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He was born December 25, 1936, in the old Secor Hospital in Kerrville. In his infancy the family moved from Rocksprings to southern Oklahoma where his father served churches in Holdenville and Sulphur. The family returned to Texas a few years later at Junction. It was there Lewis L. entered the first grade. The family completed its return to Rocksprings October, 1945, and this time stayed seven years. It was during this second pastorate that the congregation built the education and fellowship addition onto the back of the church. During his two years in Rocksprings High School, Lewis L. competed in extemporaneous speaking, and then, after the family’s move to Kenedy, Texas, he went to state semi-finals in debate his senior year. He was graduated from Kenedy High School in 1954, and continuing his formal education in the years following, from Schreiner Institute (now University) in Kerrville, Southwestern-at-Memphis in Tennessee (now Rhodes College), and Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. In February, 1960, he married Harriet Elaine Adamson.
Upon his graduation from seminary in 1961 the Presbytery of Western Texas in its summer meeting voted by special action to designate his acceptance for graduate study in Old Testament at the Johannes Gutenberg University at Mainz, Germany, as pastoral call in basis for ordination, and accordingly ordained him in the same meeting. Following three years’ study at Mainz, he served four years on staff of the World Reformed Alliance in Geneva, Switzerland. He and Harriet, with the two young children born to them in Geneva, returned in 1968 to the US. Back in the States he served in a number of capacities with Presbyterian and interdenominational church administrative bodies in Richmond, Virginia; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Nashville, Tennessee; Indianapolis, Indiana; Lubbock, Texas, and Fort Collins, Colorado.
Lewis L. completed a Doctorate of Ministry degree in church administration at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago in 1978.
His personal and professional interests and vision were as broad as the ranchlands, horizons, and skies of the Edwards and Kimble Counties’ Hill Country which – and the people of which – first nurtured and oriented him, and waters of which he first drank and in which was baptized in Rocksprings, and as the Panhandle’s High Plains to which he at last came back home to Texas.
Throughout his ministry he was active in denominational and ecumenical polity, issues, and concerns, including reunion to form the present-day Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1983.
It was, however, in small Presbyterian and Lutheran congregations near Lubbock. in the Panhandle and Eastern New Mexico, which he could at last serve pastorally, much like those of his Presbyterian minister father’s and teacher mother’s service in the Hill Country and elsewhere, that in the end he found his most satisfying work and peace as a minister and as a man. For the past several years he had preached without notes.
He was a member of Sierra Blanca Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which granted him honorably retired status in 2002, and at the time of his death he was also an associate member of Shepherd King Lutheran Church.
He had been preceded in death by his parents, the Rev. Lewis Langley Wilkins, Sr., and Antoinette DeMauri Wilkins, and during boyhood in Rocksprings by a best friend, Gordon Charles Taylor. His first marriage ended in divorce. He married Dr. Judith McDonald on December 27, 1992, in Lubbock. Together they ran the Plains Institute, a consultancy for clergy and church resources.
He is survived by Dr. Judith McDonald Wilkins of Lubbock, children Katrina (Ryan) McDonald Jansky of Pflugerville, and Tucker McDonald of Washington, DC; by children Alisa Antoinette Wilkins (Franklin) Cortez of Kansas City, and Timothy Pack (Christine Theuma) Wilkins of Brooklyn, NY; and their mother Dr. Harriet Adamson Wilkins of Indianapolis, IN; by two grandchildren, Violeta Isabel and Maya Cortez of Kansas City, and a brother John Antoine (Cheryl Chenoweth) Wilkins of Elgin, IL, and Knoxville, TN.
A memorial service was held February 2 at Shepherd King Lutheran Church in Lubbock. Memorials may be made to Shepherd King church or to Neighborhood House, 1318 Broadway, Lubbock, TX 79401.