Today we’d like to introduce you to Bob Hill.
Hi Bob, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, raised in Brownsville, Texas, a graduate of Texas Christian University (Ft. Worth, Texas), and Vanderbilt University Divinity School (Nashville, Tennessee).
Before arriving in Kansas City, I worked with ex-prisoners for 4 ½ years at Project Return, in Nashville.
Much prior to that, after my first year in college, I was drafted as a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War and served for two years as a Youth and Family Worker at All Peoples Christian Church in Los Angeles, where I would eventually be ordained in 1981.
Beginning in 1985, I served Community Christian Church, first as Associate Minister and then, beginning in 1987, as Senior Minister until my pastoral retirement in June of 2015 and being named Minister Emeritus. From 2015 through 2022 I worked as a Community Consultant with the Kauffman Foundation, focusing on community engagement with public education. I was also a community consultant for other nonprofit organizations in the areas of access to quality health care and voter registration, voting, and citizenship engagement.
In Kansas City I have served on boards and various leadership capacities in the areas of civil rights, social justice, and civic betterment. With Judy Hellman and Rick Hellman I served as co-chair of the GKC Martin Luther King Interfaith Service from 1991 to 2024. I also had the honor of being a founding of co-chair (with Rev. Eric Belt) of MORE2 (Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity) in the Greater Kansas City region, chairperson of The Council of Mayors’ Metropolitan Human Relations Commission, and co-chair (with Dr. Kelvin Calloway) of “Compassion Sabbath” for The Center for Practical Bioethics.
Since 1993 I’ve been a co-host, with Rabbi Michael Zedek, of the renowned Sunday morning radio call-in show, “Religion on the Line,” on KCMO-Talk Radio 103.7FM/710AM, which transitioned into a semi-regular national podcast.
Starting with the influence of my grandmother and encouraged by teachers all along the way, writing has been a life-long passion which I’ve expressed in nonfiction works and poetry. I am the author and/or editor of 11 books, the latest of which, PUBLIC PIECES, will be released in December.
My greatest joy has been sharing life with my wife, Priscilla Reckling, for the past 37 years, and enjoying wonderful friends, travels in the U.S. and abroad, countless trips to Priscilla’s beloved New Orleans, a love of live music, the discovery of wonders large and small, quaint and magnificent, and the stimulation and satisfaction of figuring things out or at least trying. We’ve also enjoyed celebrating our four nephews and niece and their burgeoning families.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it hasn’t been a smooth road at all. There have been rough patches all along the way. But the challenges – – like growing up fairly poor (though we didn’t know it at the time), or a mother who dies too early in her life (and yours), or living in the poorest zip codes in Texas and LA, and the regular disappointments and occasional betrayals that all human beings face — have served to strengthen an appreciation of life’s tender mercies and deepen a sense of the precious nature of each new day. As Hemingway put it, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are stronger in the broken places.”
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The work I’ve done as a pastor and activist has been the most gratifying public endeavors I could have ever imagined. And I’m glad to have made some contributions for the movement toward wholeness for the human family in KC and elsewhere.
Apart from my work in the church and other non-profits, one of my chief passions has been writing, beginning with poetry at a fairly young age. I’m mostly a nonfiction writer and a poet who luxuriates in the pleasures and inducements to growth that words can be. When I was serving as pastor at Community Christian Church a friend of mine was once asked to describe me and she said that I was “a poet who had found the perfect gig.” I felt flattered for her to describe me that way, and I believe that that may be even more true now, as I enjoy retirement and learning new forms and traditions of poetry. Before I published my first book of poems, I was experimenting with poetic forms like villanelles, pantoums, and sonnets. Over the past two years I found haiku — or I should say the poetic form of haiku found me! — to be refreshing and stimulating.
How do you think about happiness?
Instead of happiness, I think I would rather focus on Joy. Among the experiences which bring the greatest joy in my life are: participation in community in all of its messy and beautiful complications; the beauty of sunrises and sunsets; listening to new musicians and their breath-taking talents; accompanying a friend or colleague through a new stage of growth; reveling in our nephews and niece and our great nephews and great nieces, traveling (nearby and far away), staying connected with friends over long years.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://revhill.wordpress.com/
