, a young adults' group, and a youth group. Finally, the church also set up a building fund.

On the surface, then, the situation of the church appeared promising in 1953-54. In fact, Eckerson had walked into a deteriorating situation which increasingly divided the church along generational lines and according to length of residency. Indeed, the younger, newer members dominated in certain parts of the church's program such as the new men's group and Young Adult Fellowship (later known as the Family Fellowship). Many of these new members felt uneasy with the traditional-minded Laurel church they joined in the late 1940s and early l950s because it appeared to them that a small clique of older members dominated the church and ran it in a dictatorial fashion. National political and social events and trends in the early and middle 1950s encouraged Americans generally and these young Laurel Presbyterians in particular to react negatively to hints of organizational oppression. The widespread fear of communism reminded people of the dangers of a totalitarian state, a danger that had plunged the nation into World War II. At the same time, the discredited Joe McCarthy and the emergence of a more visible Civil Rights Movement encouraged increased sensitivity to issues of repression.

In this social context, younger members of the Laurel Church felt that they suffered under domination by the older members who, they believed, refused to take those steps needed to improve the church. Specifically, the older group dominated the Session and appeared to use their power on it to block badly needed changes, particularly concerning the church's physical plant. The older members, of course, saw things differently. They felt that they had dedicated an important part of their lives to the church and by their efforts had sustained it through many lean years. Before this influx of newcomers, the church functioned with a minimum of friction. Furthermore, each member of the Session received his position in accordance with the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church U.S. The older members also believed that the younger faction irresponsibly wanted to overextend the resources of the church and to use improper fund-raising methods, such as church suppers, to shift the burden of church support from the church's members to the larger community. Thus, while the younger members believed the older to be unprogressive and dictatorial, the older believed the younger to be irresponsible and unprincipled.

The church fought out these differences in a series of clashes in 1955 and 1956. In the first clash, the Family Fellowship asked the Session for permission to raise funds for a new organ. Session hesitated, only agreed with what appeared to the younger people to be considerable reluctance, and specified that the Family Fellowship could not solicit support in any form from outside the congregation on the principle that Presbyterian churches must support themselves by the voluntary contributions of their own members. The Session went so far as to distribute to the congregation a pamphlet on 'the proper methods of church support.' Under these strictures and almost as an act of defiance, the Family Fellowship went ahead and bought the organ.

The younger members wanted to prove to the Session that they and the church could do more than the Session believed possible. Unfortunately, the whole matter of the organ erupted into an open misunderstanding in January 1956. The Family Fellowship sought Session's permission to hold a recital to dedicate the new organ. Session granted permission. But then the Family Fellowship advertised in the local papers that the recital would include a free-will offering. Session, by a three to one vote, withdrew approval of the recital until it received assurances that the recital would not include an offering. Both sides felt betrayed by the other.

Another series of clashes began in the Summer of 1955 when the Board of Deacons, dominated by the younger faction, went to the Session with a request to renovate the sanctuary. The Session initially approved their request and the letting of a contract for a painter. On the very next evening, July 4, after it made these decisions, the Session reversed itself and postponed all work on the sanctuary until it could call a congregational meeting. Evidently, concern for the possible reaction of the congregation to the renovation and for certain questions about the letting of the painting bid caused these second thoughts. The Deacons ignored the new decision and went ahead with the scheduled renovation. Session did not meet again until September, and, at its first meeting after these events, it voted three to one that the Deacons acted in a manner contrary to Presbyterian church law by ignoring a lawful order of Session. Eckerson, who had generally not taken sides, agreed with the Session. As usual, Elmer Brown found himself a minority of one in this and most other controversial votes taken during that time. On October 11, the two boards met jointly, and the Deacons agreed to submit all projects to the Session thereafter.

Within days of that meeting, a congregational meeting again split the church along new member-old member lines. At that meeting the Building Committee presented plans for a new Sunday School building. The older members held a majority that day and carried a motion to substitute other plans for remodeling the old Sunday School building. The issue of Sunday School facilities held greater stakes for both sides. The younger faction needed better facilities for their children. The older faction doubted that the church could undertake any serious building project.

Although both sides largely kept their thoughts to themselves and seldom discussed the church's problems with non-members, the tension in the church reached serious levels. The younger faction took the next action.

In accordance with what they perceived to be current PCUS practice, the younger faction began to press for a rotary elder plan by which the church would elect its elders for set terms of three years. In a congregational meeting held in November, Eckerson had to rule one of the younger members out of order for bringing up this proposal in a meeting called for other purposes. By January 1956, the younger group gathered a significant number of signatures on a petition requesting that the Session call a congregational meeting to consider the rotary eldership plan. Leaders of the younger faction appeared at the February 14 meeting of Session with that petition. The older members caved in at that point. Within a week most of them, including three elders, left the church. Although only seven members left the church, those members held a significant number of offices and positions in the church. A March congregational meeting voted to go to the rotary eldership plan and elected James Cross and Raymond Bauer to join Elmer Brown on the Session.

