Robert W. Gingery papers

Robert Walter Gingery, retired Elder of the Indiana Conference and former senior minister of the United Community Church (United Church of Christ) in Sun City Center, Florida, died on Friday, October 12, 2012, at the age of 92. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 15, 1919 to Walter and Clara Gingery. He graduated from George Washington High School in Indianapolis. He later graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and the Boston University School of Theology. After graduating from college and prior to entering seminary, he married Annis Elizabeth Baldwin of Kokomo, Indiana. In his first church, now the United Methodist Church of Edinburgh, Indiana, his ministry focused on meeting the needs of the soldiers of near-by Camp Atterbury, as they prepared to deploy to the front in the Second World War. In 1954, while he was serving the church in New Albany and only nine years after the end of World War II, he exchanged pulpits with a minister in Frankfurt, Germany, making him the first minister from Indiana to be involved in such an exchange. While he was serving in the pulpit at Gobin Memorial Methodist Church, he was granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree. His last church in Indiana, before moving to Sun City Center, was the First Methodist Church in Bloomington, Indiana. Dr. Gingery was the fourth of six children, and four of his siblings preceded him in death. He is survived by his wife of seventy years, Annis Elizabeth, his three sons, Richard Cameron and his wife Suze of Ridgway, Colorado, Robert Gerald of Sun City Center and Stephen Thomas of Noblesville, Indiana. He is also survived by four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.