evan howard

Thank you for being interested enough to learn more about my journey of life and faith. From boyhood until now, I’ve been a lover of stories. In stories, we find the meaning of our lives — and of life itself. This is why we call the Christian gospel “the greatest story ever told,” and it’s why the gospel is the organizing theme of my life as a pastor and a creator of fiction, nonfiction, songs, and short films.

While growing up, I moved with my family eleven times in eighteen years as my electrician father transitioned from job to job. In each new place, I met people with compelling stories to tell. The first home I remember was a twelve-acre farm outside Bellingham, Washington, surrounded by towering mountains and lush forests, and nestled on the pristine southern end of Lake Samish. In the summer it stays light there until ten p.m., and the scents of pine and evergreen mix with the salty air of Puget Sound. The mystical aura of the ocean must have seeped into my soul because the sea has been a place of refuge and enchantment for me ever since (I have been blessed always to live near the Pacific or Atlantic, except for an unhappy two-year exile inland).

In 1963 my parents bought a motel in north Bellingham, and we moved into the city so my mother could earn an income managing the business while raising four children. I met a variety of guests with intriguing stories to tell – truckers, nightclub singers, traveling salesmen, families in transition, and many others. After short stays in Everett and Renton, Washington, we moved to Kent, where I gained an appreciation for Shakespeare at Meridian Junior High and got scolded in Math class for reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird instead of paying attention. All the while, my love of reading was balanced with a growing passion for playing the guitar, until I received some life-altering news. . . .

My father had accepted a job in the Navy civil service, and we would be moving six-thousand miles away– to the island Guam in the western Pacific. The move was a challenging adjustment, but it turned out to have major rewards. Along with running cross country, playing on the basketball team, and working as a lifeguard and at McDonald’s, I heard memorable stories about haunted parts of the island, secret military operations, resistance to the Japanese during World War II, and many other dramas, large and small. I also encountered memorable books such as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque; The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane; The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; and Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

In four years on the island, I had the good fortune of traveling to Japan, Taiwan, and Hawaii, and of meeting people from all over the Pacific Rim. And yet, not every experience was positive. The racial strife that underlay Guam’s multicultural society exposed me to bigotry and violence based on skin color, nationality, and religion. The Vietnam War was also raging, with B-52s departing Andersen Airforce Base hourly to bomb Cambodia during the Nixon years. When I ended up in the naval hospital after cutting my foot on the coral reef, I was surrounded by wounded American marines and soldiers. 

These experiences, together with the cultural stresses of the transition from the Sixties to the Seventies and the challenges of adolescence, prodded me to participate in nondenominational Bible studies held in various homes and churches on the island. Through these gatherings, I began to sense the presence of God and seek spiritual guidance for my life. For this reason, in my heart, Guam will always be more than white-sand beaches and golden sunsets, swaying palm trees and rugged coral formations. It will be a place of formative memories from which I continue to draw inspiration, and for which I will always be thankful.

After high school, I returned to the Pacific Northwest to live with my maternal grandmother and attend Everett Community College and the University of Washington in Seattle, where I majored in English and History. My professors assigned novels by master storytellers such as Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, and many others. I also discovered that history is an unfolding story of high drama and unforgettable characters.

While in college, I participated in the music and youth programs of the First Baptist Church of Everett. Although I had been baptized as an infant in the Greek Orthodox Church, I experienced a call to the Christian ministry in this American Baptist congregation. Somehow, it made sense, because on Guam, I had been influenced by the Evangelical movement and its most prominent leader, the Reverend Billy Graham. I had also begun to study the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were Baptists. 

I graduated from the University of Washington in 1976, and, supported by a generous scholarship from the Everett church, I drove cross-country to Hamilton, Massachusetts, to enroll in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. This was the beginning of an eleven-year journey through biblical and theological education. At Gordon, I met follow student Carol Diane Caster. We married on September 2, 1978 and now we have two grown sons, Evanjohn and Peter.

After graduation in 1980, I was ordained as an American Baptist minister in Everett and began my pastoral career at the First Baptist Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 1981. While serving this multicultural urban congregation for nearly six years, I earned my Th.D. at Boston University School of Theology. In September 1988, the congregation of Central Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, located in a residential community near Brown University, called me to be their pastor. 

In thirty-three years of ministry together, this mostly white, aging congregation became a much younger, multi-ethnic and ecumenically diverse church, with a contemporary worship style and growing ministries to children, youth, and families. In the process, we changed our name to the Community Church of Providence in order to expand our ministry to a wider population. After retiring from Community Church in August 2021, I knew I wanted to stay active in Christian ministry, but I wasn’t sure where or how. Thankfully, the First Baptist Church of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, needed a part-time pastor, and in March 2022, they called me to serve their small but faithful and joy-filled congregation.

Writing has always been a form of therapy for me, and I eventually gravitated toward storytelling as a creative way to engage the world and wrestle with my own growing edges. It took me about nine years to publish my first novel, The Galilean Secret, in 2010. Ten years later, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I had to learn new ways to communicate with my congregants online, and this began my journey into storytelling with music videos. 

In all of this, I agree with the French novelist André Maurois that the need to tell stories arises from an unresolved inner conflict. Writing is not a method for ending the conflict, but rather a way to deepen and broaden one’s awareness of it, in pursuit of personal understanding. I admit, though, that some of my favorite stories don’t come from such profound thoughts, but rather from having fun by the ocean, eating fresh seafood, enjoying sunrises and sunsets, traveling around New England and beyond, and watching TV and movies with Carol and the cutest Bichon in the world, Emmie.