Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

I did find a job in southern California. I was to be an assistant minister at the West Covina Methodist Church, located some twenty miles from the school of theology. I would devote thirty hours a week calling on families and cultivating new members. I would join an impressive staff: senior minister, Rev. Miles Acker, minister of Christian education, Rev. Max Graham and Paul Biering, another beginning seminarian from the Northwest. The salary was slightly over half of what I was earning as a faculty member, but it included a pleasant parsonage several blocks from the church on Cherrywood Street. I was content. I was where I wanted to be.

I was the only graduate of Buhl High School to enter Idaho State College, indeed, one of a handful of young men who even went to college. So I enter alone and scared! There I was a sixteen year old walking from Ferris Hall, the freshman dorm, to classrooms around the campus wearing one of my home-made polka dot short sleeved shirts–green, yellow, or blue– tucked into my white cord trousers with rolled up cuffs. The Kid had arrived!

I was born during the Great Depression in the community of Twin Falls in Southern Idaho, surrounded by Harrys, my father, older brother, and uncle. Some would add my younger brother also, who was named Harold. Earlier I had been accustomed to saying that I was the middle of three boys until I remembered that there had been an earlier stillborn infant whose gravesite bears the simple name, Baby Brizee.

This is a story of a theology and a life and how they came together. The theology is process relational theology. It is a personal story told as clearly as I can remember.