Reminiscing about Gerald Keown

A biographical sketch

Born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1946, just after World War II, Gerald grew up as the son of a Baptist pastor in the Deep South. He attended grade school in Louisville, Kentucky, while his father attended Southern Seminary, where Gerald would teach Old Testament for more than twenty years. In many respects, this background prepared Gerald to understand clearly what was at stake for Baptists in the 1980s and 1990s. From a young age, he learned the church was both a source of great gifts and an institution that could cause great pain. He graduated high school in the south Alabama town of Brewton, before attending the University of Alabama in the mid-1960s.

Gerald came to realize in college and beyond that he had absorbed a great deal of cultural stereotypes growing up when and where he did. He once wrote as part of his tenure application at Gardner-Webb University, “As a child of the South, I had imbibed my share of the routine racism which was as much a part of life as air and water.” That unreflective approach began to change in college. He attended the University of Alabama at the same time as Vivian Malone, the first Black student to attend that school, and he saw how she was harassed simply because of the color of her skin. And he was there at the same time as Joe Namath, the star football player and notorious party boy who was treated like royalty because of his ability to throw a football. Gerald began to see that the racial stereotypes permeating the South were wrong, and once converted, he confronted racism throughout his life.

Upon graduating college with limited options for continuing graduate school, Gerald enrolled in the US Navy. After having been lured into signing by the prospects of going through officer training, he learned once he joined that he was not eligible for officer training. Gerald spent four years, in his words, as a “college-educated grunt.” He did, however, opt to enroll into the Hospital Corps where he also received training as a surgical technician. He ended up working as a surgery tech at an Oakland hospital to which the military flew battle-wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War. The combination of these experiences shaped him profoundly and deeply formed his choice of profession and the content of his teaching.

After his relatively brief assignment as a surgical tech in Oakland, the Navy reassigned Gerald to Barstow, California, and this move allowed him to realize he had the capacity to be a teacher, and he began to sense a calling to Christian ministry. In his own words, again from his tenure application at Gardner-Webb, Gerald described these changes:

While a Navy Corpsman in Barstow, California, I discovered my vocation. While stationed at the Marine Corps Supply Center in Barstow, I was in charge of labor and delivery preparations, as well as any surgery which was performed there. My responsibility was to have everything in place for the doctors and nurses, and to assist with deliveries and any surgical procedures. Off duty, I became friends with a local mission pastor and served as a volunteer minister of music on weekends at the church he served. During a summer Vacation Bible School experience for the church, I discovered my love of teaching.

Gerald had selected his role as a Navy Corpsman because of his desire to work in the medical field, but he came to realize that his professional life would be in ministry, not medicine.

During his time in Barstow, Gerald also began to reconnect with the woman whom he would soon marry. Gerald first met Sharon in 1968 before he began serving in the Navy when she was the suitemate of Gerald’s sister at Judson College. They went on a couple of double dates with Gerald’s sister, but the relationship did not take hold at that time.

In the summer of 1970, they both attended his sister’s wedding while Gerald was on leave. Their long-distance relationship did not get serious, however, until January 1972, but then things proceeded very quickly. They were married by the end of the year even though they had never lived in the same city up to that point. Sharon described what made the relationship different the second time around:

Neither of us were very impressed with the other. Gerald was on leave for Elaine’s wedding in June of 1970 when we reconnected. Later that summer I went to Hawaii to visit my brother (he was in the Navy, stationed at Pearl Harbor) and sister-in-law. On my return trip Gerald met me at the LAX airport, and we had breakfast during my layover. He was stationed in Barstow, CA at the time. After that we began to correspond sporadically. Then in January of 1972 our correspondence became very regular. Though we were not physically together, our closeness grew through those letters and phone calls. We learned so much about each other, our hopes, and dreams through the US Postal Service! He was discharged in August, drove the weekend he arrived home from his parent’s home in Carbon Hill, AL to Huntsville. Within a couple of days we were engaged and then married between semesters.

I suspect their first encounters may not have blossomed into a relationship because the double dating accentuated the fact that Sharon and Gerald had very different personalities. He was outgoing and talkative; she is more reserved and reticent. Gerald would tell you exactly what he thought of an idea while Sharon often waits to be asked, and even then she will likely deflect the question if she does not know the people in the room.

