Ambassadors
Evangelical Single Young Adults in the 1970s …and the angst of young people today.
December 2024
(A shorter version of this article is available on my Substack page: substack.com/@kendaniel2)
We are growing old now, and our numbers are decreasing with age. We have children and grandchildren. But I want to write about our youth, our twenties and thirties, which means the 1970s. I recall the opening scene in the movie Chariots of Fire, the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1981. An elderly man makes his way to the cathedral podium at the funeral of his Olympic teammate from over 50 years before. He says something like “Now there are only two of us left, young Aubrey Montagu and me…. but there was a time in which we were young, and had wings on our feet.” Then the action switches to that iconic scene of runners on the beach and the sound of the haunting sound track by Vangelis. I am starting to feel similar feelings as I age into my eighties, as I recall my time in the Ambassadors Fellowship, when we were young, full of dreams, and also had wings on our feet.
There has been much in the media lately about the dilemma of young single adults: millennial, Gen-Z, and some older. Delayed marriages, no children or delayed parenthood. But not much happiness. Uncertainties regarding career satisfaction, settling down. Uncertainty in desire and uncertain in ability to execute or acquire. All these factors affected by the new digital landscape with its distraction from normal relationships. The prevalence of online dating, a “Failure to Launch,” and much anxiety. A decline in faith and church attendance for some time, but recent signs of an upswing, perhaps an indicator of the failure of secular culture to fulfill.
I want to talk about a counter example from an earlier generation, my own. Of some who did find hope and fulfillment in the middle of that troubled generation, one which had been, in its own way, looking for optimism in ways that would disappoint. By contrast, a large group of singles in a Washington DC church in the 1970s, and what we learned from our friendships and faith, then and over the years since.
Imagine a warm Sunday evening, the parking lot of a Presbyterian church in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, DC. It is late in the evening, after 10, but people are still milling around, in small clusters, just talking and enjoying being with each other before the Washington work week starting the next morning. About fifty to a hundred single young adults, still hanging around after the evening meeting of a group called The Ambassadors. They had first gone to the evening church service and heard the Reverend Richard Halverson deliver the sermon. The sanctuary was pretty much full, perhaps 800 people, with the left rear quadrant taken up by us. This is noteworthy in two ways, not only that there were a couple of hundred young singles, but the fact of a Sunday evening service at all. That was largely because of the spiritual magnetism of Dr. Halverson, or Dick as he like to be called. He would become Chaplain of the U.S. Senate in the early 80s. Most churches by this era had abandoned Sunday evenings, but Dick’s sermons drew us there rather than more secular Sunday night alternatives such as the Georgetown bar scene. We had all been there and done that by that time in our lives. That is why we came for something else, and Dick Halverson was the evening opener for us.
We would next proceed to a large assembly room called the Upper Room for our meeting, around 200 of us. After mixing it up for a time socializing, we would sit around tables, or chairs theater style for some music and singing. Just piano and acoustic guitar, maybe some vocalists up front. None of the theatrics of contemporary “worship teams” in todays mega churches, no drums to signify that the action was about to start. There would be an emcee of a sort, Chairman of the Committee that set the group agenda and picked the speakers and coordinated the wide flung activities that came to dominate the Washington experience of our youth. The activities announced would include a number of small group bible studies located around the area, at least six or so, each drawing 12–40 people, mixed guys and girls.
Note that I used the term “girls,” an anachronistic term today which could get you cancelled if you use it in public instead of “women.” But we actually did refer ourselves as the guys and the girls, so I will do that in this essay. We still do today.
Other activities could include various volunteer programs around the city, short term mission opportunities, and so forth. There might be a ski trip to Austria being organized, around 30 or so traveling to Kitzbuhel where we would stay at a 12th century castle, Schloss Mittersill, a spiritual retreat center owned by the international branch of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Many of us would have encountered InterVarsity on our college campuses.
Or, there might be a solicitation for shareholders to rent a summer beach house at Rehoboth Beach, a couple of hours east on the Delaware coast. We would easily find 40 people to share the summer rental of a house a block from the boardwalk. Pay your $150 and the 40 of us would put together the $6,000 (remember this was the mid-70s, before these numbers inflated by a multiple) to rent a large Victorian house with a large front porch. It would sleep about 45 if you put 4 to a room, sleeping bags helped. Free for shareholders, $7 a night for others. Just enjoying the beach, eating together at a table for 20 or so at The Avenue restaurant. Strolling the boardwalk, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch reading the increasingly interesting evangelical books coming out during those years. Sunday morning sunrise service on the beach, curious walkers stopping to listen, sometimes joining.
