Grace and Peace

Essays in Memory of David Worley

Thomas H. Olbricht, Stan Reid, Olbricht, Reid

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781532635472
  9781532635496
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532635489
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

These essays are presented by the family, friends, and colleagues of David Worley of blessed memory. David Worley was an extraordinary man of many talents and interests. David was born and raised in Texas, and was educated at Abilene Christian and Yale. Upon receiving a PhD in New Testament, he and his growing family moved to Austin, Texas, where he lived until his untimely death by cancer. David's family owned a series of broadcasting stations. Over his lifetime he was interested in the media, venture capital investments, church life and music, and mission efforts in Russia, Africa, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He taught courses as an adjunct professor at various colleges and served as president of the Austin Graduate School of Theology and chairman of the board of the Institute of Theology and Christian Ministry, St. Petersburg, Russia. Even his close friends knew little of the magnitude of his activities. What was clear, however, was that he served one Lord--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nothing can be more challenging to a complacent life than these essays about the activities and commitments of David Worley.

1

David Worley as Husband and Father

Melinda Worley

My family and I would like to thank Tom Olbricht, Stan Reid, and the other friends and colleagues who have written in this book; it will be a treasure to our family. David, however, would not have agreed to this book since it is about him, his commitments, and his way of life; he would not have enjoyed the attention on himself. I believe, though, that he would have appreciated the opportunity readers of this book might have to see the grace of God at work in one person’s life and to praise the name of our Father above for it.

I’ve been asked to tell something of the man David Worley as I have known him for fifty-two of his sixty-seven years. He would have wanted me to say that what follows here is not what David accomplished but what God, by his grace, accomplished through David.

In that regard, I hope you will see here the beginnings of a life of faith, amidst false steps and imperfections. I believe I can look back at David’s life and see how God prepared him, nurtured him, and equipped him to take advantage of the opportunities he was to be given to participate in the coming of the Kingdom. Indeed, I believe I could see some of it happening as it was lived.

As I tell this story, I will include some statements from family members and friends that help to illustrate David’s character. I will focus on aspects that seem to have had the greatest impact on the people around him.

If I were to write a lionized version of David’s life, he would have rolled his eyes at me and moved on to something else he found more interesting. So, I will say on his behalf that he was not perfect. For one thing, his communication style was based on the assumption that less is more, as anyone who has received one of his terse emails will testify. He often recited his grandmother’s old adage from his childhood, “If you don’t have anything important to say, then say nothing.” Those of us who lived and worked with him would have preferred she’d kept that little gem of wisdom to herself.

David had strong, well-conceived convictions about most things he thought to be important and could articulate these convictions with enormous skill, particularly in written form and classroom lecture. In our family when our girls were young, these convictions largely went unchallenged. As the girls grew up, married, and had families of their own, they and their husbands each had to balance their own perspectives with David’s, tempered by their love and respect for him. It was not easy to do with a father who is beloved, articulate, and has such a commanding presence, but each managed it successfully in his or her own way.

Also, David was fearless. When he began traveling to Russia in 1990, in that era of bread lines and unrest among her people, I was terrified. He called me from the hinterlands of one of Russia’s eleven time zones; the phone connection was often very poor and characterized by odd clicking noises that, in my imagination, sounded surely like KGB wire taps, gathering information for his arrest and imprisonment in Siberia. But he couldn’t understand that kind of fear. Our middle daughter, Christiana Peterson, remembers that her dad sometimes made light of such fears.

There is a photo of my dad and me from the late 70s. I was a baby, perhaps just within reach of walking. My dad, his signature beard a little shaggier and a lot darker than it was in later years, holds out a mask for me to look at. I’m looking away from him with a smile but his hand gently placed on the back of my head indicates that he’s trying to get me to face this strange carved creature that he’s holding. This photo is innocuous on its own, but knowing what I know about my dad, I have always looked at that picture with a combination of irritation and amusement.

