The Reverend Robert Stuart, Now in Springs, Celebrates 60 Years of Ministry

In 1962, the Reverend Robert Stuart was fresh out of seminary, flush with an academic background in theology and ready to apply it to his work in the church.

But it wouldn’t be so simple.

Right away, the minister realized that he would need to loosen his grip on his education and hammer what he had learned into something more accessible for people — weaving it into the everyday experience of what it meant to be in their homes or next to their hospital beds, serving as a witness and guide through the highs and lows of their lives.

That perspective would come to define Stuart’s 60 years of ministry across three churches — an anniversary he celebrated last month as interim rector at Springs Community Presbyterian Church.

“For me, theology is a language with God,” he said, “but it’s also a language with people.”

Born in Minneapolis, Stuart grew up in a Protestant home in suburban St. Louis that valued religion, he recalled. His parents taught in Sunday school and were elected elders in the church, and they attended church without question. “Religion was very natural to me,” he said, “right from the beginning of my life and my childhood.”

Stuart went on to study history at DePauw University in Indiana and earned his master’s degree in American history from the University of Wisconsin. But in the midst of his graduate education, he was drafted.

He registered as a conscientious objector and was stationed at the University of Kansas Medical Center, where he served for two years as an attendant in the psychiatric ward. And it was his time there — spent working with people — that showed him his next step.

“That experience led me to see that it wasn’t so much a matter of how smart I was in terms of my education, but what I could do with myself as a person in relationship to another person,” he said. “So that revelation led me to think, well, I would like to go on to some kind of work where I’m using not only my mind, of course, but my whole self in relationship to another person or persons. So that thinking then led me to go to seminary.”

In the fall of 1959, he landed at Princeton Theological Seminary and, after he was ordained three years later, he led congregations in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Ringwood, New Jersey, filling an interim position in Bellingham, Washington, before coming to the East End in 1981.

Divorced and with sole custody of his then 14-year-old son, Stuart stepped in as pastor of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church and a new chapter of their lives began. Outside of his ministry, he became a pastoral volunteer for the Long Island Association for AIDS Care, where he would visit men and women who were sick and dying.

It was a “very intense and also very rewarding” time, he said. And, not long after, he came out as a gay man himself.

“Coming out is a process, and you don’t necessarily just come out to everybody in the world all at once — although some people might do that, but not me,” he said. “So I came out little by little to various people, including my family along the way, and they were fine with that. And also eventually to the church. When I did, it was not a problem.”

Concurrently, Stuart became a staunch advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, speaking to the Suffolk County Legislature and Southampton Town Board on various gay rights measures when they came up, he recalled.

“There I was, out, and not only out personally, but out on television and out to the press — including The Southampton Press — so a few people in the Amagansett church were a little nervous about that, but they weren’t hostile,” he said. “We talked it through. That’s my style, anyway: If there’s a problem, let’s talk about it. And so we did and everything continued to be fine.”

Starting in 1989, on the first Sunday evening of every month, Stuart led a “healing service,” he said, a place where members of the LGBTQ+ community could come together and see themselves in religion — which had historically rejected them.

“This was something that the Presbyterians weren’t yet doing much of,” he said, “but I had done some reading about that and had attended seminars about healing as a dimension of ministry.”

The service continued up until Stuart’s retirement in 1998, he said, and then his ministry shifted. Beginning in 2005, he joined a mission partnership between the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba, and every year, with a group from the South Fork, he has visited a church in Güines, southeast of Havana, where he meets the people there and even preaches in Spanish.

“It’s been a very rich part of my retirement years,” he said.

Today, at age 88, Stuart serves as the interim pastor at Springs Community Presbyterian Church, a role he stepped into last January after occasionally filling in at churches across the East End, including Montauk, Amagansett and East Hampton.

While he enjoys preaching on Sunday mornings, the most rewarding part of his service — “right from the beginning out of seminary, all the way up to now,” he said — is meeting the people in the community, talking with them and hearing their stories.

And while his theology continues to be grounded in scripture, at the heart of his ministry is common humanity, he said.

“This whole thing that we call life that we share, which is often a mess, can also be beautiful,” he said. “So this whole mess of living, or the whole beautiful thing about living, it reflects back on myself and my self-perception of myself, to the point where it makes me very grateful just to be alive — and to be able to engage in these conversations, these ministries, or social settings, with other people. So it enhances a sense of gratitude.”