Growing up in the Lutheran church, Bob Cummings contemplated going into the ministry. It was a natural consideration. Cummings’ parents were lifelong Lutherans, and he was active in the church from the age of five on.

In his teens Cummings got a taste of the work of a minister. He and lifelong friend George Spindt assisted the pastor with the liturgy in their Pasadena congregation. The ministerial training “took” for Spindt, Cummings jokes, but not for him.

Instead, Cummings charted a different course. He became a business owner, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Vesper Society. He built affordable housing for seniors and was a guest lecturer at the University of Southern California. Yet throughout his professional life, Cummings’ work served a larger purpose. It was his ministry on behalf of the church.

“I always felt that if there was no place for the church in my business, I had no business being in it,” he says.

In 1965, Cummings founded Vesper Society with Eugene Heckathorn, a fellow Lutheran lay leader who also sought to live out his vocation in the business world. Heckathorn was owner of an agricultural chemical company. The two men shared a vision of providing opportunities for other lay leaders to use their professional skills in the service of the church.

They had met a year earlier in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the national convention of the Lutheran Church in America. Both men served in leadership posts for the denomination. During a break in the proceedings, Heckathorn struck up a conversation with Cummings. “Are you out here boondoggling?” Heckathorn asked. Their friendship blossomed immediately. “We just had a natural interest in each other,” Cummings recalls.

Soon, the two leaders were providing consulting services for their denomination, helping church-related agencies better manage their nonprofit organizations. Already, Cummings had a few years of consulting experience under his belt after 13 years in various manufacturing businesses. His firm, Robert B. Cummings & Associates, developed and managed senior housing.

One evening after a busy day of consulting in Philadelphia, Cummings and Heckathorn sat down at a local restaurant. They were enjoying the work immensely and imagined that other lay leaders would value the opportunity to contribute their skills to the church. On the back of a placemat they sketched out their vision of a consulting network. And turning the placemat over, they saw that the restaurant’s religious-sounding name, Vesper Club, was ideal for their “society.”

A Mind for Business, A Heart for the Church

Cummings was born in Wisconsin. When he was 14 his family moved to California upon the advice of their doctor. Cummings suffered from hay fever and asthma, but the California climate was ideal, and he was better immediately.

He earned his associate degree at Pasadena City College and attended the University of Southern California before World War II interrupted his studies.

Active in the Luther League as a teenager, Cummings’ involvement in church programs continued as a young adult. He found employment in the manufacturing arena and rose quickly in the management ranks while also providing leadership to the local and national organizations of Lutheran Brotherhood, a fraternal benefit society.

In 1951, Cummings became a partner in California Tank & Manufacturing Company and quadrupled the firm’s sales in four years. During this time he was approached by Dr. James P. Beasom Jr., the president of the Pacific Southwest Synod of the Lutheran Church in America, to help recruit lay leaders like himself. “He wanted to communicate that the church needed lay people,” Cummings recalls.

Beasom proposed creating a new program, The Committee of 1,000, which would raise awareness of the work of the laity through local meetings and large gatherings. In the post-war years, Protestants and Catholics increasingly emphasized the importance of the laity in the ministry of the church. But the organizing activity Beasom envisioned hadn’t been attempted before among Lutherans.  And he wanted Cummings to help.

Cummings’ business partners were active church leaders in the Pentecostal tradition, so they supported his involvement in the laity movement. Piggybacking on business trips, Cummings would speak to groups of lay leaders eager to integrate their faith and work. “I found a lot of men in the West who had the same feelings and the same desire,” he says.

The Committee of 1,000 helped establish congregational chapters of the Lutheran Brotherhood, and the campaign fueled conversations and area meetings of lay leaders.

An Arena to Apply Faith

Soon after launching Vesper Society in 1965, Cummings and Heckathorn were invited to help a financially troubled Lutheran-related hospital in San Leandro, Calif. What started as a consulting relationship turned into unanticipated ownership of the hospital — to the surprise of Cummings and Heckathorn.

Following Heckathorn’s untimely death in 1970, Vesper Society acquired a second hospital in nearby Hayward. While they hadn’t planned on this, Vesper Society’s ownership of the hospitals “played right in and fit like a glove” in terms of getting lay people active in the church, Cummings says. The hospitals created a laboratory, an “arena where the laity could apply their faith,” he explains.

The opportunities for application were numerous. Vesper Society started an innovative internship program in the hospitals that placed ministerial students of all faiths alongside lay medical professionals. Within the hospitals and their wider communities, the Society convened conversations about ethics. It brought together clergy and medical leaders to discuss the integration of faith and health.

As the worldwide laity movement grew, the Society found kindred spirits in the Evangelical Academies of Germany. Renowned British lay leader and author Mark Gibbs was enlisted to publish Vesper Exchange, a compendium of articles dealing with ethics and social concerns. Later called Laity Exchange, the publication had an international readership.

‘A Home for My Service’

While Vesper Society grew, Cummings kept up his senior housing consulting business, at times managing more than 4,500 apartments, principally in Southern California. He chaired the Subsection on Housing for the 1971 White House Conference on Aging. He lectured occasionally at the Ethel Percy Andrus School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California.

And his involvement with the Lutheran church deepened. He served on the denomination’s Board of Pensions. He was treasurer for the Pacific Southwest Synod and a regent for California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

Proceeds from the sale of the two hospitals in 1984 established an endowment, and Vesper Society’s engagement in the laity movement continued to flourish. Its projects in health care, leadership development, and peacemaking all provided opportunities for lay people to express their faith.

Looking back, Cummings sees that Vesper Society has made a difference in the world. And in this reminiscence, the path of a young man who contemplated ministry comes into clear view.

“I found a home for my service,” he says, “which I just couldn’t refuse.”

November 2007