I am quite sure that he would’ve been amused in the moment that photo was taken. I’m sure of this because I knew what he was trying to do: he wanted to see my reaction to a creepy troll-ish mask that some family member had brought back on one of his travels. Perhaps the mask was a relic of Scandinavian folklore . . . aimed at naughty children and intended to scare them into being good.

I was mostly a well-behaved child, but I was quite fearful. I was desperately afraid of what crept about my room at night and in the grains of wood on my closet door in the dark, a fact that wasn’t helped by my dad’s amused introductions to me of scary images and stories.

But I don’t believe my dad was trying to scare me into being good. I don’t know that he was trying to scare me at all. I think he was actually amused and a little baffled by my fears. He didn’t understand why I was so afraid. So, his response was to show me what was behind the curtain, to amuse me out of my fear.

I am not sure his tactics worked. I still struggled with fears well into adulthood. But I do wonder if his periodic insistence on showing me frightening things actually gave me the courage to face some of my own fears: fears like traveling the world and moving overseas as a single woman, knowing absolutely no one. I watched him do the same for years, and I knew there was something to be gained by stepping out into the unknown, even if it frightened me.1

Not only was I unnerved by David’s travels to a place I once regarded as dangerous, I also worried about David’s frequent absences and how that would affect our daughters and their relationship with him, and frankly I was mad at him about it for the first few years of his travels. After all, every parenting seminar I attended or book I read emphasized how important a daily relationship is between a father and his daughter. And I think each of our three girls struggled in her own way with this. But this brings me to another aspect of David’s character. He almost never did anything, including parenting, the way other people thought it should be done. And, by God’s grace, his unorthodox choices could sometimes be redemptive. Christiana wrote the following about traveling in this supposedly dangerous place with David and her older sister, Heatherly. Being in St. Petersburg and meeting the people her dad left home to see helped to shape her view of the world and the relationships people have with each other.

“What My Dad Didn’t Teach Me”

Olga seemed old at the time, hobbled over by years of labor and sorrow. But it might be that I was just young, thirteen at the time, and everyone seemed old to me. I remember the darkness of her apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Russia: the natural light streaming through the gaps in the curtains, the dusty red walls, the simple decor, and the table full of food.

When she got up to check the hot water on the stove, my sister and I noticed the flies buzzing around the food: cakes and treats, her best baking. I ate it anyway, not because of any mature understanding of hospitality but because I was hungry enough to eat.

My father had been traveling to Russia since the Soviet Union fell; starting the first Christian radio program in Russia since the collapse. He wanted his daughters to see where he’d been traveling, and to meet the people who had moved him so much.

Through a translator, Olga told us about her life. How her father had been stolen away in the night when she was a girl, then her husband too had disappeared, then her son killed in war. The secret police had stolen so many of the family members of people we’d met. There were tales of the famous horror of the Russian breadlines that stretched out for miles down the sidewalk, when food was scarce.

I don’t remember my dad talking much to us afterwards about the high rises we visited on the outskirts of town or the Russian children’s hospital where kids with broken bones were forced to spend months in a room they shared with dozens of other children, only because their parents couldn’t afford to cart them back and forth to the doctor or care for them at home.

At Olga’s house and in the other places we visited, I learned that suffering was a common experience that didn’t deplete one’s ability to offer the best of what they had. My dad visited Russia several months out of the year, becoming more and more comfortable blending into the culture he’d fallen in love with, befriending and learning from the people he met. But he never offered us an “us and them” narrative, or told us how blessed we were compared to them and weren’t we wonderful for helping them? I could tell that his Russian friends didn’t need him because he was wealthy; they loved him because he spent time with them and wanted to share his faith with them. Even though we missed him when he left, I also knew from an early age that it was our father who needed to be with the Russian people.

In Russia, I learned that we all need each other.2

Though I had reservations at first about David’s absences in faraway places, his sharing these experiences on occasion with his family and bringing people from those places into our home gave us all opportunity to see the world in exceptional ways. David’s approach to life was unique, and his careful and creative use of words was no exception. He believed that words shaped character and clarified thinking. Christiana writes that her father’s approach to words was life changing for her.

