Bob Edgar, champion of many causes

This past April, a colleague, mentor and friend passed away suddenly at the age of 69. The Rev. Bob Edgar was a United Methodist minister and a former member of Congress who once headed the National Council of Churches (NCC) for two terms. The NCC consists of more than 100,000 local congregations and some 45 million congregants. He had a heart attack while exercising at home in Burke, Va. I first met Bob Edgar back in 2000 when he was elected general secretary of the NCC when I was serving as a liaison to the NCC representing the National Association of Diocesan Ecumenical Officers. At that time the NCC was suffering from a lack of organization and fiscal instability. As general secretary he immediately began the work of reorganizing the NCC’s priorities and addressing the huge budget deficit of the organization.
Bob Edgar was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Springfield, Pa. He discerned his call to ministry while attending a church camp at the age of 16. After getting ordained as a Methodist minister back in 1968, he was the chaplain at Drexel University and served at the same time as pastor at the United Methodist Church in Lansdowne, Pa. At that time he helped to start Philadelphia’s first homeless shelter for women. This emergency treatment center for women in West Philly eventually became the People’s Emergency Center, a homeless service organization.
Bob Edgar was elected to Congress from southeastern Pennsylvania back in 1974. He was one of those reform-minded Democrats elected in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He championed causes dealing with pollution, transit funding and caring for the Vietnam veterans dealing with the deleterious effects of Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder. He served on the congressional committee that investigated the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He left Congress after he lost his bid to unseat Sen. Arlen Specter in 1986, losing by 13 percentage points.
Eventually returning to his church affiliated life as general secretary of the NCC, he was immediately thrust into the limelight when he became involved as an intermediary in the case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban child caught in an international custody dispute. He was involved in transporting the boy’s grandmothers to and from Cuba.
Because of the the NCC’s many troubles both in self identity and a multi-million dollar deficit, Edgar set about the stabilization of the NCC. He did this by streamlining the number of offices and ministries, while at the same time initiating a 10 year plan to defeat poverty in the United States.
He was one of the early supporters of Christian Churches Together in the USA (CCT), an ecumenical organization/movement that brought together the NCC’s mainline Protestant, Orthodox and African American churches together with Roman Catholics and Evangelicals for the first time. The official charter of CCT states that it came together to build relationships among these different expressions of Christianity. In their statement of purpose they narrowed their charter to four foci on “being together”: “1. To celebrate a common confession of faith in the Triune God. 2. To discern the guidance of the Holy Spirit through prayer and theological dialogue. 3. To provide fellowship and mutual support. 4. To seek better understanding of each other by affirming our commonalities and understanding our differences.”
In 2007 he returned to politics once again but this time as a reformer of the political system. He became president of Common Cause, one of the first civic organizations to tackle the growing problem of the negative influence of big money in the political spectrum. His advocacy for a constitutional amendment to curb the expansion of campaign spending took both political parties to task. His most recent endeavor was to reform the Senate rules requiring 60 votes to stop a filibuster, which he claimed had no constitutional foundation.
Bob Edgar was a tireless proponent of Christian unity, eradication of hunger and poverty and honest clean government. The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and a close friend of Bob Edgar summed up his life very well in saying, “We spoke seriously about the personal cost involved in our commitment to the kind of unrelenting activity required in trying to make our country a better, more secure and more caring place to live. We both agreed the toll it took was worth it because of the passion we had for our work.” May Rev. Bob Edgar rest in peace.

Father Joseph D. Wallace is coordinator, Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs, Diocese of Camden.