Asked how he came to attend Wooster, Eugene Bay sums it up in a word: “serendipity.” Growing up on a dairy farm in Maryland, Gene thought about a career in agriculture, applied and was accepted at the University of Maryland. But late in his senior year of high school, he began to think seriously about the ministry. He noticed that a candidate for pastor at his home church had graduated from Wooster, and visited the campus in June. The candidate never did become Gene’s pastor, but the seed he inadvertently planted bore fruit, and Gene enrolled at Wooster that fall, graduating in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in history.

In a further bit of serendipity, Wooster is where Gene met the woman who would become his wife: Jean Stobo ‘60. “My roommate was dating her roommate,” he recalls, “and they introduced us the winter of my sophomore year and her freshman year. Our first date was at a basketball game.”

Two of their children have also graduated from the College: Walter ‘85 and Bonnie ‘88. A third, William, got away. “He always had a mind of his own,” Gene says. “Always had and always will.”

Gene went on to receive a bachelor of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a doctor of ministry from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He began his ministry as pastor of Deer Creek Harmony Presbyterian Church in Darlington, Maryland in 1962.

“I assumed I would spend my life in rural ministry,” Bay told Wooster magazine in 2000, “but…the cities started to blow up, and I had what I’d term an intellectual call to urban ministry.”

So in 1968, Gene became pastor of Norwood Presbyterian Church, an inner-city parish in Cincinnati. At this and each subsequent stop along the way in his ministerial life, Gene became deeply involved in the community.
In Cincinnati, he joined with other religious leaders in trying to resolve one of the longest strikes in the history of General Motors. As senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Youngstown from 1974 to 1979, he witnessed the collapse of the steel industry in that city and chaired a coalition of community leaders who tried to promote labor-management cooperation to address the ensuing problems. In Rochester, New York, between 1979 and 1987, he chaired a conference on police-community relations, as well as a task force on the public schools.

Since 1987, Gene has served as senior pastor of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church in the Philadelphia suburbs, facing a different set of challenges. “We’re in an age where consumerism is as rampant in religion as it is anywhere else,” he says. “We probably have 150 visitors on any Sunday, regular visitors who are just shopping, who don’t want to make any commitment to the church.”

No matter what the challenge, however, Gene’s faith sustains him. As he told Wooster’s graduating class of 1988 in his baccalaureate sermon, “ The call of God is not a guarantee that life will be easy. Our call is to leave things here on earth better than we found them.”