MEMORIAL: ROBERT L. BROWNINGJune 19, 1924–May 11, 2008

Charles R. FosterSalem, OR, USA

Robert L. Browning, retired Chryst Professor of Christian Educationat the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, died May 11, 2008 af-ter a bout with pancreatic cancer. His professional accomplishmentsare many. He was a popular teacher and mentor, author or co-authorof books that helped shape the field, and innovative practitioner ofteaching and learning in theological education, inter-professional ed-ucation, and at the intersection of public and religious education.

A strong sense of family, school sports, and music activities, andwhat he once described as the “warm, pietistic, but honest and realisticfaith community” of First Christian Church anchored his childhoodand teen years in Trenton, Missouri. He attended Missouri ValleyCollege before entering Union Theological Seminary under the aus-pices of the United States Navy’s V-12 officer training program. AtUnion he discovered through his reading of John Dewey and GeorgeAlbert Coe sources to the liberal progressivism that had influencedthe religious nurture of his childhood. At Union the theological as-sumptions of his childhood faith were also radically challenged bythe neo-orthodox conversation that enlivened the teaching of Rein-hold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Pitney Van Dusen, John Knox, DavidRoberts, James Muilenberg, and Samuel Terrien. The creative tensionhe experienced at Union between liberal and neo-orthodox theologies“forced” him, in his words, to embrace Kierkegaard’s categories ofsin, grace, and reconciliation as central themes in his own developingunderstanding of Christian education.

Bob began ministry as a student intern in the Old Stone Church ofMeadville, Pennsylvania in 1946, was ordained to the ministry of theDisciples of Christ Church in 1947, graduated from Union in 1948,and stayed on at the Old Stone Church as its Minister of Education. In1949 he transferred his ordination to The Methodist Church. In 1951he returned to Union to continue his studies in Christian educationwhile serving the Community Church at the Circle in Mt. Vernon, NewYork as its Minister of Education. In 1953 he joined the staff of NorthBroadway Methodist Church in Columbus, Ohio and began studies

Religious Education Copyright C© The Religious Education AssociationVol. 104 No. 4 July–September ISSN: 0034–4087 print

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for his Ph.D. at Ohio State University. He completed that degree in1959 with a dissertation exploring the influence of Soren Kierkegaardon American Protestant Christian education. That same year he joinedthe faculty of the newly established Methodist Theological School inOhio in Delaware, Ohio, where he remained until his retirement in1989.

Bob wrote several books beginning with Communicating withJunior Highs (1968),the standard guide to junior high youth min-istry for many years. He directed an extended research project onself-instruction in leadership training sponsored by the Board of Ed-ucation and Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church.This project culminated in a series of co-authored and field-testedself-instruction materials including Communicating the Faith withChildren (1971) recipient of the Paul M. Hinkhouse Award, Ways theBible Comes Alive (1975), Ways Persons Become Christian (1976),and Looking at Leadership Through the Eyes of Biblical Faith (1978).He also co-authored the Foundations document (1979) that guidedUnited Methodist Church policies and programs of Christian educa-tion for many years. He edited The Pastor as Educator (1989) evenas he began working with his Methodist Theological School colleagueand professor of worship Roy Reed on a series of three books that tookan explicitly ecumenical and interfaith stance in developing a sacra-mental theology emphasizing the integration of education and liturgy.Those three books include The Sacraments in Religious Educationand Liturgy (1985), Models of Confirmation and Baptismal Affir-mation (1995), and Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Moral Courage(2004).

Bob was a popular and creative teacher in the seminary classroom,the church, and with inter-professional groups. Students sometimescompared Bob’s teaching style to that of an orchestra conductor. Thatimage fit my own experience of his teaching, first in 1965 when Iwas a graduate student attending a national conference in which hewas the keynote speaker and later, as his colleague, in a series ofcourses that we taught together. In the conference he was responsiblefor four hour-long sessions in a hotel ballroom with an audience ofmore than 1000 people. He began with a brief presentation outliningkey themes in the work of Kierkegaard relevant to an understandingof contemporary Christian education. Rather quickly he guided usinto table and then plenary discussions, where with a wave of hishand he gathered us from here and there across that large room intoconversation with each other.