Sunday nights were the focal point activity of the group for the first few years, until we also started a large Sunday morning Bible study meeting at a civic center community room. It was very successful, but I have always felt that the Sunday evening meetings were the soul of the group. After announcements, there would be a speaker, usually from outside the church. Before the speaker, there might be a skit to focus attention on an upcoming activity. By skit, I mean something like you see on Saturday Night Live, but ours were amateur, but often hilarious.
If you saw the 2023 movie “The Jesus Generation” with Kelsey Grammer you get a snapshot of our generation, with an exception. In that movie pastor Chuck Smith was ministering to the counterculture, the “hippies” of that era. We were not hippies. Many people think that hippie culture dominated those years, late 60s early 70s. That was not really the case, broadly speaking, and we were the mainstream kids from colleges all over the country. I wouldn’t venture a guess of the percentage of this generation that were actually part of the counterculture, but nowhere near the majority, if the influx of young people into DC is representative. Of the large swath that were actually counterculture, there emerged a significant minority that turned to Jesus, a sort of “get high on Jesus, not drugs” movement. Some of our number in Ambassadors came out of that group, but most were just “silent majority” types, like me. I got my Army draft physical notice and managed to divert to Navy Officers Candidate School, then to DC where I found Ambassadors. I was not unusual; several of my friends came to the group as Viet Nam era military officers, some after serving in Viet Nam. We did have one notable hippie associated with Ambassadors. Lon Solomon was a young seminary graduate who taught our Sunday morning class for a time, and spoke at two of our Retreat getaway weekends. Lon is Jewish, and had been an acid-dealing hippie at UNC Chapel Hill, even gone to Woodstock, but came to faith in Christ, the only convert of a street preacher in Chapel Hill. But Lon was not typical, and still isn’t. He did make a teaching impact on Ambassadors during the early days, and later went on to lead McLean Bible church as it grew to become a “mega-church” of thousands.
Sunday night meetings would feature an outside speaker, and in this Ambassadors differed from many other youth groups which were organized around in house speakers. The 1970s were an exciting era in the growth of the evangelical world and there were any number of the luminaries of that movement who found their way to Sunday night Ambassadors. Those familiar with the times may recognize such names as Charles Colson, coming to us as a new believer following his Watergate days, just prior to going to prison. Chuck would of course gain a different sort of fame by founding Prison Fellowship. We got him when he was literally a “baby Christian,” and he was indeed a very humbled person. One of our guys later would drive Chuck’s wife Patty regularly to visit Chuck in prison.
I could list many names of Evangelical leaders who spoke to us. Rev John Stott from London was as much of a personification of the Evangelical world as you could find. The founder of World Vision, Bob Pierce, and Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ each spoke. This period was before Evangelicals became associated with the Religious Right, so not every speaker was from that side of the political spectrum. Senator Mark Hatfield was a liberal Republican who was close to Dick Halverson (and helped disciple Chuck Colson). Ron Sider, author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was generally associated with the “Evangelical Left”. Letha Scanzoni was well known for her militant Christian Feminist teaching. Ron Sider left a positive impression overall, Scanzoni less so. Brad Curl was a special speaker at one of our retreats. A “one of a kind” person, Brad had played football at Oklahoma and studied Art at the Sorbonne. He was an artist who owned a gallery in Georgetown with a coffee house which he used to minister to various drug culture characters. Brad would pull someone out of the gutter literally and give them the gospel and point them to us. Later he would immerse himself in ministry to young men in the inner city of DC, and operate a camp outside of DC to help druggies from Anacostia get a reprieve from their dysfunctional environment.
Another speaker was Doug Coe, the nominal leader of the so-called “Fellowship,” a group that ministered to political leaders, and coordinated the yearly National Prayer Breakfast. Dick Halverson was very close to Doug, so the Fellowship was always a rich source of speakers. It deserves an essay of it’s own, having been the subject of a somewhat inaccurate portrayal in the Media in a book by Jeff Scarlett called “The Family,” and a streaming video by the same name.
