Remembering Forrest—An Online Tribute
From The New York Times:
Rev. Forrest Church, Who Embraced a Gospel of Service, Dies at 61
By WILLIAM GRIMES
The Rev. Forrest Church, a longtime pastor at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side who spent the last three years of his life, after being told he had terminal cancer, articulating a philosophy of death and dying and a complete expression of his liberal theology in two books, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 61. The cause was complications of esophogeal cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Buck Luce.
As the senior minister to the liberal and affluent All Souls congregation since 1978, Mr. Church preached a message of love, compassion and social service in stirring fashion, inviting his listeners on a shared quest.
“I don’t come thundering out of the pulpit with the quote unquote truth,” he told People in 1996. “I am involved in a search, and all of my conclusions are tentative.”
He set up a shelter for homeless women in Harlem, started a scouting program for boys and girls at a welfare hotel and organized free lunches and dinners for the homeless. In 1985, early in the AIDS epidemic, he organized a task force to place placards on buses and subways reading “AIDS is a human disease and deserves a humane response.”
He also wrote nearly two dozen books, many of which applied his theology to everyday life. They included “God and Other Famous Liberals” (1991), “Life Lines: Holding On (and Letting Go)” (1996) and “Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday” (2000).
“Much more than a parish minister, he was a writer, thinker and public intellectual of consequence,” Dan Cryer, who is at work on a biography of Mr. Church, wrote in an e-mail message on Friday. “In the ’80s and ’90s, he was a key national spokesman challenging what he depicted as the religious right’s hijacking of flag, family and Bible. He was an eloquent public speaker and commentator on radio and television who also wrote books of enormous spiritual power and who, as a historian, showed great insight into the nuances of church-state relations in American history." ...
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"Forrest Church, a deeply spiritual but always practical visionary, is a minister to us all with this moving and instructive book on the lessons of life and death. A lovely, important book."
—Tom Brokaw
"In the midst of an extremity for which there is no euphemism-the prospect of his own imminent death-Forrest Church has written a book that defies the usual adjectives. It is poignant, moving, candid, and eloquent; but it is also so much more. Love & Death, a meditation on the end of life, is really a book about life-a book that shows us how to love ourselves and others, how to know God, how to live. I read it with inexpressible gratitude."
—James Atlas, author of My Life in the Middle Ages
"Forrest Church is one of our great prophetic intellectuals and compassionate voices. His poignant and wise words on the two ultimate realities of our journey-love and death-reveal his grand courage and vision."
—Cornel West, author of Race Matters
"Truly a gift, one that will echo in my own preaching and teaching, and in my own life as well. Like Moses gazing at the Promised Land he would not enter, Forrest Church blesses us with his eloquence, his faith, and, mostly, his love."
—Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
"Love & Death is transformative. I was not prepared for the power of this splendid, soaring book. It totally captured me."
—Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of Creating a Life
"This beautiful book by a matchless preacher, poet, and author is Forrest Church in his finest hour."
—Senator George McGovern
"Here is one of the great confessional narratives about dying that provides profound insights into meaningful living. Forrest Church evokes the full gamut of emotions as he probes the meaning of living, dying, and loving. Nothing in this book is theoretical or inconsequential. At its center is truth that will live forever."
—C. Welton Gaddy, President of the Interfaith Alliance
"Forrest Church in Love & Death, a deeply moving testament, utilizes his commitment of love to transform our fear of death into a fuller appreciation of life."
—Derrick Bell, author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well
"Every Christmas Eve, for a quarter of a century, I, a confirmed skeptic 364 other days of the year, have been inspired by Forrest Church's words at All Souls. Now, on reading this magisterial meditation on his-and our-mortality, I understand at last the marvelous anomaly he has brought to my life."
—James Lipton, host of "Inside the Actors Studio"
"Forrest Church has given us many gifts of illumination over the years, often using his own life experiences to disclose insights into the nature of faith and hope, but now in Love and Death he has given us the ultimate gift: a treatise on life's meaning revealed in the face of his own impending death. The book is consummate with the man: witty, eloquent, gracious, with not a touch of the maudlin. Once again, Forrest teaches us how most passionately to live."
—Reverend William F. Schulz, President of the UUA 1985–1993
