Ex-atheist professor now a pastor David Yonke, Jan 2, 2009
PHOTO BY JETTA FRASER/COURTESY OF THE BLADE
The Rev. Julian A. Davies is pastor of the University Church at the University of Toledo.
By David Yonke Blade Religion Editor
TOLEDO, Ohio—A student ambled out of the University of Toledo’s Driscoll Alumni Center auditorium and noticed a plaque on the wall that honors Dr. Julian Davies, distinguished professor of chemistry and medicinal chemistry.
He turned to the Rev. Julian Davies, pastor of University Church, and said, “Wow, look, there’s a guy here with the same name as you!” Mr. Davies said he smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s a real coincidence.”
Truth is, Julian Davies the distinguished professor and Julian Davies the United Methodist minister are one and the same person, separated by a few years and a calling from God.
Mr. Davies, 53, a native of London, came to Toledo to teach chemistry in 1981 and moved swiftly up the ranks of academia. He earned full tenure, earned honors for outstanding teacher and outstanding researcher, was named one of only 10 distinguished professors on the UT campus, and served as an associate dean of natural sciences and mathematics.
In addition, Mr. Davies was a lifelong and rather smug atheist.
“My parents and the rest of my family, we grew up entirely outside the life of the church. I had literally never been inside a church other than maybe a wedding or two all the way through to my adult life—ever,” he said in an interview. “So I was an atheist and actually a pretty serious atheist. I quite enjoyed baiting Christians about their faith.”
But after 23 years at UT—two years before being eligible for retirement—he quit his professorship in 2004 and enrolled at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., where he received a master of divinity degree.
Today, Mr. Davies is an ordained United Methodist minister and pastor of the fledgling University Church, which he founded to meet the spiritual needs of UT’s 21,000 students as well as alumni, faculty, staff, neighbors and friends.
The path from atheistic chemistry professor to Christian believer and pastor did not take a straight line, nor did the journey occur overnight.
Mr. Davies, interviewed in his office at UT’s Interfaith Center, adjacent to the campus, speaks enthusiastically and articulately, with a noticeable British accent.
He said the start of his spiritual journey began when he met his future wife, Dr. Mary Kay Smith, a psychiatrist at UT’s medical college.
“Mary Kay had grown up in a little United Methodist church in Pemberville, which was sort of the center of village life,” he said. “And when we decided to get married, Mary Kay always thought she’d get married in that church, which is where her sisters got married. And I would have nothing to do with it. I said, ‘Thank you very much but it’s a deal-breaker for me. I can’t do that.’”
The reason, he said, was that he felt it would be hypocritical for an atheist to stand up in church and recite vows that meant nothing to him. “I felt the last thing we should do is go in and pretend. That seemed to me to be wrong,” he said. “But I did make her a good counter-offer, though. We flew to Maui and got married on a beach.”
They were wed 22 years ago, and Dr. Smith said she asked Mr. Davies if he would go to church with her on her birthday. He declined, but went a week later.
“Going to church would be a different proposition,” Mr. Davies said, “because I wouldn’t have to stand up and say vows that I didn’t believe were true. So I said, ‘OK, I’ll go as long as I don’t have to do anything.’”
The couple attended Epworth United Methodist Church, a prominent, 1,500-member church in West Toledo.
“It was my first experience in a church and I can tell you, if you’ve never been to church before, church is really strange,” Mr. Davies said. “There are people standing up and sitting down—the people know to do things at certain times and you don’t. It’s very, very off-putting.”
Being an academic, he said, he naturally had questions. During service, he tugged on the sleeve of the man next to him and asked why everyone said “Amen” at the end of a prayer.
“The person just pulled away and said, ‘I don’t know, we just do!’ And I said, ‘Well that’s strange to do something without knowing why you do it.’”
Another time, he said, he wanted to raise his hand and ask the preacher a question during the sermon. The person next to him gasped and urged him not to do it.
“On the way out, the same man said to me, ‘You know, we do have classes in the church for people who want to learn more.’”
Mr. Davies signed up for every class Epworth offered, and read a stack of books on every topic.
“It didn’t take long before people said, ‘Well, you could teach this!’ So I started teaching classes.”
It opened his eyes to new views of Christianity.
“I had naively assumed when people read the Bible, which I had never read, that everybody believed everything happened in a literal way. And I quickly discovered that that wasn’t the case, that there were people with a much more sophisticated understanding.”
So he read books on hermeneutics, exegesis and linguistics and “came to understand the scope of this narrative,” he said, referring to Christianity, “and what it might mean in somebody’s life.”
Dr. Smith said her husband’s transformation from academic atheist to devout believer and minister as, “in a word, ‘mind-boggling.’”
And yet, she said, “it was just right. It was clear that this was where Julian was being drawn, where he was being pulled to go.”
Mr. Davies’ first step toward the ministry was to become a certified lay speaker in the United Methodist Church. He then took further training to be a “guide,” someone who can mentor a person interested in the ministry.
“I thought, ‘Well, I should read this book in case they ever assign someone to me.’ So I sat down and I worked through the entire book on discernment and when I got to the end, I looked at it and I thought, ‘Wow, this points me in a whole new place that I never thought about before.’”
He went to Epworth’s pastor at the time, the Rev. Barry DeShetler, and asked if “perhaps I was called into ministry, and would he support that, and he said, ‘I’ve just been waiting for you to knock on the door.’”
Mr. Davies said that along with his academic understanding, faith came in the form of a gift during a weekend retreat in 1997.
“It was a three-day retreat experience in which there were talks given and worship services and celebration of Communion, and during that weekend, I think I moved from a position of intellectual curiosity to one of commitment,” he said.
“So when people ask me about faith . . . my favorite image is a gift. Because I always say I didn’t earn mine, I didn’t pay for it. It was just given to me. It was a gift.”
When he made the decision to become a minister, he opted to do it right away. He chose not to wait two years until he would have reached the 25-year mark at UT, which would have made him eligible for retirement.
It was a big step to walk away from a well-paying and secure job that was essentially guaranteed for life, and move into a career that paid comparatively low wages and for which the church hierarchy could have ruled him unsuited for.
With his wife being a psychiatrist, he added, “we’ll never be broke, I don’t want to mislead you . . . but nonetheless it took our income like that”—pointing straight down.
He discussed it with his family—son, Josh, now 17, and a daughter, Anna, 13—and together they took the step of faith.
Dr. Smith said it was “kind of like holding hands and deciding to step off that cliff on faith alone. And only when we took the step in faith did we realize it was not a cliff after all, it was just a little drop of about six inches.”
Mr. Davies said he has no regrets.
“We were convinced that this was the right thing to do. I wanted to be able to ask the sort of questions you don’t ask in a chemistry lab, and to do the sorts of things, interacting with students, that you don’t do in a chemistry classroom. And that’s proved to be very rewarding,” Mr. Davies said.
Dr. Smith said that while she never anticipated her husband’s spiritual journey and his career path—or that she would be a pastor’s wife—in retrospect everything has lined up perfectly.
“It has all come together,” she said, “and you can look back and say it wasn’t so much of a left turn or a hairpin turn as it was the next step in what he was preparing to do.”
Reprinted with permission of The Blade of Toledo, Ohio.
PHOTO BY JETTA FRASER/COURTESY OF THE BLADE
Another time, he said, he wanted to raise his hand and ask the preacher a question during the sermon. The person next to him gasped and urged him not to do it.
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