In Memoriam: Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes

In Memoriam

Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes

The Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes died of pancreatic cancer on Easter morning, April 16, 2017. Dennis was one of the finest men and surely the finest pastor I have ever known. He was a scholar. He was a saint of the church. The world is a lesser place for him no longer being in it. I will not be able to attend Dennis’ memorial service because I have an unavoidable work conflict at its scheduled time on May 20, 2017. So I want here to recount my memories of Dennis and give some idea of what he meant to me on my journey from law to professional ministry.

I met Dennis in 1993. I was a practicing attorney at the time and a member of the Interim Minister Search Committee of Richmond Beach Congregational Church, UCC, in Shoreline, Washington, USA. Dennis applied for our interim position. He was one of two candidates I remember interviewing, or maybe we interviewed three. I was immediately impressed. Dennis had gravitas, but also seemed to be a really nice guy. We knew he was a Presbyterian not a member of the UCC, which made his application to be our interim minister seem a bit odd. He was between calls in the PCUSA, the denomination in which he was ordained, and was looking for work I guess. After we had talked to him for a while I asked him one last question. I knew that the Presbyterians in the Seattle area were notoriously conservative. They still are, but Richmond Beach UCC was not. So I said: We are an Open and Affirming church. What is your position on that issue? He said: “I’m open to and affirming of that.” Indeed we learned over our time with him that he was. We offered him the position, and he accepted.

During most of Dennis’ year and a half or so of interim ministry at RBCC I was the Moderator of that congregation, so I got to work with Dennis a bit more closely that I otherwise would have. We got to know each other fairly well. There was one thing Dennis never got used to serving a UCC as opposed to a PCUSA church. As Moderator I presided at the meetings of the Church Council. In a PCUSA church the pastor presides at the meetings of the Session, a Presbyterian church’s equivalent of our Church Council. Dennis told me he never got used to not presiding at those meetings. Still, he worked well with us. I came to admire and respect him all the more over our time together at RBCC.

During his time with us Dennis offered several sessions in which he introduced us to the psychology of Carl Jung. Dennis had practiced some as a Jungian analyst in addition to his work as a Presbyterian pastor. I knew nothing of Jungian psychology at the time, but I found it absolutely captivating as Dennis introduced us to it. It is psychology that, among other virtues, is so much more open to religious experience than Freudian psychology is. In 1994 I was just beginning to burn out on law and enter into a time of depression that eventually led to my leaving law and going into pastoral ministry. At some point in our time together at RBCC Dennis gave me the business card of another Jungian analyst he knew, the Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, an Episcopal priest and graduate of the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. I put the card in my wallet and gave it no more thought. For reasons I still don’t quite understand but for which I am most grateful, three years later, in 1997, I pulled it out and called Kimbrough. I made my first appointment with him. In February of the this year we passed our twentieth anniversary of my seeing Kimbrough at least once a month. Seeing Kimbrough professionally is a major part of my self-care in ministry. Kimbrough knew before I did that I was done with law and was moving to something else in my professional life. He helped me see that all the reasons I had for not making a change, while on some level true, just didn’t matter. I never would have made that connection with Kimbrough without Dennis.

I remember a few things Dennis told me about ministry while we were at RBCC. He told me “there is no non-dangerous theology.” He told me that “bad theology kills people.” He was absolutely right about both of those things. There is no non-dangerous theology because bad theology warps souls and even kills bodies by making people violent. Good theology is dangerous because it turns the world on its head. It changes how we see everything in life. Dennis was a very deep thinker. He had a Ph.D. in pastoral theology from the University of Notre Dame, and the advanced work he had done in that field showed in how he thought and how he approached pastoral ministry.

I kept in touch with Dennis some over the years after he left RBCC. In September, 1997, I entered the M.Div. program of the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University. Dennis was pastor of Northminster Presbyterian Church in the Ballard district of Seattle by then, and he was one of the advisors of the Presbyterian students at IETS. He had become something of a mentor and advisor to me as I entered seminary and prepared for professional ministry. I saw him fairly regularly in those years. During the 1999-2000 academic year I served as a pastoral intern under Dennis at Northminster. Mostly what I learned from Dennis that year was liturgy. Although Dennis’ Ph.D. was in pastoral ministry not liturgy, he became one of the leading voices of the liturgy reform movement in the Presbyterian Church and beyond. He served for a time as Associate for Worship at the national offices of the PCUSA. My experience with Dennis made me what I have called a “high church Congregationalist.”

