St Paul
, Ohio
317 512 5404

• Education: Bachelor of Sacred Literature (4 yr degree) at the Cincinnati Bible Seminary. English and Drama graduate studies at the University of Evansville. Working on Doctorate from Trinity.
• Experience: Ordained in 1958, have served 3 Christian Churches and 4 Anglican Churches as pastor. Have taught classes and served as Dean at St. Alban’s Center, a school that helps prepare men for ministry.
• Comment to those looking at my sermons: That which is written in the Bible was intended to be understood by the readers, and was certainly understood by the authors. If we labor to understand the times and the language, we should be able to preach intelligible sermons.
• Sermon or series that made a difference: Series on the Church as the Continuing Incarnation, the Christ of this time.
• One of my favorite illustrations: God’s love for us as it is shown in the parable of Jesus regarding the Lost Coin, The Lost Sheep, and the Lost Boy.
• Family: My 4 children are grown. My household consists of my wife Virginia and Duke the Beagle.
• What my parents think of my sermons: Unfortunately, they were seldom in the same state where I served, and heard few of my sermons.
• What my spouse (really) thinks of my sermons: The short ones are best (10-12 minutes).
• Best advice given to me about preaching: In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a compacted conciseness, a clarified comprehensibility, a coalescent cogency, and a concatenated consistency. Eschew obfuscation and all conglomeration of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and voracious vivacity without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy, and vain vapid verbosity. In short: "Be brief and don’t use big words."
• Books that have had an impact: N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus Teilhard de Chardin The Divine Milieu The Phenomenon of Man Early Church and Apostolic Fathers, especially I and II Clement Karl Barth - Church Dogmatics
• Hobbies: Fishing, writing, computers.
• If I could Preach one more time, I would say...: The first and great commandment is "Thou shalt Love the Lord God with all thy heart, soul and mind; and the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
• Something funny that happened while preaching: In 1973 there was an ecumenical and evangelical movement called "Key '73". Churches in Cincinnati responded by inviting pastors to switch pulpits and also invite neighboring churches to share meetings for educational as well as inspirational purposes. We also shared outreach efforts. On one Sunday I was invited to deliver a sermon at a church where the pulpit was located 1/2 way to the ceiling , accessed by a winding staircase. After opening hymns and prayers, I ascended to the lofty pulpit and preached. After the Amen, I started to descend, but slipped, twisted an ankle and hobbled in pain to the floor and immediately hobbled out to my automobile and drove to a nearby hospital. As the practitioner in the emergency room was applying a bandage to strengthen the ankle, I explained that I had fallen out of a pulpit. His pithy remark, "Must have had to much communion wine."
• What I want on my tombstone: Rest, Rest, Perterbed Spirit (from Hamlet)