1966—50th Reunion Class

Some reflections about my years at Yale Divinity School- 1963-1966

In June of 1963, I graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, married my fiancée, and moved to an apartment in West Haven, Connecticut, in preparation for starting at Yale Divinity School in September. At Oberlin, there had been four professors of religion who were most influential upon my theological education: Walter Marshall Horton , J. Robert Nelson, Clyde Holbrook and Edward LeRoy Long. While at Oberlin, I had studied with a major and minor respectively in Religion and Zoology, with some of my courses at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology.
J. Robert Nelson, a United Methodist theologian and active leader in the Faith and Order movement of the World Council of Churches, invited me to serve as a steward at the international Faith and Order Conference that June in Montreal, Canada. During that conference I met two YDS professors with whom I would later study: Sidney Ahlstrom and Paul Minear. A few years earlier, I had participated in a World Council of Churches ecumenical work camp near Paris, France, and had visited several places in Europe associated with church history and ecumenical activities. The Montreal conference was especially exciting to a college graduate just starting theological school. I had many opportunities to observe and listen to some of the major theologians and church leaders from around the world involved in the ecumenical movement. For the first time, this Faith and Order conference included observer representatives from the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions and participants from Russia.
Upon my return from Montreal, I worked for the summer as an interim minister at the Allingtown Congregational Church in West Haven, a small congregation which was to disband within the next few years. My primary work was to create and undertake a house-to-house survey of the neighborhood served by the congregation to determine the needs of the families for future ministries and outreach. Most of the families I interviewed were African-American. The study became the foundation of my report. It led to several families who became members of the First Congregational Church of West Haven, thereby integrating the larger congregation.
During the summer and the next few years, I became aware of the social and economic issues which needed to be addressed by the city government, schools, churches, businesses and human service organizations. While I was a student at Yale Divinity School, I continued to lead adult education programs about African-American history, race relations and discrimination. I helped to establish increased communication and relations between the minority population of West Haven and the school board, city and school administration and the leaders in the community. I helped to create the West Haven Human Relations Council in association with the established Human Relations Council of New Haven.
In August 1963, I joined with many Yale University students and faculty and New Haven area residents in a train caravan to participate in the March on Washington, under the local leadership of Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin. This experience in planning and supervising alongside other activities in the New Haven area with people from all over the nation was a highlight of my life. Hearing the major speakers, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., continued my own study and social action that had begun during my years of high school in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and undergraduate years at Oberlin College.
Another area of my personal commitment since high school had been for international peace and justice. In high school, I had visited the United Nations and wrote a major science paper about the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. I had met Dr. Albert Schweitzer in 1955 in Gunsbach, France, and had attended an education program for international college students led by Father Dominique Pire, a Dominican friar in Belgium. Dr. Schweitzer and Father Pire had both received the Nobel Peace Prize. Beginning in my college years, I began giving lectures and exhibitions about the life and work of these two plus other Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
In November 1963, I was the host for Father Pire when he arrived for his first trip to the United States. I organized his speaking engagements in Connecticut, including at Yale University the weekend of November 22. He shared with our nation in the mourning of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I heard the news of the assassination during my Friday class on church and race taught by Liston Pope.
My first year at YDS included field education as assistant pastor at the First Church of Christ, Congregational, Fairfield, Connecticut. Much of my work there was with the church school and youth groups focussing on the relationship of the suburban church to urban issues through agencies and churches in Bridgeport.
My field education during the second and third years was with the First Congregational Church of West Haven. I worked with the church school, youth groups and adult study groups in developing my experience and skills for parish ministry. Because I lived with my wife in West Haven and worked in West Haven, I was not able to be active as a resident on the YDS campus. My academic work at YDS and the practical opportunities of learning were significant and helpful for the rest of my career and life.
My primary purpose at YDS was to prepare for the parish ministry, with a particular interest in the study of church history. During my YDS studies, the faculty members who most influenced my thinking were Sidney Ahlstrom, Charles Forman, Brevard Childs, Jaroslav Pelikan, B. Davie Napier, James Gustafson, Tom Campbell, David Little and Gaylord Noyce. Dr. Ahlstrom’s courses in American church history gave me a deeper and broader appreciation of the diverse background of American religion, including the forces for unity as well as for disunity. Dr. Forman’s courses in church mission taught me the values of ecumenical cooperation in world outreach, and the weakness of conflicting Christian groups serving in non-Christian cultures.
In West Haven, I taught courses for adults from several congregations (Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist and United Church of Christ) under the auspices of the West Haven Council of Churches. One of these courses was about the Consultation on Church Union which had been proposed in 1960. I continued to support the study and proposals of COCU during its varied manifestations for the next fifty years.
In the summer of 1965, I travelled with my wife to the Middle East for three months. We visited historic sites associated with Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions. We observed the church and world religious groups at work in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and Israel. We visited schools and colleges supported by the United Church of Christ Board for World Ministries and Church World Service.
Again, such international ecumenical experiences led me to support more strongly efforts to bring the Christian Church together so that the diversity of beliefs and practices could be appreciated and shared. The weakness of a divided Church was very apparent to me in the discord among the Christians responsible for maintaining the sacred sites in Jerusalem and throughout the Holy Land. Yet, in contrast, I saw the positive value of interchurch and interfaith cooperation and understanding through the work of the World Council of Churches and the Near East Council of Churches in programs of health, education, social services and refugee relief.
My years at Yale Divinity School ended with commencement and my ordination into the United Church of Christ in June 1966. My first pastorate as an ordained clergy was with a two-congregation yoked parish of the United Church of Christ in North Canaan, Connecticut. I served there for the next seven years and led many ecumenical ministries and programs. All of my successive ministry locations have benefitted from the foundations of learning and ministry provided at YDS. In June 2016, I celebrated fifty years of ministry and retired July 1st. to live in Springfield, Massachusetts. I continue to be active in ecumenical and interfaith activities.

