Bill Nickels, Interim Pastor
Bill was born in Leesburg, Virginia in 1954 and grew up with three siblings in the nearby village of Waterford, where a Presbyterian congregation helped to form his early faith. In 1972 Bill entered Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, graduating with honors in 1976 with a degree in Religious Studies. Offered a Friends Fellowship by Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, Bill studied in Richmond for a year. At the end of that year, Bill moved to Greenville, South Carolina to work as a student minister in a church that had lost its Associate Pastor. In June of 1978, Bill married Ann Neale Canter, whom he’d met seven years earlier when they were camp counselors together at Massanetta Springs. They moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Bill earned a master’s degree in 1980 from Yale University Divinity School. Following that, and with the approval of Norfolk Presbytery, Bill accepted a call to serve a small congregation in Newport News, Virginia. His ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament came on November 16, 1980. Five years later, Bill was called to a 300-member congregation in Orange, Virginia where he served a 20-year tenure as Pastor/Head of Staff. During that time Bill also was given a number of leadership roles within the Presbytery of the James. In 2005, Bill was invited to serve as an Intentional Interim Pastor for the church in Suffolk, Virginia. Two years later, the session of First Church in Wilson, North Carolina asked him to lead it through its interim transition, and in 2008 the same invitation was issued by the session of First Church in Kinston, North Carolina. In New Hope Presbytery Bill has served on the Committee on Ministry and as the chair of an Administrative Commission that worked with Hudson Memorial Church in Raleigh.
Bill and Ann have two sons – Laird, born in 1983, a 2005 engineering graduate of Virginia Military Institute working for Northrup Grumman, and Neale, a 2008 graduate of the University of Virginia working for The Environmental Company. Ann, who graduated with a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, labored in print journalism for several years and then shifted her focus to public relations and marketing in the hospital sector. She currently is Director of Marketing for University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina in Greenville, North Carolina.