My dad was very careful with words. He used phrases that became part of our family lexicon like “Sweet sleep” instead of “Good night.” A word spoken to him in anger or frustration was met with the response: “Remember to give thanks to the Father above.”

He began church services and ended his emails with: “Grace and peace”

And he infuriated hospital and hospice nurses near the end of his life when they asked, “What is your pain level today, Mr. Worley?” because he would reply the way he always did to a question about how he was doing: “I’m very blessed.”

My dad’s language could sound strange, atypical, slightly off-kilter when you first heard it. His words were certainly apt to make you pause, reconsider, and wonder. And truthfully, I think that was his purpose.

My dad loved words, but he was also a man of few words. As his daughter, and especially as a teenager, I found that his lack of words could be annoying; his cryptic one sentence or one-word email responses just weren’t satisfying. I just wanted him to communicate like a normal person.

But eventually, as I matured, I began to realize that what had frustrated me as a teenager was something that became a cherished part of who I was: Dad passed his love of words onto me. But I think I’ve come to the conclusion that my Dad didn’t use words in the same way that I do, that most of us do: he didn’t use them primarily to communicate a shared experience.

Instead, he believed that using the most biblical language, the truest language, pushed him and the rest of us forward toward the Kingdom.

My dad used words sparingly and very specifically because he believed that every word counted. Every word had meaning. Every word spoken had the capacity to reveal our true spirits and also change our hearts. And for those of us who knew him, his consistent use of Kingdom language revealed a gentle, generous, and unique man of God.

I feel very blessed to be his daughter.3

In Christ Twenty-Four Hours a Day

I met David Worley on his first day of high school choir at Eastern Hills High School in Fort Worth, Texas. It was our junior year, 1965. He was fifteen. We did not begin dating until the end of that year, but I remember vividly on the day I met him that he wore a plaid button-down shirt, a dark cardigan, and khaki-colored corduroy jeans that were a trifle too short. He had dark curly hair, beautiful green eyes, and tan skin. He was quiet in a crowd and smart, but had a ready laugh. I especially remember his low, resonant radio voice that I would later come to understand he had inherited from his father.

David’s father had died unexpectedly a year earlier. That loss and the McKay melancholy inherited from his mother’s side of the family would help to form his character, and give him both direction and challenges as he matured.

His family had assumed he would go to Texas Tech University as both his parents had. Then, they assumed, he would earn a degree in business and join his mother, Iva Lea, overseeing their radio stations in Austin, Lubbock, and Lovington, New Mexico. But David, newly baptized, was beginning to take a new direction. He often said in those high school years, “I just want to know what God’s will is.” He carried his black Bible with him when we went to church, and I could tell by looking at it and hearing him speak about what he read that he was reading it often. So, as a freshman at Abilene Christian College in 1967, he took one business course but began his work toward a BA in biblical Greek. He labored to understand what Scripture in its original language really said and what it meant in his life. We...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: David Worley as Husband and Father
• Chapter 2: His Hands
• Chapter 3: David Worley as Mentor
• Chapter 4: David Worley as Student
• Chapter 5: David Worley as Entrepreneur
• Chapter 6: Memories of a Father
• Chapter 7: A Shepherd in Word and Administration
• Chapter 8: David Worley as Churchman
• Chapter 9: Living to the Praise of God’s Glory
• Chapter 10: David Worley as Missions Promoter
• Chapter 11: David Worley and the Mission of God
• Chapter 12: David Worley as Lecture and Teaching Planner
• Chapter 13: David Worley as Worship Planner
• Chapter 14: My Own Experience as a Friend
• Chapter 15: David Worley as Teacher
• Chapter 16: David Worley as Fundraiser
• Chapter 17: David Worley as Philanthropist
• Chapter 18: The Center for Heritage and Renewal in Spirituality (CHARIS) at Abilene Christian University
• Images