With his early release from the navy, Gerald started his master’s degree at Southern Seminary in the fall semester of 1972, and he and Sharon were married in December. Gerald received his PhD in Old Testament in 1979. Together, Gerald and Sharon raised two daughters, Stephanie and Allison. Both were born during Gerald’s time as a PhD student at Southern Seminary. Upon graduating from there in 1979, Gerald landed a job teaching religion at a state school while working for a Southern Baptist agency. He served for three years as Professor of the Chair of Bible, Baptist Student Center, University of Missouri. He was appointed to the Baptist Student Center as a campus minister whose primary role was to teach non-sectarian introductions to the Bible to undergraduate students. He learned to use his gifts as a storyteller to keep the attention of his students who were not particularly interested in studying the Bible.

The student population at Southern Seminary exploded as baby boomers born after World War II dramatically increased the teenage population in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and then those students graduated college and went to graduate school. Gerald was hired in 1982 to teach Old Testament at Southern Seminary. Southern Seminary expanded the faculty dramatically that year by hiring more than a dozen new faculty members, most of them in junior positions. He continued to teach seminary students until his retirement from Gardner-Webb University in 2017.

Throughout his career, Gerald served as a pastor or interim pastor of churches while he was in graduate school or on faculty. In addition, churches routinely sought Gerald’s service to fill the pulpit when a pastor was away or to lead annual Bible studies for the entire church. Even in his retirement in 2019, Gerald taught an adult Sunday School class, served as a deacon, and sang in the choir of his church in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Gerald’s commitment was to helping students see the value of the Old Testament as an underutilized tool for pastors. Serving the church by teaching the Old Testament was not merely an academic enterprise for him.

Four particular themes became recurring ones in Gerald’s teaching and ministry, themes deeply rooted in his life experiences: a commitment to social justice, an awareness of his own organizational skills, a clear view of the realities of war, and the need for critical thinking in all walks of life. Gerald’s recognition of his own innate prejudice from his time at the University of Alabama caused him to incorporate social justice into his theological paradigms. Early on, I also realized Gerald was a staunch defender of civil rights, but I did not fully appreciate the path by which he came to these commitments. Until researching this article, I did not know he was not born a warrior for justice. His experience took him there. Gerald made a conscious decision to confront his own prejudice that he had absorbed growing up deep in the heart of Alabama. As a teacher and preacher, he also confronted others regarding their own racial stereotypes. He saw clearly how prejudice played out not only in things individuals said but also in how social structures helped to embed racial bias across the country, often with the force of law. The Jim Crow laws of the South were still in affect when Gerald was growing up, Gerald joined many of his generation who celebrated the fall of segregation, and he never wanted to see the South return to those times of segregated schools and housing. It galled him that Christian ministers in white churches in the South never condemned the lynching of Black Americans in the first half of the twentieth century or those who bombed the church in Birmingham in 1963. In the 1980s, Gerald Keown was already teaching his white ministerial students without qualification that Black lives matter. Just as importantly, Gerald came to see social justice as a part of biblical theology. When he taught a course on the prophets, he highlighted passages that called for justice, and he waxed eloquent about the evils of slavery even though the Bible does not condemn it. He highlighted Deuteronomy’s condemnation of the mistreatment of resident aliens and asked students why inerrantists did not take those commands literally. He also forced his Christian students to think more sympathetically about other religions. He required his Old Testament students to read James Michener’s novel, The Source, because it told the story of Israel’s entry into the land from the perspective of the Canaanites who lived there at the time.

His work as a surgical tech helped him as a minister since it made him more comfortable than most ministers when talking to parishioners in hospitals about medical issues. The work also made him aware of his own organizational skills from his experience in prepping surgeries for wounded soldiers and women in labor. On the other hand, Gerald could not ignore the brutality of war. He had seen large numbers of wounded soldiers flown to the hospital on a daily basis since the hospital in Oakland where he worked was one of the primary surgical centers for those wounded in combat. He could not square the scale of the human trauma he encountered with the rosy reports of continuous victory coming out of press briefings in Washington, D.C. Seeing the sheer number of eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys with missing limbs and mangled body parts from their encounters with explosive devices did not look like victory to Gerald. His insistence on critical thinking made him became mistrustful of “official” reports from “institutional sources” because they typically had an agenda, hidden or explicit. This experience taught him to question the agendas of those delivering such reports and usually to take them with a grain of salt.

The Baptist educator: Teacher, scholar, churchman, administrator

These four facets of Gerald’s professional identity also have a bearing upon understanding who he was as an educator. In a variety of ways, Gerald’s experience in ministry guided his thoughts on curriculum. He put his teaching into practice. His ministerial experience and commitment also served Gerald well when he arrived at Gardner-Webb, where the Divinity School would soon begin a formal application for accreditation by the ATS, and this process would require them to revise the shape of their curriculum. Gerald became instrumental in this process, discussed in the following paragraphs.

