By Akshara Vivekananthan ’13
Imagine finding a new passion several years after graduation from college. Perhaps the lesson in the life of Erich Thompson ’79 is that passions sometimes find their ways to individuals, bringing the best surprises in life when least expected.
Erich graduated from Austin College with majors in philosophy and communication arts and set off to seminary. He became a Presbyterian minister, serving churches along the East Coast. A few years ago, a hobby led to another calling.
He took up woodworking purely for practical reasons, then started making ornamental boxes for his family and friends. As he developed his woodworking skills, his hobby grew into something much more and before long, Erich was building chancel furniture. In the late ’90s, he was asked to build a font for Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina. “Over the next few years I worked on designs for the pulpit and table to complete the suite for Montreat,” Erich said.
To his delight, his work was greeted with immense appreciation and he was asked to take on a similar project for another congregation. Since then, Thompson has been displaying his works of art from Indianapolis to as far south as Brownsville, Texas, and all along the Eastern seaboard. He has more than 70 pieces in worship spaces around the country and has made pieces for family, friends, and clients.
“After I reached a certain level of accomplishment and saw the reaction to my work, I didn’t doubt that the woodworking could be a success,” he said. “Actually becoming one was another issue; the business portion, marketing, and management were new challenges.”
Thompson said that Austin College develops in students the skills and experiences to guide them through life. However, he said, as today’s graduates surely know—there are no lifetime jobs anymore. “The rigor of learning should not be left on campus,” Thompson said. “We need to be able to reinvent ourselves for each new season and to find the unique combination of skills and experiences we have accrued that can serve the world around us. In so doing we remain a valuable and marketable asset for everyone’s sake.”
Austin College has an amazing history of turning out graduates who take on some of the most important work in the country, Erich said. “But none of us is ‘graduated full grown and armed for battle.’ What Austin College does is provide a wonderfully broad foundation upon which to build the next answers for a developing world. Success comes in how we continue to build on that foundation—both in breadth and depth so that solutions draw from a wide pool of possibilities. As a nation, that’s what we do best. As Austin College alumni, that’s what we’re trained to do.”