The Rev. Robert William Edgar is completing his tenure as General Secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA on September 1, 2007, when he formally assumes the presidency of Common Cause, the citizen's advocacy group.

The Edgar years at the NCC were filled with challenges that included the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the War in Iraq, the acceleration of global warming, tsunamis and earthquakes, Hurricane Katrina, and crushing worldwide poverty and human rights abuses.

Edgar's first days on the job in 2000 were consumed by a crippling financial crisis in the NCC that challenged all the skills he had honed as a community organizer, member of Congress, and seminary president. He brought to his new job a prodigious appetite for hard work, an informal style, and a lifelong commitment to the goals of peace, justice and the relief of human suffering. If he felt the stress of the job, he rarely showed it and he often deflected it with a lighthearted joke and – as his colleagues will attest – a painful pun.

At the end of his eight-year tenure, the financial emergency had ebbed but the conditions that caused it – including the financial exigency of many of the NCC's contributing communions – were still in place. Perhaps his most useful bequest to his successors is a buoyant Christian faith that is contagious enough to infect others with a joyous optimism for whatever the future holds.

This is a brief retrospective of Bob Edgar's crowded career, and the kinetic Edgar years at the National Council of Churches.

(Click on the pictures at the right to move to the next page)

The Edgar Years compiled by Philip E. Jenks