Official Biography of KG Powderly Jr.

     Kent G. Powderly Jr. was born and raised in the Boston area and spent the summers of his youth on Cape Cod. He joined the Navy at age 18, and experienced conversion to Jesus Christ as savior in March of 1978 at Millington, Tennessee after being won to the Lord by the art and ministry of Mike Pearl in a little Christian coffeehouse called Liberty. Kent slowly grew to take the Bible more seriously on an intellectual, spiritual and personal life-style level in the decades since. Two duty stations later, he wandered like a stray cat into a Calvary Chapel Imperial Valley Bible study led by Pastor Pete Mallinger at NAF El Centro in late 1979, and has been attending Calvary Chapels in various parts of the Southwest ever since. He married his wife, Dianne in 1980, and went on to the Calvary Chapel Bible School (then at Twin Peaks, Ca.) when his enlistment was up in 1981. Kent and Dianne moved to New Mexico in 1982, sure they were headed into some form of pastoral ministry under Pastor Skip Heitzig at the then embryonic-sized Calvary Chapel of Albuquerque. They were wrong.

     Kent had some misplaced priorities he needed to get into order during the early 80s. Instead he found that God wanted him to work a “secular” career, write, and only occasionally allowed him to teach Bible studies. This period gave birth to the research and the first of many versions of the idea that eventually became The Windows of Heaven series. Kent also developed an intense interest in church history and science philosophy that drove him to study everything he could read on the two subjects, in addition to his Bible study.

     Dianne’s health began to fail, until she left nursing and worked at a tiny Christian School where the physical demands were a little less strenuous, but the spiritual and emotional demands a thousand times more rewarding. Their daughter Shannyn (born 1987) began kindergarten there at about the same time. Kent worked in the semi-conductor industry at Intel for 11 years, until forced by epilepsy and other advancing neurological disorders to go on Social Security Disability in 1996. Kent continued to study and write; though the same medical conditions that made it impossible for him to continue at Intel also hampered his efforts.

      It was at this time that the study of worldviews and epistemology (the mechanics of how people know what they know) became the Lord’s redemptive instrument to preserve Kent’s sanity. Faced with horrendous bouts of depression and frequent seizures and seizure auras that bordered on both audio and visual hallucinations, Kent stayed close to his pastors and developed a system of sanity checks that have allowed him to remain productive in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Kent taught church history at a Calvary Chapel Bible College extension campus at Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho in the late 90s through 2001, and co-taught a course on Genesis worldview foundations with Pastor Robert Hall of Calvary Rio Rancho. Kent remembers the highlight of the course was a field trip, during which he and Pastor Robert taught, standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, about the global Flood of Noah, and some of the global flood legends of the local Walapai and Havasupai Indians.

     Kent is now on part-time staff at Calvary Rio Rancho, a board member of both the New Mexico Creation Science Fellowship and Christian Life Academy, and an educator and author involved in home schooling, church and private Christian education. Powderly also speaks on church history, worldviews, Bible-related issues, dealing with chronic illnesses, arts and literature, and prophecy.