Rev. Dr. Robert Loesch
August 2016

Life has influenced the faith I live by more than formal education. I have a B.A. from Yale College in International Affairs, B.D. from Yale Divinity School, a M.A. from the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy, and a MPA,Public Administration, and have spent a few years studying public accounting. However, what shapes my faith is growing up in a large family, in a small town in Illinois, with a dominant father born in 1886 who never saw the inside of a school room and remained largely unlettered his entire life, going east to a series of academic enterprises and en employment history working for the church, medical care consulting, teaching political economy and farming, to try and find out why this "great nation" is organized and performs so poorly when it comes to justice and compliance with nature's requirements which were the center of my direct experience as a youth. While at YDS, I worked full-time each year, as minister to youth, night shift in a local steel foundry, truck driver for local New Haven area deliveries, and in the stacks at Sterling Library on the main campus -taking 4 years to complete my B.D. After 2 years at the Fletcher School, I became the first Director of International Affairs for the American Baptist Convention, with offices across from the UN and the Supreme Court, served for 7 years until involuntarily separated from this work, followed by a year of setting up maternity and child care centers, and then teaching labor studies, micro and macro economics,and counseling students in various branches of the NYS University system. In 1973, I purchased a farm with my life partner, Sonja Hedlund and formed a Brooklyn commune where we lived for 22 years while commuting to the farm on weekends and every other day we could. We left the commune after 21 years to live full-time at the farm, which by 1995, was an energy independent, organic, horse-powered farm with a contingent of international and US farm apprentices focusing on learning to live sustainably and share our learning with the general public through welcoming several thousand people to the farm every year for educational tours, classes, workshops and extended stays in our guest house. Living on a working farm, serving Sullivan County and the Mid-Hudson Regional sustainability coalition as consultant and Co-Chair keep my faith strong and rooted in the struggle to live in concert with nature and assist people and organizations makes that radical shift. I have no interest or faith in salvation. I am immersed in the creation of evolutionary steps to bring all forms of life to work together for everything that is and will be if we would let them be born and provide for them. Christianity, in my view needs to shed is exclusive claims to anything and learn to be a humble, authentic partner in the great task of arranging a future for the human family through negotiating a new synergistic partnership between commercial and biological laws.