Longstanding tensions among parishioners at the renowned Riverside Church erupted again this week as a group of congregants went to court to stop the installation of a new senior pastor whose compensation package, they say, exceeds $600,000 a year.
In a motion filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the group said that the new pastor, the Rev. Dr. Brad R. Braxton, and the church board that selected him last September after a yearlong search, had dismissed their calls for transparency in financial matters. They also complained that Dr. Braxton was moving Riverside away from its tradition of interracial progressivism and toward a conservative style of religious practice.
On Tuesday, a Supreme Court judge, Lewis Bart Stone, effectively denied the motion by adjourning the case to the end of May, a month after Dr. Braxton’s installation, which is scheduled for Sunday. The judge urged both sides to reach an accommodation in the case, which was reported on Wednesday by The Daily News.
The church, a Gothic cathedral built in 1930 by John D. Rockefeller at 120th Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan, stood for many decades at the most heavily trafficked juncture of religious faith and social activism in the United States. Its pastors were early civil rights advocates who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and invited him to speak in the pulpit. Its best-known leader was the fervent civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist, the Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr.
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