I was born and raised in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in biology and from The University of Texas at Austin with a Ph.D. in botany. After nearly 30 years of teaching and research, primarily at Wells College in Aurora, NY, I received a call to ministry, and I hold the Master of Divinity and the Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, NY. While I grew up in the United Methodist Church, during my college years I attended Congregational and Presbyterian churches. Life circumstances and the need for my children to grow up in a vital church community where the word of God is preached led me later to the Assemblies of God in Lansing, NY and the Episcopal Church in Auburn, NY. It was during my years at Northeastern Seminary that I "discovered" the Free Methodist Church, and was ordained Elder in April, 2005. For the last three years, along with Pastor Schwab, I served in the pastoral ministry at the First Church of Christ, Congregational in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, most recently as a Minister of Outreach and Evangelism. And following a long career teaching college students (and my two sons currently in college -- Grant and his wife Bethanie are seniors at Roberts Wesleyan College, and Matthew is a junior at Bucknell University, I remain committed to campus ministry.

                                       As an "Army brat" I was never sure how to answer the question "where are you from?" The short version is that my parents were from Rochester NY, and I've always felt like an Upstate New Yorker. I graduated from Wells College in Aurora NY with a B.A. in chemistry, and from the University of Rochester with an M.S. and Ph.D. in organic chemistry. I taught for four years in the Medical School of the University of Rochester, and for 21 years at Wells College. Thanks to an administrative reorganization at Wells some years ago, Margaret and I ended up in the same department where we taught some interdisciplinary courses together and developed a joint research program on medicinal plants. That is how I happened to go to her office one day while she was researching seminaries on the Internet. The rest, as they say, is history. My denominational background is, if anything, slightly more diverse than Margaret's, thanks to a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) elementary school (which, by the way, provided a terrific exposure to the Bible). At Northeastern Seminary, I was deeply impressed by the life as well as the learning of the Free Methodist faculty and by the breadth of the Wesleyan tradition. Choosing to pursue ordination in the FMC (I too was ordained Elder 2005) felt like "coming home." And, lest we forget, the Parsonage Pups (Margaret's dogs) are two not-very-Reformed yellow labs named Calvin and Baxter. Timothy, a burly cat who lets no one despise his youth, is responsible for leading them into temptation. He owns Linda