A Fundamentalist Minister, A Pentecostal Preacher, and a Brethren Pastor Walk into a Feast… by Diane Findlay, submitted July 2022

No, it’s the not the start of a bad joke, and yes, I took some liberties! Actually, it should read “A FORMER Fundamentalist Preacher, a FORMER Pentecostal Preacher, etc.” And I don’t know that they ever attended a Feast together. But for a time in the 1980s, it could have happened. Remarkably, considering the size of the Iowa Baha’i community, these three dear souls were all active and devoted members of the community at one time. Here’s a little information about each of them.

Fay Himes spent seven years as a fundamentalist minister based in Minnesota. On a visit to Iowa City in 1963 in her role as clergy, she attended a talk on the Baha’i Faith. She was immediately interested, began to learn about the Faith, and became a Baha’i in Rochester, Minnesota later that year, in the home of Vern and Anita Tuttle. Seeking a new career path, she enrolled in Palmer College, in Davenport, to become a Chiropractor. Both Fay and her husband Dan clearly followed the promptings of the spirit, finding and embracing the Faith and each other quickly and wholeheartedly! She met Dan at a Feast in Davenport in June, 1965 and they married that December at the House of Worship in Wilmette. They never looked back! The family lived in Iowa (Ames, Davenport, and Bettendorf) until they left in 1970 to pioneer in Papua, New Guinea. They returned to Iowa in 1973, where they lived in Davenport and then New Liberty until 1991. After several years in Arizona, they moved to Colorado in 2015. Fay became ill with bone cancer and transitioned to the next world on July 18, 2016. She was a steadfast, dynamic, positive force wherever she went.

Bill Brown attended Dubuque Theological Seminary and served for a time as a Pentecostal preacher. He lived in southwestern Iowa while raising his family. Bill found the Faith and left the ministry to become a high school teacher in Des Moines. He started volunteering to teach English to a Cambodian refugee. When the young man learned that Bill was a Bahai he wanted to know all about it. Not wanting to be mistaken for tutoring in order to proselytize, Bill tried to answer the man’s questions while staying focused on the language lessons. But the young man was insistent! Bill began teaching him about the Faith and he shared it with others among the Hmong community. Soon the Des Moines LSA began sponsoring gatherings to reach out to this refugee population. Bill and his wife Joann also hosted meetings in their home, resulting in numerous declarations. Their efforts seem to anticipate the focus of recent plans on community building in receptive target neighborhoods. When Bill retired in the late 1980s, the couple moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Bill eventually passed away.

Leslie Rogers grew up on a farm near Mt. Etna in northern Adams County in Iowa. He attended a teachers college in Kansas, where he met and married his wife Betty in the late 1930s. They taught in schools in Kansas and raised their family there. Their son Steven Rogers became a Baha’i in the late 1960s or early ‘70s. Sometime during the 1970s Les and Betty retired from teaching, bought the farm and house and that Les grew up in, and moved back to Adams County. Les became the pastor of the Church of the Brethren in Mt. Etna. In concerned conversations with his son, Les set out to prove Steven’s beliefs were in error. But the more he investigated the Faith, the more he became convinced that the Baha’i Faith was true, that Baha’u’llah was the return of Christ. He and Betty became Baha’is and loved and served the Faith for the rest of their days. His humble, cheerful spirit and Baha’i-inspired woodworking projects let to many profound conversations about the Faith. Les passed away in about 1996 in Washington, Iowa.