Citation for The Rev. David Harris Cole

Presented by The Rev. Dr. Neil Gerdes
Associate Proessor of Bibliography

Mr. Barker, I have the honor to present to you for the award of the degree Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, the Rev. David Cole.

David Harris Cole, we honor you today as a distinguished clergyman, as a devoted servant to the causes of liberal religion, as a tireless advocate for social justice, and as a global humanitarian.

A descendant of a radical Scottish Presbyterian minister, and seafaring New Englanders, you grew up an independent child, who refused to memorize the Ten Commandments in your kindergarten Christian Science Sunday School, and who thereby failed to be promoted until finally you were just too big for their small chairs.  Later drawn to the Universalist Church of Lynn, Massachusetts by its youth programming and its dynamic preacher, you were still irreverent enough as a teenager to follow the example of your friends at one Sunday morning service, and put green dots on your cube of communion bread, and then proceed to play dice together in the pews.  But you also found other and more mature exemplars in loving ministers and caring religious educators whose lives and works inspired you to decide during college on the vocation of ministry.

Graduating from Tufts University and its Crane Theological School, you went on to serve as a Unitarian Universalist minister in churches in Danvers, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Urbana, Illinois; Rockville, Maryland; and Cleveland, Ohio as well as interim ministries in Boston at the Benevolent Fraternity and in Rancho Palos Verdes, California and Shelter Rock (Manhasset), New York.  At each of these ministries you were a change agent for growth and development.  During the first years of your ministry you helped found the Humiliati, a group that had significant impact on reforming the Universalist church in its administration and practice.  While you were at Danvers the old church was remodeled; at First Universalist of Chicago, and in Rockville the churches erected new buildings, and in Urbana a religious education wing was added.  After you came to the West Shore Church in Cleveland, a large mortgage was retired and a major capital fund drive successfully completed.  At your interims and other part time ministries your experience and wisdom have made for effective and much appreciated transitions.  Yet while serving so admirably in a lifetime of mostly parish settings, you were in addition instrumental in the founding of and became the first president of the Society of the Larger Ministry, an organization dedicated to advancing chaplaincies and other nonparish community ministries in the Unitarian Universalist Association.

As an active leader in our movement, you have served on numerous and sundry boards, committees, and organizations, including as president of the Universalist Youth Fellowship, of the Universalist Ministers Association, of the Illinois and the Midwest Universalist Conventions, and as a board member on the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association and at the Meadville Lombard Theological School.  Special mention should be made that while on the Meadville Lombard Board not only were you chair of the honorary degrees committee, which makes your award today particularly apropos, albeit belatedly so, but you were also a skilled mediator during some very stressful times of student rebellion and administrative turmoil.  Even in retirement you continue to make many noteworthy contributions to liberal religion, such as your conception and implementation of an oral history project documenting the merger of the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association.  This work will be an invaluable record of what to date is the most important event in the annals of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

As a concerned citizen you have championed many issues critically relevant to the progress of your native towns and country.  Going to the racially torn state of Alabama in the 1960s, you participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of Martin Luther King, Jr. and then later in the march on Selma.  Even after sharing a last supper with the Rev. James Reeb, who was martyred shortly thereafter on the streets of Selma, you bravely returned again and again to that place of hate to demonstrate your faith in human equality.  Moreover, from being head of the ACLU Chapter and organizing the Urban League in Urbana, to serving on the Boards of interfaith councils and planned parenthood in Cleveland, to chairing a group that exposed the link between organized crime and city government in Chicago, and finally to arranging what was probably the first Urban Church Conference in the Unitarian Universalist Association, you have brought admirably the social ethics of the church to the affairs of state in the noble tradition of prophetic Unitarian and Universalist forebears such as your Crane mentor, Dr. Clarence Skinner.

Finally as a strong proponent of a world community, you have labored mightily to bring harmony to the peoples of our planet.  You traveled to Germany after the Second World War for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee to help set up housing for displaced children and orphans from the war.  As a young man you worked for the Zionists, but after trips to Israel and visits to Arab refugee camps, your attention re-focused on Palestinian issues.  A delegate at conferences of the International Association for Religious Freedom in Belgium and Transylvania, you have also been on aid missions from the UUA to the Unitarian Church in Prague, Czechoslovakia helping to revitalize that historic congregation.   Your professional odyssey has taken you as well to India, Japan, and other nations in the Far East and Europe. 

Indeed as you yourself have written: "I have always been fascinated by the myth of journey: a pilgrim moving through unknown country, with possibilities of good and evil.  The pilgrim is frightened but allured.  He never escapes from the journey.  He has only a few brief moments of rest and reflection.  In a sense of being on a journey, there are oases along the way.  One can stop but cannot stay.  There is always a sense of uneasiness, and of vitality.  One has come a long way; one has a sense of growing skills and self-confidence.  I am not where I was, but I have not arrived.  I still look with anticipation to tomorrow.  On the whole, it has been a good voyage, but I'm sure the best is to come.  My love of ministry, my wife, my children, all seven of them, my friends and loved ones, my theology, my numerous projects, including my nineteen room house, keeps me well occupied.  Life goes on.  I'm glad it does.  The pilgrimage still continues."

David Cole, you certainly have been a worthy pilgrim on the road of liberal ministry, denominational leadership, social activism, and internationalism.  Wishing you well on your life's future excursions, the Meadville Lombard Theological School is proud and privileged to recognize today your many past achievements by awarding you the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa. 

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