Born in Salamina (Caldas), Colombia, in 1950, he is married to Blanca Lucia Echeverry. They have three children. He was received into the Episcopal Church in December 1967 by the first bishop of Colombia, the Rt. Rev. David Reed.
Duque holds a doctorate in law and social sciences from the Universidad Libre de Colombia in 1978. He is a practicing trial attorney for several companies and in the financial sector, as well as a university professor, teaching in the area of civil, family and commercial law since 1978.
He has studied alternative mech-anisms of conflict resolution at the National University of Colombia and participated in several symposiums on the subject. Duque studied theology at the Seminary of the Caribbean in Puerto Rico, the Universidad Javeriana of Bogota, and the Theological Training Center of the Diocese of Colombia (CET), where he currently serves as a professor of constitution and canons.
Duque also participates in social work with vulnerable groups who are victims of Colombia's internal conflicts, in union with different churches and religious denominations and participates in different ecumenical forums involving the country's minority churches.
From 1997 to 2003 he represented the Episcopal Church's Province IX as a member of the Executive Council and also served as a member of its communications and international relations subcommittees. He also represented Province IX before the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He served on the Comite de Convenio of Province IX, and participated in the writing of agreements with the Church of Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. He is president of the Province IX Court of Appeals and representative of Province IX to the Ministry Development Committee of the Episcopal Church.
He served the Diocese of Colombia as Secretary of Diocesan Convention in 1972, as well as president of the diocesan standing committee and of various diocesan committees. In 1975 he represented the Diocese before the Provincial Synod and has been a member of the Province IX Council for 20 years. In 1978 he was elected Provincial Chancellor, a post he held for 14 years.
Jenkins was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Nashotah House in 1992 and an honorary doctorate from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1999. In his continuing education, he studied for five years with Rabbi Edwin Friedman.
Jenkins was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop James Brown in 1977. His first call was as assistant chaplain at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where he served from 1976-77. He next served as assistant rector at Grace, Monroe, until 1979. In his only tenure out of state, he was called as rector of St. Mark's, Arlington, Texas where he served from 1979-1985. Jenkins was called as rector of St. Luke's, Baton Rouge, in 1985 where he served until his election as bishop coadjutor in 1997.
As a priest, Jenkins was president of the Standing Committee from 1992-1994. He was elected a Louisiana clerical deputy to General Convention in 1994 and 1997. He also served on the Board of Trustees of Nashotah House Seminary from 1981-1991. At the 73rd General Convention in Denver, Jenkins chaired the House of Bishops Structure Committee and served as a member of the church's Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons. At the 74th General Convention in Minneapolis in 2003, he served on the Cognate Committee on Evangelism and was appointed to the Presiding Bishop's Council of Advice. In 2004, he was elected president of the council.
In 2005 he was invited by Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold to join the delegation to address the Anglican Consultative Council's meeting. Following hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the fall of 2005, Jenkins partnered with Episcopal Relief and Development to form the diocesan Office of Disaster Response and is involved in long-range community rebuilding plans.
He and his wife, Louise Hazel Jenkins, reside in New Orleans and are the parents of two grown sons.
Sauls serves as a member of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, the Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons, and the Budgetary Funding Task Force. He is a member of the board of Forward Movement Publications, the Episcopal Media Center, and the American Committee for the Kiyosato Environmental Education Project (Japan.)
Two new congregations have begun in his tenure as bishop.A third is in the early planning stages.Yet another congregation, near closing five years ago, is being successfully redeveloped in Northern Kentucky. Under Sauls' leadership, the diocese hosted the 2004 Provincial Youth Event, which resulted in the building of St. Timothy's Youth Outreach Center at Barnes Mountain, Kentucky. The diocese hosted the 2003 national Episcopal Hispanic Youth Event at Berea College, and the 2005 Episcopal Youth Event, also at Berea College.
Sauls is a native of Atlanta, where his family has lived since the 18th century. He moved with his family to the New Jersey suburbs when his father was transferred to New York City in 1962. When he was 15, he and his mother moved back to Atlanta to be closer to family after his parents' divorce.
Sauls met his wife, Ginger Malone, at Furman University where he graduated summa cum laude in 1977 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to attend the University of Virginia School of Law, graduating from Virginia in 1980, a member of the Order of the Coif.
Sauls accepted a federal court clerkship with Judge Robert Hall and went on to practice in the corporate law department of Delta Air Lines and briefly in the firm of Phillips, Hinchey and Reid. He left the practice of law to enter General Theological Seminary in 1985, from which he graduated cum laude with a masters' in divinity in 1988.
Sauls was ordained a deacon in 1988 at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta and priest in 1989 at St. George's Church in Griffin, Georgia, where he served as assistant to the rector. He also began a more than tenyear tenure leading the Diocese of Atlanta's senior high camp. He was called to be rector of St. Thomas'Church in 1990, and by St. Bartholomew's Church to be its rector in 1994.
The Sauls were investigating opportunities to serve as missionaries in South Africa when he was elected Bishop of Lexington.
Ginger and Stacy Sauls were married on August 11, 1979. Ginger has been a special education teacher for 27 years, and currently directs the personal learning program at the Sayre School of Lexington. She is a founder of the diocesan Reading Camp program. Their oldest son Andrew, adopted from Korea in 1984, plans to follow his mother as a teacher and expects to continue his college education at the University of Kentucky in the fall. Their second son Matthew, adopted from Korea in 1987, is a freshman at the University of Alabama. Three dogs are a part of the family: two Labrador retrievers, Griffin and Annie, and one "other," Dottie.