Although Sunday night speakers gave the group exposure to a rich variety of evangelical thinking, we felt a bit of a shortfall in the area of systematic Bible teaching. One of the group leaders, Ron Walton developed a vision for a large Sunday morning study, and this resulted in a Sunday Morning Class of around 500 singles meeting offsite, first in a Holiday Inn ballroom where the curiosity of hotel guests was aroused by the crowd of young people carrying large blue notebook binders. What could be going on? In later year the meeting would move to a civic center room above the Bethesda Rescue Squad. Ron enlisted one of the church pastors, Eddy Swieson, to write the curriculum. Eddy had come to faith in as a young boy in Indonesia who had stumbled on a Dutch language bible. Eventually earning a theological doctorate during his pastoral time at Fourth, Eddy applied his learning to developing a Bible study curriculum which was adapted by a women’s Bible study leader at Fourth, Lee Campbell. Lee’s group would grow to become Community Bible Study, now an international organization reaching around the world.
Looking at an old membership directory, I see something on the order of 1,000 names for the year 1973.
The Beginnings
Although Dick Halverson had brought the name Ambassadors for a singles group with him when he came to Bethesda from Hollywood Presbyterian in 1958, the group didn’t really grow dramatically until the years 1969–71. I was privileged to arrive on the scene just in time to witness the growth, and would take away some lessons learned on some of the ingredients of that growth.
Like others, I came to the group by word of mouth. I had come to DC as a young Naval officer, with a Baptist background, and I was committed enough to the Faith that I set out to find a good Baptist church, if for no other reason than to please my mother. The Baptist church youth groups were fine, but a bit stuck in the 1950s in format. Let by “Adult” church members, with a couple of token married couples of our age, as singles one felt very much less than fully developed. Then, the roommate of a girl I was dating [Nadine] told us about a group that met Sunday mornings at Fourth, and as well for volleyball on Wednesday evenings. So I showed up for the volleyball on a Wednesday night the summer of 1969. My first reaction was that the women were too old for me, seemingly about 30-ish, and I was still in my 20s. But I did determine to give the Sunday School class a look.
The Sunday Morning Class was called “Issues Class” and had a teacher, one of the church pastors, Bob Strain. Not a lot of people, perhaps 20 or so, but there was a good atmosphere and Bob was an engaging and personable leader, with good Biblical knowledge and teaching skills. The social atmosphere was an improvement over the Baptist singles Sunday Schools, so I decided to stick around. Now, at this point, my memory gets a little murky, but by that Fall (of 1969) there was enough growth in the group that a Sunday evening gathering formed, meeting the hour before the evening service. And that Fall a retreat was organized, which proved to be the catalyst to the tremendous growth that would ensue over the next few years. So we loaded around 100 of us into a couple of yellow school buses and set off for Hilltop Ranch in Maryland, somewhere North of Aberdeen. I don’t remember who the speaker was at that retreat, but something somehow sparked the group which then achieved something of a critical mass. That is to say, it started to feel like this is where some significant action was happening, both spiritually and socially.
As the group exploded to hundreds over the next couple of years, it truly seemed like we were experiencing an authentic movement of the Spirit of God such as was seen in other corners of the mid-century Evangelical Awakening which had starting in the 1950s with the Billy Graham crusades, and continuing until Time Magazine featured Jesus on it’s cover in 1971, announcing a “Jesus Generation.”
On the Friendships of Men
It was on that Hilltop retreat that I noticed something special, and it involved the relationships among a number of the guys that appeared to be leaders. The first one that I met was named Jerry Eisley, and he invited me to be a part of some sort of small group that he and a few other guys were in. This was something new to me and I didn’t really pick up on it. Frankly, I was mainly there to meet girls. Not to say that I wasn’t interested in the spiritual side of things; I was looking for that also, but in a girl first, one that could turn out to be future wife material. That group of guys turned out to be at the center of the success of Ambassadors.
There originally were a group of guys, six or seven, that clustered around each other, and seemed to be at the center of the group. There was just something different about them. First, they seemed to be serious about their faith, and they weren’t just hustling the girls. They would all marry eventually, but not for a while. And there was a method to them. They were being discipled by Dick Halverson. That is, he spent time with them, challenged them spiritually, and encouraged them to be close to each other.
