Photo Courtesy Wake Forest University
Thomas E. Frank
Thomas E. Frank
Compiled from News and Staff Reports
While not many people in the pew may have heard his name, Thomas E. Frank ranks among the few whose vocation, professional achievements and family heritage qualify him as a bona fide nited Methodist church expert.
Son of the late Bishop Eugene Frank, Thomas Edward Frank is University Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Dr. Frank is a scholar of American religious history with a focus on mainstream Protestant denominations, particularly Methodism. He teaches leadership courses in the Wake Forest School of Divinity and courses in the history of American religious institutions as well as historic preservation in the college.
He has written extensively on the culture and place of American congregations. His book, The Soul of the Congregation (Abingdon 2000), explores congregational narrative and "sense of place" and is widely used in clergy education. Author of the standard textbook on the evolution and practice of United Methodist polity and organization, Polity, Practice, and the Mission of The United Methodist Church (3rd Ed., Abingdon 2006), Dr. Frank also wrote polity articles for the Encyclopedia of Religion in America (2010), the Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (2009) and the T and T Clark Companion to Methodism (2010). He is co-author with Russell E. Richey of Episcopacy in Methodist Tradition: Perspectives and Proposals (Abingdon 2004).
A graduate of Harvard College (B.A.) and Emory University (M.Div. and Ph.D.), Dr. Frank completed a Masters in Heritage Preservation degree at Georgia State University in 2006. He taught at Emory University for 23 years before moving to Wake Forest in 2010. He teaches and is active in the field of historic preservation, currently serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of Partners for Sacred Places in Philadelphia, Pa.