Guerrillas of Grace

The Rev. Dr. Theodore W. Loder served for almost thirty-eight years as senior minister of one of Philadelphia's most unusual churches. The First United Methodist Church of Germantown, named "The Oddball Church" by the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, is a thriving, ethnically mixed metropolitan congregation of over one thousand members. Loder's social activism grows out of a long history of involvement in social causes. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, opened his church as a Public Sanctuary Church, and cofounded a job-training program for high school dropouts, a nonprofit housing renovation corporation, and an ecumenical consortium to rehabilitate abandoned houses. He serves on the Philadelphia Mayor's Advisory Commission for Children and Families. A graduate of Yale Divinity School with an honorary doctorate from Willamette University, Dr. Loder currently also serves on the National Advisory Board of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.