For its next pastor the church turned to an experienced man, who had most recently pastored a large church in Charlotte , North Carolina . The Rev. Stuart A. Ritchie represented a 'new breed' of Southern Presbyterian clergyman, men who spoke out against racism and wanted the church to champion social justice. Looking back twenty years later on the years he spent at the Laurel Presbyterian Church, Ritchie remembered in sharp, pointed phrases that:

The sixties, particularly the late sixties, were times of change—great change. Institutions were challenged and toppled—or at least exposed for their weaknesses. The age when we venerated ideas and idols had ended. The world and all things in it stood upon feet of clay. We looked—not for champions, but for corruption. We challenged, we questioned, we experimented. It was as if we had no past upon which to build. Thus, we began to build new ways. We did not know what final form they would take. We did not even know where these ways might lead us. 'The past is dead! Long live the present!'

Ritchie responded to the ferment of the sixties with a distinctive ministry, which sought to change fundamentally the church's relationship to the Laurel community. He opened the doors of the church to social turmoil and asked it to respond with creativity, innovation, and relevance to that turmoil. When Potomac Presbytery installed Ritchie on July 11, 1965, the church entered the most unsettled period in its history, a period which lasted some fifteen years.

A headline in the September 1965, issue of The Presbyter stands out among the early signs of change. It read, 'Divorce - Sex - Drinking' and announced the topics of Ritchie's sermons for the Fall. In the months that followed, Betty Ritchie started an issues-oriented class for post-high school youth. The church started a class on loneliness. The Session appointed a committee to study community problems. Alcoholics Anonymous began using the church buildings for meetings. In September, the church elected a Church Planning Council, consisting of five members and chaired by William Snyder, to plan for the construction of a sanctuary. By January 1966, the council's plans progressed far enough for it to hire an architect. Most startling of all, perhaps, a congregational meeting in October 1965 voted to expand the Session from six to nine elders and elected Isobel MacKenzie, a native of Scotland and already an ordained elder (in Scotland), to hold a one year term on the expanded Session. The church called her its first 'lady elder.' Potomac Presbytery thereafter appointed her first alternate commissioner to the next General Assembly.

The new year, 1966, thus, opened on a positive note, and church records indicate that the new climate of issues, questions, and challenge spread throughout the church as the year advanced. The Session's Christian Action Committee, tried to live up to its name by contacting other churches in Laurel on the possibilities of joint social ministries. It sponsored a seminar on fair housing. The older youth, meanwhile, discussed issues of sexual morality and drug addiction, and the church helped sponsor one young person's work with poor children in Washington . The church conducted a drama workshop and involved itself in a coffee house ministry in Laurel .

Increased awareness of social issues did not, however, infringe upon the other realms of church activity. The church continued to devote a considerable amount of time to its Christian education program. Social activities, if anything, increased, and the Family Fellowship remained strong and active. The church sponsored a softball team and a winning bowling team. The Men of the Church and the Women of the Church still met, and the women had five active circles. The church's music program also remained strong, as indicated at the end of the year when the Senior Choir joined with the choirs of other churches in a Choir Festival held at the First Methodist Church , Hyattsville, under Dale Krider, a former member of the Laurel Church. LPC, in short, achieved a level of activity higher than it had ever achieved in its past. The Planning Council ran into one of the few snags of the year. It had to suspend any decisions on the new sanctuary until the State Roads Commission decided whether its plans for an access road for interstate 95 would infringe on the church's property.

In October 1966, the church nominated six women to the offices of elder and deacon and then elected Katherine Birdsong to a two year term as elder. 'Kitty' Birdsong was the first woman ordained by LPC to the office of elder. She had been active in the church for years particularly in the leadership of the Vacation Bible School and the Women of the Church. She also served on the pastoral nominating committee which called Ritchie. Her election represented a larger trend. In January 1966, the Session had appointed or approved members of nine committees, a total of forty committee members. That total included seventeen women.

