Lon Ray Call, Sabbatical Minister 1963-1974

Biography

Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography

Harvard Library: Call, Lon Ray. Papers, 1910-1979.

Biographical / Historical

Lon Ray Call (1894-1985) was born in Advance, North Carolina. Call was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1915 and graduated from Wake Forest College in 1916. Following his graduation, he enrolled in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. From 1918-1919 Call served as a chaplain in the American Expeditionary Forces. He returned to the Divinity School following his service and graduated with a BD in 1920.

Call was ordained to the Unitarian ministry in 1923, and served at the First Unitarian Church, Louisville, Kentucky from 1923-1930; the West Side Unitarian Church, New York, New York from 1930-1931; the Community Church, New York, New York from 1931-1933; and the All Souls Unitarian Church, Braintree, Massachusetts from 1933-1935. From 1935-1941 he served as the executive secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference in Chicago and the regional director of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) for Midwestern States. From 1941-1951 Call was a Minister-at-Large for the Department of Extension of the AUA. In this role, he gathered and organized thirteen new congregations, and for his work in developing the Unitarian Fellowship movement he became known as the “father of the Unitarian Fellowships.” In 1951 he founded the South Nassau Unitarian Church in Freeport, New York where he ministered for nine years. In 1959 Call received his DD from Meadville Theological School in Chicago, Illinois. He retired in 1960 but later served as an interim minister for fifteen years at four churches: Unitarian Church, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1962-1963; Unity Church, Unitarian, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1963-1964; First Unitarian Church, Dallas, Texas, 1965; and East Shore Unitarian Church, Bellevue, Washington, 1966-1967.

Call was married twice, first in 1921 to Stevie Kennington, with whom he had one child, Marjorie Call Kimbrough. After Stevie Kennington died in 1933, he married Lucy Powers in 1945. He received the Annual Award for Distinguished Service in the Cause of Liberal Religion for the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1967.

https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/12/resources/1080

Works

"A Research on Church Extension and Maintenance Since 1900: A Progress Report" and "Unitarian Lay Groups" 1946, and "Fellowships: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow -- With the Accent on Yesterday 1967" in A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism, Volume Two: From 1900 to the Present, edited by Dan McKanan, pp 137-139.

"My Religion," Community Church, 1932.

In the Historical Collection, Anderson Library, Unity Church-Unitarian:

"The Unitary Process," sermon, November 10, 1963.

Mentions

"Call, Lon Ray" in The Unitarians and the Universalists by David Robinson, 1985. Snippet only.

Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History by Mark W. Harris, UUA, 2011.

"Middletown Becomes Everytown," in The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public by Sarah E. Igo, 2007, pp. 82-83.

The Lon Ray Call papers are in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. COLLECTION Identifier: bMS 711

https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/12/resources/1080

SCOPE AND CONTENTS

SCOPE AND CONTENT
This collection consists of Call’s diaries, letters, sermons, interviews, an unpublished manuscript for a book, documents from his ministry, and a scrapbook. Some of the subjects Call was interested in are the intersection between religion and public politics during the Cold War era, psychology, and aging. These topics are reflected in a number of his sermons and writings, such as “The Pulpit and Politics” (box 3, folder 18); “What Should We Demand of Our Religion?” (box 4, folder 1); “America and Russia: Can They Ever Be Friends?” (box 4, folder 1); “Religion and Public Education” (box 4, folder 2); “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe of Religion” (box 4, folder 2); “Communism, the Congress and the Clergy” (box 4, folder 2); “Growing Old” (box 4, folder 3); “Guarding Our Children from Prejudice” (box 4, folder 6); “Religion in the Schools” (box 4, folder 6); “Old Age Wisdom—Fact or Farce?” (box 4, folder 7); and “The United Nations: Dream, Failure, or the World’s Best Hope?” (box 4, folder 9).