He attended Yale Divinity School for one year after college, and then transferred to Chicago Theological Seminary, where he received a BD in 1928. At the same time he received a Master's degree in history from the University of Chicago. He was ordained right after graduation in a ceremony with three of his CTS classmates.
His first pastorate was at Kahului Union Church on the island of Maui, TH, under the auspices of the American Board of Home Missions of the Congregational Christian Church. He was pastor there from 1928 through 1936, when he became pastor of Pilgrim Church in Honolulu, where he remained until the spring of 1940.
From September, 1940, until he retired in 1968, he was pastor (later senior pastor) of the First Congregational Church of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Under his care this church grew and flourished, joined the UCC at the time of the merger between Congregational Christian and Evangelical and Reformed denominations, and built a markedly expanded and updated physical plant in the mid- 1960s, finished and occupied several years before his retirement.
The collection of sermons provided here, 781 in all, were transcribed from their original handwritten manuscripts by his second son, Henry S. Kingdon. The original manuscripts have been transferred to the Wisconsin state historical society, and the plan is that after they are catalogued and evaluated, they will be kept at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. The sermons represent all that we have from his 28 year ministry in Wisconsin Rapids, plus a handful that originated after his retirement. Quite a number were delivered originally in Hawaii, and then updated and used again in Wisconsin Rapids. The sermons are filed here under the date on which they were first delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, with all the dates on which they were used noted at the end of the text. The files, directly readable in HTML, are accompanied by a searchable database, which can be used to identify specific sermons on a topic of interest, or referring to a specific or more general Scripture reference.