A sense of optimism pervaded the congregation in 1966, and a report prepared for the Church Planning Council reflected that optimism. Drawing upon the congregation's recent rate of growth and projections of population growth in the Laurel area, that report estimated that LPC would grow to a membership of 980 in 1986 and 1,770 by the year 2000. A revised estimate made in another report in 1969 still showed the church growing to a membership of 757 by 1977.

The church's records for 1967 further reflected this sense of optimism. The church had to go to two Sunday morning worship services. It also hit a statistical peak when it added 95 new members and reached a total membership of 440. Giving grew by nearly twenty percent during the year, and even the Sunday School, which had declined significantly in enrollment the year before, grew substantially in size. The diverse, innovative program of the previous year continued to expand. Ritchie himself developed community contacts and became a recognized leader in programs for social change in the community. The church began to talk about the need for a second pastor.

The church also continued to open its inner councils to new voices. At the end of 1967, It elected Kathryn Brown to the office of deacon, the first women so elected in the church's history. The church also elected a youth to the Church Planning Council. The call for a more inclusive American society in the late fifties and sixties, then, spilled over into the church and led to the first steps towards a more inclusive Laurel Presbyterian Church.

Ritchie's leadership carried the congregation into yet another area of innovation when the church, in cooperation with the First United Methodist Church , held its first 'Mod Worship' in November 1967. The Session approved the continuation of these services using contemporary expressions of worship. The church held them once a month on Sunday afternoons (later Sunday evenings), and under the leadership of Floyd Werle, a creative professional musician with the Air Force band, these services explored different mediums of expression for worship.

The mod worship services also symbolized the strengths and weaknesses of the church's ostensible break with its own past. Some, in fact, broke with the past more than others. While some members found the mod worship format stimulating, others called the services 'weird,' and a few, evidently, considered them disrespectful of God. Still others simply ignored the services entirely. Innovation, experimentation, and a more liberal approach resulted in excitement, ambivalence, resistance, and even animosity.

At the start of 1967, Elmer Brown stepped down from his position as Clerk of Session, after more than a decade in that position. Brown had become the elder statesman of the congregation, a man whose voice was trusted. Raised in a Northern Presbyterian church in Tennessee , he embodied something of the border state and Southern tradition of the old Laurel Church, and of the more cosmopolitan, national attitude which entered the church beginning in the late forties and fifties. By the end of 1967, Ray Bauer, another long-time member and influential voice, gave up his position as church treasurer which he had held for seventeen years.

In 1968, the church reached an almost feverish pitch of creative ideas, of outside speakers, of innovative programs, and of opportunities for involvement. At the center with Ritchie, stood a corps of people who shared with him his concerns and vision. Chief among that group was Elder John Guy, chairman of the Session's Committee on Commitment. Under Guy's leadership, that committee planned a film festival, a second money management clinic, a vocational guidance program, and a couples in crisis program. In addition, the Women of the Church began to assist Project Outreach, a program of the Episcopalian women, aimed at providing services to lower income families in Laurel . Ritchie involved others in a program of interracial understanding and involvement which brought some Presbyterians into contact with black poverty in Laurel . Members of the church helped plan interracial events and the church itself engaged in activities with the local black Methodist Church . At the same time, more and more community groups used the Presbyterian Church building.

The Poor People's March on Washington in the Spring of 1968 brought a number of issues together, with unhappy results for the church. In his role as a civil rights leader in the community, Ritchie very naturally took part in local planning for that mammoth protest event. At the last minute, he found himself in the position of having to ask the Session to house some marchers in the church building. Although most of the elders agreed, if reluctantly, Ritchie's request resulted in conflict with an element in the church. Whether or not that element represented the thinking of others, church statistics for 1968 indicate that the church lost something of its momentum of 1967. Membership in 1968 dropped by five after its huge increase in 1967. Giving, especially in the first half of 1968, did not match pledges and the church had to tighten its belt for a period. Benevolence giving grew by much less during the year than it had for several years previously. The Sunday School's total enrollment dropped by a third.

