Archdeacon
Henry Favorite among 13 to be inducted into Stivers Hall of Fame.
If you are familiar with the Bible, you know God supposedly has appeared as a burning bush, a dove, an angel and a rock.
And he’s also arrived as the
“rushing of mighty wind.”
But to come bounding in on a cartwheel or hand spring?
That’s how it can be when the delivery is being made by
Pastor Henry Favorite, the onetime standout gymnast at Stivers High School, the University of Cincinnati and Wright
State, who, on Sunday, will be enshrined in the Stivers Athletic Hall of Fame.
The 69-year-old minister is one of 13 new inductees who will be celebrated at a gala luncheon emceed by basketball legends Don Donoher and Bill Hosket Jr. at the Presidential Banquet Center in Kettering.
Now living in Marion, Indiana, where he is a hospice chaplain, Pastor Favorite took some time Thursday evening to talk about how he
mixed a past on the parallel bars and the pommel horse with present life behind the pulpit.
“I would use my gymnastics in church,” he said with a laugh. “Now I don’t want to lead you astray. I wasn’t coming in on Sunday morning in a coat and a tie.
“I’d do youth work Wednesday nights at church and I might do some cartwheels, some handsprings and some forward rolls. I could use gymnastics to inspire them.
“I’ve even done some now that I’m a grandpa and people will go, ‘Wow! My grandfather can’t even move out of the chair.’ Now don’t expect a backflip or a double twist or anything like that out of me, but I do what I can.
“Over the years, part of my philosophy as a pastor has been that I want people to know who Jesus Christ was. And I also want them to know that when you become a follower of Jesus Christ, you don’t have to become a monk or a hermit cloistered in a monastery.”
You can be a trumpeted athlete, though.
Favorite won four track letters at Stivers as a sprinter and a pole vaulter and another four in gymnastics, his primary sport.
His senior year, he was No. 3 in Dayton on the pommel horse and No.
5 in the state in the All Around competition (floor exercise, vault, high bar, parallel bars, pommel horse and rings.)
Joe Sullivan was the Stivers coach then and he had his athletes do exhibitions all over the city.
Favorite remembered performing during halftime of University of Dayton basketball games at the Fieldhouse and especially at the Gymkhana shows at Memorial Hall.
“The Gymkhana was sort of like a circus,” Favorite said. “I remember my teammate and good friend Jim Lewis and I were dressed as clowns once. We had the noses, everything. We were the same size and we were the center of the whole thing.
“I remember we put on one show for all the elementary kids in the city. Afterward, one little boy came up to us on the stage and just stared at us. Finally, he said, ‘One of you is not real, but I don’t know which one!’’’
Introduction to church
As for Favorite’s early reality, he grew up around the South Park area of Dayton — first on Vine Street, then at Hickory and Brown — and later on Stonemill Avenue near UD.
His dad was a mailman and his mom worked at Miami Valley Hospital.
He said his family didn’t go to church when he was growing up, but that his parents did two special things that forever shaped him:
“My mom knew the importance of going to church and in grade school I started attending the Burns Avenue Christian and Missionary Alliance Church.
“And the people there did everything a church is supposed to do. I was a neighborhood kid and they adopted me: Got me involved in church activities, paid my way to camp and I even went on a youth conference to Chicago.”
He said his dad wanted nothing to do with church or his son’s early admission that he wanted to be a preacher. In fact, when his father died at age 79 in 1980, he had never once come to see his son preach.
But his father did regularly take him and his older brother to the YMCA on Monument Avenue.
“We swam there and played basketball and I took up gymnastics,” he said. “Then I went to Emerson grade school and did gymnastics. My coach there kept telling me about Joe Sullivan over at Stivers and the great program he had.”
And Stivers was where he’d wanted to go all along. Both his parents went there, as did his aunts and his brother.
“When I got there, right away, I had an identity because I was good at gymnastics,” he said.
That also made it easier for him when it came to his passion to be a preacher.
“I carried a Bible with my books,” he admitted. “Back then the teachers encouraged me to stand up for my faith ... and I did.”
Fountain also was a top student — graduating No. 4 in his class — and that led to an academic scholarship to UC, where he was on a club gymnastics team and also threw the javelin for the track team.
He transferred to Wright State and again was involved in gymnastics while getting a business degree.
By then he also was doing the prep work for his life as preacher,
Favorite called it “street evangelism” and said there were times he went to campus parties and tried to add some heaven to the hops.
“You go to college parties and there’s lots of drinking,” he said. “But it’s amazing what the power of God does. I’d sit on the floor with the other folks and their beer cans would be in front of them and they wouldn’t touch them as we talked.” He started to laugh: “But then, after a half an hour or so, they’d go, ‘OK, I had enough.’ And then they’d go into the next room and drink again.”
Hall of Fame ‘an honor’
After getting a master’s of divinity degree at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, Favorite went on to be a pastor of various churches in Ohio — including in Dayton and in New Carlisle — as well as Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota.
Over the years he’s led missionary trips to Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Three times he’s gone overseas to teach English, twice on stints in China and once to Spain.
Now a hospice chaplain, this past week he needed some of that endof-life comforting himself.
He buried his mother last Saturday at Woodland Cemetery.
Now, a week later, he’ll be back in his old hometown for a joyous affair.
He’ll be accompanied to the Hall of Fame induction by Patti, his wife of 46 years, and two of his three daughters.
“I always appreciated my high school years at Stivers and all the lessons I learned there that I still use now,” he said “So I really consider going into the Hall of Fame an honor. I’m excited and humbled.”
But he’ll also be tested. “They’ve already warned us they want us to keep our acceptance as short as possible,” he laughed. “We can go no more than 2 ½ minutes.”
For a preacher on a Sunday, now that could be tough.
‘I always appreciated my high school years at Stiver sandall the lessons I learned there that I still use now.’ Henry Favorite Stivers class of 1966