About the Author

A Life Shaped by the Word

Edwin Dale has spent much of his life teaching, serving, and trying to understand Scripture more deeply. But that story did not begin behind a pulpit.

He accepted Christ when he was seven and later spent four years in the U.S. Navy. After leaving the service, Edwin started attending church again and joined a Sunday school class. One week, the class was challenged to spend more time reading the Bible. He took the challenge seriously.

Then he reached Acts.

Edwin sat down with the fourth chapter and kept going until he had read the entire book. He still remembers that moment because something had shifted. Reading Scripture was no longer an assignment or a good habit he was supposed to maintain. He wanted to understand it.

That desire eventually took him into Bible college, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Bible and began preparing for ministry.

The years that followed were busy ones. Edwin started a bus route for children, then another. He served as a children’s pastor and youth pastor, taught an adult Christian growth class, and eventually took responsibility for a bus ministry that grew to sixteen buses. Later, he and his wife, Sherry, moved to North Carolina, where he continued working with children and young people for many years.

Then life changed.

A shift in church leadership brought Edwin’s years in full-time ministry to an unexpected close. It was not the direction he had planned, but over time he came to see that a calling does not always disappear when the setting changes.

Today, Edwin works with National Write Your Congressman, helping small-business owners speak up about government issues that affect their businesses, families, and religious freedoms. He sees purpose in that work too.

What has never changed is his appetite for God’s Word.

Edwin still studies Scripture as part of his daily life, and the teacher in him never really went anywhere. That background sits behind his writing today.

As the author of Keys to the Kingdom, Edwin Dale writes about questions he has spent years thinking through himself: Why are we here? What does God expect us to do with the faith we have been given? How do spiritual gifts, natural talents, calling, and faithfulness fit together? And what does any of it mean for the Kingdom still to come?

Those are not abstract questions for Edwin.

They are the questions that have followed him from the Navy, to Bible college, to ministry, through an unexpected change of direction, and eventually to the pages of Keys to the Kingdom.