Those statistics did not represent a rejection of Ritchie personally. They did represent, instead, an increasingly apparent ambivalence about his program. Most of the people liked Ritchie and even considered him charismatic, although his 'can do' style and emphasis on 'secular' concerns also put some people off. People in the church, generally, considered him an excellent preacher, and they felt that his preaching attracted newcomers. Those newcomers appreciated him because he was sensitive to their need for help in finding their way into a new community. Some members of the church, however, criticized him for 'not preaching from the Bible,' and a few found Ritchie's liberal style and program so objectionable that they left the church entirely. A larger group felt drawn to his program, excited by it. For them Christianity took on a new meaning. The majority, however, simply did not catch the vision that Ritchie sought to communicate.

Involvement and controversy took its toll on Ritchie himself. He had experienced a similar pattern of ambivalence and resistance before, and he increasingly adopted the position of some other liberal churchmen that the acid of social irrelevance would soon destroy the organized church. In those stirring, frightening years of the late sixties, Stuart Ritchie felt his faith drawing him away from the pastoral ministry and the institutional church.

The year 1968 closed with an event that clearly demonstrated the church's growing uncertainty about its own future. In November, the Planning Council presented its plans for a sanctuary to the congregation and members of the church, as they examined the council's recommendations, raised a number of issues. Some questioned the congregation's ability to pay for a new sanctuary. Others found flaws, major and minor, in the plans themselves. The meeting finally voted to delay approval of the plans for six months and returned the plans to the council for further study. Behind the doubts raised in the meeting itself, evidently, lay two other sets of feelings. On the one hand, the substance of Ritchie's preaching and concerns influenced some and caused them to doubt the wisdom of the church's 'wasting' money on itself by building a sanctuary. Some more traditional members, on the other hand, had little enthusiasm for a sanctuary in the round, the style called for in the plans. While the congregational meeting did not reject the plans or the need for a sanctuary outright, the vote to wait six months effectively terminated the church's building plans. A detailed study issued by the church Finance Committee the next year, in September 1969, counseled, in effect, that the church should postpone plans for a new sanctuary for at least five years.

Only in retrospect can it be seen that, by the early months of 1969, the church had already passed a peak in its history even though the church continued to exhibit a high level of activity. During those months, the Session approved a rearrangement of the sanctuary, Potomac Presbytery elected Elder John Guy to represent it at the General Assembly, and the Division of Family Life of the Southern Presbyterian Church selected the Laurel Church as one of three to test a special course on human sexuality. The congregation's brief excursion into the realm of relatively intense engagement with the world, however, ended abruptly at the end of April when Ritchie announced his resignation, effective May 31, 1969.

The pastoral nominating committee formed to find a new pastor moved quickly to fill the leadership gap left by Ritchie. In July 1969 it reported back to the church that it had found a suitable successor, the Rev. Dr. Albert G. Harris, a resident of Georgia who had only recently returned from several years service as a missionary in Brazil . The congregation accepted Harris, and presbytery installed him in September.

A brief controversy marred the process. The Harris family agreed to come to Laurel only if it did not have to live in the manse. The manse's isolation on the edge of town reminded them of the isolation they had experienced living in a missionary compound. They also asked for a housing allowance. While the congregation readily acceded to these requests, some members felt disappointed that the Harrises did not live in the manse, especially because it was built by the men of the church. Others felt that having to pay a housing allowance when the church had a manse available put an unnecessary burden on the church. These irritations and the Harrises' awareness of them hinted at a pattern that emerged more clearly in the ensuing years.

In spite of the growth and progress of the previous two pastorates, Harris came to the Laurel Church at an awkward time in its history. Once again growth split the church into older, long-time members, who tended to be traditionalists, and younger, newer members, who tended to favor change. Ritchie had attracted a following of definitely more liberal individuals, some of whom felt uncomfortable with traditional church structures. Ritchie and the church held the potential tensions between traditional and liberal elements of the church in check partly by the force of Ritchie's own personality and partly by the maturity of some older leaders who did not let changes drive them away and who, in a few cases, responded positively to those changes. As he took up his work in the Fall of 1969, then, Harris faced a potential breakdown in the balance achieved under Clayman and Ritchie.

