The Reverend Dr. John Wolf—fearless, powerful orator and dominant public spokesman for social justice causes in Tulsa, OK, who guided his congregation to become one of the largest in the UUA and had his own Wikipedia entry —died on 19 September 2017, aged 92.
John Burton Wolf was born on 6 September 1925 in Bloomington, Illinois, to Walter & Helen Young Wolf. He was raised in his mother’s Presbyterian church and by his early teens was teaching Sunday School, but got into trouble when he added his own research into the lesson plan he was given to follow. “One of the first cracks in my Calvinism was right then and there.”
With a B.D. from Meadville in 1952, Mr. Wolf was called to the Church of
the Good Shepherd Universalist (now Olympia Brown Memorial UU Church) in Racine, WI, where he had often preached as a student; he was ordained there on 19 February 1953. His second settlement (1954–60) was Meadville, PA.
The Rev’d John Wolf began his ministry at All Souls in Tulsa, on the first of May, 1960. In his 35 years there, he made an indelible stamp on the life of the city with a public ministry reminiscent of that of A. Powell Davies in Washington, D.C. His sermons were quoted, often extensively, in the Monday newspapers and on television newscasts, and his activism ranged over women’s rights, funeral industry reform and, of course, racial justice.
On 13 March 1965, in the midst of the events in Selma, John arranged for his church to host Tulsa’s first ever interfaith and interracial worship service, with more than fifty local clergy serving as ushers for the crowd of over 700 crammed into the sanctuary and parish hall. It was followed by a solidarity march of more than a thousand people through the city’s downtown. See an interview with him about this (pp. 24-25; search by last name at www.voicesofoklahoma.com).
John had a “contest [with God] going on for [the] better part of sixty years” as he summarized it. He once began a prayer at a UUMA gathering with a drawn-out, and greatly affected southern drawl, “Well..ll, God, here we are again.” He recalled that “on one occasion I did call [God] an SOB from the pulpit. Two weeks after that, a tornado came through Tulsa and hit Oral Roberts (University). And I said, ‘See? Missed again!’” (More on this in the interview as above, p. 8.)
In 1976 he was named a Doctor of Divinity honoris causa by Meadville Lombard Theological School, and on retirement in 1995 All Souls elected him Minister Emeritus. In 2015 he was inducted into Tulsa’s Historical Society Hall of Fame.
John Wolf is survived by his spouse of 65 years Barbara N. Hudgins Wolf, son John David Wolf and daughter Catherine Elizabeth Wolf, a grandson, and a great-granddaughter.