Originally published in the Presbyterian News Service, March 17, 2025
Mary Ann Lundy, Presbyterian feminist, Sanctuary advocate, and self-affirming “unindicted co-conspirator” has died. Known for her contempt of court conviction during the trial of John Fife, and for organizing the feminist theological conference Re-Imagining, Lundy had a nearly 30-year career in ministry.
Born Mary Ann Weese in Morgantown, W. Va. December 23, 1932, she graduated from West Virginia University in 1954. While at school she met Richard Alden Lundy; the couple were married in 1956. She completed a master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1957, and spent the early part of her career teaching English and Spanish in public schools, while accompanying Richard to pastorates in Kelseyville, California and Moscow, Idaho. From 1972 to 1980 she was assistant for ministry at McKinley Presbyterian Church (Champaign, Ill.).
While Richard was pastor of St. Luke Presbyterian Church in Wayzata, Minnesota the congregation became one of the first Presbyterian churches to shelter refugees from Central America, taking in the former paramiltary known as Rene Hurtado.
In 1982 Lundy returned to New York as the director of the National Student Young Women’s Christian Association, and continued to promote the Sanctuary movement, co-chairing the Sanctuary committee at Riverside Church, and traveling to share testimony of refugees with Presbyterian churches curious about becoming sanctuaries.
As part of a national network of activists, in 1986 she transported a refugee family from Tucson, Arizona to sanctuary in Riverside Church. Fife and others had adopted a strategy called “public Sanctuary,” which meant to leverage public opinion by openly documenting the lives of the people being sheltered. Lundy appeared in an episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal on CBS, and was interviewed by the Des Moines Register. Shortly thereafter, FBI agents began visiting the family home in Minnesota, and the house began receiving threatening phone calls “all night,” as Lundy later testified in an oral history, “by harassers, paid by the government I’m sure, saying ‘you are being watched,’ with horses’ hooves in the background and funny sounds and bells.”
That year seventeen Sanctuary workers, including Presbyterian minister John Fife, were tried in U.S. District Court for conspiracy, transport, and harboring of people in violation of immigration law. Mary Ann Lundy and eleven others were called to testify. Lundy refused, pleading the First Amendment: “I choose not to testify on the basis of my First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and I invoke my privilege as a Presbyterian elder not to speak against my community of faith.” She was held in contempt of court and sentenced to house arrest for the duration of the trial.
Lundy began work at the national agency level of the PC(USA) in 1987 as director of the Women’s Ministry Unit. As co-chair of the convening committee for the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Decade: Churches in Solidarity with Women, she responded to a call for a feminist/Womanist theological conference. With the organizers Sally Hill of Minneapolis and Judith Strausz-Clement of Seattle, Lundy organized the 1993 gathering known as Re-Imagining, which brought 2000 people to Minneapolis.
Immediately following the event the organizers faced accusations of heresy and witchcraft – chiefly surrounding a personification of feminine wisdom, Sophia. Mary Ann specifically was a target of character assassination. She later told the archivist David Staniunas that a VHS tape was circulated among conservative Christian churches that featured a body double of her, averring that “she” worshipped Satan. Under pressure, she resigned from national agency service. The long-term fruit of the conference was the Re-imagining Community, an ecumenical, radical, Christian movement which carried on the ethos of the original Re-imagining, until its dissolution in 2023.
Lundy would go on to serve a year at Hartford Theological Seminary, before joining the World Council of Churches as deputy general secretary, from 1995 to 1999. She and Richard had divorced in 1991, and she married the former Presbyterian mission co-worker Don Wilson. The couple retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Receiving the PC(USA)’s Women of Faith award in 1986, Lundy wrote: “The church and the world in this day will need the remarkable gifts of women to be healers and reconcilers, to be mediators and peacemakers.”
Mary Ann Lundy died Tuesday night March 11, 2025. She was 82 years old.
Learn more
RG 522, Mary Ann Lundy papers, 1983-2018.
ARCHIVES 22-0312, Mary Ann Lundy oral history, 2022.
Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship (AWTS), Re-Imagining records, 1988-2016. Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University.
Finding and Providing Sanctuary, 2022.
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