Dick had a theological approach to the Friendship of Men. First, he recognized that this was something missing in the Church. It was common in our culture to associate “religiosity” with women. Despite the whole practice of ordaining men to the clergy in conservative churches (both Catholic and Protestant) this stereotype persists. I think of the classic movie “Shenandoah” in which the widowed Jimmy Stewart tells his several sons that they will be going to church, but mainly because their mother would have wanted them to. Or think of the old ladies in black forming most of the congregations in the mostly empty churches of Europe today. But if you read the New Testament, you see that Jesus had concentric circles of men around him. Halverson would quote the first half of Mark 3:42, “Jesus chose the Twelve, that they might with him…”. Emphasis on the term “with Him,” as an end in itself. This emphasis would form the basis for Dick’s version of what is called “Relational Theology.” Now I won’t get into the theological nuances and criticisms of this, that it can veer off the road into an inattention to important doctrines, but for what it is, I was seeing it in action among Dick’s young men, and the rest of their theology seemed just fine. But the relational part was magnetic, and not just to other guys, but to the women as well. What the girls saw was a bunch of guys that weren’t just looking at them in a sort of meat market way, but in a sort of godly perspective, as future wives but only in the context of a God first orientation.
There was a priority of relationships in the biblical precedence: Jesus had the “three” (Peter, Andrew and John) then the Twelve, and then there was a group of 40, then the 500 we are told. So, continued Dick, you guys need to nurture your friendships with a small number of other men. He continued, most men have their priorities out of kilter. Most men don’t have real friendships: they have work colleagues, maybe some casual social friends, but no other men, that they really go deep with, and even their marriages suffer for this lack. Men might agree that in order of precedence God should be first, and then of course next down would be wife and family, then job, then general friendships. But, he challenged with another set of priorities: first God, then wife, then family, but next, before job and career, a relational priority to at least one other man, better two or three, then and only then does job and career come into your order of things. This is what I was seeing among those guys at the center of Ambassadors in the early days.
I might as well mention some names of those guys. First, there was Stu Murtoff. I could write an essay about Stu. Although professionally he was an economist for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) specializing in Far East Economies, Stu was one of the most God-centered people I have ever encountered. For others, see end notes of this essay. All of this inner core of Halverson disciples participated in his world in the so-called “Fellowship” network associated with the yearly National Prayer Breakfast.
It was only natural that this model of male friendship would spread among the larger group, and become a catalyst to its growth. And it was not only men; the women had their own version of relationship theology. If I think of the women who also modeled this, the first person who comes to mind is Molly Kay M. (now Richards, married to Jim). Molly eventually would run the National Prayer Breakfast.
We formed ourselves into group houses: four to six roommates sharing expenses and life together. There would be guys houses and girls houses. The girls houses became centers of group fellowship, and developed house identities and names: Trinity House, Bradley House and others. Molly’s group house on Namakagan Road would be a popular Sunday afternoon hangout after church. [Note 3].
Although we were contemporaneous with the 60s Counterculture with it’s emerging sexual promiscuity, we were looking for something more, and stayed with Biblical morality in practice. We dated but didn’t “hook up;” we didn’t move in with each other until we got married. I expect that this was a major ingredient of the amazing resilience of the marriages that emerged and have endured, now for decades.
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Organizing Ambassadors
As the group grew during the first couple of years, an organization evolved, with a “Coordinating Committee,” later sometimes called the Steering Committee, but with the same structure. First there was a Coordinator, then six Committee Members, and the manner of organizing and succession was significant. The Committee would last for a year, then chose another group to replace itself. The manner was that the existing committee would chose the next Coordinator along with three of the next Members, excluding themselves from the process. Those four would then meet and decide among themselves who the remaining three would be. The process was informal, a matter of practice with no church rules. In practice the Coordinators were guys, and the remaining Committee being three guys and three girls. I will not get into any “women’s ordination“ controversy in this discussion; this was just the practice.
We never had a paid staff nor drew funds from the church. Rather, we passed the plate at the Sunday evening meeting, and kept our own banking account, paying for such things as Retreat expenses from it. This was in keeping with the general philosophy of church organization at Fourth, which has always been long on volunteer support and deliberately short on paid staff.
Similar Groups
There was a very similar group to Ambassadors going in California at Peninsula Bible Church in Mountain View, where the pastor was Ray Stedman, author of the popular evangelical book “Body Life.” It did have paid leadership from church staff, especially Reverend Ron Richie. We kept up some communication between the two groups, and had Ron as a retreat speaker in the late 70s. This group was called Careers and it met at a local restaurant for teaching by Ron, and was almost the same size as Ambassadors.
