From segregated churches of East Texas to destitute slums of India, the Rev. Charles Moore fought for human rights.He delivered sermons about racism and sexism. He stood vigil against the death penalty. He went on a hunger strike to protest discrimination against gays and lesbians.
But during retirement, the United Methodist minister questioned whether he had done enough. He saw the broken world around him.
On a Monday afternoon in June, Moore, 79, drove from his home in Allen to Grand Saline, the town of his childhood about 70 miles east of Dallas. He traveled along country roads near fields of wildflowers and grazing cattle. In a strip-mall parking lot, outside a dollar store, beauty salon and pharmacy, he knelt down, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire.
As flames engulfed him, he screamed and tried to stand. Witnesses rushed to put out the blaze with shirts, bottled water and, finally, an extinguisher.
He was flown unconscious to a Dallas hospital, where he died from burn injuries.
Moore had intended his act to be a grand but selfless gesture in the manner of Buddhist monks who have done the same before him.
He had considered doing it at Southern Methodist University, where he had earned a degree at Perkins School of Theology. He expected that his self-immolation would make national news and hoped his message of social justice would be broadcast along with his funeral.
But his final act drew little notice. A report in the Grand Saline Sun described him as an elderly man who seemed troubled. An article in the Tyler Morning Telegraph asked if he was a “madman or a martyr.”
He left his family and friends reeling from grief and trying to make sense of his death. At a memorial service Saturday at Faith Presbyterian Church in Austin, he will be remembered for the work he did — not for the way he died.
Charles Robert Moore was born July 18, 1934, on the outskirts of Grand Saline, home to about 3,000 people, numerous churches and a large salt mine. He saw the ministry as a path out of his family’s little frame house and the dusty farmland that felt confining.
In his notes, Moore said he found a home in the academic world of SMU, where he earned degrees in English and divinity. He was mesmerized by his schoolwork and inspired by his teachers at Perkins.
In the 1950s and 1960s, he worked at churches in suburban San Antonio and then in Carthage in East Texas.
It was a tense time in Carthage. Moore and the Rev. Jack Albright, another United Methodist minister, supported the civil rights movement. But people were afraid of integration, and some churchgoers called them communist sympathizers and racial slurs.
“He did not win a lot of friends — nor did I,” Albright said.
The ministers would meet at a coffee shop for a two-person support group.
“When people are raised and spend their life in an atmosphere of segregation, it’s very threatening to make changes,” said Albright, who retired in the East Texas town of Jacksonville. “The issue was how hard do you push, especially if you are going to create a lot of confrontation.”
But Moore was undaunted by popular opinion.
“He was very clear about where he believed the church should be about opening its doors to African-Americans and treating them like human beings,” Albright recalled.
Frustrated and tired, Moore enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University and Harvard Divinity School. In the mid-1960s, he moved with his first wife, Patricia, and two sons to inner-city Chicago, where he worked for the Ecumenical Institute to create economic and educational opportunities in troubled areas.
They opened a preschool, started a job training program and rebuilt a dilapidated neighborhood that had burned during riots after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Later, Moore worked in a slum in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He traveled to developing nations in Africa and the Middle East.
In his writings, he said his 12 years with the Ecumenical Institute exposed him to “the pallor of illness and poverty on a world scale.”
Among a group of optimistic advocates, Moore offered a “heavier and gloomier perspective,” said Terry Bergdall, now executive director of the Ecumenical Institute. He said Moore’s speeches were inspiring but not rosy. In one, he called himself a “fundamentalist for social justice.”
Moore returned to Texas in the 1980s, serving in various churches. In 1990, he went to Austin to lead the 100-year-old Grace United Methodist Church, with its six-person choir and dwindling congregation.
He fixed up the quaint old building, added stained-glass windows and hired a homeless man to be the groundskeeper. In sermons to the white-haired worshippers, he took up a new cause, welcoming gays and lesbians to the church and condemning their exclusion.
During his decade as pastor, the church started a pumpkin patch on its lawn, hosted a religion school for a Jewish congregation and opened its doors to a chapter of PFLAG, which held meetings for parents, friends and families of lesbians and gays.
