The Life of St. Paul is a ten-lesson study of the Apostle, the Book of Acts, and the missionary journeys of the early Church. Walter wrote it over a couple of years and released it about 2007. What you are reading is that original writing, not a later rewrite. The file was only saved into a newer document format when that became available.
His father’s papers
The course began in an attic. Walter’s father died on November 17, which he places in about 2004. Going through what had been stored, Walter found the study work his father had set aside.
His mother had served as a lieutenant in the Salvation Army, stationed in California. His father, as Walter tells it, graduated from the Naval Academy in Chicago two days before D-Day. In the Second World War that service came to one resupply run to Guam — he drove truck for the Navy — and then discharge. He went back in for Korea in the same trade: Navy truck driver and diesel repair. That is how the family came into trucking.
He had met Walter’s mother before Korea. He was driving a truck at her store, they were dating, and he was in classes so he could apply to become a Salvation Army officer and marry her. Korea came first. He put the study work away.
It was still there: an outline on the life of Saint Paul, highlighted, with notes Walter took to be an instructor’s — a push to expand the timeline and to make a real chronological study of the Apostle. Walter spent the next couple of years with that outline. This course is what he wrote.
Yakima
Walter was born July 14, 1964, in Yakima, Washington, and raised in the Salvation Army there — junior soldier, then senior soldier, inside the corps program of his childhood. The family also sat, especially when he was younger, in his grandparents’ church. He remembers Sam Kinison, a little older than he was, among the youth leaders at Bible school and vacation Bible school, and at the sermons they attended when they were over at that church.
The scholarship
When he was ready to step into adulthood in the Army, he stood before the local panel, the sergeant major among them, applying for a scholarship to officer training at the Salvation Army school in Oxnard. In the Northwest Division study group he had placed in the top two percent. A full ride toward becoming an officer was in front of him.
It ended with a question. When they asked if he had any, he asked whether Oxnard would teach the true history of the church’s involvement in the slave trade and in human trafficking. The question offended the sergeant major. The scholarship was denied.
He describes what followed as a lifelong effort to find the faith and to keep it. He still believes. He does not automatically believe everything presented in the manuscripts the churches currently hold, and he has spent years studying for himself.
How the course went out
He published the study through the Universal Life Church Seminary in Walnut Creek, California, under Reverend Amy Long. She is no longer there; Walter does not know who holds the office now. The study remained part of the seminary course. It was, for a time, treated as accredited coursework in California. He did not keep up with that standing, and he does not claim it now.
He has since placed the lessons on Substack, chapter by chapter, with a short presentation alongside. This reader follows the original manuscript.
How he meant it to be read
Read the assigned Scriptures with the lesson. When the papers cite a verse, study that passage for the answer, not only the paragraph in front of you. The questions at the end of each lesson are the original workbook. Anything you type there stays on this device.
This account is compiled from Walter’s own telling, for readers of the study.