I was born in China, in Kiangsu province in north China, the son of
Presbyterian missionaries. My mother's family were from North Carolina
and Virginia, my father's from South Carolina. My mother died when I was
three years old, so that my father bundled up his four boys, of which I
was the third, and came back to North Carolina to be with her family,
and so my first memories are really of Charlotte, North Carolina, where
I now serve as a pastor. I grew up in part here and in part in
Charleston, South Carolina, and then in Nashville, Tennessee. I went to
public schools in Charleston, South Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee,
and then spent my summers during all those years in Montreat, a
Presbyterian conference center outside Asheville, and with visits pretty
regularly to Charlotte. I've always had a deep feeling of identification
with North Carolina. Not surprisingly, I went to Davidson College, which
is a Presbyterian school, and my family had been intimately associated
with it. My great-great-grandfather was the first President of Davidson
College, so these roots go way back in North Carolina soil and history.
I met my wife in Montreat, and we were married in her home in
Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1951 and then went to Union Seminary in
Richmond, Virginia, where I received the theological degree and then
went to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and got my Ph.D. degree.
I returned to this country in 1956 and went to Washington, D.C., where I
was pastor of the Church of the Pilgrims, an inner city
Page 2 church near Dupont Circle, a fascinating experience. I was
there eleven years, all during the civil rights struggle and the
beginning of the Vietnam struggle. I moved from there to Atlanta,
Georgia, where I was pastor of Central Presbyterian Church, right across
the street from the State Capitol and the City Hall and so forth, and
again [had] fascinating experiences in terms of community involvement,
and was there for a period of almost nine years. Then I came here to
Charlotte in 1976 and have been here now for nine years as pastor of
Myers Park Church. It's like coming home, and it's also been a valuable
experience for me to work with a very established church, a kind of
flagship church for southern Presbyterians, and my ministry has been one
of seeking to help and assist and enable this congregation of leaders in
the community and business and political life to identify their
involvement in the church with their involvement in the community and
the moral underpinnings for social and personal involvement. At the same
time, I've been heavily involved in the whole matter of Presbyterian
reunion, and that's a whole different subject, but that's engaged me a
great deal since I've been here. You may know that I have just accepted
a call and will be leaving in June of this year to go to San Francisco,
California, where I'll be President of San Francisco Theological
Seminary, and so we are building a house up outside Montreat, and that
will be our anchor in the East. In fact, the call to San Francisco
includes a specific item of a leave of absence at Christmas and New
Year's in order to be able to spend the holidays with family in North
Carolina. That's specifically noted in the call, so that they on the
west coast are aware that our
Page 3 roots are here, and we
will return to Montreat as an anchor in the eastern part of the
country.