The congregation began to grow.
Andy Smith, now of Dallas, attended Moore’s church and called him “a major figure of my life.”
Moore appointed Smith and other openly gay members to church leadership roles. He prodded the congregation with views that were unpopular or uncomfortable.
“He gave the best sermons of any pastor I’ve ever known,” Smith said. “They weren’t always uplifting; that wasn’t his style. What he did would challenge you to think.”
In 1995, when United Methodist bishops held a worldwide meeting in Austin, Moore went on a hunger strike to protest the church’s treatment of gays and lesbians. One of his colleagues, the Rev. Sid Hall, tried to talk him out of it. But Moore dismissed his concerns.
He had “a conviction that if the Bible stood for anything, it stood for radical inclusiveness,” Hall said.
“If you ever were on the side of powerlessness, if you were ever on the margins yourself and were looking for someone to help you, Charles was the person,” he said.
The hunger strike made headlines. Moore broke his fast after 15 days, when the bishops issued a statement that acknowledged their role in contributing to the the stigma and ostracism of gays and lesbians and encouraged Methodist churches to welcome them. The bishops did not advocate a change to a church policy, which stands today, that calls the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
Hall said he struggles with Moore’s death. Perhaps, he said, his old friend was so in tune with the pain of others, “for whatever reason, he wasn’t able to pull back from it.”
Even so, he said Moore left him a final lesson.
“I have no doubt that there will be some people who use this to blow off everything he worked toward. They’ll say, ‘It’s what we knew all along. He was a nut case.’ And there will be others who just feel the tragedy and loss of his life,” Hall said.
“And there will be those like me, that even though I don’t agree with what he did, I’ll be able to struggle with and wrestle with the message he believed in and examine my own life. I’ll ask myself, ‘Am I doing enough?’”
After he retired in 2000, Moore moved back to North Texas to be closer to family. He settled with his third wife, Barbara, near a park in Allen where he visited with his two young grandchildren.
In private, he wrote about his inner turmoil. He regretted not taking more risks to fight discrimination during his years in the ministry. He began to contemplate self-immolation as a forceful way to convey his message of social justice.
“I have always felt that death for a cause was my destiny, but never so much as during the past several years — when it has admittedly been a preoccupation,” he wrote.
In his typewritten notes, he said that his efforts seemed futile, the progress of the world too slow. He underlined a passage in a New Yorker article about Tibetan monks who set themselves aflame to protest China’s rule.
Moore wrote that he attempted the act several times, but fear and the simple beauties of the world tempted him to stay.
“The turning leaves on the trees in my front yard are almost reason enough to keep living,” he wrote.
In the end, Moore chose Grand Saline as the place of his last protest. He left a note on his car saying he’d been troubled throughout his life by his hometown’s history of racism and the prejudice he witnessed there as a boy.
After his death, Moore’s son-in-law, Bill Renfro, found a folder of notes on his study desk, along with letters for his family.
Renfro said he is certain that Moore didn’t intend to hurt members of his family, though they can’t make sense of his death. “He did this selfless act, this sacrifice for others, but he also did not think thoroughly through the consequences of the act.”
Moore left his wife detailed instructions about his death benefits and credit cards to cancel, but he couldn’t prepare her to live as a widow.
“He was taking care of the worldly things for her, but what he failed to realize was the emotional turmoil that he would leave behind. And not just her, but his sons, his grandchildren,” said Kathy Renfro, his stepdaughter.
One of the saddest parts, she said, is that Moore didn’t realize he still had the potential to bring about change.
Bill Renfro said, “I wish I could have sat down and pointed out, ‘Charles, look at what your life has meant to the world. Look at what it’s meant to individuals. You’ve changed their lives.’”
The Rev. Lou Snead, a retired Presbyterian minister from Austin who will lead Moore’s memorial service, likens his old friend to an Old Testament prophet. He said Moore challenged structures of power and directed people back to the Bible’s teachings of social justice.
“He understood almost instinctively Jesus’ message — love, justice and peace require an intentional way of embodying that in the world around us,” Snead said. “He was about transforming the culture.”
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