Bill King wasn’t your typical Presbyterian minister.

He spent, by his telling, a good chunk of his teenage years in one form of juvenile detention or another. He was a bit of a hoodlum until well into his teens. As he described it once, he didn’t get the right to vote until he was into his early twenties, as backwash from his teenage legal issues.

But somewhere along the way, he straigtened out, and literally “got religion”, went to college and then McCormick Theological Seminiary, and then sometime in his thirties got called to the FIrst Presbyterian Church in Jamestown.

And he created a bit of a stir.

Presbyterians were known as “God’s Frozen People”. King was far from frozen; he was an ebullient man with a sense of humor that could have found a home at a comedy club.

He encouraged the church – divided between older folks who’d been there forever, and younger parishioners, many of them college staffers – to loosen up. To engage. And, in a move that horrified some of the traditional Presbyterians, to applaud the special music – unthinkable to generations of staunch Knoxists. This actually launched a bit of a dispute – some people actually left the church.

But the Presbyterians have always valued a good, or ideally a great, sermon. It’s a trait that’s kept me in the Presbyterian church – albeit not the same one King presided over.

More on that later.

One of the things that drew my Dad, a speech teacher who gave speaker points to everyone, was the fact that King’s sermons were freaking brilliant; if you could get past all that clapping, it was absolute gold. And so when I was 11, we “converted”.

And King had a way of engaging even the pre-teen, and adolescent, me. Mitch the child had been bored and fidgety in the Lutheran services, with their endless up and down and aaaaaaal thaaaaat chaaaanting. King’s sermons had an uncanny way of having enough intellectual “oomph” to engage Dad and Mom, but were direct and clear enough to cause me to sit up, pay attention, and think “there’s something to this faith thing”.

And in ninth grade, in confirmation class, he gave me a lesson – more secular and psychological than theological – that redounds with to this day. Confirmation was serious in his church; kids could, and did, flunk; it wasn’t easy, but it happened. And there was a final conversation with him before the actual confirmation service. I ran over to the church, not quite sure what to expect, over lunch hour one spring day, and sat in his office, where he quizzed me on what i”d learned.

And then, a few minutes of his own observations. Where he started: “Mitch – I’ve noticed that you are far and away your own nastiest critic”.

He was right. And he still is. That internal critic still howls at me every day – and the voice of Bill King pops up, most every time, and reminds me to be as forgiving to myself as God wants to be.

It’s hard to describe, but was an amazing gift in its own simple way.

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King didn’t run a big church – but he had a little help.

First came intern Jim Jacobson. Also from Chicago, aso with a past out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel, “Jake” was 27 and in his senior hear at Jamestown College, after having been a heroin addict for many years, he was also a great guitar player. He sold me my first electric guitar – a 1960 Fender Jazzmaster – and taught me a lot, about playing guitar and other even more important things. He was a minister in Hallock the last I heard of him. I’ll have to look him up sometime.

Then, Mick Burns and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Joni Jordheim. Twin Cities natives, they ran the youth group at a time when Presbyterian churches still had enough families to warrant having youth groups. It’s hard to explain how important that group was for me. Mick and Joni gor married 45 years ago, by the way, and after a career running churches in Fargo and Baltimore, they just retired back to Oakdale.

Mick was a drummer in a Christian rock band up at the college. Along with Jake, there was another guitar player, Ron Allen. Ron was the fullback on the college football team, and a great one at that. He could have been playing at a higher division – but he’d been dragged to Jamestown by his then-fiance, Jenny, of whom more in a moment. Ron had an amazing talent for relating the stories of the life-changing importance of faith in his life – stories that stuck with me during some of the more parlous times of my life. Ron was semi-famous for having been one of very few NAIA Division 3 players to get a tryout with an NFL team – he did a walk0-on with the Raiders in, I think, ’79. He’s also semi-famous because of his son, Jared, whom Vikings fans may remember.

Jared was not the son of Ron and Jenny – they broke up shortly after they arrived in North Dakota (although I do remember Jared’s mom, too). But Jenny was a huge influence; a student of my dad’s at a class he taught at the college, she became a long-time friend of the family. And in the summer after eighth grade, as I was struggling to teach myself to play a wrecked, cheap, borderline useless guitar, she lent me a Yamaha acoustic guitar that she wasn’t using. Which may have been what made teaching myself guitar actually do-able.

And playing guitar certainly had an impact on the next ten years of my life.

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Reverend King was a “progressive” minister at at time when that was simultaneously a little out of the norm in mainstream Protestantism, and not all that remarkable to me. He was working in rural North Dakota; he could read a room.

His next calling, my sophomore year of of high school, was to a church in Madison, Wisconsin, where he got to let his Progressive flag fly. He was there until he retired, probably 20 years ago.

My politics changed – and, one day in the fall of ’86, after I’d not only changed politics, but become a conservative talk show host, I called Reverend King – partly to say “hi”, partly to nudge him a bit over the fact that the critical thinking he’s helped teach me had led me to that particular fork in the road.

He sounded disappointed. Probably not theatrically. But that was OK. I took one of his lessons to heart, and didn’t castigate myself too hard over it.