Jim Taylor is the author or ghostwriter of 17 books. He was the founding editor of an ecumenical clergy journal, PMC: the Practice of Ministry in Canada. For 10 years, (1983-1993) he published his own newsletter of theological reflections called Currents.
In 1981, he and Ralph Milton founded Wood Lake Books, Canada’s largest independent religious publishing house.
He writes weekly columns for the Lake Country Calendar and the Okanagan Sunday (Kelowna Courier and Penticton Herald).
In previous careers, he was for 13 years Managing Editor of The United Church Observer, at the time Canada’s largest religious periodical. And before that, he had ten years in broadcasting, in both radio and television, with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and with private stations.
A student of the art of Christian communication, Jim Taylor has written several hundred magazine articles, including a series published in the Christian Century. Other articles have appeared in The Financial Post, the Imperial Oil Review, Reader’s Digest, the Toronto Star, the McLuhan Studies Journal, and dozens of denominational publications.
He has led writing and communication workshops for all four of the United Church’s lay training centres, for Anglican and Lutheran regional editors, for the Freelance Editors Association of Canada, for the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, for both the Canadian and American Church Press associations, and for Presbyterian writers. He has taught as a member of faculty of McLuhan and Davies Communications and of Centennial College, both in Toronto. In recognition of his ministry of writing and publishing, United Theological College in Montreal, an affiliate of McGill University, granted him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1991.
He developed Eight Step Editing workshops, which he has taught in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Kelowna, Vancouver, Victoria, and Edmonton. The Freelance Editors’ Association of Canada, now the Editors’ Association of Canada, made him an honorary life member in 1993.
Jim was born in India, where his parents were missionaries, and has retained a lifelong interest in the interaction between Christianity and other religions. He taught Sunday school for 20 years, has written more than a dozen chancel dramas, and wrote a religious observance program for Scouts Canada, called Focus Breaks, that is now in use all around the world.
Jim is married to Joan; in 2010 they celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. They have one daughter, Sharon, a consultant in ergonomics living in Edmonton. Their son Stephen died of cystic fibrosis in 1983. Jim and Joan currently live in Okanagan Centre in the interior of BC.