Seventy-three years ago today, I took my first breath at 4318 North Broadway in St. Louis, Missouri. The house where I was born no longer exists. In its place is a vacant lot.

Some people think I’m from Southeast Missouri. Others are convinced I’m from California. But for the first few years of my life, my family, consisting of Mom, Dad, and me, lived in St. Louis and its environs. We moved to Southeast Missouri when I was about five years old and to Rector, Arkansas when I was about halfway through the third grade. We moved to Kennett, Missouri in 1959, where I completed grades 8-12.

After graduation from high school in 1964, Judy Miller and I married and moved to Stockton, California. After the first year of Bible college, we returned to Kennett for the summer. Then we went back to Stockton, where I completed the second and third years at WABC.

After I graduated with the Diploma in Bible and Theology in 1967, Judy and I returned again to Kennett (with our daughter, Sharon, who was born November 13, 1966). We worked in the church there until March 1968, when we moved to St. Louis, where I served as Director of Promotions and Publications for the General Sunday School Department and Editor of Junior High Literature for Word Aflame Publications. Our son, Mark, was born in 1970.

In 1971, I began working as Minister of Christian Education at the First Pentecostal Church, located in Maplewood, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb. This was the first Oneness Pentecostal church in St. Louis. In 1974, I taught for one semester at Gateway College of Evangelism in Florissant, Missouri, another St. Louis suburb. From 1975 to July, 1982, I was pastor of the First Pentecostal Church in Dupo, Illinois, about fifteen minutes from downtown St. Louis.

We left this pastorate to move back to Stockton, California, where I served as executive vice-president and president of Christian Life College for twenty-five years before returning to the St. Louis area in 2007 to teach at Urshan Graduate School of Theology.

When Judy passed away in 2011, I remained where I was and continued to teach. On June 22, 2013, Susan Fuller said, “Yes, I will,” when I asked, “Will you marry me?” Today, we continue to live in St, Peters, another St. Louis suburb.

So, from whence do I come?[archive]