The Rev. George W. Hill, for 15...

The Rev. George W. Hill, for 15 years a prominent American Baptist pastor in the nation’s capital, was recently lured away from semi-retirement in Southern California to become interim senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City.

Considered to be the most renowned pulpit in mainstream Protestantism, the prestigious pastorate was last held by the Rev. William Sloane Coffin. He left to assume leadership of a new peace organization in Washington.

Hill, 71, said the Riverside Church was persuasive. “I tried to divert them to other possibilities, but they insisted,” he said. Hill said he was asked to take the interim post for a year to a year and a half while the church’s search committee looks for a permanent pastor.

Hill, who graduated from USC 50 years ago, once pastored First Baptist Church in Pasadena and concluded 15 years at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington in the fall of 1986. The latter congregation, 12 blocks from Capitol Hill, included a number of congressmen as members and ran programs aiding the homeless and hungry.

The minister, who also chaired a campaign for a national peace academy, received the Edwin T. Dahlberg Peace Award from the American Baptist Churches at its 1985 biennial assembly.

Hill left Washington to live in retirement in Claremont, but he was also persuaded to serve part time last year on the staff of First Baptist Church of Los Angeles.

Hill said his first sermon will be on Jan. 31 at Riverside Church, a congregation dually aligned with American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ.

PEOPLE

California Baptist College’s “Dr. Music” has been appointed to head a national Southern Baptist subcommittee on new songs for a new denominational hymn book. That isn’t just the students’ name of endearment for the chairman of the Riverside college’s music department. His name is David Music.

Sister Marie Madeleine Shonka, president and chief executive officer of St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, will be honored by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith as its 1988 Humanitarian of the Year at a dinner Tuesday in the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

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DATES

“Is God a reality or just an idea in human minds?” Four religious philosophers from Great Britain will tackle opposite sides of the question Friday and Saturday in the annual Philosophy of Religion Conference sponsored by the religion faculty of Claremont Graduate School. The sessions will begin at 9 a.m. each day at Bauer Center on the Claremont McKenna College campus in Claremont, but interested listeners are urged to request advance papers from the Claremont Graduate School’s religion department. The conference will deal with what organizer John Hick said is perhaps the most fundamental of questions in religious study: “Whether religious language refers to divine reality that exists in its own right, independently of our human desires and thoughts, or whether it is a projection or expression of those desires and thoughts.”