Ted Loder served for almost thirty-eight years as senior minister of First United Methodist Church of Germantown, Pennsylvania. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, opened his church as a Public Sanctuary Church, and cofounded a job-training program for high school dropouts, a nonprofit housing renovation corporation, and an ecumenical consortium to rehabilitate abandoned houses. A graduate of Yale Divinity School with an honorary doctorate from Willamette University, Dr. Loder also served on the National Advisory Board of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.