If any one person was an innocent victim of these events, that person was John Eckerson. He was caught in a situation not of his own making and one that he could not calm. He finally had to give up, and in February 1956 at the height of the tensions, he announced to the Session that he intended to resign. Thus, even as the lay leadership suffered serious losses the church also lost its pastor, who preached his last sermon on March 25, 1956. Those who knew Eckerson remember a likeable, friendly young man who blamed himself unfairly for much of what happened.

Although traumatic and painful, the transfer of lay leadership from the representatives of the 'old' Laurel to those of the 'new' Laurel resulted in less change than one might expect. Those who replaced the old leadership in many ways shared their generally conservative vision of the church as an institution which provided moral training for children and a place for adults to find community. The younger group revolted only because it wanted a more vigorous program not because it wanted to alter radically the program itself. The next decade, in fact, saw no real changes in the types of activities in which the church engaged or in the mildly conservative theology it espoused.

Yet, an essential change did take place in the middle 1950s, and the split between older and younger members of the church accented and hastened that change. The Laurel Presbyterian Church took a long step away from its past as a Southern Presbyterian church. The influx of new people and the loss of the old Laurel leadership brought the congregation into the fold of 'main line,' national Protestantism where the distinction between 'northern' and 'southern' made increasingly less sense. Only after almost one century from its founding did the Laurel Presbyterian Church start to lose something of its border state identity.

In the wake of the organizational chaos which resulted from the 'Great Split,' the congregation began in the Spring and then Fall of 1956 to reorganize itself. That reorganization involved more than merely filling in the gaps left in the structure of the church by the departure of several key members. The new leaders, among whom Elder Elmer Brown had substantial influence, proceeded to act on their belief that the church could and should achieve more than it had under the old leaders. As a matter of faith in the future of the church, they decided to call a full-time pastor at a relatively high salary level. As a result of that decision, the congregation called the Rev. George Clayman as pastor. Clayman's church in North Carolina , however, refused to concur in his request to dissolve his pastoral relationship with them, and it took some time to overcome their objections. Clayman assumed his new duties in Laurel in December 1956. As the new year, 1957, dawned, the church stood on the threshold of the most remarkable period of growth in its history.

Members generally remember George Clayman with affection and gratitude as a man with a firm but gentle hand. He spoke to the values of the congregation in his commitment to Christian education, a viable youth program, improving the church's physical plant, and increasing the membership. The death of their daughter in 1960 further cemented the deep, sympathetic relationship of the congregation to Clayman and his family. In the first months of Clayman's ministry, the church reorganized its Sunday School, put together a calendar of events, produced a church directory, started a choir, resumed Sunday evening services, and established a Church Extension Committee to stimulate numerical growth.

Space proved to be a more difficult problem. At one of Clayman's first Session meetings, the Session discussed the church's need for more room and appointed a 'Property Procurement Committee' chaired by Elmer Brown. The membership generally assumed that the Fifth and Main property no longer served the needs of the church and that the church needed to relocate. By November, the committee located a three acre piece of property on the edge of town, on Sandy Spring Road , and the congregation agreed to purchase the property for $10,000. The next month the Session appointed two new committees, a Building Finance Committee and a Building Planning Committee.

The next four years were a whirl of activity that centered on the church's Christian education program, numerical growth, and a building program. The building program began with a new manse, built under the direction of a committee chaired by Mr. Fred Thomas. Even with the sale of the old manse, the church could not afford to contract out the construction of its new manse. Therefore, the men of the church did nearly all of the work on it themselves. They soon felt that this important experience gave the church, particularly the men, a new sense of purpose and a deeper sense of community. Furthermore, the church accomplished an identifiable, difficult project primarily out of its own resources. The congregation voted permission to build the new manse in July 1958, and the men completed it by October 1959. The Claymans moved into the house before it was completed, and Clayman devoted almost all of his energies for some months to its completion.

In the meantime, the church voted in October 1958 to accept the plans presented to it by the Building Planning Committee. By those plans, the church would construct a new building in two stages beginning with a Christian education/assembly hall unit followed by a sanctuary in stage two. Thus, the building that the church eventually erected very much embodied the historical experience of the church itself and symbolized not only the concern of the young parents of the middle 1950s to see their children trained by the church, but also the decades long struggle of the church to build a decent, permanent educational building. The small church of the 1920s could not afford a fully adequate facility, and it did the best it could do with the resources at hand.. But the unavoidable compromises it made, when it constructed its educational unit, led directly to the dissatisfaction of the 1950s and, ultimately, the decision to build a Christian education unit first.

