Mountain Ministry

When I retired from engineering, no one could have told me that I would enter the ministry. I had considered becoming a pastor many years earlier but dismissed the idea as being impractical. I had a wife and four small children to support and couldn't see how I could possibly take off the requisite amount of time to study for the ministry, so I continued to work as an engineer, eventually earning a Doctor of Engineering Management degree. I worked as an engineer in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Morgantown, WV where I served as a professor at West Virginia University and later as Executive Director of my professional society, the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE International). I took early retirement in 1993 and my wife Betsy and I moved to Granite Falls, North Carolina where we became very active members of the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, NC, and later the Fairview Presbyterian Church in Lenoir, NC. While at Fairview I learned about a program of the Presbytery of Western North Carolina to educate lay people to better serve Christ and I enrolled in the program. At that point, I had no intention to become a pastor, but I could feel God's call, and I resisted it. The Presbytery's program consisted of two years of classes on alternate Saturdays. The classes covered, among many other things, preaching, and I got hooked. I couldn't deny God's call any longer. I went well beyond the requirements of the program, then called the "School of the Laity", and purchased every book mentioned by the instructors, even casually, and voraciously read them.