For the Reporter
A U.S. Army Ranger turned Kent pastor will keynote the annual men’s retreat of California’s oldest Armenian Church.
The Rev. Tommy Allen, senior pastor of the First Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Kent, speaks at the First Armenian Presbyterian Church (FAPC) of Fresno, Calif., this weekend.
A native of Florida, Allen entered the U.S. Army and spent nearly four years as an Airborne Ranger with the First Battalion of the 75th Infantry. Upon discharge, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Florida State University and a master of divinity degree from Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.
From 1997 to 2002, Allen and his family planted a new church in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. He took a break from ministry for several years, serving as a neuroscience sales representative for Eli Lilly Company.
Allen and his wife, Judy, have three adult daughters: Whitworth University students Abby and Flannery, and Mercy, a member of the U.S. Army training to be a Farsi linguist.
Forty immigrants from Marsovan chartered the Fresno congregation in a rented hall on July 25, 1897. The boyhood church of authors William Saroyan and A.I. Bezzerides and filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian, FAPC today is a multigenerational evangelical congregation drawn from the Old and New Worlds.
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