The condition of the church's lay leadership aggravated the situation Harris and the church faced. Many of those attracted by Ritchie, including key leaders, simply could not accept any successor, and they soon began to leave. Older members, on the other hand, had already ceased to exercise as much leadership as they had under Clayman. Patterns beyond the control of Harris, then, conspired to weaken the church's structure of lay leadership, and Harris himself later remembered feeling with particular force the loss of Elder Elmer Brown, a strong spiritual leader and a moderating influence, when he moved away from Laurel in November 1970.

Demographic trends in the Laurel area further complicated the church's prospects. The rapid growth of the area drew a significant proportion of younger families to it. The church, as a result, contained a large number of younger couples just beginning to establish themselves professionally and just starting their families. They could not afford, they felt, to give relatively large financial amounts to the church. They also could not contribute to a mature, stable lay leadership. These same demographic trends enticed the United Presbyterian Church USA to establish, in 1966, its own congregation, Oaklands Presbyterian Church, in the area. LPC now had to compete for Presbyterians.

The political and social climate abroad in the nation only added to the potential problems the church faced in late 1969. Racial unrest continued to pull at the social fabric of the nation. Growing civil resistance to the Vietnam War added to the sense of social crisis, and Americans felt more and more alienated from each other and from their leaders. Residents of suburban Washington, many of them employees of the Federal Government, felt these national tensions with a particular force.

Throughout the Fall of 1969 and Spring of 1970, the church experienced a series of troubling trends, which further contributed to a sense of decline. The congregation sponsored little in the way of youth activities. It had trouble finding people willing to serve as officers. Attendance at social and educational events dropped off significantly. Church records, over all, show that the church refocused much more of its attention on its own internal concerns and needs. The trend which most disturbed the Session, the deacons, and others was the drop in church giving.

These problems, on the one hand, reflected difficulties, mentioned above, over which the church had little control. But, they also arose out of a deteriorating relationship between Harris and some members of the church. LPC received, early in 1970, an inheritance bequest of $11,850. The gift actually created the difficult issue of how to use it. Harris participated in the tug of wills, and the result was hard feelings on the part of some key members.

Only in two areas, Sunday School and contemporary worship, did the church continue to prosper. In Sunday School, attendance grew by an impressive 65 per cent from 115 per Sunday in October 1969 to 190 per Sunday in October 1970. An expanded adult Sunday School program provided the key to this growth. The 'Mod Worship' program also continued to present creative contemporary worship experiences. Otherwise, the most creative program established by Harris took place entirely outside of formal church structures. The Harrises led a succession of informal small groups composed primarily of young church leaders. The Harrises sought to create within these groups the closeness of a family, and for a number of participants the groups resulted in a deep sense of fellowship. They provided spiritual and personal growth.

Those same informal groups, however, also resulted in ambivalent feelings within the church. Since the groups were by invitation only, some who did not receive invitations resented being left out. Some participants felt that the groups, at times, delved too deeply into feelings and emotions. In later years, members, as well as Harris himself, remembered that the Harrises tried to get too close to members of the church. Harris' desire to create close family feelings within the church had unintended results: it created an atmosphere of acceptance which many members interpreted as moral laxity. It also did not take into account the fact that family ties can, in their very closeness, create tension and unhappiness. In short, these and later small group programs led to deep, rich sharing experiences for some and greater disaffection for others.

In spite of the strengths of certain elements in the church's program, the financial situation of the church continued to decline at an alarming rate. By the end of 1970, actual giving fell short of pledges by well over $4,000, and the church would have gone into debt had it not dipped into reserve funds. From early 1971, then, the Session placed heavy emphasis on church visitation plans as it sought to reach out to both inactive members and potential new members. Trends in giving and participation forced Harris, the Session, and the entire church to look even more inward and community involvement largely died away.

