Let Wisdom Speak

Jerry Keeney is a pastor, teacher, and lifelong student of the spiritual and historical forces that shape families, people, and communities. He was born in Bourbon, MO, and educated in its public schools in Missouri's northeastern Ozark Border region, where his roots run deeper and wider than he knew. Jerry's education continued through liberal arts and theological studies, primarily in Baptist institutions, then expanded to include Methodist-related and Catholic settings. He cultivated an ecumenically oriented vocation grounded in contemplative practice. In over five decades of pastoral leadership, Jerry served congregations in the Midwest, Midsouth, and Southeast, beginning as pastor during college and seminary days in three small country churches in Missouri, then Tennessee and Mississippi, He eventually became a seasoned pastor focusing on the inner life of the church and the self. In the final phase of his pre-retirement career, he specialized in shepherding congregational transition, serving eleven churches in fifteen years across three denominations—American Baptist Churches USA, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the United Church of Christ. His vocation has been marked by a focus on spiritual formation practice by individuals and congregations, interfaith collaboration, and involvement in congregation-based neighborhood organizing, with a contemplative focus in these ministries, too. Jerry's spiritual imagination has been shaped by diverse influences, including training in the distinctive practices of Church of the Savior, Washington, D.C., and the experience of forming an experimental church in St. Louis. He has remained anchored throughout by a deep appreciation for the wilderness and for mountain landscapes. He and his family actively steward their rural family land with its enduring wilderness ambience in Washington County extending into adjacent Crawford County where the story of this book unfolds. Now Pastor Emeritus of Second Baptist Church in St. Louis—where he served as pastor for fourteen years during the 1980s and 1990s—Jerry continues to lead Bible study and pursue the reflective reading and writing that has long engaged his interest and informed his ministry. His current book, "Let Wisdom Speak," grows out of decades of research and contemplation, plus the profound, personal, five-year journey writing this book's story of his Ozark pioneer great-great-grandfather, Job Harman. Job's recently discovered thirty-nine original poems illuminate a life that participated in the mid-nineteenth-century westward migration, endured America's Civil War, engaged with the early agricultural populist movement, and witnessed World War I as his life and the war approached their respective ends in 1918. Jerry's work brings together biography, history, and poetic spiritual memoir, inviting readers into richly layered exploration of ancestry, identity, spirituality, and the enduring ties between past and present.