Word: wilkinson
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...Publisher Benjamin H. Wilkinson '98-'99 calls the jump "very significant," especially since the job is a demanding...
Spanky Duley is spilling his heart to the Rev. Jim Wilkinson, and it sounds like a country song in overdrive. Spanky's wife left him. The girlfriend who followed left him. The woman he's courting is the sister of his ex-wife's new husband. Wilkinson acknowledges Duley's "difficulties" and congratulates him on the upside--that his young daughter continues to live with him. As the men talk, a changing landscape of fancy houses, junkyards, suburbs and woods unscrolls on either side of them. Two football fields away, over Duley's shoulder, the blue jackstaff light marks...
...When Wilkinson, 55, retired after 22 nomadic years as an Army chaplain, he remembers thinking "the appropriate thing would be to get settled." Then his Episcopal bishop spotted an ad announcing that the Seamen's Church Institute, which has ministered to ocean mariners for 165 years, was expanding to the nation's towboat fleet. Within months, Wilkinson and his colleague Karen Cox were staring at a pastoral fiefdom encompassing the Ohio River, part of the Cumberland and the Mississippi from Greenville, Miss., up to Lock 27 above St. Louis--1,808 miles as the catfish swims...
...Wilkinson's approach to this challenge is low-key. Unlike the motorboat-riding evangelists ("ambulance chasers," he calls them) who infest some locks, Wilkinson wants only to draw the men more closely into the Christian community to which most of them already belong. He has set up an 800 number for mariners in need of emergency pastoral care far from home, and in three months has logged 7,000 land miles in his white Ford Escort, recruiting shoreside ministers to respond. Boarding the Grainger at the Robert C. Byrd lock in West Virginia, he forgoes preaching in favor of hearing...
...hours later, as Wilkinson debarks in Marietta, Ohio, Spanky Duley and some other deckhands request a sermon the next time the chaplain comes on. He mulls Mark 4: 35, in which Jesus and the disciples, crossing the Sea of Galilee to preach on the far shore, encounter a storm that threatens their boat. "The guys on the towboats may not think they are in a spectacularly good environment in which to be religious," Wilkinson says. "But in the end, I think they can minister to one another. You know, the disciples ultimately got safely to the other side of that...