Minister Gordon Davis Gibson to speak at UUFEC

Civil Rights activist, author and Unitarian Universalist minister Gordon Davis Gibson will be the speaker on March 19 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast (UUFEC). The title of his sermon will be “Powering It Up for Ministry,” to coordinate with the congregation’s quest for a minister.

Gibson is a Yale graduate with his ministerial divinity degree from Tufts and a 2003 graduate of the Starr King School for the Ministry. He has served Unitarian Universalists congregations from Roxbury, Massachusetts, to Jackson and Ellisville, Mississippi, and Elkhart, Indiana.

Gibson was an elementary and high school student in Louisville, Kentucky, when those schools were first desegregated. In his mid-20s in 1965, following his graduation from Divinity School, he volunteered to explore possible Unitarian Universalist involvement in voter registration in Selma, Alabama. It was during this trip that he was arrested and spent five days in jail with other Civil Rights activists, all of whom were greeted by Martin Luther King at their release. Later that year, he was ministering in Jackson, Mississippi, when the KKK critically wounded Rev. Donald Thompson.

As the only Unitarian Universalist minister in the entire state of Mississippi during the 1970’s and into the mid-1980’s, he served on numerous inter-racial, inter-faith and social justice committees and task forces. From then until 2005, he served on numerous boards and committees, including the Elkhart Human Relations Commission, the Elkhart County NAACP, the anti-Klan group of UC4PEACE, the Elkhart County Jail Chaplaincy Board and Planned Parenthood of North Central Indiana. In 2015, the Unitarian Universalist Association awarded him the President’s Volunteer Service Award.

He is the author of “Southern Witness: Unitarians and Universalists in the Civil Rights Era.” Copies of the book will be available for purchase and personal autographs on March 19.

UUFEC is at 1295 Bayshore Drive in Valparaiso. Services begin at 10 a.m. For more information on UUFEC activities, their non-dogmatic approach and what it means to be a welcoming congregation, visit their website at www.uufec.org.