Dr. John Killinger
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JOHN KILLINGER
John Killinger, often called “a preacher’s preacher,” was educated at Baylor, the University of Kentucky, Harvard, and Princeton. He nevertheless remembers when he was ordained as a Baptist preacher and pastored his first church at the age of eighteen. Then, he understood that the essence of being a preacher was to be a good storyteller with an important message to convey. He still regards that as his job.
Seven churches later, and seven colleges, universities, and divinity schools, and seventy books with his name on them, he is still telling stories and still on message.
His churches were small and large. Little Poplar Grove Baptist Church in rural Rockcastle County, Kentucky, where the men sat on one side of the church and the women on the other. Smart, fashionable First Presbyterian Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, with 65 doctors and an equal number of attorneys and school teachers. Stately old First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, the first English-speaking church in the City of the Angels, whose majestic organ is the largest in the world and whose center aisle is so long that the choir sometimes has to sing the same hymn over again because it takes so long to process from the back to the front. And diminutive but charming Little Stone Church on Mackinac Island, Michigan, where he conducted 40 to 60 weddings every summer and preached to a congregation of summer visitors from all over the world.
His school jobs were mostly big, important ones. Places like Vanderbilt, Chicago, Princeton, and Claremont. But he started out as Dean of the Chapel at little Georgetown College in Kentucky, and ended up as Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at mid-sized Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a born teacher, who always explained things clearly and patiently to his students, and they loved him. In his second year of teaching, he was named Most Popular Professor. Four of his former students are now bishops and many are teachers and authors. His students still call and e-mail him from all over the U.S. He and they will always have a special relationship.
Because John Killinger is interested in almost everything, his writings have touched on many subjects: Christian history, personal spirituality, world religions, preaching, worship, church politics, a female Christ figure, the Gospels as devotional literature, secular writers and artists, the nature of pastoral ministry, and the relationship between theology and contemporary culture. He has even written a book called The Loneliness of Children, about the inner fears and worries of most children in our so-called Good Society. Many of his books become textbooks in seminaries, and ministers around the world quote what he says in their sermons. They also use his prayers from their pulpits and in their Sunday bulletins.
Maybe the most special thing about John Killinger, say those who know him, is the way he says what’s really on his mind, whatever other people may think about him for saying it. Like Andy Rooney, he has an attractive kind of honesty whatever he’s dealing with, whether it’s theology or politics or spirituality or human behavior of any kind. It has often gotten him in trouble with fundamentalists, politicians, and institutionalists. But he never seems to mind. He just goes on being who he is and saying what he thinks he ought to say. It’s his calling, he says.
But what he says isn’t without compassion. Never, because John Killinger is a tireless lover. He loves God and he loves life and he loves people. He has often said that if he had to sum up all of Christian theology in a single word, it would be “love.” Somebody quoted him recently as saying, “All the theology and fine preaching and great devotionalism in the world aren’t worth a thimbleful of kindness done for a little child.” This is probably why he has been invited to preach in many of the most famous churches in America and why thousands of people always look forward to his next book. They know he will be honest and that he will speak from a heart filled with love.
ANNE KATHRYN KILLINGER
If there is one key to John Killinger’s success as a preacher, teacher, and writer, indeed, as a human being, it is his beautiful wife, Anne Kathryn Killinger. John and Anne were childhood sweethearts. She had to cobble together her education piecemeal because she was busy putting John through years of college and graduate school. But when it was all done, she had studied at the University of Kentucky, George Peabody College for Teachers, and the New England Conservatory of Music, and became a piano teacher at Georgetown College and later in a parochial school in Nashville. Not only that, she had become a gourmet cook, a brilliant home designer, a great hostess, an outstanding mother of two sons, a composer of hymns, anthems, and musicals, an indefatigable traveler, and a marvelous minister’s wife. Once, when the family was living in Paris, France, for John to write a book about the theater of the absurd, she became a model, and appeared in fashionable ads all over Europe and America. And just for good measure, since her husband was a writer, she has written three books: a devotional book called An Inner Journey to Easter and two beautiful historical novels.
As John said of his lovely wife in Annie at Seven-Oh, the privately published biography he wrote for her seventieth birthday, “Who is Anne Kathryn Killinger at seventy? She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Her hair is turning silver, but it is so gorgeous that people stop her to ask if she had it streaked that way. She still sports the same shapely figure she had at age twenty and thirty, and women friends are always fussing that she hasn’t spread or torsoed up the way they have. Her smile is brighter and bigger than ever, because she has had so much practice smiling at so many things across the years. She also loves everything even more than she did before. She is a total nurturer, always wanting to take care of people who are needy or hurting. She’s the most generous person I ever knew, and would give you anything she has if you only expressed half a wish for it. Her compassion is unbounded, for birds and animals as well as people. She is the earth mother personified, a woman who knows how to be a woman without vaunting it, who knows instinctively how to make children happy and grown people feel better about life and themselves.”
She is also a very graceful writer.
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August 26, 2012
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