Dorothy, also an ordained minister, served with Gabriel in congregations in the Chicago stockyards district and in the greater Pittsburgh steel mill towns of Homestead and Duquesne, Pennsylvania, for 12 years.
[10] At Chicago, Fackre and another Divinity School student led a walk-out and protest at the Quadrangle (faculty) Club, where they worked as waiters, at the refusal by the majority of its members to include in membership an African-American professor, a policy shortly thereafter overturned.
[12] In the decade of the 1960s when Fackre was a professor at Lancaster Theological Seminary in the same state, they, with their children, helped to found a network of "freedom schools" for young black and white Lancastrians, and participated in demonstrations for civil rights in the city.
[14] Later, the couple led in campaigns to integrate the city's de facto segregated junior high schools, helped to found a citizen's newspaper, The Lancaster Independent Press, and a coffee house, Encounter, out of which much of the foregoing activity emanated.
They moved to the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1950, the denomination of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose thought much influenced them in a journey out of an earlier pacifism to a post-war period of neo-orthodoxy.
[20] The conjunction of concern about Christian doctrine and commitment to the ecumenical project led Fackre to invest himself deeply in efforts at theological renewal in his own denomination.