Obituary: Locke E. Bowman, 86, Episcopal Priest

Locke E. Bowman, Jr., 86, a leader and innovator in Christian education and curriculum development, died at Evanston Hospital on November 14. 
Locke Bowman was an Episcopal priest and a professor emeritus at Virginia Theological Seminary, where he served as professor of Christian Education and Pastoral Theology for 11 years. At the Seminary, Mr. Bowman founded and was the first Director of the Center for the Ministry of Teaching. He was the author of several books, numerous articles and book chapters and an Episcopal children’s curriculum that is widely used today. 

Mr. Bowman was graduated from William Jewel College in Liberty, Missouri in 1948. He graduated from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago in 1951 and was ordained a Presbyterian minister that year. He worked in the Presbyterian Church for 34 years, as a parish minister, as a writer and editor for the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education in Philadelphia and as the founder and director of the National Teacher Education Project in Scottsdale, Arizona. 
In 1972, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Schiller University, in Heidelberg, Germany. 

Mr. Bowman joined the Episcopal Church and was ordained a deacon in 1983 and a priest in 1984. At his death, Mr. Bowman had served in the Episcopal clergy for 30 years and was the only living person to have held a national office in both the Presbyterian and the Episcopal denominations. 

“Locke believed that learning should be interactive and should involve students directly in the experience, a concept just beginning to emerge in education theory in general and well ahead of its time in church education,” wrote his former Virginia Seminary colleague Amy Geary Dyer. Teachers should be taught to teach using the same interactive approach, Bowman believed, and he trained generations of Christian educators by filming them in the act of teaching and then gently critiquing their performance. 

Mr. Bowman was born near Shawnee Mound, Missouri in 1927 to Locke E. Bowman, Sr. and Naomi McCann Bowman. He attended the Shawnee Mound School for all 12 grades. Before his ordination, he was a reporter for newspapers in Sedalia, Liberty and Clinton, Missouri. His love of newspapers was life-long and, in retirement, he worked for several years as a meticulous copyeditor for the Pilot, in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where he lived before relocating to Evanston. 

Locke Bowman loved music. He regularly attended performances of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Evanston Symphony. Among many other avocations, he was an accomplished baker and a devotee of the Sunday Times cross word puzzle, which he strove to complete after church and before dinner. 
He is survived by his son, Locke Bowman, a lawyer and professor at Northwestern law school, three grandchildren, Krister, David and Annabel Bowman and by his sister, Dorcas B. DesCombes. Ruth H. Bowman, his wife of 53 years, died in 2005. 

Mr. Bowman’s ashes will be interred in the cemetery on the campus of Virginia Theological Seminary, next to those of his wife.

Reprinted with permission of Donnellan Family Funeral Services.