I remember one conversation with Dennis in particular from that year. I was a member of University Congregational United Church of Christ near the University of Washington in Seattle while I was in seminary, having left the Richmond Beach church over a disagreement that I later came to understand had more to do with me than with the church. On the same big block just north of the campus are located the church buildings of both University Congregational UCC and University Presbyterian Church, PCUSA. In the early 1990s University Congregational called the Rev. David Schull and the Rev. Peter Ilgenfritz to job-share a pastoral position with the church. David and Peter were at that time a committed gay couple. When University Congregational called them to be part of its pastoral staff the lead pastor at University Presbyterian announced that University Congregational was no longer a Christian church. Never mind that David and Peter are two of the best men, best pastors, and best preachers I have ever met. I said to Dennis once that I found it odd that University Congregational and University Presbyterian are next door neighbors and that they belong to denominations that have a strong cooperative agreement with each other but that those two local churches have nothing to do with each other. Dennis said “that’s because they believe in different Gods.” He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have. One of those churches believes in a God of grace and love, the other believes in a God of rules and judgment. Dennis was a Presbyterian, but his God was the God of University Congregational not the God of University Presbyterian, the largest PCUSA church in Seattle.

I graduated from IETS with my M. Div. in December, 2000. Shortly thereafter my wife Francie, with whom I had been together since 1972 and who was the mother of my two children, was diagnosed with terminal metastatic breast cancer. I sought pastoral support from the pastors of my church, University Congregational. Francie had not been attending church for a while, and I asked Dennis if he would in effect be her chaplain through her terminal illness. He agreed. Dennis spoke at my ordination in the UCC on June 9, 2002. Later that year, on the night Francie died, July 31, 2002, I called Dennis. He came to our home, which was quite some distance from his, to be with my son, my daughter, and me as we wept and grieved. Several weeks later Dennis crafted and led Francie’s memorial service at Northminster. His presence as pastor, colleague, and friend in those horrible days didn’t make the grief go away, but it sure helped.

A few years later, in late 2006, I wrote my first book on a theological subject, the book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium. I thought the book was good and important, but I didn’t have much confidence that I was right about that. I’d never written anything like it before, and my Ph.D. is in Russian history not theology. I gave a copy of the manuscript to Dennis and waited to see if he would respond to it. It took him a few months to do it, but on July 31, 2007, the fifth anniversary of Francie’s death, he called me and reminded me of that sad anniversary. He’d read the manuscript of Liberating Christianity, which has not yet been accepted anywhere for publication. Frankly, he blew me away. I recorded his remarks in my journal. I wrote: “[Dennis] was almost embarrassingly complimentary about [the book]. He called it important not only for educated but [for] theologically uninformed laypersons but for pastors who, he says, are searching for language.” He said I had carefully worked out such language in my book. He said it was thoughtfully written. I wrote “YES! Dennis loves my book….Halleluiah! That book that seems so good and so important to me really is good and important!” Dennis’ affirmation of that book meant the world to me. I would get other affirmations of it from other highly respected people in the worlds of the church and of academic theology, but Dennis’ was the first. He made a tremendous difference to me that day.

I lost contact with Dennis in recent years, something that I regret. Earlier this year he sent me an email and told me of his illness. He said he’d call me so we could get together, but he never did. I suppose he had a lot of people to see and that perhaps his illness was progressing faster than he had hoped. I haven’t seen him for some time, but I will miss knowing he’s there. Dennis was one of the more important people in my life. He was a teacher, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. He was one of the wisest men I have ever known. He did Reformed liturgy better than anyone else I have ever known. He was a minister of progressive vision who worked in a denomination much of which did not and does not share that vision. He knew that God loves all people, not just the people of whom some judgmental church approves. He loved being a church pastor, and sometimes he found that work as difficult as we all do. Once during my time with him as an intern at Northminster he told me he was getting so tired of burying his friends. He was thoroughly professional in his work, but he was also a loving man who cared deeply about the people he served. He felt their joys and their pains, and he grieved their deaths.

Now he has gone to join those who have passed. His suffering from cancer is over. I thank God that Dennis was part of my life. I am a better person and a better pastor for having known him and worked with him. So thank you Dennis, and rest in peace. Men like you do not pass this way often. I am so pleased that for a while you passed my way in life. I will never forget you.