Gunnar Teilmann graduated from East Tennessee State College in 1940. He then attended Emery University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he received his B.D. degree in 1943. He was ordained a Methodist minister and pastored at Benton, Tennessee. He entered military service and was commissioned a U.S. Army chaplain. On New Years Day 1944, he married Wava Genevieve Hale, and soon there after deployed to the European Theater of Operations as a chaplain with the 30th Infantry Division. During fighting in France he earned a Silver Star, and was captured on August 9, 1944, and held by the Germans as a Prisoner of War. After the war, from 1949 to 1981, Reverend Teilmann and his wife served together in missionary service in Singapore where he taught at Trinity Theological College. In 1981 the couple returned to the United States where he became assistant pastor of the Blacksburg United Methodist Church. He also received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the Board of Trustees of Holston Conference Colleges of the Methodist Church, conferred by Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens, Tennessee.