Charles Robert Moore
OBITUARY
Charles Robert Moore was born at the height of the Great Depression, on the outskirts of Grand Saline, Texas, in a farmhouse where his father was a sharecropper. He was educated in the town’s public schools, was a Boy Scout (order of the Arrow, Jamboree in Valley Forge 1950), attended Sunday School and was president of the Youth Fellowship at First Methodist Church. The church recommended him for ministry in 1952 after graduation from high school, where he had been president of Student Copuncil and ranked second in his class. He graduated from Tyler Junior College (Highest Honors) in 1954 and then earned a BA degree (Departmental Distinction) from Southern Methodist University in 1956 and a BD from Perkins School of Theology at SMU (High Honors) in 1959.
He served student pastorates in East Texas from 1953 to 1959, and was Associate Pastor at First Methodist in Carthage 1959-1960, before transferring to the Southwest Texas Conference to serve as Associate Pastor at Jefferson Methodist in San Antonio 1960-61, then appointed to St. Matthews Methodist in San Antonio, where he served for four years. In 1965 he did post-graduate studies at Boston and Harvard universities, while serving St. Stephen’s Methodist in West Roxbury. One of his sermons was published by the Christian Century Pulpit magazine at that time.
Charles moved with his family to an inner city ghetto in Chicago where he and his wife worked as staff members of the Ecumenical Institute. They served two terms in India, one in a Bombay slum and the other in a small impoverished village. He was a master teacher, leading seminars across North America and the head of several religious houses. Falling a divorce from his wife of 25 years, he was assigned to Brussels and travelled throughout Western Europe, as well as to Africa and the Middle East, promoting the Institute’s development projects. He returned to serve the United Church in Woodsboro, Texas and the United Church of Christ in Lockhart, finishing his active ministry with a ten-year pastorate at Grace United Methodist Church in Austin, where he opened the 100-year-old congregation to homosexual persons, worked against the death penalty and served poor persons in the city. At the time of his retirement in 2000 he received awards from Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG) and the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
For almost a decade, he and his wife, Barbara, have lived close to his grandchildren in Allen, Texas.
REMEMBERING CHARLES
A page compiling thoughts from many colleagues
Memorial service with photos and obituary as well as story about his intentional