The Reverend Dr. George Byron Koch
Author, Pastor, Teacher… radio host, musician, engineer, CEO…
The Rev Dr. George Byron Koch (coke) was the Pastor of Resurrection Anglican Church, West Chicago, from June of 1994 until his retirement in June, 2025. The church changed its name to the New Jerusalem in June 2015.
The congregation has been a model of multi-ethnic mutual care, celebration and community support, while remaining steadfastly non-political.
Dr. Koch received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics in 1968 from Elmhurst College, with minors in mathematics and scientific German. While in college he was active in the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a newspaper column, hosted a local radio program, and wrote the original music for, and led, a folk music band called “The Establishment.” Although the band never recorded an album, Marshall Chess (Chess Records) said in a newspaper interview that their lyrics were among the best he had ever heard.
George earned a Master of Divinity from Church Divinity School of the Pacific in 1992, and a Doctor of Ministry from King’s College and Seminary (now King’s University) in 2003.
Rock-‘n’-Roll Days
He started his first company, Omicron Electronics, at age 12 (with his brother Bob, age 10), to make printed circuit boards for electronics hobbyists. After college, in 1969, at 22, he became Assistant Chief Engineer at The Electric Theater, a renown Rock music venue in Chicago. He and several other technical specialists later left to create an independent audio engineering company, Tomorrow, Inc. George became Vice President, opened the company’s West Coast office in Los Angeles, and led the building of massive public address systems for touring bands and auditoriums.
George in the recording studio
He later left Tomorrow, Inc., and worked independently as a recording engineer in the music and film industries, with musicians including Eric Burdon, War, Lee Michaels, Spencer Davis, Booker T. Jones, Holly Near, and others. He then was hired to be the Editor of (and a writer for) Recording Engineer/Producer Magazine, the music industry standard. He also did some writing for television, including a pilot series for Sesame Street (through Hanna-Barbera) with co-writer Gil Baldwin, some fiction, parts of a couple of books, and an advice column for a Los Angeles newspaper.
The Continuing Corporate Adventures
In the mid-1970s George invented and patented a children’s learning toy called “Alphablocks.” He founded and was the CEO of a national company, Guidance Industries, to manufacture and market it. The toy was well-received, received the Parents’ Magazine seal of approval, and sold through major catalogs (Sears, Montgomery Wards, etc.) and toy stores throughout the country. Additional learning toys were in development and nearing release, when…
Sadly, the company was forced to close, after a regional accounting firm embezzeled all of the company’s funds, and those of several other clients, and then immediately lost them all – in a South African diamond mine scam! They were never recovered.
Programming, Banking. Koch Systems, Venture Capital and Oracle…
George recovered from this troubling loss by working as an independent contract engineer and programmer (at the invitation of close friend, Irving Greisman), and together they focused on the rapid development of banking systems for major clients in San Francisco. The success of this partnership led, in 1981, to the founding of Koch Systems Corporation, one of the first venture-funded national software companies. George was its President and CEO.
There he designed and led the development and marketing of THESIS, the first major commercial application built on a relational database, Oracle, and used for the management of investment portfolios by major banks and corporations. It featured English-language query for end users, one of the first major computer applications ever to do so.
Oracle was selected after George and his team did an exhaustive study of 108 database management systems, in order to choose the one best suited for the development of an advanced portfolio management system, initially for the Federal Home Loan Bank. The study was so grueling that it made stories in computer magazines around the world, and salespeople for some of the losing vendors actually quit their jobs after their own product was examined in detail. You can read Larry Ellison’s comments about George and that early study, here.
When selected, Oracle had fewer than 30 employees, but the conclusion was that it had both the best design and leadership of all of those considered. Koch Systems became Oracle’s first VAR (Value Added Reseller), and was instrumental in Oracle’s early installations in major corporations, including IBM, then one of Oracle’s key database competitors.
As the world’s first and most experienced expert on building applications in Oracle, in 1989 he authored the massive (1045 page) bestselling book Oracle: The Complete Reference. It became the number-one book in its class, and remained there for more than 25 years–last published in 2014. It has been translated into eight languages.
It has sold an estimated 1,000,000+ copies worldwide, and millions of programmers have learned SQL (Structured Query Language), design and programming fundamentals, and advanced relational database methods, from its pages. You can read more about it here.
Koch Systems was acquired in 1989, and George became Director of Advanced Technologies for Software Alliance, a division of Teknekron, while then also attending seminary in Berkeley, California.
In 1990, George was recruited to Oracle, first by Marc Benioff (now Salesforce CEO), and then by Larry Ellison, and ultimately accepted the position of Senior Vice President and member of the Management Committee. By then Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world. George ran the worldwide Applications Division for four years while still attending seminary, and visibly applied “golden rule” moral and ethical principles for employees and customers, executing a major turnaround of the once-struggling business. He grew it from 45 million dollars in revenue to a quarter-billion, moving it from number 11 to number one in the world market. Some believe this effort positively affected Oracle overall and helped redirect it:
“Back in the early 1990s, when Oracle was up against the ropes with users and everyone else, Ellison brought in George Koch to bring a little user focus to the company. It was an enormously important moment, and in my opinion Koch’s arrival was an essential part of the turnaround that propelled Oracle forward through the 1990s.” —editorial in Managing Automation Magazine, May 2002.
A Different Calling
George with school children in Uganda
In 1994 he resigned from Oracle to become the pastor and teacher of a small Midwest church, Resurrection, in West Chicago, Illinois, and established long-term relationships with ministries in Africa, India, and the Middle East. George has preached more than 2000 sermons (most available online), and has appeared numerous times on local and national radio and television programs (including Moody Broadcasting, WYLL, and others). Their constant theme has been mutual care: living out the love that Jesus demonstrated relentlessly, and taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-8).
George has led and taught at both secular and religious conferences, and written numerous magazine and newspaper articles, from Christianity Today to Conference Board Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
George at Penland in
North Carolina
He is the author of the books The Country Parson’s Advice to His Parishioners, as well as Healing Prayer (based on his doctoral studies on how to care for victims of abuse), and the popular and widely-praised What We Believe and Why, which examines the Jewish roots of the early Christian faith, the origin and development of Christian doctrines and practices, and the call to unity across denominational boundaries (in other words, “stop fighting and care for the needs of the world, and each other.”) It is in use in more than 70 countries, and the audio version of this book (on Audible and iTunes) is now heard on more than 700 radio stations in North America, the United Kingdom, and Africa.
He has also produced an online course in Hebrew and the Tanach (the “Old Testament”), called Starting with Genesis. It is available free.
He is a part of the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Church in North America. He has been a director of many corporate and nonprofit boards, including Apropos Technology (which he helped take public), a ministry to AIDS orphans in Africa, a ministry to residents of convalescent homes, and The Initiative – a network of leaders, ministries, churches and missions that strive to live out the love and friendship which Jesus prayed for in John 17.
He has studied several languages, including Hebrew, Greek, Sanskrit, Hindi, French, Spanish and German, but says he is fluent in only one: English. His interest in physics continues, as well as number theory (he’s the author of one of three known Prime Number formulae), and he is a dedicated ceramic artist in high-fire porcelain, with his own studio, and a membership in the American Ceramic Society.
He and his wife Victoria married in 1979, and they have two sons, George August Koch, a writer and freelance copy editor (www.copyedit.pro) , and Isaiah James Koch, who is in the grocery business and an avid bowler.