December 28 Today in OPC History

Happy 50th wedding anniversary to Doug and Susan Felch!

The son of an engineering father, Doug made his first radio in second grade and built an X-ray machine for his ninth-grade science project. The daughter of Wycliffe Bible Translators missionaries, Susan, as a child, sat through her parents’ college classes and grew up in Mexico and Papua New Guinea. Doug and Susan met at Wheaton College, where Doug earned his bachelor’s in philosophy in 1973 and Susan her bachelor’s in music the previous year. In 1974, Susan immediately went on to earn her M.A. in theology from Wheaton. On this date in 1974, Douglas A. Felch married Susan Weimer. They moved East where Doug earned his M. Div. in 1976 from Westminster Theological Seminary.

The Felches in 1976 moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Doug served as a Home Missions summer intern at Matthews OP Fellowship in Matthews, North Carolina, then became a self-supporting home missionary by writing for Great Commission Publications while Susan taught music and English at a Christian school. Susan learned how to teach when her first English class was made up of the starting lineup of the soccer team. On December 17, 1978, Doug was ordained by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s Presbytery of the Mid-Atlantic to labor in Matthews as their first pastor from 1981 to 1984. While there Susan helped to form the Charlotte Crisis Pregnancy Center and served on the Virginia Board of Advisors for Bethany Christian Services. For nine months, they also served as house parents for pregnant teenagers at a maternity home. Bethel OPC in Leesburg, Virginia, called Doug to serve as pastor from 1984 to 1992. While in Leesburg, Susan had a full-ride scholarship and earned her Ph.D. in literature from the Catholic University of America in 1991.

Since 1992, Susan has been an English professor at Calvin College, where she now serves as director for the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship. Doug earned his Th.M. from Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids in 1995. In 1999 he became professor of theological studies at Kuyper College in Grand Rapids. He also earned his Ph.D. from Calvin in 2005. A cat lover, Susan coedited with Gary Schmidt The Emmaus Readers: Listening for God in Contemporary Fiction and co-wrote with David I. Smith Teaching and Christian Imagination, published in 2015.