Born in 1947, Gordon earned a bachelor’s degree from Illinois State University, and he played left field for the Redbirds’ baseball team, which won the 1969 NCAA championship under the coaching of the legendary Duffy Bass. He also batted once against Satchel Paige in a barnstormer game on a hot summer night as a ringer for one of the local Danville businesses. Gordon then served for two years in the U.S. Army, where he also played baseball across Europe. He kept playing baseball throughout his life because baseball’s lessons do come slowly. He also played handball, tennis, and golf regularly and competitively. Ultimately, he found that coaching young people on the field and in the Sunday School classroom and whenever they showed up in his path, really was his joy and delight.
Gordon was a committed follower of Jesus Christ, and in all aspects of life, Gordon’s mission was to share the good news that we are made in the image of God and loved unconditionally. He used the many talents he was blessed with — his business acumen, his leadership abilities, and his curious, ridiculous, and empathetic personality — for the betterment of God’s kingdom. He died of a stroke in 2022. He asked that his tombstone read, "Not perfectly, but increasingly." Following that sentiment, his wife and children started the Center for Change Studies to provide folks with the encouragement needed to contemplate and discern their own beliefs and behaviors as the world changes around us.
Our Gordon.
Gordon E. Murphy's greatness lay not in the expected arenas but in his willingness to let his “beliefs” be challenged so that he was always evolving how he “behaves” with other people.
He was devout because we must have a spiritual framework upon which to build lives of integrity. He was powerful enough to make every person he spoke with feel seen and known. He was dedicated to social justice and a loving patriarch. But most importantly, he questioned himself and brought people in his life who would push back at him if he was falling off the path.
He read so many books challenging his faith to be better by pursuing justice and not just charity, to work toward balancing the scales that dictate who suffers and who doesn’t. He read books that encouraged him to look at the ways his social position might be harming others. And then he cajoled others to read those books, too, so he’d have someone to talk about them with. For decades, he met regularly with other affluent Christians in this hungry world to figure out what Jesus meant when he taught that the kingdom of Heaven was as inaccessible to them as an eye of a needle would make a camel.
Gordon married Cheryl in 1975 and adopted her sons, whose father Fredrick Tolentino had been killed as a Navy pilot. A daughter and another son came along shortly. Gordon earned his law degree at Northern Illinois University at night while swaggering his power suit and tie into work at the First National Bank of Chicago, where he spent 10 years and served as a vice president. During that time, he served as board chair of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Also during that time, he made the poor decision of doing business The Chicago Way and served a year and a day in federal prison in 1992. Modeling himself after the Apostle Paul, while he was incarcerated he focused on correspondence, study, relationships, and because it was minimum security, playing baseball.
Leading the Call…
Rebecca Cynamon-Murphy
Founder and President
Rebecca Cynamon-Murphy has spent the last 15 years running a household, raising 3 children, establishing a daily prayer practice, launching a quilt business, and shedding her concern for the expectations society pushed onto her as a smart, creative, and prophetic girl and woman. She has wrestled with her role as the child of a Great Man for decades and has emerged peaceful and determined to build his legacy in the place where her deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet, which is where Frederick Buechner tell us we can find God.
Rebecca's deep gladness is spiritual hospitality: creating social spaces where people feel welcome to bring their whole selves in safety to the table and to the other people in the room.
Rebecca feels lucky to have been raised as a cradle Presbyterian (USA) and as part of the Christian Community Development movement, led by John M and Vera Mae Perkins. She was active in the emergent Christianity movement of the early 2000s under the leadership of Rev. Nanette Sawyer, figuring out how to be a faithful community without requiring all participants to believe the same things about our Higher Power. It turns out that Rebecca was born with a Jewish soul and converted in 2019 to keeping the original Covenant as a Jew and this gives her special perspective working on interfaith projects.
Rebecca heard a specific Call when she was 20 years old to work with under-resourced teens and began her professional career as a high school teacher of English and Social Studies. But it turns out that grading papers is a low-dopamine event and her ADHD went undiagnosed until 2021. When teacher burnout and the explosion of her purity culture marriage coincided, she moved to Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington, to rest, to heal, to figure out how that physically remote community flourished full of people not following the white suburban American Dream of college, career, marriage, house, kids, retirement. She returned to Chicago to say "heneni" to her Calling by working in the non-profit community development field for World Vision and Safe Families for Children. Her desire to understand why poor teens stay poor and how those systems might be changed led her to earn a master's degree in Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Gordon E. Murphy considered her his favorite daughter, as well as an apprentice, hiring her often to be his Communications Director, when needed.
The world hungers deeply for people who make choices knowing they are worthy of love, rather than fear that they'll lose what they have. The pace of modern life makes that it difficult for most of us to find that confidence and then we feel stuck.
Rebecca is using the money from her recent divorce settlement to found the Gordon E. Murphy Center for Change Studies as a meeting place for people who are stuck and need to rest to move forward with the spiritual work of discernment and healing in beautiful physical spaces with good food, good people, and good energy.
She is excited to the meet the people who want to walk this path with her.