Gerald had a strong commitment to critical thinking, but he combined these skills with a deep sense of wonder and spirituality. The God he served was not afraid of questions, and Gerald was not afraid to ask them. Gerald did not need to claim the stories of Adam and Eve concerned real people to perceive the truth those stories conveyed about the biblical God and divine-human relationships. He did not need to find the ark Noah built to keep his faith from being shattered. Gerald saw the theological testimony in Genesis 6–9 for what it was: two versions of a flood story woven together to blend a Priestly account with a Yahwistic version to recount how God saved humanity from its own corruption. While Gerald did not believe Elisha really caused an axe head to float (2 Kgs 6:4–7), Gerald recognized the value of miracle stories as a genre for the role they played in the biblical narrative. A natural storyteller, Gerald generated excitement about biblical texts in the way he taught. For him, the Bible was a storybook whose subject was God and humanity. He believed Christian ministers had much to learn about God, humanity, and faith communities by reading the Old Testament. Gerald had a keen ability to cut to the heart of the matter, often because his critical thinking skills helped him to see connections between things others may have missed. He was particularly perceptive at spotting institutional spin, when administrators would say things in a certain way that stretched the truth to the point of breaking. Gerald was direct, not duplicitous or cagey.

As noted earlier, Gerald’s teaching, administrative commitments, and his work in churches filled his weeks. Gerald also read vociferously. He often told me about books I had not known had been published. He was particularly interested in books that helped ministers understand how to draw from the Old Testament. He was not driven to write, but when called upon, he was a capable scholar. His most significant contribution was as one of three co-writers of Jeremiah 26–52 for the Word Biblical Commentary that appeared in 1995 shortly before he left Southern to go to Gardner-Webb. Pam Scalise, Tom Smothers, and Gerald were recruited to write the volume by John Watts, another Old Testament professor at Southern Seminary and then Old Testament editor of the commentary series. Watts recruited the three to write a commentary on the latter half of Jeremiah following the untimely death of Peter Craigie, a British evangelical scholar who had agreed to write two volumes on Jeremiah for the series but then was killed in a car crash in 1985. ⁶ Along with his colleagues at the time, Gerald stepped in to do the commentary even though Gerald did not consider himself a writing scholar with expertise in Jeremiah. They produced original translations with detailed text-critical notes, a literary analysis including discussion of genre and structure, a verse-by-verse commentary explaining key words and concepts, and a theological analysis of every passage in those thirty-seven chapters of Jeremiah. It took ten years after Craigie’s death to complete the nearly 400-page project. Nevertheless, the volume the three wrote together was well-received.

When Gerald went to Gardner-Webb, he became involved with the process of obtaining accreditation from ATS and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). As Gardner-Webb’s School of Divinity was constructing its curriculum, Gerald was instrumental in making sure that every course offered served to train ministers. Those discussions developed a series of 28 “be, know, do” statements by asking three questions: What do we want our graduates to know when they have completed the program? What should they know how to do? And most creatively for the time, who do we want our students to be when they graduate? The faculty did not merely replicate the MDiv programs of the seminaries in which they had previously taught.

Gerald fought hard to maintain the requirements of Hebrew and Greek, not because he taught them at Southern, but because he knew that requiring students to translate biblical texts from the original languages forced them to understand the nature of translation. He was convinced that learning Hebrew and Greek teaches students to understand the text as it was actually written and not what someone else tells them the text says. For Gerald, learning to translate from critical editions of biblical texts helps students to realize we do not have access to an original text of the Old or New Testament. Gerald knew conservative evangelical scholars often took refuge, when discussing inerrancy, behind the claim that the original manuscript was literally without error even if minor variations had crept into the texts. Gerald loved to point out that thousands of Greek fragments and manuscripts exist from an era prior to the invention of the printing press but that no two sets of physical Greek manuscripts agree with one another exactly. Once students realize not one but multiple New Testament texts exist, supporting claims of an inerrant text became difficult. Gerald wanted to make sure alumni of this new school would realize the impossibility of determining which of these texts is the inerrant one. He also enjoyed pointing to conflicting historical claims in the Bible or to narratives about the distant past that did not align with the archeological records. Explaining the problems of inerrancy statements to students is unnecessary when they can see those problems for themselves. Knowing Hebrew and Greek also provided students access to a new world of reliable reference tools that provide critical analysis of words, concepts, and traditions.

