A Tribute to Ellsworth Kalas
By: Dr. Kenneth Cain Kinghorn
J. Ellsworth Kalas was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on 14 February 1923, the same year that Henry Clay Morrison began Asbury Theological Seminary. The members of the Kalas household went to church twice weekly, and the family attended church every night during its frequent revival meetings. Father and Mother Kalas had limited formal educations, yet they were readers and faithful Sunday school workers. Ellsworth’s father was intellectually curious enough about national and world events to subscribe to The Sioux City Tribune, even though it cost three cents a day and five cents on Sundays. This was a time when many workers in the United States received a wage of $1 a day. Ellsworth said of his parents, “I will never stop marveling at their courage; not the courage of a moment in raw battle or in crisis, but the 24/7 courage to get up every morning . . . struggle to find work, and eat modestly.”
Ellsworth was six when the Great Depression blanketed America; 25 percent of the country’s wage earners lost their jobs, including Ellsworth’s father. To economize during those difficult days, Ellsworth went barefoot in the summer to avoid adding wear to his shoes. To obtain inexpensive housing, the family moved into an apartment that had no running water, but it was available from a faucet across the hall. Two bathrooms—one for men and one for women—accommodated a dozen apartments. Years later, Ellsworth remarked, “Today, some of my friends have walk-in closets bigger than any bedroom I knew in my boyhood. . . . But we had a surprising sense of dignity and self-respect, and we believed that virtue had its own rewards, and we intended to pursue those virtues.” When he was a child, Ellsworth sometimes sat on the front steps and saluted those who passed by with a hearty “Good morning.” Later he mused, “This experience may have prepared me for the long decades of greeting people at church doors on several thousand Sunday mornings.”
Ellsworth said that he was awkward on the elementary school playground but agile in the classroom. “I didn’t survive even the first cut when I went out for the football and basketball teams,” he wrote, “but this meant that I gave my full energy to the debate team and the a cappella choir—matters far, far more valuable to me in the years since then.”
When Ellsworth was ten, he came to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Others noticed that he was serious about God and the activities of the church. His family attended the Helping Hand Mission Church, which had begun as a rescue mission. “There was nothing glamorous about this church experience, nothing to make me think the ministry was a profession,” he later reflected. Nonetheless, as a boy he sensed that God was calling him to become a clergyman. He bought a five-cent notebook in which he recorded sermon illustrations and information gleaned from the sermons he heard. In junior high, his good grades qualified him to take Latin, which he opted to do. He understood that Latin would give him a better grasp of language and grammar, both of which would make him a better preacher when he grew up.
At the age of ten, Kalas began to read the Bible each year, a practice he continued to follow throughout the years. Decades later, he said, “Every day I find something new. . . . The newness is a result of the depth of the material and the quite wonderful way the Holy Spirit adapts it to the changing patterns of my life. . . . All of the . . . books I’ve written . . . are a product of my lifetime of Bible reading.”
When Kalas attended the fiftieth reunion of his high school class, a former classmate showed him a printed interview that had appeared in an eighth-grade student publication. “My answers were almost unbelievably inane,” he tells. “But when the interviewer asked what I hoped to be when I grew up, I answered something like this: ‘I want to be a preacher and write books.’” In his mid-eighties Kalas said: “When I recall some of the arrogant things I said in my teens and twenties, I’m astonished that God didn’t judge me a hopeless case and smite me dead.”
In 1951, the University of Wisconsin awarded Kalas a B.A. degree in literature, with honors. In 1954, he obtained his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Garrett Theological Seminary. There, he received the Trustees Award for Scholarship and the Kidder Preaching Prize. He then took further graduate study in American history at the University of Wisconsin, and at Harvard University. Dr. Kalas received honorary degrees from Lawrence University, Asbury Theological Seminary, and Kentucky Wesleyan College.
Kalas served Methodist pastorates for thirty-eight years in Watertown, Green Bay, and Madison, Wisconsin, and in Cleveland, Ohio. He also served for five years as associate evangelist with the World Methodist Council (1988–93). He authored more than forty books, prepared lectures for a variety of occasions, and wrote twelve Sunday school quarterlies for the United Methodist Church. Dr. Kalas prepared a groundbreaking study, Christian Believer, designed to teach Christian theology to lay people.
In 1993, Ellsworth joined Asbury Theological Seminary’s faculty as a professor of preaching, and in 2004 he became director of the Seminary’s Beeson International Center. In 2006, during a time of administrative transition at the Seminary, the school’s Board of Trustees asked him to become interim president of the school. During Kalas’s years as a pastor, he had declined invitations to be considered for college and seminary presidencies. He declined these overtures. However, the invitation to lead Asbury Seminary was different. He recalled, “When [board chairman] Jim Smith . . . asked me to allow my name to be considered as the interim leader at Asbury, I knew that I must say yes.” Ellsworth Kalas’s presidential term began on 18 October 2006. He was eighty-four years old.
With Ellsworth serving as interim president, the trustees had the necessary time to conduct a national search for the next president. This search lasted two years. By any measure, the responsibilities of a seminary president are extensive, and the many roles are intricately convoluted. A seminary president must relate effectively—always in the context of Christian ministry—to a board of trustees, denominational officials, mission boards, faculty, staffers, students, alumni, and donors. Each of these relationships is different, and they all require wisdom and spiritual maturity. Robert E. Cooley, the retired president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, said, “The presidency of a major theological seminary is now one of the hardest jobs in America.”
Kalas had a good understanding of the church and of the academic world, and he epitomized the spirit, theology, and mission of Asbury Theological Seminary. His integrity, wisdom, and interpersonal skills fitted him for the presidency. As a bonus, he was one of the best preachers in America. President Kalas’s leadership proved so effective in the several areas where leadership was most needed, that the Board of Trustees, at their spring 2008 meeting, “with great enthusiasm” voted to change his title from Interim President to President. When he retired from the presidency of Asbury Seminary in 2009, Dr. Kalas continued to teach homiletics. He championed the practice of preaching without notes, and he encouraged his students develop this ability.
When he retired, the Minutes of the Board of Trustees read: “This action was taken as an expression of the immense appreciation and respect the Board and community have for Ellsworth and in acknowledgement of the reality that he is being ‘presidential’ in every sense of the word in moving the seminary forward in so many areas. His capable leadership is strengthening in every way the position and platform that the new president will have when such time comes.”
Thank you so much for this beautiful tribute to Dr. Kalas. This morning I cherish this time to reflect on his inspiring life and example as one called into ministry. As I join with my sisters at this clergywomen conference for the SEJ, my heart smiles, with memories of Dr. Kalas. Oh, how I miss him.
Kalas was a great preacher and lived what he taught. he taught