A Fellow Traveler

For a long stretch of my life, my path looked like it was heading in every direction at once — accounting, electronics, a recording studio, a classroom, a pulpit. On paper it can read like a man who couldn’t sit still.

But there was always one thread running underneath all of it: the Epic story of God’s mission for humankind, from Genesis to Revelation. Every “hat” I’ve worn — minister, musician, teacher — has been the same work carried into a different room. This page is simply where those rooms connect, so you can see the road I’ve walked and decide whether it’s worth trusting where it points.

Minister

Faith came early and never let go. I was commissioned to preach in my twenties and ordained in my thirties, and ministry has run alongside everything else I’ve done ever since — bi-vocational, in the thick of church life.

In 1992 I joined a church-planting venture as associate pastor. Years later, from 2015 to 2019, I served as Senior Pastor of The Church at the ROCK, an ECO Presbyterian congregation still finding its feet — I was asked to help launch it. The goal all along was to hand it to a younger, more energetic shepherd, and in 2019 we installed Rev. Devin Tasker to lead the next season. He’ll serve that congregation well.

Music

Music has been a calling as much as a craft. I apprenticed to learn how to build and repair professional sound systems, studied electronics, and in 1980 partnered with two musicians who shared a dream of owning a recording studio. We built AirCraft Communications and spent decades in every corner of the recording world. Under the name HeartSong, I’ve worked in artist development and production ever since — the part I love most is still mixing and mastering.

In 2010 I published a book called Longing for Eden. A couple of years later I was asked to give spiritual and musical direction to a band that shared my heart — and in time they took the name of that book as their own. Producing their debut album, Heaven’s Inside Me, remains one of the joys of my studio years.

The band stopped playing together in 2019, just as we had begun work on a new album. But the story wasn’t finished. The band’s most prominent songwriter and I have gone back to several of those original sessions, added new parts and a handful of new songs, and we are preparing to release new music.

You’ll find it at longingforeden.com.

The working years

Why I can be trusted to point

I don’t lead with the résumé, but a guide should be plain about the road he’s actually traveled. God gave me time in the marketplace, the studio, and the classroom, and I’ve tried to steward all of it.

That time included a decade in higher education — professor, department chair, and adjunct faculty in technology and audio-video production — along with years of IT and business-process consulting, and, further back, the accounting and electronics work that started it all. It’s an unusual mix. But understanding people, building things that last, and teaching others to do the same turned out to be the same skill wearing different clothes.

Fuller detail lives on the Ministry, Music, Teaching, Consulting, and Education pages.