John Killinger

About the Book

There is arguably no preacher of this generation who has influenced more preachers than John Killinger. John’s ability to mingle heart and mind, passion and mundane, love and justice is incomparible and inimitable. John Killinger: Celebrating 75 Years is a festschrift honoring John on his 75th birthday. John Killinger was born on June 12, 1933, near the small town of Germantown, Kentucky. His father, an unemployed agricultural agent at the height of the Great Depression, ran a huckster wagon, going door to door with hams, chickens, eggs, and farm produce. His mother was a school teacher. The night he was born, the temperature dropped below freezing and his father, caught up in the excitement of the birth, forgot to cover a penful of young pheasants he was raising for market and they froze. John has often said his father never forgave him. A good student, he showed promise as a young artist and spent most of his spare time drawing and painting, thinking he might one day become Norman Rockwell II. He often earned money painting signs and show cards for local merchants. But when he was called to the ministry shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he shifted his efforts toward public speaking, and, during his senior year in high school, won many honors as a debater. Because he was a Baptist, John went off to Baylor University, the largest Baptist institution of higher education in the world, even though he had received a four-year, all-expenses-paid scholarship to the University of Kentucky. He says it was probably the first truly big mistake of his life. By the end of his freshman year, he was broke and returned to Kentucky, was ordained to the ministry, and, at age eighteen, began pastoring Bronston Baptist Church in Bronston, Kentucky, while attending Georgetown College. The church didn’t have a pianist, so he asked young Anne Waddle of Somerset, Kentucky, to accompany him to church and play for the services. That was in September; in December, he asked Anne to marry him; and the next summer, on June 12, 1952, his nineteenth birthday, they were wed. Anne was barely seventeen. That fall, they piled their few belongings into the back of a 1940 Ford that had been a wedding present and returned to Baylor, where Anne worked as a secretary in a drug company while John completed his A.B. degree. Back in Kentucky, John became pastor of the Poplar Grove Baptist Church in Rockcastle County and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Kentucky. While writing his thesis, Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism —which would become his first book—he studied Greek and theology at Lexington Theological Seminary. Anne took courses at the university and worked as a secretary for Russell H. White, president of the Kentucky Medical Foundation, which raised the money to establish the university’s now famous medical school. Next, the young couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where John had won a fellowship to study at Harvard Divinity School and he became pastor of the Union Baptist Church in North Reading, a few miles north of Boston. Because a parsonage came with the job, Anne was able to stop working and further her musical education at the New England Conservatory. When it became apparent that no Southern Baptist church would employ a minister who had been to Harvard, John accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Georgetown College, which he had attended for a year as an undergraduate, and Anne became an instructor in piano. Twelve months later John became Dean of the Chapel, and during that year, Anne gave birth to their son John Eric. Meanwhile, Dr. Paul E. Scherer, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, left Union to become professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary. When he read John’s recently published book about Hemingway, he invited him to Princeton as his assistant. So the young parents took their son to Princeton

About the Author

David R. Tullock is pastor of Northside Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. Dr. Tullock is also author of The Shepherd's Crook and John Killinger: Celebrating 75 Years; and The Scandalous One: Jesus in Matthew. He is married to Cristin, and they have three children, David Isaac, Sadie Grace and Lily Anne. For more about David, go to www.davidtullock.com.