Por Marv Knox
Kathy Pickett heard God calling her into ministry when she was a 30-something mom who loved her church but never considered becoming a pastor. And just to be sure she got the message, God called her twice.
Pickett’s nontraditional call into ministry opened a vocational path that has blessed two churches. She served her home
congregation, Holmeswood Baptist Church in Kansas City, Mo., in a variety of capacities for about 15 years. And she has been senior pastor of Prairie Baptist Church in nearby Prairie Village, Kan., 12 years.
“Even though I have been involved in church my entire life, my call to ministry was surprising,” Pickett conceded. “When I was growing up, my family spent most of our time Wednesdays and Sundays and often in-between at church. I was afforded the opportunity as a child and teenager to try just about every ministry other than preaching.
“But I didn’t feel a sense of calling to vocational ministry until I went to camp with a group of youth as a parent and a volunteer.” That was 1998, when Holmeswood sent its teenagers to Passport Camp, and Passport’s co-founder, Colleen Burroughs, served as camp pastor.
“It was the first time I experienced a female pastor preaching and sharing and taking a big lead position,” Pickett recalled. “I kept processing everything through the lens of ‘I could do this; I want to do this.’ By the end of the week, I went home and said, ‘I think I’m being called to ministry.’”
Pickett spent an intense week reflecting on what God wanted her to do with her life. During that week, she recalled an earlier experience she had at work. “Three times, I heard, ‘Kathy, if I ask you to leave everything, would you do that?’” she said. The first question was so clear, she went into the next office to see if someone were speaking to her. “The third time, I said, ‘OK, God, if this is you, I’m going to need time to process that.’”
Later that summer, she walked the aisle of her church and told her fellow members, “I don’t really know what this means, but I’m saying yes to whatever God is calling me to do.”
Soon, Holmeswood asked her to serve as interim youth minister, and then, in her words, “it took off from there. “Took off” points toward Pickett’s whole-hearted plunge into ministry.
“Kathy crossed over from being a civilian to being a minister,” noted Keith Herron, Holmeswood’s former pastor, who overlapped with Pickett on staff. “She did that by going to seminary, and she got a part-time job at Holmeswood, and then she morphed through multiple positions until she became the one with the most work to do at the associate-pastor level.
Pickett’s approach to ministry training reflects not only her nontraditional path into ministry, but also flexibility and creativity. When she joined the Holmeswood staff, not only did she not have a seminary degree, but she had not earned an undergraduate degree.
She took advantage of a program at nearby Central Baptist Theological Seminary that allowed her to take master’s-level classes without a bachelor’s degree, demonstrate her capability, then continue on track to receive a Master of Divinity degree. She earned her M.Div. on a presidential scholarship and later earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from St. Paul School of Theology.
In addition to embracing a mid-career, nontraditional call to ministry, Pickett also negotiated “the obstacles of being called to ministry as a woman,” she said.
“What aided me most was learning I would need to take a different approach about how others perceive women in ministry,” she explained. “Rather than being upset or angry when I was challenged, I needed to step back and recognize we all grow differently in our faith and understanding—especially in religious life and in church life.
“Even though sometimes it was discouraging, I decided I needed to allow people to voice opposition to me. I had to recognize folks have a long way to go in accepting a woman as a pastor or a minister. I needed to give them space to journey with me, to ask questions and to figure out for themselves if it is all right or not.”
Eventually, Pickett changed denominations and roles. When she left Holmeswood, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregation, as associate pastor, she became senior pastor at Prairie, affiliated with American Baptist Churches USA.
At Prairie, she followed a female senior pastor and returned to her home denomination. “The church where I grew up was American Baptist, and it felt like coming home here,” she said. “I just had a sense that I could be fully myself here. Things seemed to line up and mesh theologically for me—spiritually and energy-wise. The congregation has been incredibly supportive from the very beginning, open to me, encouraging. Of course, it’s not been perfect.”
Prairie’s community has changed, and the church’s size has declined from its post-World War II, Baby Boom heyday of 600 attenders to about a third of that now. Changes have resulted in difficult-but-necessary adjustments that affect pastor and congregation alike.
“On some days, when we’ve been working through hard decisions as a congregation, I would have an individual say out of the blue, ‘Kathy, I want to let you know how much I appreciate you,’ or ‘I love to listen to your sermons and the things you have to say.’ Something encouraging and affirmative kept me here and hanging in there on those days when I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’”
The Prairie congregation reciprocates those feelings, reported David Grummon, a lay leader and member of the search committee that brought Pickett to the congregation, and Beverly Cosby, the church’s retired administrator and 40-year member.
“One of the things we really wanted to lean into was someone who could help our church navigate difficult processes and difficult topics,” Grummon said. “That is one of Kathy’s strongest points.”
Pickett is a vital asset to the congregation because of “her openness, her willingness to meet head-on issues that need to be addressed,” Cosby added. “She has skills that help us. Kathy approaches everything with a willingness to make changes and to keep us moving forward.”
A major reason Pickett possesses those skills is the path she followed to ministry, Cosby added. “Life experiences qualify us for a great deal of things education sometimes doesn’t, and Kathy is a perfect example of that. From her past careers, she brings a sense that, ‘Everything matters, and I want to get to the bottom of what it is and how we can address it.’ That’s refreshing.”
Pickett’s life and ministry models receptiveness to the divine nudges that brought her into ministry, as well as the flexibility, creativity and tenacity that enabled her to thrive across the decades.
Those qualities made her a likely model for Called in Context, CBF’s emphasis on helping churches find solid ministers from unlikely—nontraditional—sources, such as among their own members.
Pickett’s experiences—first at Holmeswood and then at Prairie—demonstrate how congregations can find exemplary staff leaders by looking to their laity, stressed Colin Kroll and Brian Foreman, CBF staff members who developed the Called in Context initiative.
The aim of Called in Context is to “create a culture of calling in our congregations,” said Foreman, CBF’s coordinator of congregational ministries. “We want to stimulate conversations about how the resources to fill ministry positions already may be in your church or community.”
Unfortunately, the “old great model” for filling church ministry vacancies doesn’t work anymore, he said.
That model relied upon a stream of clergy who spanned generations. They trained for ministry in seminaries or divinity schools, signed on to serve congregations and then became candidates who were available to be “called” or hired by other churches when staff positions or senior pastorates opened.
For various reasons, that ministerial pipeline doesn’t function as well as it once did, Foreman acknowledged. “But just maybe the people who can meet your church’s needs are right under your nose.”
Called in Context demonstrates the changing nature of “recognizing and finding good leadership in our faith communities and how God continues to call ministers,” added Kroll, CBF’s young adults ministry manager.
Called in Context’s “culture of calling” must be part of a broad conversation about both heeding God’s nudge into ministry and staffing congregations, he said. It may focus on changing careers and entering full-time ministry, as Pickett did. But it also may involve maintaining a secular job while taking up bivocational ministry.
“Thinking this way could lead to helping churches that cannot support a minister the way they used to because of financial reasons,” he explained. “It also could address the needs of congregations that may find it difficult to invite clergy to move into their communities because they are rural or underserved.