After the prime years of the Ambassadors, around the early 2000s, much of the singles activity in the DC area shifted to the Frontline group at McLean Bible Church (where Lon Solomon was then pastor). Frontline grew spectacularly for a few years under the leadership of Ken Baugh, to at least twice the size of the old Ambassadors, and was run by a paid staff. But Frontline had a much shorter life, although it did produce a serious crop of next generation believers.
I would be remiss not to mention the enormously successful high school and college ministries at Fourth, initially nurtured by Chuck Miller who had been brought from Hollywood Presbyterian by Dr. Halverson. These “Youth Family” kids formed such a strong fellowship that they were referred to as “Fourthies” in the halls of nearby high schools. Also the impact of one church family, Paul and Carolyn Kokulis whose home became a constant open house and gathering spot for the kids. One of them, Jim Byrne would migrate up to Ambassadors, then lead the High School ministry, becoming a expert about the developing youth culture into the 90s and 2000s. The Youth Family served as a feeder to Ambassadors, but not as seamlessly as we would have liked. We looked pretty old to many of the new college graduates, so most of our influx came from the outside.
Marriages
For the first two years almost nobody got married, just a dribble, then the dam burst. Maybe a hundred over the next few years. Remarkably, after about 5 to 10 years later, it seems that only a handful of these had failed. This is an informal assessment, but most of those with whom I have discussed this agree that by about 10 years later we were seeing at least a 90% marriage retention rate, way above that of the surrounding culture, and this has endured over the years since. There must have been something in the water that we were drinking, metaphorically.
Spreading Out
One of the healthy outcomes of the spiritual energy of Ambassadors was seen as individuals would decide to migrate from their secular jobs to full time ministry, often going to seminary. After a few years any number of our members had moved into the mission field, both traditional and in new variants. Some became pastors, others went on the foreign mission field, others to so-called para-church ministries. I think of Steve Olson who wound up literally smuggling evangelical study material behind the Soviet Bloc Eastern European countries when such activities were illegal before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 80s. Then there was a young woman, Stephanie, who I met in the early days of the Sunday Morning Class. She had been with the State Department in Africa. Stephanie had come to faith in a Bible Study in Africa, left her government job and come back to DC to pause and figure out her life. Leaving the Ambassadors class for a stint with the Sudan Interior Mission, she married a Peace Corps volunteer, went to seminary and as a couple they were supported by the Fourth Presbyterian mission budget for decades, leading a country ministry for World Vision in North Africa. And there were others and other ministries spawned from the group.
Lessons Learned
Looking back on it a number of lessons learned emerged, some of which you will have surmised from the words above:
The centrality of the the priority of relationships, especially the friendships of men.
Relational theology is important but shouldn’t displace knowledge the intellectual content of Christianity, particularly in a time of increasing cultural tension with an increasing secular age. We absorbed much in the way of Christian apologetics (the intellectual defense of the faith) from our guest speakers.
Leadership: regular and self-excluding leader transitions to avoid creation of cliques. Volunteer self-governance and independent finances, under overall church authority and guidance.
Ages. There was always a difficulty absorbing the graduates of Fourth’s successful college fellowship, getting them to move up, but the process did happen. One mistake in the latter years was to separate off the under 26 group into their own caucus. I could have predicted that this would have a deadening effect. And it did: after this happened around 2000, the group just withered as it aged, and was ended by the church leadership.
Ages again, like Jesus own ministry from age 30–33, there always seemed to be sweet spot at around age 30 in terms of mature leadership. We always welcomed even older singles, and those that worried about the “image” of the group need not have. As long as the great mass of the group were from mid 20s to mid 30s the essential look and feel and social magnetism of the group endured. I didn’t marry my way out of the group until I was 36, and I was starting to feel a bit old. That should not have been the case, and today we especially hear from young women feeling their biological clocks ticking. We hear about this anxiety in the general culture today. So by contrast, a relationally oriented fellowship should nurture everyone as the years continue, so older singles feel comfortably engaged. Forty looked so old then, but at our ages now, it seems so young.
