Bishop Leontine Kelly shattered the stained-glass ceiling 18 years ago by becoming the first black female bishop in the United Methodist Church. Now retired, she is hardly slowing down.
For her, peace, and its consequences, are too important.
Any time you preach, you're speaking about peace, said Kelly, 82.
"The word of God is so clear," she added. "Particularly when teaching on Christ -- after all he is the Prince of Peace."
Kelly's ministry has carried her from Japan to Kenya to Italy. She's preached on civil rights, education, and AIDS compassion.
But for Kelly, the issues of peace and war are never far away.
Tomorrow, her peacemaking will bring her to Pittsburgh -- where she spent part of her childhood -- to receive the Thomas Merton Award for 2002 at the organization's annual dinner.
Two decades ago, she was arrested while rallying against nuclear arms in San Francisco; in 1995, she was protesting weapons build-up in Nevada; today, she speaks out against President George W. Bush's plan to wage war in Iraq.
It's a long way from the 1950s social studies classroom in Richmond, Va., where Kelly first worked as a teacher.
Her second husband, James Kelly, was a United Methodist minister. He encouraged his wife, a talented orator, to use her gifts for the church.
She became a certified lay speaker. When her husband died in 1969, the rural Virginia congregation he pastored asked her to take the helm.
Initially, she refused, but was soon "called" to ordained ministry.
"I didn't see ministry as just another vocation," she said. "I waited to hear from God, then I didn't have any alternative but to go [preach]."
With her youngest daughter and elderly mother in tow, Kelly lived on campus at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, where she received a Master's of Divinity degree. Each weekend, she went home to preach.
Her pastorship coincided with women's growth in the Methodist church. Kelly's role in the church increased. In 1984, the church's Western Jurisdictional Conference elected her as its bishop. She was the second female and first black American woman to be elected bishop of any major denomination in the world.
America's relations with other countries and peoples in the world are based on a "power position," she said.
"We are rich. We have the technology and the weapons. But we have so much arrogance. People have come to hate us because we haven't given them much reason to love us."
What ails the nation also affects the Christian church, she said, "and the real casualties of war strike people's hearts. They leave a moral wound."
Kelly has also been outspoken on urging the church's inclusion of homosexuals and calling for an end to its ban on the ordination of gays and lesbians.
Much of her activism was shaped by her minister father, David DeWitt Turpeau Sr., who once lead Warren United Methodist Episcopal Church in the Hill District.
Kelly was 3 when her father moved his wife, Ila Marshall, and their eight children from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s.
Then known as "Teenie," Kelly lived in the parsonage on busy Centre Avenue. She remembers when the Pittsburgh Courier building went up down the street; she played games at the Centre Avenue YMCA and she started kindergarten and first grade at a school down the street.
In 1928, the family moved to Cincinnati.
In recent years, Kelly has been a president of the AIDS National Interfaith Network and former president of the Interreligious Health Care ACCESS campaign. She has worked on development of the church's Africa University in Zimbabwe since 1991. She has taught at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., and Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn. She also was named one of the "One Hundred Most Important Women in America" by Ladies Home Journal.
"All my life, my political and social and spiritual selves have all moved together," she said. "I just could not separate them."