Weekly Update | January 28, 2024
This Sunday let us rejoice in the return of the Rev Canon Warner Traynham to our pulpit at St. John’s Cathedral. St. John’s is honored that the Rev. Traynham served as the first black rector of this church from 1984-2001. This beloved priest is known and remembered as a brilliant scholar and philosopher with intellectual acuity and a prophetic voice. He is a writer and artist, as well as a man of action through ministry.
Warner Raymond Traynham attended Dartmouth College, Class of 1957, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, during an age when it was a predominantly white college. After, he studied at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and attended the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. Rev. Traynham would then serve as the Associate Chaplain to Harvard University and Radcliffe as an Episcopal priest, before returning to Dartmouth as a Dean of the Dartmouth Tucker Foundation. After Dartmouth, he was called to serve at St. John’s.
While at Harvard, Rev. Traynham would begin writing religious tracts (theological writings) on various topics that would be distributed to proclaim the Word of God. At Dartmouth, he would write tracts on issues of equal opportunity for blacks, same-sex relationships, and woman among other topics. In his own words, the most popular tract he ever wrote was an exegesis on the moral and ethical study of homosexuality in the bible.
The Rev. Traynham is both a black theologian and an authority of Black Theology, which he defined “at the present stage as an attempt to make sense of the black experience in America in the context of the Christian faith” (Blacks @ Dartmouth).
Join us on Sunday to welcome and hear the voice of God through the Rev. Warner Traynham, and then discover some of his paintings on display and for sale in the Parish Hall after worship.
After the 10am service, we will also hear from Candidates running for election to the Vestry, and you can learn more about our church budget for 2024. We hope to see you then.
