Seminary and Beyond

After the Montgomery Bus Station beating, Zwerg was was torn between joining the Freedom Riders again and attending seminary. Then, as he was being honored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for his courage, he talked to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about his career indecision. "He said, 'Jim, go to seminary. You'll touch a lot more lives through pastoring,' " Zwerg recalls. "Basically, that made up my mind for me.

"When Zwerg entered seminary, he decided to go through six months of therapy to help cope with the anger he felt towards his parents. While he was in therapy, he often thought about a woman he had shunned in his angry college days. "I worked a lot of this though, which made me feel much better," he says. "When I finished, I knew I wanted to see my lady again. So, I called her up that night, asked her out, and asked her to marry me." Today, Zwerg and his wife Carolyn, live together in Arizona and have three children.

In 1975, Zwerg left ministry because he felt dejected by the politics of his new job. He work various jobs such as a chamber of commerce lobbyist, an IBM manager, and a business manager at a hospice. He also worked for a ministry that put people into low-cost housing. Even though Zwerg had many jobs, he has commented that his work in the ministry will always be with him. He has a lifetime commitment to nonviolence and he retired 1999, at the age of 59.