Rogers-Witte, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Elon parent and former Elon trustee, died Nov. 12, 2019.
The Rev. Ann Calvin “Cally” Rogers-Witte. Rev. Rogers-Witte, who served as a member of the Elon University Board of Trustees from 1999 to 2009 and is a trustee emeritus, died. She was 74.
A native of Cocoa, Florida, Rogers-Witte was the mother of Elon alumna Mary Ann Rogers-Witte ’99 and delivered Elon’s Baccalaureate address in May 1998. A graduate of Mary Baldwin College in Virginia, she also received a master’s degree in religion from Yale Divinity School and a master of divinity degree from the Pacific School of Religion.
Rogers-Witte was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1973 and before retiring in recent years, she was executive minister of Wider Church Ministries and Co-Executive of Global Ministries for the UCC for six years and she served as the UCC’s Southwest Conference Minister for 10 years. Prior to that, she was pastor of Community UCC in Raleigh, North Carolina, for 18 years. In the 1970s, she worked as a regional associate with the former Office for Church Life and Leadership in the UCC and she was the director of Christian education at the American Church in Paris, France in the 1960s.
Rogers-Witte chaired the UCC Insurance Board and she served terms as president of the New Mexico Council of Churches and the North Carolina Council of Churches, as well as a board member of the National Council of Churches and Church World Service.
Describing overseas and cross-cultural experiences as her “passion” since a young age, Rogers-Witte attended two international assemblies of the World Council of Churches, in Australia (1991) and Zimbabwe (1998). In 2000, she spent a sabbatical learning Spanish and living with families in Guadalajara and Morelia, Mexico. She worked to strengthen the Southwest Conference’s ties to the Christian Congregational Churches of Mexico and the Southern Mindanao District of the UCC in the Philippines. She also traveled to Puerto Rico, Singapore, Malaysia, Switzerland, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
A service to celebrate the life of Rogers-Witte will be held on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2019, at 10 a.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Cocoa, Florida.
More information is available online here.