James Hendrix Glassman

The Reverend Dr. James Hendrix Glassman, who was born December 5, 1925, in Seattle, Washington, died on December 5, 2011, in Austin, Texas, his home for the last 19 years of his life. Dr. Glassman grew up in the Queen Anne Heights neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He spent most of his early career as a minister in the Seattle area. At Queen Anne High School, he received scholastic honors and athletic awards, including inspirational and city-wide recognition in baseball and football. He studied at the University of Washington on an athletic scholarship and graduated with honors in mathematics in 1949. He had a life-long passion for baseball, and in the two years following his graduation from college, he played the game semi-professionally at Ontario in the Idaho-Oregon League. During his early years he had dreamed of playing baseball with the University of Texas Longhorns, and it was not by chance that he spent the later part of his life in Austin, bringing some aspects of that dream to fruition.

During World War II Dr. Glassman served with the Army Air Corps in San Antonio, Texas and the Counter Intelligence Corps of the United States Army in Japan. While in Kyoto, Japan, he provided classes for professors and students at Doshisha University of the Christian Religion. He did his theological studies and student ministries in Washington, Oregon, Texas, and Scotland, completing his Masters work at the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1953 and his PhD in Church History from Edinburgh in 1958. From 1989 to 1991 he did post-doctoral studies in England, at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and assisted Chapel at Nuffield College, Oxford. He had a long career in the Presbyterian Church, serving congregations in Washington, Scotland, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Texas.

Dr. Glassman was also an avid musician and stage performer. He played banjo (the four-string plectrum) and performed with various musicians in Seattle, Laramie (Wyoming), Minneapolis (Minnesota), the Rio Grande Valley (Texas), and Austin, where he was a long-time member of the Austin Banjo Club. He also loved his amateur acting career, performing at the mid-Valley Civic Theater (the Tower) of Weslaco between 1984 and 1997, where he was especially known for his role as Fagin in "Oliver." He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Tower.

Dr. Glassman loved to travel and over a period of more than fifty years managed to make it repeatedly to many parts of the world, especially in Europe and the Middle East. He led tour groups from his churches overseas on many occasions, taking members of his congregations and his family on month-long educational trips to sites of religious and historical significance in places such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Rome, Athens, Crete, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. Late in his life, he also returned to Kyoto, where he had served sixty-two years earlier in the US Army.

Dr. Glassman was preceded by two of his siblings, older brother Eugene Glassman of Johnson City New York, in 2009 (at age 84), and older sister Anne Holland of Portland, Oregon in 2010 (at age 89). He is survived by his cousin Lynn Iverson, of Kirkland, Washington. Dr. Glassman is also survived by his ex-wife, and their son, daughter-in-law, daughter, and son-in-law. A disabled veteran of the Second World War, he will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

"God sees when the footsteps falter,

when the pathway has grown too steep.

So he touches the drooping eyelids,

and giveth his loved one sleep."

Dr. Glassman's Ministerial Career and Religious Scholarship

Dr. Glassman began his professional ministry in 1953, as Youth Director at the West Side Presbyterian Church in Seattle, where he served over 1,000 young people between the ages of ten and twenty-five. While in Scotland, he worked for two years as Assistant Minister of the Larbert-Dunipace Church of Scotland, a 2,800-member congregation in Stirlingshire, served at one time in a similar capacity by the renowned Robert McCheyne. Upon his return from Europe, Dr. Glassman became Minister of the Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Seattle, where in his six years the congregation tripled in membership. From 1964 to 1969, he served as Minister of the (University) Presbyterian Church in Laramie Wyoming. While there, he also served on the faculty of the University of Wyoming, teaching in the School of Religion.

From Wyoming, Dr. Glassman moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he served as Senior Minister of the 1,400-member Valley Community Presbyterian Church until 1978. In Minneapolis, he provided continuing education classes on Religion in American Life for the teachers in Public School District 281. At Valley Community, as in his other churches, he continued to work with youth and saw the church through major building programs. In 1978, he became Minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Mission, Texas, a "sunbelt" community in the Rio Grande Valley, on the Mexican border, where in addition to his regular membership he ministered to hundreds of "winter Texans" from the Upper Midwest as well as to the Hispanic Community. He retired in 1986, but in later years served as "interim minister" at the First Presbyterian churches of La Feria and Mercedes, Texas, at the Faith Presbyterian Church of Brownsville, Texas, and the First Presbyterian Church of Edinburg, Texas.

Dr. Glassman brought his churches into the union of the United Presbyterian Church of North America and the Presbyterian Church USA in 1958, as well as the union of the Presbyterian Church US (Southern) and the United Presbyterian Church USA in 1983. These unions linked the main bodies of Presbyterians in the United States, culminating a process extending over 200 years.

Dr. Glassman worked on numerous committees and councils both within and beyond his denomination, chairing Vocations, Personnel, Ministerial Relations, and Administrations committees; chairing fund-raising programs such as the 50 Million Fund Drive for Wyoming, leading theological and confessional studies and ecumenical camping programs; and working with young people troubled with the law. Over the course of his Ministry, he saw more than 30 persons "called of God" to some form of Christian work in the Presbyterian, Congregational, or Episcopal Churches.

Dr. Glassman's written ministry includes masters and doctoral dissertations, the latter of which is on the Nineteenth Century Modern Missionary and Awakening and is cited in scholarly work on the topic. He also wrote A Year of Rotary Prayers, published by the North Seattle Rotary Club in 1965 and reprinted in 1983 and 1985 (he was an active Rotarian for more than twenty-five years); a sermon, "Let Your Light So Shine," published in the Congressional Record of the United States Senate in 1966; The United Presbyterian Church of Laramie, Wyoming, 1869-1969, a centennial publication; and contributions to The Minister's Manual (1976 edition), as well as Argus filmstrips on comparative religions in America and various other Presbyterian publications.

In his last years, Dr. Glassman's researches were dedicated to a work he entitled "Between the Tides: the Missions of Robert and James Haldane of Scotland 1796-1843, and the Leading Voices of their Reformation in Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, the Jewish, Orthodox, and Muslim Worlds, the Americas, and in Africa South of the Sahara." He is listed in the following publications: The Dictionary of International Biography, International Who's Who in Community Service, International Who's Who of Intellectuals, The International Register of Profiles, Who's Who in the Midwest, and Who's Who in Religion.

Dr. Glassman will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.