The third question of what they wanted their graduates to “be” led to the most creative part of Gardner-Webb’s curriculum. Gerald and the faculty there determined that their graduates needed to have a mature spirituality and a deeper understanding of spiritual formation to help mature their congregations or minister to those facing theological crises. As a result, the faculty created a curriculum that combined spiritual formation classes and spiritual formation groups that met every semester to talk about their responsibilities for helping congregations mature or how to deal with someone experiencing a theological crisis because of the death of a loved one. The final semester of the curriculum involved a team-taught seminar for all graduating students in which students were asked to respond to church-based scenarios using their knowledge of the Bible, biblical languages, church history, theology, and pastoral care. As a result, students learned from one another and had to recall learning from seminary classes, using their knowledge and maturity to help shape the spirituality of their congregants. Not only did Gerald actively and energetically participate in these discussions, but many of the scenarios derived from Gerald’s experience work with churches.

Gerald also utilized his gifts as an administrator to serve the institutions in which he worked. He served as the Associate Dean for the School of Theology at Southern Seminary (1990–1995) and at the Divinity School at Gardner-Webb (2006-2019). He also performed substantial administrative duties while being a faculty member at Gardner-Webb, especially in setting up course schedules and serving as the chief academic advisor for students. He had strong organizational skills and worked well with students. He was responsible for scheduling and addressing quite a variety of curricular decisions. If a student had a schedule conflict, had questions about a grade, or wanted to substitute a class, Gerald was often the person whom the student would see. This administrative experience gave Gerald a keen understanding of the curriculum, especially how and why certain courses were required for all MDiv students. It also prepared him to think more deeply than many of his faculty colleagues about the role of coursework.

Gerald’s interest in scholarship also reflected his commitment to serving the church. Gerald was not driven to produce vast numbers of articles and books, but Gerald served on the editorial board of Review & Expositor. He loved to help plan future issues of the journal, and his own publications overwhelmingly consist of his contributions to Review & Expositor. One must understand the history of this journal to understand Gerald’s contributions to its legacy.

Until the 1990s, Review & Expositor was the faculty journal of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. When the president appointed by the fundamentalists took over in the fall of 1993, he announced he would no longer hire anyone or tenure anyone who did not ascribe to inerrancy or who affirmed that women could serve as senior pastor. These unilateral changes violated accrediting standards, which brought about a visit from two accrediting agencies. Southern was cited for violating protocols and had to respond to the accrediting charges, but they did not lose accreditation. These changes stirred resistance among faculty and students. Trustees backed the president’s moves, and tenure guidelines were simply rewritten. Several tenure-track and female faculty members left quickly because they did not affirm the language of inerrancy and/or because their support for women in ministry precluded them from consideration of further employment. A large bloc of tenured faculty would leave at the end of that academic year when the administration offered an extremely generous early-retirement package.

The abrupt and unilateral changes instituted by the new president in 1993 created pockets of resistance among the faculty. One result of faculty resistance was the largely symbolic gesture of reconfiguring the charter of the Review & Expositor journal. This journal was chartered as the faculty journal of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the early twentieth century. ⁷ As such, the journal produced articles that reflected the theological convictions of the faculty of the oldest and most scholarly seminary of the old SBC. The journal eventually produced four issues a year almost exclusively written or edited by faculty members of the seminary. It produced articles concerning biblical texts, theological concepts, and practical theology. One issue each year was produced to coincide with the SBC’s annual January Bible Study.

The editorial board of Review & Expositor discussed what to do because future faculty hired at Southern Seminary would have to sign inerrancy statements, would have to affirm Genesis 1-11 as literal history, and would have to agree to restrict the position of minister to males only. Such positions would radically change the nature of the faculty and would obviously also change the nature of the faculty journal. Almost overnight, the seminary became associated with conservative evangelical schools and took on a conservative evangelical identity. From that point onward, new faculty searches began targeting faculty from evangelical schools outside the US South that had similar inerrancy statements and provided only limited training to women. None of these hiring principles were part of the faculty identity prior to 1993 and the installation of the new president.