While the church became more self-absorbed in 1970 and 1971, the Women of the Church seemed less influenced by events and trends than other facets of the church's program. If anything, the WOC gave more to community programs and missions than before, and national women's organizations such as Church Women United kept current issues alive among the women. In February 1971, the WOC numbered 66 members, roughly one-third of the total number of women in the church. It continued to function as something of a church within a church, a place for women to take the full leadership role they did not have in the life of the total church.

Under other circumstances, December 1971 might have been a happy time for the church because in that month it burned its mortgage, first taken out in 1958. The congregation, instead, found itself rapidly slipping into a depressed and tense state. A growing number of members and officers felt, rightly or wrongly, that they could not get along with their pastor. While some felt dissatisfaction with worship and others with the quality of administration, personality clashes between Harris and individual members caused most of the unrest in the church. During the course of the year, three deacons resigned, and then in December 1971 three elders resigned. A number of members expressed their feelings by engaging in gossip, which added to the atmosphere of disaffection and polarization.

The tensions that spread throughout the life of the church defy simple analysis because they had to do with personalities and patterns of events which records and documents cannot fully capture. Some members found Harris too much of the ebullient Southerner, while Harris felt alienated from the more reserved nature of life in suburban Washington. In the years before 1972, the one factor that may have hurt Harris' relationship with the church more than anything else was the widespread perception among church members that he lacked tact. In some cases, people came out of meetings so hurt and angry that they never returned to the church. The year 1972, then, opened with the church and its pastor feeling increasingly beleaguered. Once again, the Fall stewardship campaign had failed to produce an acceptable budget, and the Session and the Board of Deacons spent hours pasting together a budget on which the church could operate.

The resignation of the three elders in December did open one unexpected door for the women of the congregation. In October 1971, the church elected Judy Young as an elder, the first woman elected to a full term as an elder, and, then, in December it also elected Fern Nicholas as an elder. Thus, January 1972, marked the first time in the Laurel Church's history that more than one woman sat on the Session. Later in the year, the Women of the Church celebrated another happy event when they elected Edith Bayer and Flo Cross to life memberships.

January 1, 1972, marked an important change for the church in another way. On that date Potomac Presbytery united with Washington City Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A. to form the National Capital Union Presbytery. The Laurel Church, along with all of the churches in this new presbytery, now belonged to both denominations. For the 'Presbyterian Church at Laurel ' this event meant that the church returned to membership in the denomination which had founded it and from which it had withdrawn just over a century previously.

Other, less happy, trends also emerged during 1972. First of all, the church introduced programs in sex education into the adult Sunday School and as a special evening course. Given the climate of opinion in the congregation, these programs inevitably gave some members more reasons for dissatisfaction. Secondly, Jean Coleman, previously a nominal member of the church, experienced a deep personal conversion to fundamentalism, and in September 1972, she began teaching a class on 'The Presence of God' in Sunday School. Coleman would soon put herself at the center of yet another controversy.

The congregation's membership continued to express its displeasure with Harris in early 1973 by restricting their financial giving. The budget for 1973 dropped below $50,000 to a level just above that of the 1966 budget. In the meantime, attendance at worship continued to dwindle, and members continued to drop away. Matters reached such a state that the Session formed a 'Reconciliation Task Force' to try to open lines of communication with those inactive members who had been active until recently.

In late March 1973, the church's officers participated in a retreat led by a member of the presbytery's staff, and at that meeting the participants engaged in an intense airing of the issues, which so concerned so many members. Many of the feelings, which people had expressed only haphazardly if at all, broke to the surface. Out of the maze of particular concerns about preaching, worship, and administration, came one clear message: the majority of the members wanted Harris to change the ways in which he dealt with them.

