NASHUA — Ask him how literature reflects his life’s course and the Rev. Steve Edington is liable to quote the two artists who have led him on his path from Christianity to humanism.

“‘All life is holy and every moment is precious,’” Edington said, quoting Jack Kerouac.

“‘Every step on Earth I traipse around, every step is holy ground,’” he added, this time quoting Woody Guthrie.

In just days, Edington will deliver his last sermon before the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, where he has served as minister for more than 20 years.

The pastor, who will take up an interim ministry at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester later this year, calls himself a panentheist.

“It’s more the belief that there’s a sacred or holy dimension to life that’s just contained within the natural world,” he said.

“As much as I still am fascinated and have an appreciation for the life and ministry of Jesus, what we know of it, I realized that the person of Jesus was no longer central to my religious worldview,” he said. “That didn’t mean I’d gotten rid of him altogether. He just wasn’t the central figure.”

But it didn’t start that way.

Born in England in 1945, Edington was raised in the American Baptist faith in rural West Virginia under a devoutly religious father. His chief role model there was the minister of his church.

“When you’re a kid ... at some point you see somebody you decide you want to be like when you grow up,” he said. “And I guess this minister was that person for me.”

It landed him on a path to the seminary. But the four years he spent studying English at Marshall University, just 45 minutes from his home town, would prove transformational.

This was during the tumult of the 1960s, what he calls some “wild and crazy years in the history of the country.” The life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. represented to Edington the gospel that would help define his destiny.

“King became a national figure, and for me, he kind of offered a whole different way of looking at what being a minister meant,” he said.

From Marshall, Edington entered a “very liberal seminary” in New York, the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. After graduating, he spent six years as campus minister at two Midwestern universities. It was there that he encountered the Beat Generation, which was helping to define American literature through the work of writers like Kerouac.

“For all the flaws of his personal life, (Kerouac) had a kind of a mystical, spiritual connection to America and to the world itself that I find very attractive and that I try to attain for myself,” Edington said. “I doubt that he was able to stay with that kind of awareness for every moment of his life, and neither am I.”

Meanwhile, Edington was having an increasingly hard time calling himself a liberal Christian, having been ordained to the American Baptist ministry.

“I realized that my concept of God was no longer that of a supernatural supreme being,” Edington said, “but more of a force of presence or power that I feel is both within us and beyond us.”

He left the ministry and moved to Madison, Wis., to study social work. In Madison he met a minister at the Unitarian Universalist church there. The minister took Edington under his wing and finally helped him to switch his Baptist credentials for Unitarian Universalist ones.

Edington served briefly in Rockland, Maine, before becoming the first minister at a new church in Stony Brook, Long Island. But in Maine he’d fallen in love with New England and wanted to return.

Edington threw his hat in the ring at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua after the departure of Don Rowley, who had led the church for nearly three decades. And that’s where Edington has been for the last 23 years — a die-hard Red Sox fan and one of the key players in the Kerouac scene in Lowell, Mass., the writer’s birthplace.

The author of three books, Edington said the Unitarian Universalist faith allows its ministers a broad spectrum of religious thought.

“I feel like I’m leaving a good, healthy, stable congregation here when I go,” he said. “I think it’s time for this congregation to decide where their road is leading them apart from my being a minister, and it’s time for me to see where my road’s going take me.”

Over the next two years, the Nashua church will search for its next minister. Interim Minister Olivia Holmes, the first woman to take the job at the church, will preside for the next year as Edington moves on to Manchester.

Edington’s final sermon at the church will take place on Sunday, June 3. His going-away party will take place on Saturday, June 2.