 Richard
Finley Ward the Associate Professor of Preaching and
Performance Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver,
Colorado. He is the author of Speaking from the Heart:
Preaching with Passion (1992) published by Abingdon Press.
With Fred Craddock and Mike Graves, Richard edited the
collection of Craddock Stories (Chalice, 2001). His new book
Speaking of the Holy: The Art of Communication in Preaching
was released by Chalice in December, 2001. Both Speaking of
the Holy and Craddock Stories were named by Christian
Century as “Best Sellers” from Chalice Press.
Richard taught speech communication on the
faculty of the Candler School of Theology at Emory
University from 1985-1993. His Ph.D. is from Northwestern
University's School of Speech in the field of Performance
Studies and his Master of Arts in Religion is from Christian
Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana. He also holds
the Master of Fine Arts in Drama from Trinity University,
San Antonio, Texas and a BA in Speech and Drama from
Oklahoma Baptist University.
Richard was ordained into the ministry with the
United Church of Christ in October, 1989. He has also been
in pastoral ministry in the Church of the Brethren and
United Methodist churches and was raised Southern Baptist.
(He is committed to ecumenism!) Richard preaches regularly
and has spoken in such places as the Easter Sunrise Service
at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre of Denver; at the Alice Millar
Chapel at Northwestern University; the Fourth Presbyterian
Church of Chicago, Illinois; the Cathedral of St. Philip in
Atlanta, Georgia; and Grace Cathedral of Greenwich,
Connecticut.
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Ordained in 1992, Mr. Bascom’s first posting was to Piedmont
College where he taught in the religion and Philosophy
Department and worked with then-President John Elger to
reinvigorate the relationship between the college and the
churches of the NACCC. At the college he served as the
interim Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
for two years, during which time he revised the Department’s
course offerings, successfully lobbied to convert the
part-time Chaplain position into full-time, co-organized and
hosted the first two NA Youth Leaders’ Meetings, and added
extensively to the college library’s holdings in the field
of religion. Called to church ministry in New Jersey
in 1995, Mr. Bascom developed a passion for church
revitalization. In 2000 he was invited to fill an open term
on the Board for Congregational Church Development (CCD),
and in 2001 he proposed to CCD a three-year project to
prototype and field test approaches to church
revitalization, with the goal of developing repeatable
methods to share with other NACCC church change leaders. The
proposal was funded and Mr. Bascom accepted a call to a
small, struggling church in Connecticut.
In Connecticut, Mr. Bascom enrolled at Hartford
Seminary, where he pursued a Doctor of Ministry Degree.
While a student, he conceived the idea for an online
newsletter that would take the best of academic and
judicatory research on methods to revive faith communities,
garnered from across the faith spectrum of the United
States, and present it in an interactive format that
addresses questions change leaders ask at the grass roots
level. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research and its
affiliate research arm, the Consortium for Congregational
Studies Project, funded the concept and the first edition of
Leadership & Transformation was published online in June
2005, with Mr. Bascom as editor.
A 1991 CFTS Fellow, Mr. Bascom was awarded the 1991
Henry David Gray Award for his History/Polity paper. Eight
years later, he was one of the presenters at the first
Congregational Symposium, held in Wauwatosa, WI in 1999. He
was awarded a Harry Butman Fellowship by the Division for
Ministry. For his leadership role in inviting and
shepherding the town’s faith communities to build the first
home for Habitat for Humanity in Bound Brook, NJ, the town’s
Rotary Club made him a Paul Harris Fellow in 1997, the only
time the Club conferred that status on a non-Rotarian.
In 2006 Mr. Bascom went full circle, leaving
ministry to pursue an opportunity in the business world. As
a renewed layperson, he is interested in the ways that
Jesus’ claim on our lives is carried out in daily
decision-making. The animating questions he is asking, from
the perspective of a lay Christian, are, “What does it mean
to be a confessing Christian today?” and, “What difference
does it make to be a Congregational confessing Christian
today?”
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