The March meeting came too late. Harris tried to respond to some of the criticisms leveled against him by attending a course in clinical counseling, by attending a seminar on church administration, by setting up a sermon feed-back and preparation group, and by returning to a more traditional format for worship. None of these attempts to deal with the crisis facing his ministry could repair his relationship with the majority of the congregation. Too much had already transpired for Harris to win back the trust of the majority of the church, and he became prey for every dissatisfaction. The conservative element identified him with contemporary worship, moving the arrangement of the sanctuary around, and 'liberal' programs such as therapy and sex education groups. The liberals, on the other hand, felt that Harris did not go far enough in seeking to make the church innovative and relevant.

Tension reached a peak in June 1973, when the Session and Harris held a lengthy discussion concerning their relationship. The Session concluded its deliberations with a conditional vote of confidence in which the majority voted its 'complete support for Dr. Harris pending [the] outcome of the November canvass.' If giving increased, in other words, and the congregation showed some signs of coming out of its depressed condition, the Session would then support Harris.

Other events contributed to a sense of decline and disarray, including, most especially, a theological controversy. In her Sunday School class, Jean Coleman began teaching dispensationalism, an ultra-fundamentalist doctrine, as accepted Presbyterian doctrine. Among other doctrines, dispensationalism teaches that the so-called 'main line' churches have strayed from Christ's teachings and, therefore, cannot be trusted. Harris felt and said that Coleman's teaching was divisive and that she should not teach dispensationalism as Presbyterian doctrine, which it is not.

Coleman resigned as a Sunday School teacher, her husband resigned as a deacon, they left the church, and, eventually, they established a church of their own. Harris, meanwhile, stated his views at a special meeting of the Session. The Session supported him, and its minutes for June 19, 1973, state that, 'The Session holds that any subject dealing with some aspect of Christian life may be taught, but that no viewpoint or interpretation may be advocated as the one true and divine word.' The Session held another special meeting at the end of June with members of a prayer group Coleman had led to discuss its actions.

The deep feelings in the church in 1973 tended to obscure the positive, creative accomplishments of the congregation in that year. The adult education program, particularly in Sunday School, continued to provide a variety of courses, often of a high quality. The church held a number of unusual special events including, for example, hosting a reporter who had covered President Nixon's historic trip to China . During the summer, the Laurel Presbyterian Church and St. Mark's Methodist Church , a black congregation, sponsored a joint evening vacation Bible school. Over 100 attended the Women of the Church's May mother-daughter banquet. Nevertheless, the church's negative atmosphere kept it from enjoying these accomplishments and otherwise dominated nearly everything that happened. In November 1973, for example, the Session considered purchasing an additional two acres of land adjoining the church's property. At a meeting of the Session, presbytery representatives stated bluntly that the congregation simply could not consider such a step until after it repaired its relationship with its pastor. The Session agreed.

On December 3, 1973, The Rev. Ed White, of the presbytery, moderated an open meeting of Session attended by a large number of members. Some forty individuals made statements to the Session concerning the state of the church and its relationship with Harris. The Session heard read an additional fourteen statements sent by people who did not attend the meeting. Having heard these statements, the Session went into a closed meeting. After further discussion, the Session entertained a motion to recommend that the church retain Harris with full confidence. That motion lost by a vote of six to three. Harris and the Session then agreed that Harris should seek another call, and the Session stated that in the meantime it would work with him for the common good of the church. The Session, in short, held to its vote earlier in the year that its confidence in Harris depended upon the financial condition of the church at the end of the year. Church statistics for 1973, compared to those for 1972, showed a 19 per cent drop in total income, an 18 per cent drop in number of financial pledges, and a 17 per cent drop in the total amount pledged

Unfortunately, the vote of the Session and its agreement did not resolve the tense situation existing within the church. First of all, Harris felt that he could not simply quit or take the first job which came along. He owed it to his family and his vocation to seek a decent call, and finding such a call would take some time. Secondly, in the early months of 1974 a group of Harris supporters coalesced around a petition presented to the Session in April. Signed by 57 members and two regular attenders, the petition called upon the Session to rescind its vote of December. The petition blamed the decline in church giving and attendance in the Laurel Church on national trends. It pointed out that the Session itself approved those programs which later caused dissatisfaction. It observed that many of the 'dissidents' had already left the church so that anti-Harris people would play little part in the future of the church, even if Harris left. It charged that the anti-Harris faction ignored the fact that Harris had done all that the Session asked in making changes. The petition also stated that the divisions in the church went deeper than differences over Harris, that if Harris left the church would have trouble finding a replacement, and that without a pastor the church would find itself in an even worse condition.

