Ordained Minister -
Making History

She ran her eyes over the bronze plaque in the church's vestibule: two-and-a-half columns of names, 99 in all, and all pastors of St. John United Methodist Church since its founding in Augusta, Georgia, in 1798. She recognized a good number of the names, giants in the history of southern Methodism. Five of them became bishops. In fact, one of these bishops occasioned the secession of the southern Methodists from their northern brethren in 1844; his wife inherited a black slave, and northern Methodists could not tolerate a bishop who was a slave-owner. Thus, an ex-pastor of St. John was instrumental in an ecclesiastical schism that prefigured America's bloody schism—the Civil War—by 17 years.

Now, 160 years later, in June 2004, her name was to be added to the plaque: Renea Slater. As St. John's 100th pastor stood in the sanctuary for the first time, taking in the century-old stained glass windows, the long pews, the aisles where generations had worshiped and lived history, she was making history. The Reverend Renea Slater is not only St. John's first female senior pastor, she is also the first African American to lead this predominantly white, 600-member congregation.

Renea has come a long way from the eight-hectare farm where she was born in segregated Louisiana 60 years ago. "Back when I was 16," she recalls, "I could only relate to 'Anglos'—what we called white people—on a business level. You didn't get close. You never looked them in the eye. As a little girl I thought, 'I don't like this.' But that was America's way. I remember on a bus trip, we couldn't use the same waiting room [that white passengers used], but I never felt less than anyone, it went against my soul."

Still, she loved living on the farm in Shady Grove, Louisiana. She grew up in the midst of seven brothers and sisters, cows, chickens, ducks, pigs, rows of crops that furnished the table, and a mother and father who taught them to love everyone. "We didn't buy much from the store," Renea says. "We even grew sugar cane for making syrup and had our corn ground into meal. When watermelons grew ripe, we'd go to the field and take them and crack them open and just dig out the heart, because the heart was the best." The only crop she didn't like was cotton. "You've got to hoe the cotton and then you have to pick the cotton; we had these long sacks that would hold maybe 50 pounds [22 kilograms]. You had to go through and pick that cotton and cut your hands on the bolls."

In addition to farming, her father worked in a sawmill and as a school custodian. While he was at the sawmill, it was Renea and her brothers and sisters who cleaned the school just down the road from their farm. Their mother worked at the school, too, as the cook. "Whenever a daughter was old enough," Renea remembers, "she learned to cook for the family, and after the girls were grown, the boys did it. My mother said, 'That's what I do for a living, and I don't want to do it at home.' "

Because neither her mother nor her father had finished high school, they insisted that their children do so. "That was their dream for us," Renea says. "If you had a dream farther than that, you go for it, but you're on your own at that point."

Renea's dream was to teach. "I was in segregated schools until I went to college in the mid-1960s, but I knew I could be anything because my teachers taught us that," she says. "It's true that in America at that time our world was limited, and we didn't have a broader vision of all the many possibilities, but within that narrower scope you believed you could still be what you wanted to be." Renea went to college, but before she graduated she married, at age 20, and had babies. Raising three children slowed her progress, but not her determination. She finished in eight years, got her master's degree, and spent 20 years teaching children of all races.

Trapped in a marriage to a man who demanded her subservience, Renea accepted his authority and stifled her dreams. Then she started to read the Bible, the same book her husband cited as his authority. To her amazement, she found it was actually a book about liberation. "Our God creates us for liberation, and we don't have to hold to the law when it is destroying us," she says. This was the same message of liberation the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was preaching in the streets of the South at the time. Renea had to discover it in her own home.

After her 19-year marriage ended, Renea began hearing a voice: "I want you to preach my gospel. I want you to minister to my flock." It was ridiculous. Renea knew no women ministers; her Baptist parents would disapprove; and few congregations wanted a female preacher. But the voice returned every night. "It was as if a television screen appeared in my whole being and this voice came on, and I knew it to be God," she says. At age 45, Renea entered the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Three years later, in 1992, she was ordained a Methodist minister. St. John is her fourth appointment.

When Renea entered the seminary, she heard the voice again: "If you go, I will open doors for you, and you will never have to knock them in." God, she says, has kept that promise. "I've never had to knock down any doors to get in." Then the 100th pastor of St. John Church smiles: "Which is not to say that once I walk through those doors, there are not many challenges!"

Renea knows that not everyone at St. John has welcomed her appointment. But having come through the door, she believes more than ever in the message she's been given: "I have nothing but good news to tell people about how God can change one's world." — James Garvey

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