PITTSBURGH (ABP) — Edwin Tuller, who shepherded the American Baptist Churches USA through one of the most prosperous — and turbulent — periods in American and Protestant history died Aug. 25 in Pittsburgh, according to the American Baptist News Service. He was 95.
A strong advocate for civil rights during the tumultuous 1950s and '60s, he served as the general secretary for the denomination — then known as the American Baptist Convention — from 1959 until he retired in 1970.
Tuller was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1913, into an active Baptist family. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the nation’s oldest Baptist institution, Brown University, where he was the editor of the university yearbook and won six athletic letters in soccer and lacrosse.
Ed Tuller, in an undated photo (ABCUSA).
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He graduated from Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y., in 1938, and did graduate work at La Faculte Libre de Theologie Protestante in Paris in 1938 and 1939.
Tuller then served as an assistant pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington until 1944.
He was the director of Christian education and assistant executive secretary of the Connecticut Baptist Convention from 1944 to 1950, when he became executive secretary of the Connecticut State Council of Churches, a position in which he served until 1955.
In 1955, Tuller returned to denominational work as executive secretary of the Massachusetts Baptist Convention, where he helped revitalize its church-planting efforts. In 1957, he became ABC’s associate general secretary.
Two years later, he became general secretary — the denomination’s most important full-time office. Tuller presided over the completion of the American Baptist Mission Center headquarters in Valley Forge, Pa.
In the 1950s and '60s, he poised the denomination in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement, often participating in public advocacy efforts. For instance, Tuller sat behind Martin L. King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial as King delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963.
“Dr. Ed Tuller was that rare mixture of both the prophetic and pastoral leader,” said current ABC General Secretary Roy Medley. “He became general secretary during the racially charged civil rights struggle. Through his prophetic leadership, American Baptists threw their support behind Dr. King and his fledgling movement. Yet, Dr. Tuller was pastoral in his approach to those American Baptists who questioned such an active stance in ‘politics,’ patiently answering their concerns and helping them embrace the struggle for equality as a biblical response to injustice.”
Albert Paul Brinson, a former ABC executive, was a childhood friend of King’s and served as co-pastor with him under King’s father at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Brinson, who also worked with Tuller, called him “one of my American Baptist idols and mentors. He was a true model for ministry, committed to all the things the American Baptist family stands for … freedom, equality, and justice. He was a friend and a great soldier for Jesus Christ. He will be missed indeed.”
“Ed Tuller was one of a vanguard of church leaders who made it clear that support for the Civil Rights Movement was a Christian duty," said Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, in a statement posted on the NCC website. "His strong Christian faith gave him unquestioned moral credentials to stand for freedom, justice and equality and he set an example for the generation of church leaders that followed him."
After retiring as general secretary, Tuller and his wife, Rose, were appointed as special workers by ABC’s Board of International Ministries. He served as pastor of the American Church in Paris — the oldest non-governmental American institution on foreign soil — until his retirement from active ministry.
For the past several years, Tuller lived in the Pittsburgh area, where he had continued to be an active American Baptist as a member of First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh. A memorial service for him was held there Aug. 29.
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