My Father's Influence on My Spiritual Formation

My Father’s Influence

My family background and early life experience may be described as being church-based, with significant interfaith and ecumenical exposure. The ministry has played a large role within both my father and my mother’s sides of the family. My paternal great grandfather immigrated to the United States, in the 19th century, from the West Indies. He built A.M.E. churches up the coast of Florida, eventually settling further inland, in Gainesville. Since that time, each generation on my father’s side of the family has produced an A.M.E. minister. Both of my father’s parents died when he and his two brothers were children, so the boys were often rotated between the homes of relatives in Florida, and were eventually sent to a boarding school using some of the money from a trust fund their parents established before they died.

My parents had three sons, but the youngest was stillborn. I was the second to be born and I have an older brother. Although both of my parents eventually became academics and taught at the University of Pittsburgh, both my brother and I grew up with an awareness that one of us should enter the clergy, as each generation had done that preceded us. My parents never really pressured either of us on this matter, but my father brought us with him as he made the rounds, performing his ministerial duties along with the work he was doing at the university. Every Sunday, of course, my father presided over the services at church and we were quizzed on his sermons as he took the family out to dinner. In this environment my brother and I could not help but to feel close to my father’s ministry.

As a minister, my father always had an eye on the “competition”. He learned from watching other clergymen at work. While my mother listened to Billy Graham’s sermons, my father studied the speaking style of Martin Luther King and the delivery of Bishop Fulton Sheen. My father was constantly reading up on ecumenical and interfaith theological arguments, particularly as they affected the civil rights movement. He also stayed on top of the literature to make the gospel more accessible to young people. It was through my father, and his circle of ecumenical and interfaith friends in the clergy, that we learned about changes that were occurring in the Catholic Church, as a result of Vatican II, and attempts in mainstream Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues to respond to the challenges of war, poverty and prejudice.

(From my Spiritual Autobiography)