Thomas Cowan Starnes

The Rev. Thomas Cowan Starnes, lately of Frederick, Maryland, loved his family, his friends, his Church, and the countless parishioners who knew him as their pastor. He was the one whose sermons they looked forward to on Sundays, who joined them in marriage, baptized their children, visited them when they were sick, consoled them in times of loss, and whom they ultimately entrusted, at life’s end, to commend their souls to the everlasting care of their Creator. Tom died peacefully on Thursday, March 5, 2026, surrounded in his final days by his three children and their spouses, and visited in his last weeks by all seven of his grandchildren, all of whom will forever cherish their final earthly conversations with this magnetic, bright, and loving man.

Born on June 14, 1932, in Sewanee, Tennessee, Tom was the seventh of Grady and Lucille Starnes’s eight children. Four years later his family moved to Delaware, where his father worked for DuPont, and Tom spent most of his childhood there. He graduated from Laurel High School in 1950, where he excelled academically, played basketball, and performed on trombone in the school band. At Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts he met and fell in love with Waveline Trout. While working part-time as a butcher, Tom majored in Philosophy, served as a reporter and later Sports Editor for the college newspaper, played forward on the basketball team, and sang tenor in quartets that toured the Northeast.

Tom and Wave married on June 14, 1954, one week after their graduation. Their life together took them from Massachusetts to Ohio, where their daughter Vicky was born in 1956, then to Kansas City, where son Tommy arrived in 1957. Returning east in 1958, Tom became pastor of a Nazarene congregation in Easton, Maryland. It was there that he and Wave felt called to become Methodists, leading them to Washington, D.C., where Tom completed his seminary studies at Wesley Theological Seminary while serving as associate pastor of four churches on Capitol Hill. Their son Floyd was born there on October 14, 1960.

Tom’s long and distinguished ministry included serving as pastor of churches in Harford County, Bowie, and Hyattsville, Maryland, where he led the largest congregation in the Baltimore-Washington Conference. He later served as District Superintendent for Northwest Washington, D.C., and Montgomery County, returned to the pulpit at Capitol Hill United Methodist Church, and held leadership roles including Council Director for the Baltimore-Washington Conference and Senior Pastor of Chevy Chase United Methodist Church until his retirement in 1994. Throughout his career, Tom’s greatest passion remained parish ministry—being present with people in their most significant moments and offering thoughtful, carefully crafted sermons that touched many lives. A gifted writer, he published a memoir, Through Fear to Faith: A Spiritual Journey (2006), and a collection of sermons, No One Knows When It’s A Good Day (2014).

Above all, Tom found his deepest joy in his family. He delighted in time spent with his three children and their spouses, his seven grandchildren and their spouses, his seven great-grandchildren, and two more on the way, as well as his siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, and their families. He regaled them with stories from his childhood, colorful tales of people he had known, and familiar jokes that somehow never grew old. Everyone who knew him as Thomas, Dad, Pop Pop, or Uncle Tom understood that he loved them deeply and unconditionally.

Tom was predeceased in 2021 by his loving wife, Waveline Trout Starnes, and by his sisters Florine, Elizabeth, Jane, and Ruth.