"Would I Do It Again?" 
David Bumbaugh Celebrates 50 Years in the Ministry

April 4, 2007

David Bumbaugh, BD '64 acknowledges that his entry into the ministry 50 years ago could not be easily replicated by the students he teaches today as a Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard.

First of all, Bumbaugh became a Universalist on the same day he became a Universalist minister. While he was an undergraduate student in 1957, he was recruited to be the minister of the First Universalist Church of Blanchester, Ohio. Though he grew up in the faith of the Salvation Army and always knew he would be a minister, it wasn't until he first met with the Superintendent of the Universalist State Convention that he realized there was a denomination that would "tolerate my heresy."

Later, when he went to the Ohio State Universalist Convention, Bumbaugh said he found the religious community he had longed for--where people could argue strongly and at length and still walk away from the discussion as friends. "There I found people of honesty and tolerance," he said, who would allow him, for the first time, to raise the questions that had troubled him deeply since he entered college, about God, about Jesus, about the nature of human beings.

And so it was, Bumbaugh says, that with a lay license to preach and just over a year of college yet to complete, on Palm Sunday, 1957, he stepped into the pulpit and the career of his lifetime. In October 2006, in a sermon for students, faculty and staff at Meadville Lombard where he considered the question "Would I do it again?", Bumbaugh noted that his career began in the "twilight of an age" when "we were living in a nation that still dared to believe that renewal and renaissance were possible."

A year after he graduated from college, Bumbaugh left the church in Blanchester, to be the minister in Lyons, Ohio, where he found a church community that did not know it wasn't supposed to be as strong as it was. "The population of the town was 500," said Bumbaugh, "and still the church had a membership of around 100 people." Bumbaugh remembered that people from the national organization would come to tell him how improbable the church success would be and left, saying there was no way they could create a church school. "But the congregation didn't know that," said Bumbaugh, and they supported the church by communally farming a section of land that they had set aside.

It was while he was at Lyons that Bumbaugh decided to attend Meadville Lombard Theological School. Arriving in 1960, Bumbaugh commuted to his church community until he went to Toledo, Ohio, to complete his internship.  (left:  David Bumbaugh as a student in the early 1960s, talking wtih Margaret Boell, Librarian.)

After graduating from Meadville in 1964 and through the years until his retirement in 1998, Bumbaugh has served a number of parishes, some as the minister, and others as co-minister, with Beverly Bumbaugh, his wife.

Through the 50 years of ministry, Bumbaugh says he has been lead by the congregations he served.  He remembered serving the Park Forest congregation in Chicago Heights, Illinois during the late 1960s.  When Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb was killed, the call came for UU ministers to go to Montgomery, Alabama to march. Bumbaugh said members of his congregation came to him and asked if he would go. Beverly was pregnant at the time and he really didn't have the money to go, so he had not considered it seriously. "We have this plane ticket," Bumbaugh remembers them saying, "now will you go?"

Typical of his ministry, though, Bumbaugh felt that if he went to Montgomery it had to mean something to the congregation, to the community they served there in Chicago Heights. When he went to Montgomery, then, he found he had a congregation willing to challenge him and to step up to the challenges he gave them-which has been the rule rather than the exception in his ministerial career.

After he retired, Bumbaugh was offered the position of Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard. His depth and breadth of experience offer the students at Meadville a learning experience rich in both theological and practical applications-from what they study to how they discuss what they are studying. "He is very patient and lets us wrestle and sometimes fumble with important issues in ministry," said Seanan Holland, in his second year at Meadville Lombard. "Then just as we are beginning to tire of struggling against some perceived impasse, he nonchalantly asks us a question that breaks the conversation open into some profound, new direction. He helps us find our own insights. His teaching style keeps us eager." 

David Breeden, who recently was awarded the 2007 Richard Borden and Paul Holton Awards for Sermonic Excellence, thinks it is no coincidence that three of the five Borden/Holten awards were given to Meadville Lombard students.  Breeden, who was a tenured Professor in writing and literature at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas before becoming a student at Meadville Lombard, says it is Bumbaugh's preaching class that helped him learn to shape an effective sermon. "David pushes students to do their best, then do a little better," said Breeden. "From grammar to diction to theology, David is awake to every nuance of preaching--and proves it in every class."

Read more about David Bumbaugh here and here.