Paul McCusker was raised as a Baptist in the environment of Grace Baptist Church in suburban Belair-At-Bowie, now simply known as Bowie, Maryland, 15 miles east of Washington, D.C. He went to Bowie State University and spent five years between 1980 and 1985 as a copywriter working for Robert J. Brady Publishing Company, an emergency fire and medical services (EMS) specialty book and materials publisher founded in Bowie, but moved to New Jersey after Prentice Hall purchased the company in the early 1970s. In 1988, after a couple of years of freelance writing for them as creative director, McCusker joined the staff of Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family, a global non-profit evangelical para-church Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive around the world.
In 1991, McCusker wound up working in England, and much to his surprise, quickly fell in love with the liturgy of the Church of England and became an Anglican (otherwise known as an Episcopalian when he returned to the United States.) It was as an Anglican, McCusker created the delightful and highly-acclaimed nine-part Father Gilbert Mysteries Focus on the Family Radio Theatre original mini-series from 2001 to 2006, which follows the career of Louis Gilbert, after he has turned in his detective-inspector badge from Scotland Yard to become an Anglican priest and vicar of ancient St. Mark’s Church in Stonebridge, a fictional English village in the shire of Sussex.
Focus on the Family Radio Theatre was launched in 1996. Its first production was based on Charles Dickens’ December 1843 classic, A Christmas Carol. Voice actors for Focus on the Family Radio Theatre are recorded in London with post production done primarily at the Focus on the Family studios in Colorado Springs.
British Anglican author and humourist Adrian Plass, best known for his 1987 book The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37¾, a humorous, fictional satire of Christian life, followed by The Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal in 1988 and The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn in 1989 to round out the “Sacred Diary Trilogy,” was the voice actor for Father Gilbert’s character from 2001 to 2006.
Equally fine is Focus on the Family Radio Theatre’s 2009 dramatization of C.S. Lewis’ February 1942 epistolary apologetic, The Screwtape Letters, where British voice actor Andy Serkis, a lapsed Catholic atheist, known for his performances as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy from 2001 to 2003, gives memorable voice to Screwtape, the senior tempter, and last year’s C.S. Lewis at War: The Dramatic Story Behind Mere Christianity.
McCusker’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, while it had been percolating on the back-burner, was more seriously given flame in April 2006 at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas at the Third Austin C.S. Lewis Conference, “Goodness, Truth and Beauty: Apologetics and The Winsome Christ,” commemorating the 75th anniversary of the conversion of Lewis from atheism to Christianity, where McCusker met Peter Kreeft. McCusker told Tim Drake of the National Catholic Register for a June 2010 story, “There, I met Peter Kreeft and had a chance to talk with him during a break. In that moment, all of my bigotry about Catholicism came to the forefront. My thought was, Here is an incredibly articulate and intelligent man who became a Catholic while he was attending Calvin College, of all places. Why would he do that? What does he see that I’m not seeing?” McCusker was received into the Catholic Church in August 2007.
McCusker continues his work with Focus on the Family and lives in Colorado Springs, with his wife, Elizabeth, and two children.
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