This petition demonstrated that, in the midst of tension, the makeup of the church had shifted. As members either left entirely or declined to take an active part in the church, supporters of Harris, many of whom joined the church during his ministry, came to the fore. For the first time since the majority of the Session so inexplicably sought to oust Anderson fifty years earlier, the church split into identifiable factions over its pastor. The emergence of a Harris faction came too late, however, to prevent his leaving or change the general climate of mistrust in the church. Indeed, the presence of factions added to the tension and further fueled hard feelings. The situation of the church was beyond reason and negotiation. In any event, when the Session convened in May to consider the petition, a motion to withdraw its vote of no-confidence in Harris lost by the identical vote of six to three. One anti-Harris elder then resigned from the Session, and, in early June, three others followed his example.

Even as the church split into factions, some members still tried to establish new programs in it. In March 1974, some forty members organized four fellowship groups, called Christian Sharing Groups, which sought to provide mutual support for the members of each group and to deepen their Christian experience in particular facets of the Christian life. A number of members also took part in a psychodrama class. And, in spite of the tensions in the church, the Family Fellowship managed to attract 120 people to its March dinner. On the other hand, the Women of the Church had only three active circles in the Spring of 1974, a loss of two from five years earlier.

In September 1974, the reconstituted Session heard read letters from four couples in the church. Those letters collectively reflected a sense of futility and a deep feeling that LPC had lost its sense of community love and fellowship. One couple withdrew from the church entirely, while the other three withdrew their financial pledges. Then, rather suddenly, Harris ended the immediate crisis over his pastoral leadership when, on October 13, he asked the Session to call a congregational meeting to accept his resignation as of October 31, 1974, so that he could accept a call to be an associate pastor in a church in Georgia.

More than a decade later, the Laurel Church had yet to come to grips with the meaning of this difficult period in its history. The events of the period emphasized once again how much the church depended upon its pastors and how unsettling controversy with and about a pastor was to the church. The tension and division of the Harris ministry also revealed that the church had to collectively like the personality of its pastor. If it did not, then it would not respond to whatever particular skills a pastor might bring to the church. In a vague but potent way, the church expected its pastor to typify its cultural definition of good manners and pleasant demeanor. If events of the early seventies are any evidence, the church viewed its pastor not simply as a person doing a job but, rather, as a living symbol of what they expected of and wanted from a satisfying interpersonal relationship.

The period 1969 to 1974 gave further credibility to the impression that national events and moods also play a subliminal yet consequential part in the history of the Laurel Presbyterian Church. Pastors such as Bird, Clayman, Ritchie, and even Nicols in the nineteenth century embodied in their programs and their styles of ministry important aspects of the eras in which they lived. In that light, national events in the early seventies contributed to the difficulties Harris and the Laurel Church experienced in their relationship with each other. From 1972 onwards, the Watergate Scandal infected the nation with a sense of mistrust in leadership as more and more Americans decided that President Nixon had, in fact, betrayed them in a manner that went beyond partisan politics. As the membership of the Laurel Church wrestled with its own leadership problem, its members read daily about Watergate and the 'cancer in the presidency.' In the days before December 5, 1973, when the Session first voted its lack of confidence in Harris, the national headlines carried stories telling Americans that a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee was ready to recommend impeachment of the President. Watergate dominated the news until Richard Nixon finally resigned the presidency in August 1974, only two months before Harris also resigned. While the parallels between Watergate and Harris' ministry should not be pushed too far and local events did not simply slavishly repeat national ones, Watergate must have reinforced the sense of mistrust alive in the congregation.