A healthy group can absorb a good number of the socially “problematic;” there were always a few hurting people, and sometimes they approach being disruptive. But in the spirit of the Gospel, there is a calling to minister especially to the hurting. Jesus words that he did not come to heal the healthy, surely come to mind.
The Rise and Fall. I remember Dr. Halverson noting at a breakfast meeting with my Committee that such groups as ours had a natural life of growth but eventually decline. So when we sensed that the group was seeming to lose numbers, not to take the blame personally as the leadership committee. That helped, and in fact the group rebounded after that time, but did eventually get smaller and see energy shift to other groups (like Frontline).
Unfoldings
So the years unfold, and here we are. There was a time, in our thirties, in which time seemed to pause. At least that was my impression at the time. I spent the entire decade of the 70s in Ambassadors. From my late 20s to my mid 30s. You would come to the Sunday night meeting, look around and things pretty much felt the same. Slowly people would marry and drift on. You would worry, “why isn’t this happening for me?” I haven’t mentioned this theme, but it was always there. The question of “what’s in store for me now… now that I’m starting a career, where is it all headed?” Will I meet that special one?… maybe she will just happen to sit next to me at the meeting. You wondered about the mystery of the Will of God and hoped to see something happen in your own life. Back in college, there was that provocative claim of an evangelistic pamphlet: “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” This has a certain appeal at a certain youthful age, and you naturally think in terms of success in career and marriage. Later we would come to understand that, although true, scripturally we aren’t promised a “rose garden;” Jesus himself got another kind of garden: Gethsemane. And so we have gotten blessings in the way of loves and careers, but life in our “Fallen World” does turn out to be more of a “Pilgrimage” with its share of trials and temptations.
In my case, after a decade in Ambassadors, my pilgrimage would include a job change, then backpacking around Europe, April in Paris. A recommendation to visit an apartment of Campus Crusade girls (friends of Ambassador girlfriends), and suddenly a wife and a new beginning. But a decade later cancer then five years of being the single parent of three little girls. Others’ paths would also include highs and lows: seminaries and ministries, career success, becoming corporate CEOs who would suffer their own trials. Positions of proximity to political power. Academic tenure; Deaths of children, others leaving law careers to become pastors.
Now we are seeing our ranks thinned. We go on cruises. First over 50 people to Alaska, then Clipper Ship cruises in the Mediterranean, a Viking river cruise on the Danube. Each cruise sees our numbers diminished, so we approach that scene in the opening of this essay. But we stay close, always a family, the same guys and girls who sat at those Sunday night meetings wondering what God had in plan for our lives.
Coda
Signs of a Renewal?
I am back at the Sunday evening service, and the front rows are starting to be filled with another generation of single adults. Encouraging. They are mostly from the ranks of Fourth’s Fellows Program, of recent years. New graduates who take time away from their new careers to spend a year of formal study and spiritual growth under the leadership of church pastoral staff. They stay in the homes of volunteer families, and are seeming to stay engaged with each other after their year is done. As they appear to be clustering together I can’t help but think of the similarity to Ambassadors, filling the rear of the sanctuary years ago. Following their Fellows program, they will be much better equipped than we were; we were a mixed bunch, some coming from strong church backgrounds, others starting from scratch in the crazy culture of our youth. But they will have the same sort of dreams and life unfolding questions as did we. So I give you the words Dr. Halverson would use to close the evening service:
Notes:
[1] I mentioned Jerry Eisley earlier, and I’m not really sure if Jerry was really in the center of that group of core guys. I would next mention Bill Daubert, Dave Enghauser, Bill McFadden. I believe John Bishop would fall into this group, and Jack Cadeaux. John Musser came along a year or so later, but definitely moved in with the others. I’m sure I’m leaving someone out, but that is just my aging process.
[2] For the Record, my earliest memory was that the First Coordinator since 1969 was Dave McElroy, then Tom Lasco, followed by Carl Wylie, Arnie Anderson, Ken Daniel (me), Ron Walton, Arnie Book, John Burch, Dave Fitzstevens, and John Richards. I may have the order scrambled after Arnie…
[3] I won’t attempt to name all the female counterparts to the guys at the center, although Janie Gilmore does come to mind. They had their female version of Dick Halverson, and that would have been Barbara Priddy, basically a parallel to Doug Coe in the Fellowship network.
[4] I have minimized the mention of particular individuals in this essay. There are so many that to mention a few would be to omit many.
