Happy 75th Birthday, Ken Sehested!

Through the years, I have posted articles regarding many individuals, but very few about personal friends / acquaintances. This post is about a man I first met 39 years ago and whom I am glad to call a friend. I trust you will enjoy learning more about him and his meritorious activities over the past decades. 

Kenneth L. Sehested was born on April 29, 1951. After receiving degrees from New York University in 1973 and Union Theological Seminary in 1978, Ken began his career with Seeds magazine in the latter year. That publication, which I remember well, focused on food security and world hunger concerns. That is probably when I saw Ken’s name for the first time.

In 1984, Ken became the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (BPFNA), and as one who had become a pacifist while still a teenager, I became even more impressed with Ken and his work. I don’t remember how soon it was that I became a supporter of BPFNA, but I attended their summer gathering in Mars Hill, N.C., in July 1987.**

Perhaps it was later that year that Ken published “Trust and Obey,” which was identified as Peacemakers International Spiritual Pamphlet #10. I noted in my January 1988 diary/journal that I had read it. In that small publication, he quoted Clarence Jordan (1912~69), whom many of us greatly admired back then and still hold in great esteem.

Jordan said, “Faith is not belief in spite of the evidence; that’s not faith, but foolishness. Faith is life lived in scorn of the consequences.” Then Ken asserted that trust and obedience most go together: “To obey is the evidence that we live in trust.” Then he states,

Trusting and obeying creates no interest off which we may live. If unemployed, we fail to exercise our faith, we are reduced to spiritual poverty.

Edwin Dahlberg (1893~1986) was an American Baptist pastor and a passionate peacemaker. In 1960, the Gandhi Peace Award was established, and two peacemakers were selected to receive the awards that inaugural year: Dahlberg and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Four years later, the American Baptist Churches established the Dahlberg Peace Award, and the first recipient was Martin Luther King, Jr.  In 1979, Jimmy Carter received that Award, and Ken Sehested was the recipient in 1995. I was overjoyed when I heard that my friend Ken had been given such a prestigious award.

Ken and Nancy Hastings married in 1973, and they both attended Union Theological Seminary, graduating in the same class of 1978. After years of service in various ministry activities as members of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, a suburban city on the east side of Atlanta, in 2001, Ken & Nancy (and others) established the Circle of Mercy (CoM) church in Asheville, N.C.

Ken relinquished his pastoral duties at CoM in 2015, but Nancy continued her ministry there until 2021. They are still a part of that unique church fellowship. In 2014, Ken created an online blog, prayerandpolitiks.org. Its motto is “at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.”  (Here is a link to “Contagious Resurrection,” his recent post: Recent – Prayer & Politiks.)

When I asked for some of his quotes that I might share here, he wrote, “Probably the bedrock statement of my theological orientation has long been this: God is more taken with the agony of the earth than the ecstasy of heaven.” Also, “There’s no getting right with God. There’s only getting soaked. (A protest against transactional notions of faith.)”

Ken also shared this core belief/emphasis: “Faith entails both the disarming of the heart and the disarming of the nations. (One of the believing community’s worst failures is not understanding the interconnection of those two realities.)”

It has been my privilege to share these reflections about my friend Ken Sehested. Perhaps those of you who do know him and have read some of his publications learned something new from this post. I am especially happy that those of you who haven’t heard about him have learned some important things about him now, just a few days before his 75^th birthday.

I now close this post with what Ken calls his “favorite homegrown benediction.” 

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** In August 2018, I wrote an article titled "Passionately Pursuing Peace.” It was published that month in Word&Way, the historic Baptist paper of Missouri. The piece narrates some of the history of Baptist peace publications before the BPFNA was founded. (That article can be found on my supplementary blogsite, see here).