Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is an American Methodist pastor, nonviolent community activist, and author.^[1][2][3] He was most recently a pastor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit.^[4] As member of the Homrich 9, he and the others chose to get arrested by blocking trucks coming to shut off water to residents of Detroit living in poverty.^[5] While a crowd gathered, he and the others prayed and sang with interlinked arms in front of Homrich, a company that was performing the shutoffs. Normally the company performed hundreds of shutoffs a day, but that day they only turned off a few.^[6] When the case went to trial in 2016, all charges were dismissed by Ronald Giles, chief judge of Michigan's 36th district court.^[7] Wylie-Kellermann has also been the direct action point person during the Michigan Poor People's Campaign.^[8]

Wylie-Kellermann was a student of William Stringfellow, and has become an essential editor and interpreter of his work.^[9] He also knew Daniel Berrigan SJ well, and published an important book about him.^[10] A Detroit native, he long described himself as having a "place-based vocation," but post-retirement he divides his time between Michigan and Pennsylvania, where his daughter Lydia Wylie-Kellermann heads the historic Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center, long a hub of radical peace activism, and frequented by Dorothy Day, Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan, Molly Rush, Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert, and many others.^[11][12] He published a book about his late wife, Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, who died in 2006.^[13][14][15] He married the Rev. Denise Griebler, a pastor in the UCC church, in 2013.^[16]