Three Senior Ministers have made their individual marks on Newman during my lifetime.
Then new to his call, The Reverend Bob Symington baptized me. As I remember, his was a conservative ministry, geared principally to the adult members of Newman Church prior to Newman’s becoming part of the wider ministry of the U.C.C. He was a part of the background of my childhood; my memories of him center primarily on the hospital and post-op visits he made to me in the 1960s. My memories of my childhood and early teenage years at Newman focus on the personalities of my Sunday School teachers. I have particularly warm memories of the generosity of Dave Drummond’s intellect and spirit – qualities that I recalled when I became a Church School teacher in the 1980s. Life in the 1960s and the early 1970s was the richer for the influence of many ecclesiastical teachers.
Reverend Shire influenced my initially joining Newman. He came several times to see me at home. We would have tea and discuss a fifteen-year-old’s versions of sociology and theology. What was his concept of Hell? Did he believe in a personal God? How does a person sustain his/her faith during a lifetime, especially during times of trouble? He was, as ever, articulate in his interpretations; I was earnest, if not brilliant, in my questing, and our talks tended to be lengthy.
Later, one of his associates, the first female minister of my acquaintance, influenced my interpretations of independence and self-direction. Shortly before my oral exam for the Foreign Service, she sent me a The Far Side cartoon entitled, “Midway through the exam, [Herbert] pulls out a bigger brain.”
My mother, Betty Whitaker Davis, was a path-setter in her quiet but determined way – at Newman first as a devoted church member, then as a Deacon, then a Trustee. Mom began to attend Newman as a teen in the 1930s (Her father was a Methodist, her mother Episcopalian, and some of her friends were Congregationalists). Mom was Clerk of the U.C.C. Rhode Island Conference in the mid-1990s. She and many others had been impressed in a variety of ways by the last associate minister to work with David Shire, and Mom informed me when I was on a visit home from Boston that she and the Reverend Daehler Hayes had interviewed his older brother for the RI Conference. Her impressions of the young pastor were summed up in one phrase, “What a man!”
How true.
