LEWISTON – The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, who has been called one of America’s most influential preachers by Time magazine, will open the 151st academic year at Bates College with a convocation address at 4:10 p.m. Tuesday on the main quadrangle. In case of rain, the event will take place in Alumni Gymnasium.

Gomes’ address will explore themes related to the college’s 150th anniversary.

Gomes is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and minister in the university’s Memorial Church. A 1965 Bates graduate, he was elected a college trustee in 1973 and is in the fifth year of his current term on the board.

Gomes will speak to about 2,400 Bates faculty, staff and students, including 511 students new to Bates, a college spokesman said. The Bates student body will total 1,844, with 1,688 on campus and 156 in off-campus programs this fall.

An American Baptist minister, Gomes belongs to Harvard’s faculties of divinity and of arts and sciences. Named one of the nation’s seven most influential preachers by Time in 1979, he is an insistent voice of conscience, blending traditionalist views of religion and morality with contemporary concern for the physical and spiritual welfare of all Americans, the spokesman said.

A Boston native, Gomes graduated from Bates and from Harvard Divinity School. After teaching and serving as director of freshman studies at Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Ala., he arrived at Harvard in 1970 as assistant minister at Memorial Church. He has been minister there since 1974, when he was appointed to the Plummer professorship. He is a leading authority on the Pilgrims of Plymouth.

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