Ferris, Theodore Parker

(Dec. 23, 1908-Nov. 26, 1972). Seminary professor and ecumenist. He was born in Port Chester, New York. Ferris received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1929 and his B.D. from General Theological Seminary in 1933. He was ordained deacon on June 11, 1933, and priest on May 27, 1934. From 1933 until 1937, Ferris was assistant to the rector of Grace Church, New York, and at the same time served as fellow and tutor at General Seminary. From 1937 until 1942, he was rector of Emmanuel Church, Baltimore, and from 1942 until his death, he was the fourteenth rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts. Many of his publications were books of sermons. He published a book on preaching, Go Tell the People (1951), in which he stated that “A sermon is by nature a disclosure, an unveiling, a revelation . . . to preach is to draw the curtain aside from the figure of Christ and to lose oneself in the folds of it.” From 1943 until 1963, Ferris was instructor in homiletics at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was active in the ecumenical movement and an alternate delegate to the first assembly of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948. Ferris died in Boston.