In the academic year 1993-1994, private negotiations took place between a small subcommittee of the editorial board and the leadership of several new Baptist seminaries. ⁸ These conversations sought to reconstitute Review & Expositor as a consortium journal that would reflect the tradition of the journal as a Baptist journal for seminaries that were not controlled by the SBC. ⁹ In other words, the journal would represent Baptist constituencies that were neither fundamentalist nor inerrantist. The subcommittee knew that such a change would have financial repercussions since the journal’s financial stability existed because a large percentage of its revenue stream derived from annual student membership fees that the seminary paid directly to the journal. For this reason, the committee’s work was not publicized until all the pieces were in place by early 1994. Agreements were signed with the presidents of the four institutions who issued a press release once the Review & Expositor editorial board had officially voted to change its charter so that it was no longer owned by the faculty of Southern Seminary. The journal thus managed to escape a fate that the seminary could not. It freed itself from the shackles of inerrancy by taking proactive actions.

These discussions also framed a way forward for the journal that was committed to academic freedom for writers of the journal, a commitment that would bring its own controversy in 2001, a controversy that would also impact Gerald’s life. ¹⁰ Gerald had served on the editorial board of Review & Expositor during his fourteen years at Southern Seminary, and he celebrated the stance the journal’s editorial board took on academic freedom. When he left Southern Seminary in 1996 to join the faculty of the School of Divinity at Gardner-Webb University, Gerald was instrumental in getting Gardner-Webb to join the consortium. Gerald would go on to serve on the editorial board of Review & Expositor a number of times while on faculty at Gardner-Webb. In 2001, one of the new institutional sponsors of the journal withdrew its sponsorship over objections to the publication of a single article. Gerald was the recording secretary of the journal at the time. His commitment to academic freedom played a significant role in the editorial board’s refusal to disavow the article or to create structures that avoided certain topics because they made some people angry or uncomfortable. That 2001 editorial board decision deepened the trajectory of Review & Expositor to academic freedom, also increasing the breadth and relevance of future issues. The journal paid a steep price financially, but Gerald saw clearly what was at stake. What would have been gained for the new journal format had it caved on the issue of academic freedom at the first sign of trouble?

Gerald also remained actively involved in the work of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion (NABPR). Until his retirement, Gerald attended virtually every meeting and served terms as vice-president and president of that body. Gerald had a great deal of respect in this group as many of the doctoral students he taught while at Southern went on to teach at Baptist colleges from Virginia to Missouri, from Mississippi to Florida, and all points in between. Almost without exception, these students led their institutions to take moderate stands or at least to be cautious regarding how they related to Southern Baptist seminaries.

At NABPR meetings, Gerald seemed to be constantly involved in conversations with other members. Between seeing former colleagues from Southern Seminary, friends whom he had known when he was a student at Southern Seminary, and former PhD students who now taught at Baptist colleges, Gerald had long-standing friendships with the majority of those who attended the annual meetings that were held in conjunction with the meetings of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature. Unlike most academics, Gerald’s strong extroversion combined with an animated personality made him a popular teacher. Being around people who had common interests and shared memories gave him energy.

NABPR annual meetings begin with a formal time of fellowship when coffee is served and conversations take place. Gerald was tall in stature and could be seen towering over people at these meetings. If someone wanted to find him, they could easily do so, and they did. People sought him out because he was such a good conversationalist. He would regale colleagues with stories from the past, but he would also catch up on what they had been doing. Once he befriended someone, he remained interested in them. The annual meetings of the NABPR always included an address from the outgoing president. Because NABPR consisted of Baptist professors, these addresses usually touched on issues Gerald cared deeply about: education and Baptist identity. Sometimes these articles concerned pedagogy, the nature of theological education, or the importance of religion in the general education curriculum in undergraduate teaching. At other times, articles might have been about Baptist figures from the past. Gerald listened intently to the articles and generally contributed to the conversation afterward because he was still learning and teaching. That was who he was.

The person

No discussion of Gerald would be complete without talking about Gerald as a person who lived life with great gusto. He did not play sports as a rule, but he was an avid golfer. At conferences, he would often recruit colleagues to put together a foursome to spend the afternoon at a local golf course. Unlike most of his colleagues, Gerald was not just a weekend duffer. He excelled at the sport. He participated in local golf tournaments, occasionally winning prizes. The biggest prize he ever won was a professional golf bag valued at more than 1000 dollars. Not only did it allow him to separate his clubs from one another, the bag came with wheels and a handle that facilitated pulling the cart over the golf course. It was bright red and stood out on the golf course, but he was pleased that it let everyone know that he now had professional equipment when he played. The only problem was that the bag was also emblazoned in large white letters with the name of the sponsor that paid for the bag: Budweiser. When teased about carrying his huge, red beer cart around the golf course or when a well-meaning colleague expressed concern about Gerald hauling the cart behind him when he often played golf with church deacons or pastors, Gerald would brush off the comments with a flash of incredulity. On multiple occasions, Gerald would say some version of: “I hate the taste of beer and never drink the stuff, but that is no reason to park this beautiful piece of equipment in the garage.”

