The minister who has led one of New York City’s most famous and storied churches retired on Sunday — and gave one last sermon.

From the New York Times:

At Marble Collegiate, the landmark church on Fifth Avenue and 29th Street, one of the oldest Protestant congregations in North America and, thanks to Norman Vincent Peale, one of the most prominent, Sunday was a big day indeed.

Dr. [Arthur] Caliandro, who took over from Dr. Peale as senior minister in 1985 and saw the church through changing times while hewing to his predecessor’s folksy, positivist teachings, is retiring. Sunday was his farewell sermon.

In his office before the morning service, Dr. Caliandro, a slight, gently creased man of 75, gathered himself in a brown recliner. “I’m thinking about what to say, and hoping I have the strength,” he said. “Very emotional,” he added quietly, though his voice gave none of it away.

Under Dr. Caliandro, a minister’s son from Maine, Marble Collegiate, founded in 1628 by the Dutch and now housed in an 1854 limestone structure that manages to be grand and modest at the same time, navigated the waters of the post-Peale era.

He oversaw a snappy ad campaign featuring billboards, bus shelters and airplanes that dragged banners over the beaches reading, “Make a friend in a very high place.”

He gave gay members meeting space in the church, causing 150 congregants to resign in protest. He founded an interfaith group with leading rabbis and imams, adopted a group of Harlem sixth graders and paid their college tuition, put women on the church board for the first time, built an online ministry that now reaches millions, www.marblechurch.org, and charmed celebrity members (Donald Trump met Marla Maples at the church) while still preaching to the masses.

He created a fluttering war memorial to those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, hanging a gold ribbon on the church’s fence for each American soldier killed and blue ribbons for the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.

And he tried to carry on the work begun by Dr. Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” founder of the modern self-help movement and the leader of the church for 52 years.

“I learned early on not to try to be him but to preserve his approach,” Dr. Caliandro said in his office last Thursday. “He never used religious words. He spoke directly to people.”

Dr. Caliandro concentrated more than Dr. Peale did on building the church’s programs and on preaching from his own spiritual journeys and doubts.

“I went through two divorces,” said Dr. Caliandro, who is now married for a third time. “That was tough. Here I am, a minister in a pulpit like this, two failed marriages, and none of these people tried to push me out. One woman told me once, ‘The reason we never pushed you out is because you never stand on the pulpit pointing your finger at us.’ ”

Dr. Caliandro’s successor is the Rev. Dr. Michael B. Brown, 58, who most recently led a 4,000-member church, Centenary United Methodist, in Winston-Salem, N.C.

On Sunday morning, Dr. Caliandro kept it simple.

“Really, what it is all about is love.” he told the 1,000 or so worshipers who packed the cozy, burgundy-hued sanctuary with the soaring stained-glass windows. “That which every human being, every one of us needs and wants more than anything else, is to be in a relationship or in relationships where we feel safe. Relationship where we are understood, accepted, affirmed, and forgiven.”

He continued: “This is what Christianity is. The essence of Christianity is that kind of love.”

Dr. Caliandro quoted no Scripture beyond Jesus’ commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. He told just two anecdotes. One was about being on a boat, trying to catch up with the gold that a sunset was spreading across the sea, not realizing that he was in the gold all along. The other was about Churchill’s address to some schoolchildren: “Never, never, never give up.”

You can read even more at the link.