The son of Lebanese immigrants Khalil Sayyah and Eugenie Helou, Dick was born in Brooklyn on December 4, 1934 and came to Orlando in 1940. He lived a youth of mischief, meeting Jesus at a Youth for Christ rally as a teenager.

Dick was in the last graduating class of Orlando High School and went on to a deep education that included Wheaton College (from which he graduated at 19 with honors), Southeastern Seminary, Southern Seminary, Stetson University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Duke University.

He married Peggy Blackburn from Wilmington, N.C. in 1959 and they lived in North Carolina before coming to Orlando with their daughter Julee in 1964.

Upon returning to Orlando, Dick became pastor at Powers Drive Baptist Church, growing that congregation with enthusiasm until 1973. While there, he also authored three books published by Broadman Press as well as a youth musical. His influence in the lives of the many he ministered to and counseled during those years is incalculable.

Dick then took his faith into the business world, first as a highly sought-after convention speaker and then a business consultant, coaching leaders among a variety of industries. He had a visceral understanding of people, relationships, and economics. If he needed to learn the intricacies of a trade, his natural smarts allowed him to emulate an insider to access resources reserved for industry participants (not unlike his high school football career when he played half the season for a school he didn’t go to before being found out). As in all areas of life, in business, he never met a conundrum he could not master, and he did so remaining thoughtful of all affected parties. During this period, he got a real estate broker’s license and dabbled in property purchases; played the market for fun; authored a book for Prentice Hall on public speaking; and wrote another musical, this time with his early collaborator George Atwell, to address the Ethiopian hunger crisis. When he read your IQ supposedly drops after open heart surgery, he decided on a lark to join Mensa – for about five minutes.

Dick served industries for over 40 years but continued to pastor, speak, create music, write books, record albums, paint, and take amazing photographs. He was lifelong athletic and competitive from softball to gymnastics, backgammon to ping pong, playing on a high school football team for a school he didn’t go to for a whole season before getting caught. Every endeavor he embarked on, whether commercial or creative, came to him effortlessly. Throughout, he was incomparable and inimitable as a husband and a father. He was no stranger to publicity, from controversy in his pastoring days to a front page profile in the Wall Street Journal. However, the Orlando Sentinel captured him uniquely in 1946, calling him “unusually friendly…with an almost swashbuckling poise” and quoting his mother as saying, “We often leave him at night to watch the younger children and listen to the radio without interruption…That’s the nearest to work that he likes to get.”

Dick was blessed with siblings Raymond Sayyah, Edmund Sayyah, David Milham, Sylvia Milham Jammal and Renee Sayyah Sisinni, who loved him like he was her own, as well as brother-like Suheil (Jim) Jammal and sister-likes Viola Zine Hage and Tania Tamney Harmon.

Dick Alive!