With the resignation of Harris, the presbytery moved to repair the damage of the past. It did not allow the church to form a pastoral nominating committee, and through the Executive Presbyter, the Rev. Ed White, it recommended that the church accept the Rev. Tom Murphy as its interim pastor. The Session accepted that recommendation, and Murphy began his part-time ministry at the Laurel Church in December 1974. The church, at first, felt some uncertainty about Murphy because of his liberal image and his 'hippie' associations, developed during his previous street ministry; but Murphy's personality and his experience working with groups in conflict quickly overcame the initial reservations of most. Murphy spoke the words of acceptance and healing which the church needed desperately to hear.

Over the next ten months, the church engaged in a number of traditional social events which emphasized simple fellowship, At the same time, the Session and the Deaconate formulated new church policies and put the machinery of the church back into working order. The church continued to hold contemporary worship services and to conduct a fairly large adult Sunday School program, but these activities lost much of the liberal identity they had during the Ritchie-Harris years. It appeared, in fact, that the church might have dropped social action or involvement entirely had it not been for Murphy's deep personal commitment to address issues of human suffering. Under his leadership, the church for the first time heard a great deal about hunger, held meetings on human hunger, and established a Hunger Committee. In May 1975, that committee sponsored a 24 hour fast period which included a variety of activities at the church building.

The initial period of healing culminated in presbytery's decision in September 1975, to allow the Laurel Church to set up a pastoral nominating committee and initiate the process of finding a new pastor. The church, meanwhile, continued to evaluate various aspects of its program and make changes in its programs and policies, In some ways, the church began to exhibit a drift not only away from a liberal agenda but also towards a strongly conservative agenda. In February 1975, the Session had allowed one member to hold a seminar on baptism by the Holy Spirit, which included speaking in tongues, at the church building. By the Fall of 1975, the adult Sunday School classes reflected more traditionalist interests. The decision taken in May 1976, to introduce the David C. Cook Sunday School Curriculum, identifiably conservative in content, into the church further demonstrated the conservative shift. The September 1976 Presbyter contained a full page description of conservative and fundamentalist Bible study and fellowship groups in Laurel in response to the feeling of some members that they wanted more Christian fellowship and Bible study than the church offered.

A quiet tug of wills developed, meanwhile, between Murphy and some elements in the church. In March 1976, for example, Murphy rearranged the sanctuary into a three-sided arrangement. In that month's Presbyter , Murphy felt constrained to note that some would not like the new arrangement and that, 'There is an unfortunate pattern at LPC, for those who don't like something to grumble about it to each other, but not to talk to me about it.' In this and other such events, the congregation demonstrated its need not to go on experimenting, and it also demonstrated that its level of trust in pastoral leadership remained fragile. Murphy had the wisdom not to push some of his more experimental ideas, such as one-on-one shared confessions during worship.

Throughout 1976, the Pastoral Nominating Committee carried out the process of finding a new pastor. In January, it completed a 'Church Profile Study' which reflected in a balanced manner the state of the church at that time. Much of that study described a rather typical medium-sized Presbyterian Church with a full range of activities including a particularly good choir. Two major themes emerge from the study, First of all, it observes that the church was, as it had always been, a markedly friendly church, and its distinctly friendly personality attracted new members. Secondly, however, the life of the church had not yet at that time returned to normal. A large number of divorces upset the church. Disaffected members continued to demonstrate apathy and to express alienation from the church. For all of this, the church deeply appreciated the role Murphy played in healing some of the wounds of the past. Many wanted him to become pastor, and his departure in January 1977 was greeted with a generally shared sense of loss and sadness.

As the months of 1976 passed, the church lived in a time between a hard past and an unknown future. Murphy detected in the members of the church a reluctance to get too involved or invest too much in the church. They were waiting to evaluate the next pastor.