After a hiatus of nearly a decade, the church started growing numerically again. At the end of 1956 it had 122 members, only two more than in 1948, but at the end of the 1958 calendar year it had a membership of 202. Financial giving and Sunday School enrollment rose in a similar fashion. Increased membership only added to the sense of crisis over space and forced the church to go to two, and eventually three, services a Sunday. In the Spring of 1959 the church had to send some of its older children's Sunday School classes over to the Armory on Fifth and Montgomery . The church had so many new faces that at the end of 1959 it started a coffee hour after worship so that people could get to know each other better. In four short years, then, the church went from a relatively small church where almost everybody knew everybody else personally to a church where coffee hours became necessary. Symbolic of the growth of the church, the Session in January 1960 appointed Dr. John Arneal, a retired Northern Presbyterian pastor from Baltimore living in Laurel, Minister of Visitation. For several years thereafter Dr. Arneal helped supply the pulpit, visited, and even moderated the Session on occasion.

During the years 1957 to 1959 the church engaged in three central activities: Christian education, property, and worship. In 1959, for example, the Session considered 107 items of business including 41 purely routine matters such as the reception and dismissal of members. Of the remaining 66 items, however, 23 concerned Christian education and youth work (34%), 18 property (27%), and ten worship (15%).

With the manse completed, the church took steps towards starting construction of its Christian education building. A congregational meeting held on December 13, 1959, approved a building fund drive to be held in February 1960, with a goal of $80,000. It was an exciting time, but it could also be a tense time as tempers sometimes flared in meetings and differences on major and minor points had to be worked through. The plan for a new building hit something of a snag in that February drive. It collected less than half of its goal and had to be extended until June. Some months later, the church would also find that no local banks wanted to loan it money, and it finally had to go to a Catholic savings institution to get the financial help it needed. Nevertheless, by July 1960, the church authorized all of the necessary plans and actions necessary to proceed with construction of its new building. Groundbreaking took place on November 6, 1960, and for the next year the church directed much of its attention to its building program. Major issues included financing the building, preparing to move into the new building, and selling the Fifth and Main property.

Ironically, that last item proved more difficult emotionally for some 'older' members of the church than they might have anticipated. These older members always accepted the necessity of leaving that old church building, but they had belonged to the church for up to fifteen years, They had a lot of memories invested in the old church building. Indeed, when the congregation met in July 1961 to consider a bid on the old property by its neighbor, the Methodist Church , the membership had to be reminded that expressions of personal regret were out of order. The Session gave final approval for that sale on October 15. All of the intense planning and preparation bore fruit in September 1961 when the congregation used its new facilities for the first time. It dedicated the building on Sunday, October 8, 1961, with a full delegation of denominational worthies and a large number of members present.

On one level, the congregation used its intensive building program as a platform upon which to rethink and expand its general program. The Every Member Canvass Committee, for example, established in late 1961 a special team to evaluate the physical plant and total program of the congregation. Several months earlier, in May 1961, the Women of the Church sponsored a film on the subject of church extension, and The Presbyter , the church newsletter begun in 1960, observed, 'Since we are building a new church and have a growing community also, this film should be very inspiring to us in evangelizing Laurel.' Sunday School attendance, as another example, doubled in the first month after the church moved to its new facilities.

On a deeper level, nevertheless, the church's range of activities in the early l960s demonstrated how little the church had actually changed in spite of its physical removal from Fifth and Main to Sandy Spring Road . Returning to a major theme of earlier chapters, the role of women remained essentially the same as at the turn of the century. The Women of the Church,' as the women's organization was now called, continued a relatively high level of activity that included mission and Bible studies, fund raising activities, visitation, and contributions to the financial needs of the church. Outside of their own organizations, the women played a particularly large role in Christian education where they supplied most of the teachers for Sunday School and virtually all of the staff for the Vacation Bible School .

The fact that by 1964 the proportion of women in the church had dropped to 54 per cent only indicated that their participation dominated the life of the church less than twenty or thirty years earlier. They still sat on no boards of the church. They influenced church policy and decisions only through men, and the church's official records continued to ignore them. Women played, at best, only a marginally larger role than before and remained second class citizens in the life of the church. The list of potential nominees for church office presented to the Session in September 1965 symbolized the limits of their voice and influence. Only two women appeared on the list of names. At the same time, the presence of large numbers of women in Christian education and the role of the Women of the Church as fund raisers and providers of meals for church functions suggests that in terms of hours of time spent in participation in the church's life women contributed substantially more than 54 per cent of the hours invested. One senses here the lingering presence of the old nineteenth century idea that women's 'nature' made them more fit than men for carrying out religious activities.

