I lost someone this past weekend that has been a part of my life for a long time. My first discipler, not counting my father, Dean Skinner. Dean moved to Savannah and lived with our pastor Chet Hart for several years. He was our youth pastor/director at the church, and I was for a while the only youth-age person at our church. I had a lot of one-on-one time with Dean and even remember our Sunday school class in a dirt floor building in the back of the property (for those who remember how much Dean loved spiders that was interesting time). Chet and Dean were a welcomed part of our family in Savannah and we enjoyed our time with them. Dean shared a lot with me over those years when traveling to youth events in Georgia and the Southeast, but he always worked into discussions the importance of serving Christ and being the man God wanted me to be.

Later when I went to Berkshire, Dean was a senior and had married Deb. He then graduated and served as a coach at Berkshire and other Christian colleges. He also served Alton Bay and Camp Dixie as executive director. He was a church planter in Western North Carolina. But Dean always loved coaching and saw it as a bridge into helping young people know Christ. Dean touched a lot of lives during his ministry through relationship building; he was the type of person when you met him, he became your friend for a lifetime.

Dean was blessed with a wonderful family, his wife Deb; his three sons, Andrew, Chris and Nicolas and their wives and children. He will be missed by many in different ways as a coach, pastor, golf buddy, discipler, friend, teammate, college friend but mostly remembered as a servant of God!