Gerald also loved to watch golf on television. Ben Leslie, the former provost at Gardner-Webb University, recounts that Gerald was a regular fixture in the faculty dining room at the university where Gerald would tell stories and get to know his faculty colleagues across campus. In the weeks when a major golf tournament was televised, Gerald would split his time between conversation and watching the tournament on his phone.

Gerald brought the two parts of his professional life together very subtly through sports. He did not lament the loss of personal prestige that he was no longer lecturing to more than 150 students. He spent more time extolling the virtues of smaller classes over large ones. In the smaller classrooms, he could have extended conversations with students rather than merely lecturing at their faces. Gerald did, however, lament the loss of Louisville sporting events. Every year, on the first Saturday in May in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Gerald and his wife Sharon would host a Kentucky Derby party. They would invite a significant number of colleagues to come and watch the Derby together with them. Gerald would grill hamburgers and hot dogs, and he threw himself with great gusto into leading the entire group to join the choir at Churchill Downs in singing “My Old Kentucky Home.” Derby parties were quite common in Louisville, but very few people in Spartanburg or Boiling Springs had ever heard of such things.

Relatedly, Gerald seldom attended college football or basketball games while at Gardner-Webb, but he continued to follow the University of Louisville basketball team from a distance. They had won two national championships in the 1980s, and Gerald was living in Louisville when they won the second one. He remained a loyal fan long after he moved to North Carolina. He would watch Louisville anytime they were on television. In Spartanburg, he would even drive to a restaurant that carried satellite games to watch an important contest not showing on local cable. His role as a sports fan was part of his Louisville identity he never lost.

Finally, one cannot fully understand Gerald Keown unless one understands his deep commitment to family. Gerald was adored by his wife and his daughters. As noted previously, Sharon and Gerald had very different personalities. At the same time, the two of them shared certain values very deeply, not the least of which were their commitments to equal opportunities for women and a devotion to family. Sharon proudly worked outside the home and excelled as a working mother. She was so valued as an employee that the national company for which she worked in Louisville helped her find a similar position in Spartanburg. As a result, she was able to continue to advance her career even while Gerald took a position with less visibility. This opportunity for Sharon also meant Gerald committed to a forty-five-minute commute to Boiling Springs, North Carolina. He made that drive five days a week from August to May because of his commitment to ensure Sharon could advance in her career.

Sharon and Gerald had two daughters, one born at the beginning of his PhD work and the other at the end of it. Gerald took his role as a father quite seriously. When their first daughter (Stephanie) was born, Gerald made a commitment to be present for his children. This decision, he believed, would likely affect his performance in graduate school and his prospects for landing a prestigious teaching job. Nevertheless, he made a commitment that he was going to know his children and that they were going to know him. In his Gardner-Webb tenure application, he vividly described what he believed the implications of this decision would be:

At the beginning and end of my PhD studies, life changed dramatically with the birth of two daughters. Stephanie was born as I was beginning graduate studies, and she became the catalyst for a decision which still governs my setting of priorities. I made a deliberate choice to spend time with my family, rather than living in the library. I knew that such a decision would often mean a “B” in the seminar or on the paper rather than an “A.” It was, nevertheless, a decision I never regretted, and I sometimes remind my own students that, while excellence is always a noble goal, there are also priorities that matter more than academic performance. I have transferred that philosophy to my teaching career as well. If the book does not get published, the academic honor does not come, that is a price I willingly pay for what I consider more important.

Gerald’s devotion to family was a bedrock value to him, one that only increased as his family grew and relationships deepened. Gerald’s oldest daughter Stephanie got married, and in 2017, she and her husband Nathan made Gerald a grandfather. With each family addition, Gerald’s embrace of family increased. He delighted in getting to know his son-in-law and was elated to be present for his grandson Bobby. What Gerald may not have realized when he wrote his tenure-application assessment was that the same character trait that led to his commitment of loyalty to family was also reflected in his work with his students. He spoke with them as though they were part of his own extended family, which is why so many of his former students sought him out when issues came up in churches in which they worked. Gerald was a relational person. People mattered to him more than awards or publicity.