Bishop Richard Wilke’s legacy: A life of faith and impact on global Christianity

United Methodist Bishop Richard Wilke, who died Sunday at 94, was known by millions of people worldwide whose deeper understanding of the Bible is thanks to his written and ahead-of-their-time videotaped teachings.

The 34-part Disciple Bible Study, which Wilke wrote with his wife, the late Julia Wilke, likely will be his public legacy.

His true lasting impact, though, is more personal.

As his youngest daughter, Sarah Wilke, said, her father never wore one of those prevalent What would Jesus Do? bracelets, but he lived the idea.

“He was a Jesus preacher,” she said.

“It’s not that I want to paint him as soft and fuzzy,” Wilke said. “He took stands, of course.”

However, she said her father “was a coach. He wasn’t an authoritarian.”

Wilke said her father gently guided people by example and also by finding ways to ask, “How are you learning to live in the world and to be a member of community and contribute?”

Bishop David Wilson, bishop of the Great Plains Annual Conference UMC over Kansas and Nebraska, was a seminary student when he first heard of Wilke.

He described the Disciple Bible Study course as “very intense training” that “really helps you to dig much deeper into the Bible.”

He said it’s helped people worldwide discover their callings.

Still, Wilson, too, sees another legacy. He was especially struck by the encouraging words Wilke regularly had for others. He described it as a gift to so many he met.

“He was just a man of great humility and service.”

A calling

Dick Wilke, as the bishop always introduced himself, grew up the son of funeral directors in El Dorado.

At 14, he was at a worship service where he felt called and “just went to the altar and gave his life to the Lord,” Sarah Wilke said.

Her father was high school valedictorian and, at Southern Methodist University, student body president. At Yale University, he earned a master’s of divinity and the school’s senior preaching award.

His combination of confidence and abilities as an orator and storyteller never failed to make an impression.

Rev. Amy Lippoldt, senior pastor at Wichita’s First United Methodist Church where Wilke once held the same position, studied Wilke’s Bible course in college with friends and then heard him speak about a decade ago when he was in his 80s.

“He was magnificent.”

Lippoldt said Wilke was starting to have memory issues at the time, “but, boy, he knew what to do at the pulpit.”

“He was really relatable. He told stories that made sense in people’s lives. He really cared about people as much as theology.”

Though she didn’t know him well personally, Lippoldt said Wilke “was incredibly encouraging” to her.

“He was just so thrilled that I was coming to First Church.”

She said he also was proud of the TV ministry he started there half a century ago.

Wilke was still a relatively young pastor in his 40s when he joined First Church in 1974.

Just as Wilke was a coach to others, Sarah Wilke said her father also was coachable.

“He surrounded himself with giants.”

One of those was Olive Ann Beech, the co-founder of Beech Aircraft who was known as the First Lady of Aviation.

Big churches can be a lot to run, Wilke said. Though her father was Beech’s pastor, it still was crucial for him “to have someone like Olive Ann Beech to sort of say, ‘Well, pastor, I can help you with that.’ ”

Wilke said her father was a strong administrator in addition to being an amazing orator.

“That’s why he could grow a church, frankly. Once he grew it, he also knew how to run it.”

‘All was well’

First Church member Jack Focht was a lifelong close friend of Bishop Wilke, so he knew him as a buddy, a great athlete — ping pong was one of his favorite games — and competitor, too.

It wasn’t hard for him to remember his friend was a pastor as well.

Long ago, Focht said he was drinking too much.

“Dick kept straightening me out with that.”

Focht said he respected both Wilke’s scholarship and humanity.

“He had the ability to change his mind on important things when he looked into them and got what the facts were.”

Sarah Wilke knew that as well as anyone.

In 1990, she went to see her parents, who were living in Little Rock where her father was serving as bishop, to tell them she is a lesbian. Her parents responded with love along with concern.

Later, Wilke passed her father’s room before going to sleep and saw him bedside on his knees — where he always went to process issues when he was struggling.

“He was right there praying, and I knew all was well.”

In 2019, when the United Methodist Church faced a split over LGBTQ+ issues, Wilke offered what was to be his final public address to United Methodists — and beyond. He made a plea for healing and shared his own family’s experience with his lesbian daughter.

“It was sort of a family decision this video has to get made,” Sarah Wilke said.

The video has been seen almost 60,000 times.

‘A great impact’

Wilke and his wife had four children, nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, with one more on the way.

One grandson, Rev. Matthew Wilke, said there never was pressure on any of them when it came to their spirituality, but many of them ended up serving one way or another.

“His family is still making a great impact across the church,” Bishop Wilson said.

Growing up, Sarah Wilke said a friend of hers marveled that she and her siblings would disagree with their parents at the dinner table, but she said they encouraged healthy debate.

“Well, yeah, what fun would it be if you all took the same side?” she said.

Wilke said her father “didn’t expect you to just swallow the company line, so to speak.”

There was, though, a rule about what they could eat when their father inevitably brought home someone from the church for dinner.

The family didn’t have a lot of money on a pastor’s salary — or a lot of meat.

The family signal of FHB, or “family hold back,” meant they could eat all the mashed potatoes they wanted but had to leave what little meat there was for the guest, then perhaps have a bowl of cereal after the person had gone.

Frugality was one of the many lessons the Wilkes taught, but they did eventually have more money when he became a bishop and the family received decades worth of royalties from the Bible workbooks.

They gave it away, to missions, through hunger ministries and with scholarships at Southwestern College.

“They taught us all to be tithers,” Sarah Wilke said. “It’s a faith act.”

She said most of the quiet financial help her parents gave “was really more about what can we do . . . that will build up the church and help people?”

Easter joy

As Rev. Matthew Wilke was driving to sunrise service in Tonganoxie on Easter morning, he got the call his grandfather had died.

“There was a moment of grief, but it turned to gladness,” he said. “In the sorrow, because of his faith and because of the hope of the resurrection, there was also joy.”

Wilke said it was striking that his grandfather left on that note, and he discussed it during the service.

“He kind of preached as he went out,” Rev. Wilke said. “It’s just kind of beautiful, and you find some comfort and encouragement in that, his witness at the very end. . . . In his dying, he just points us to everlasting life and our hope in resurrection. It just was pretty cool.”

Wilke knew his grandfather more as a grandpa than anything, but they connected on another level as well.

“If there’s anybody who made me believe I could make a difference, it’s him.”

Sometimes, Wilke would give his granddad a book he thought he might like or find useful, and he said the prolific reader would devour it in hours.

His grandfather taught him the importance of study but also of being outwardly focused and in the world to help.

“Transformation in people’s lives he believed happen in small groups where you make a kind of nonbiological family. . . . He knew that, and he was able to put the Bible in an approachable format so people could be in those groups and make that transformation.”

While Bishop Wilke “was incredibly consistent in reading, writing ministry, in taking another step to push the church forward,” his grandson said, he also always was a grateful, joyful person.

“His approach was to see the world like Jesus did, to treat people like Jesus would. . . . It’s a simple lesson. Anybody could do that. He just did it.”

Visitation is from 4 to 6 p.m. on May 5 at Miles Funeral Service in Winfield, and a funeral will be at 11 a.m. May 6 at First United Methodist Church in Winfield. The funeral will be live streamed by the church and at Great Plains Annual Conference UMC. Memorials may be made to the Richard and Julia Wilke Institute for Discipleship at Southwestern College.

This story was originally published April 24, 2025 at 4:04 AM.