From The New York Times-
HIS work here is done. His reinvention of a dying church with ratty old wooden pews is emblemized by the 900 brand-new chairs — bought by parishioners for $900 apiece, engraved plaques included — arrayed in the exquisite mosaic, marble and stained-glass sanctuary. With a congregation of nearly 3,400, up from a foundering flock of just a few hundred when he took over in 1994, the Rev. William MacDonald Tully, 65, is retiring from active duty at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue and 50th Street. His final sermon is on Sunday.
His exit is voluntary and — contrary to that of his predecessor, who left after a decade of debilitating infighting and litigation — uncontroversial.
“I’m not going to preach on a Biblical lesson for my farewell sermon,” Mr. Tully emphasized last week, ensconced in a wood-paneled conference room because he had already ceded his cozy upstairs office to his hand-picked successor, the Rev. F. M. Stallings Jr., commonly known as Buddy. “It’s going to be personal. When I came here I had to create a new reality and not fight the old battles. People told me, ‘We need to fix this building,’ and I said, ‘No, let’s fix the congregation first.’ I was selected because I had a vision of fairly raw growth, a doctrine of radical welcome.”
The church building, with its triple portal entry by Stanford White grafted onto Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s main structure, was in need of fixing. It had been bankrolled by Astors and Vanderbilts, but they were long gone. Mr. Tully’s predecessor as rector was the Rev. Thomas D. Bowers, whose grand vision for his ministry revolved around the construction of a glass tower to provide enduring fiscal security for the church. In 1980, a British developer offered to buy the church and its property for $100 million, setting into motion a plan to use the church’s air rights to build a tower as many as 59 stories tall on the site of its community house.
More here-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/nyregion/the-last-sermon-of-st-barts-rector.html
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