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Three years later, immediately after I had joined the MethodistTheological School faculty, Bob invited me to teach the introductorycourse with him. In that class he continued to conduct the conver-sation. At times the progression of the conversation followed someinternal structure that he brought to it, not unlike the way a conductormight follow the score of a symphony. At other times, the conversationbetween us and with members of the class flowed with the spontaneitytypically associated with the improvisations in jazz. As I grew to knowBob I discovered that the influence of music on what and how hetaught should have been no surprise. From an early age he had partic-ipated in big band, jazz, marching band, orchestra, and choral groups.Trumpet was his instrument. He loved to dance and often describedhis interaction with students as “doing the soft-shoe” together.

Bob was also a major catalyst to pedagogical innovation in andbeyond the seminary. He anticipated the contemporary emphases oncontext, practice, and theologizing from practice in theological edu-cation when he included a week of laboratory teaching in his requiredintroductory course in Christian education. This placed students withlaity from a local congregation in a shared experience of learning toteach by critical reflection on their practice of teaching children andyouth. He deepened this emphasis on contextualization in the dualM.Div/M.A. degree program in Christian education that he helpedestablish. It emphasized the engagements of students in collaborativelearning projects with clergy and laity in congregational and commu-nity settings. He helped establish an early childhood learning centeron campus as a laboratory setting for student learning. With severalcolleagues he developed a design for a Professional Quarter clinicalcourse in which students explored the interdependence of Christianeducation, pastoral care, and church administration on site in the lifeof a congregation guided by a faculty member and pastor teachingteam. He brought this attention to context in his role as director ofthe Inter-professional Program at Ohio State where he helped designcourses in which students from different professional schools identi-fied and analyzed together the interplay of legal, religious, medical,economic, and social issues in cases.

Bob filled many leadership roles in the seminary and in denomi-national, ecumenical, professional, and inter-professional settings. Hehelped establish and then served as the director of the Commissionon Interprofessional Education and Practice between 1974 and 1979involving the professional schools of Ohio State University and thethree seminaries in the Columbus, Ohio area. He was a member of

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the Religious Education Association, the Association of Professors andResearchers of Religious Education (serving as president in 1989),the United Methodist Christian Educators Fellowship, the UnitedMethodist Association of Scholars in Christian Education, the reli-gion and public education task force of the Ohio Council of Churches(co-chair from 1963–73), the Curriculum Committee of the UnitedMethodist Board of Discipleship (for two four-year terms), the Boardof Ministry of the United Methodist West Ohio Annual Conference(1982–89), the Ohio State University Wesley Foundation (1960–78),and the Southside Settlement in Columbus, Ohio (1968–74). In 1989Bob became senior counselor for the Council for Ethics in Economicsand helped design the Council’s First International Conference forBusiness Leaders on Building the Ethics of Business in a Global Econ-omy in 1992. He also chaired the Council’s moral development taskforce, which became an associate of the Ohio Department of Edu-cation in the Ohio Partners in Character Education project in 1998.With a major grant this group supported character education projectsin schools across the state. In 1999 the Ohio state senate confirmedthe Governor’s appointment of Bob to the Ohio Ethics Commission,which had the responsibility of promoting ethics at all levels of stateand local government.

Bob was preceded in death by his first wife Jean whom he hadmet as a student intern in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He is survivedby his wife of more than twenty-five years, Jackie Rogers Browning,his brother Don, Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Social Sciences atthe University of Chicago Divinity School, his sister Carolyn Muncy,a musician and educator, four children and their spouses, three step-children and their spouses, fourteen grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

As I bring these reflections on the life of Bob Browning to a close,how does one begin to take the measure of the man and his influence?Perhaps one way is to note how seriously he took the familiar, themundane and everyday—whether it be the routines of organizing ajunior high youth ministry; thinking theologically about the pastoralactivity of teaching; the practice of teaching a class; reflecting onthe relationship between some practice of faith and its context; theroutine challenges of professional practice—and with a little soft shoedance of the mind or practice, change the rhythm of our thinking,the shape of our practice, or the patterns of our communication andinteraction. Perhaps another way is to recognize the generosity ofspirit that enlivened his relationships with students and colleagues,

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his practice as a teacher, his sensitivity to the range of theological andreligious perspectives to be found in both church and public life, andhis leadership on church and public boards and agencies. In thesevarious roles Bob was not only a student of the dynamics of sin, grace,and reconciliation in Christian education theory and practice, he wasan agent of reconciling grace.

Charles R. Foster lives in Salem, OR. He is Professor of Religion andEducation Emeritus of Candler School of Theology, Emory University.