Nor did the relationship of the church to the larger Laurel community change in any significant way even though church membership topped 350. In 1964, a survey of announcements and news items in The Presbyter for the years 1960 to 1962 discloses a consistent pattern which emphasized social activities within the community of the congregation. The Youth Group, the Women of the Church, the Men of the Church, the Family Fellowship, and the Come-Double Club encompassed much of the church's activities; and all of them conducted a wide range of largely social activities such as suppers, picnics, square dances, trips, parties, and programs not always of a distinctly religious nature. The world outside of the church intruded into its life only occasionally, such as in November 1963 when the church held a memorial communion service for the late President John F. Kennedy or when it opposed the plans of a local bowling alley to open a cocktail lounge.

Use of the new building also reflected the congregation's distance from the larger Laurel community. While the new building did afford the church opportunities, such as hosting a meeting of presbytery in May 1962 for the first time in many years, the Session tended to discourage use of the building by community groups other than the church-sponsored scout troop. When the new building attracted several requests for use, most were turned down. Thus, while the church, in the years 1961 to 1964, attracted many new members, it otherwise showed little interest in or connection to the Laurel community.

In addition to its heavy emphasis on social activities, the church continued to give Christian education a high priority, and the Christian Education Committee of the Session coordinated the largest, most active program of the congregation. The church also conducted an active music program. In the single month of April 1962, for example, the Senior Choir joined the choir of the Liberty Grove Methodist Church , Burtonsville, for a concert held at that church. The program featured Clayman, an accomplished vocalist, as a soloist. The Junior Choir participated in and hosted the Joint Youth Choir Festival, and it also joined with the Youth Choir to present a Cantata.

At various times, however, the Session and pastor had to contend with tensions concerning music leadership, particularly concerning the position of choir director for the Senior Choir. Those tensions led, eventually, to the Session adopting the policy of not hiring members of the church for paid positions, such as choir director. Yet, serious as were such tensions at the time they were felt, they did not reflect larger historical trends.

In sum, the congregation continued to have a strangely intimate yet distant relationship with its own past. On the one hand, the patterns of its activities and the relatively conservative attitudes expressed by its leadership simply reflected long-standing themes in the life of the church. It continued to behave much as it had since at least the 1880s. On the other hand, as the decades passed it increasingly lost touch with the actual events as well as the meaning of its own past. The death of Robert H, Sadler (1875-1963), church treasurer for thirty years and church officer for some sixty years, for example, symbolized the church's loss of memory. The deaths of Alice Wilson, a member since 1902, in 1967 and of Lucy Voris, a member since 1921, the next year further contributed to the church's loss of institutional memory. Just as the death of William Snowden in 1902 cut off the turn of the century Laurel Church from the church of 1860, so the deaths of these long-time members severed the church of the 1960s from the church of the early twentieth century. The loss of those other long-time members during the controversies of the middle fifties only made the passing of the older generation in the 1960s all the more critical historically.

The early 1960s represented a lull before the storm. As in the early 1940s when great demographic changes forced a period of tension on the church, so in the early sixties a period of great social changes loomed on the horizon. Tension would follow. The Session heard the first not so distant rumblings of events over the horizon in its meetings in the last half of 1964. In its June, August, and November meetings, the Session received reports on racial segregation in Southern Presbyterian churches, the General Assembly's views 'pertaining to the racial revolution of the present day,' and inter-racial activities in the Washington area. Not since the ill-fated 'colored' Sunday School the church conducted from 1905 to 1907 had the issue of race relations intruded into the deliberations of Session.

Clayman notified the Session at its regular meeting in December 1965, of his desire to dissolve his relationship with the church so that he could work with the Church Extension Committee of Potomac Presbytery in starting a new church in West Springfield , Virginia . Not unexpectedly, the Session and the congregation expressed sincere regret at his decision. In eight years under his pastoral leadership, the church grew from a small church of 122 members to a congregation of 352 members and accomplished the enormous task of relocating to a new building and constructing a new manse. His leadership not only helped the church recover from the bruising battle over lay control of the church in the middle 1950s but also to create a larger, more complex and diverse church program. Clayman and the congregation felt a deep bond of personal affection. Only Nicols served the church as pastor for a period of time longer than Clayman, An article in the January 1965 issue of The Presbyter written at the time the Claymans left concluded, 'Pastoral relationships can be dissolved, but not relations of friendship; and so we give to every member of the Clayman family our love, our appreciation, and our good wishes.' Although not apparent at the time, January 24, 1965, the effective date of Clayman's resignation, marked the passing of an era.