My college senior picture, taken in 1978 or early 1979.
On this day 40 years ago–June 6, 1978–I started working at the United Brethren denominational headquarters. That’s a long time to come, every day, to the exact same building (though I’ve occupied four different offices). As I tell people, it’s hard to get rid of us entrenched bureaucrats. You’ve heard of “deep state.” I’m “deep church.”
It’s been a joy to spend my career serving the United Brethren Church. I was born into the United Brethren Church, and by the time I began working here, had ordered practically every item on the UB menu–camps, Bible quizzing, youth conventions, college, preacher’s kid, attending UB churches in four different states. It may sound boring to work at the same place for 40 years, but my field, communications, has continually brought new challenges, with changing technologies and accompanying learning curves.
I’ve worked with 11 different bishops, six different Missions directors, and four different Huntington University presidents. Missionaries have always been my heroes, and I’ve had the chance to get to know, and often interview, scores of missionaries. I’ve rubbed shoulders with hundreds of ministers. They come in incredible variety.
In 1978, I had just completed my junior year at Huntington College. Elsa Houtz, my favorite professor in what was then (but not now) a very weak major, Communications, had heard that the assistant editor position was coming open. She had held that position 1975-1977, then turned it over to Denny Miller when she began teaching at HC. She told me I should apply, which I did. I worked part-time during my senior year of college, then went fulltime.
I edited a Sunday school take-home paper, and worked on the monthly United Brethren magazine and our Sunday school quarterlies. In 1982 I became the editor and, for the next 12 years, focused on the monthly magazine. We transitioned to a newsletter strategy in 1993, and in 1997, the internet crashed into my world and we launched a website. Always something new to keep it interesting. Now we have a mobile app.
I used to develop film in our own darkroom. Now I use digital cameras. I went from an IBM Selectric typewriter, to an AT&T DOS computer with two 5.25” floppy disk drives (no hard drive) and a dot-matrix printer. Then, praise God for Steve Jobs. In 1987, my life changed when we got a Mac II, with a monster 40MB drive and 2MB of RAM, attached to a green-screen 12-inch monitor.
It’s been a fun ride, a perfect use of my gifts. And it’s been a pleasure.
