In August 2015, I received an email from Rev. Larry Althouse’s wife, musician/composer Katy Freiberger, that he’d had an accident at home which resulted in a broken neck. In his recovery, she explained, he wouldn’t be able to sit at his computer and write for a while.

 

But regular readers of Larry’s column, “The Bible Speaks,” might not have even noticed (although some did note the change of focus from the Uniform Bible Lessons (UBL) outline he usually followed). Without charging the newspapers that published his column any extra, Larry paid someone to type up several columns through the end of that year under his direction, using material from his book Sixty Days With Luke.

This is the sense of responsibility I’ve noticed infusing Larry’s dedication to his column and to Christianity. Since he took over writing “Speaks” in July 1966 from Dr. Kenneth Foreman for the National Council of Churches (NCC), the sourcing for its outlines had passed through a number of doors, from one organization or group to another.

(If you want to read the history behind what the UBL is, just go to http://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/cus/?page_id=9 online – it’s too long to recount here.)

A few years ago, Larry finally ran into a situation where no one was supplying the UBL outlines to him, and he had to track down his own source, who agreed to supply them – but that well finally dried up, too. For the last two months, he’s had to come up with his own sources of column ideas.

Between the lack of outlines and his advanced age, shortly after his 87th birthday in March, Larry notified the editors of the roughly dozen newspapers for which he still wrote that he would be penning his last column in May – the one in last week’s Farm World.

Let me share some personal things about Larry. He’s been contributing “The Bible Speaks” to this paper for decades; I’ve been editing him for one of those. In 10 years I’ve noticed he seems less worried about the letter of Scripture than the overall spirit of Jesus he gets from what Christianity intends, without regard for denomination or worldly influence – although he has written on the importance of updating Christ’s enduring message to reach out to modern parishioners.

“I often say, ‘What would Jesus say? What would Jesus do?,’” he reflected, when talking about how he fashioned his columns. “I try to open people to thinking outside the box.”

As a young minister he remembered hearing a local school was sending students to events on Sundays to play in bands, and being irate that school officials were preventing them from coming to church. He’s since changed his thinking – “They didn’t really owe us anything,” he explained, adding it’s a church’s place to reach young people, not kids’ job to attend nor schools’ to force it.

In the last few years, he became more forthright in writing about topics he believes Christians should address, including politics. Followers of Christ, he said, ought to try to influence their government through people, but not be of the government itself – citing importance of continued separation of church and state.

Also, people are going to argue even within a church. “(Some ministers) think because it’s Christian there’s not any conflict; that’s not realistic … I think every pastor ought to have an easy church for about five years,” then move to one that tests their capacity to resolve conflicts.

Having worked as a minister in his native Pennsylvania, as well as New York and Dallas, Texas – where he retired from First United Methodist Church in 1995 after 18 years there – he’s learned that “God has to escape the dimensions of humanity.” If anyone could adequately explain God, or what happens after death, or the Resurrection, religion wouldn’t be needed.

Larry originally earned a business degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, intending to follow his father into insurance. But, “I think in my sophomore year, someone told me that our pastor at home thought I would go into the church,” he said, adding it seemed “ridiculous.”

Suggestion is powerful, though – and the more he thought about it, the more sense the ministry made. Following Wharton, he attended seminary in Ohio and New York, ministered to adults and children and, by 1960 at age 30, was helping write youth curriculum for a Methodist church in Yonkers, N.Y.

He was rotating with other writers on a column called “Prayer for Today” in 1965 when he was asked by the NCC if he wanted to take over “Speaks” from Dr. Foreman. “If they would have asked me to write this for the next 50 years, I would’ve said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” he recalled.

 

But time passes, and if you enjoy what you do – as Larry did with “Speaks,” particularly after he retired from the church and had more time – it can pass in a relative blink.

Larry’s dedication to God coexists with his interest in science. Long ago he was on the board of the Isthmus Institute, a Dallas-based group that explored the relationship between religion and science, and is a member of the International Assoc. for Near-Death Studies. And, he’s done a lot more, including being paid as a movie extra (in 1977’s “Semi-Tough,” if you’re interested, although he warns “my best shots ended up on the proverbial cutting-room floor”) and a consultant to Swiss Air Lines for its religious tours; marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in D.C.; and even journalism.

He wrote an editorial for the high school paper in the 1940s criticizing a prominent athletic figure – it lost him the editor-in-chief job, but caught the notice of his community newspaper, which gave him a sports column.

So far I’ve met Larry once at a dinner, in 2009 when I had to go to Dallas for work. He and his second wife, Valere (who passed away two years later), were not what I expected from a religious couple in their seventies who wrote books and conducted classes on relationships. They were funny, youthful and laid-back.

He’s still that way, whether talking about what he may do next (besides driving himself for the first time in two years when his doctor clears him to do so later this summer!) or planning a trip to watch one of his two granddaughters marry in England.

“It’s amazing,” he said last month of having done “Speaks” for almost 51 years. “I never expected to be 87 … but I’ll take 88, and 89, and more.”

-Ann Hinch

Associate Editor