Leader Connect S2E9: Wendy Westerhouse

This week on Leader Connect, we talk to Wendy Westerhouse, Alabama Baptist Historical Commission Executive Director. 

Links Mentioned:

www.abhconline.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hey folks, welcome to season two of Leader Connect. Uh this year we're gonna be focusing a little bit different than on just our associational ministers. We're gonna be reaching out across the state at Southern Baptist Convention to bring others into this uh opportunity for you to get to know them a little bit and find out how you might use them in ministry in your local church. So we hope you enjoy this episode. Well, hey folks, welcome to another episode of Leader Connect. We have special guests with us today, Wendy Westerhouse, who's the executive director of the Alabama Historical Commission, and she's going to be sharing a little bit about herself and the ministry that she does. So, Wendy, welcome to Leader Connect.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Thank you. Good to be here with you, John, and the Southeast Alabama Baptist Association. My pleasure today, you had just a mouthful, but it's good to be here with you.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

You've been here today uh doing some uh instructing and teaching, getting folks prepared for their uh anniversary celebrations they've got coming up. We'll get to that in a minute. But I want to find out a little bit about you. Tell us about Wendy.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Oh my, oh me, that's a story. Um, I was blessed to grow up in a Christian home. I had devoted parents who had me in the right places where I needed to be, introduced me to the Lord, and that was just part of our DNA. And I'm so thankful for that. Not every child has that, and I I'm just so grateful. Um and God's uh of course I accepted Jesus as my savior at a young age and uh felt sensing his call on my life. And so after I went to high school college, I grew up in Birmingham and I went, I finished at Huffman High School, then went to Stanford University, graduated from there, and then immediately I went to Styth Western Baptist Theological Seminary to pursue my degree so I could work in a Christian vocation and what we used to call back then full-time Christian service. And so um I did those years of preparation, and then as God does his thing in placing us uh in the plan he has for our life, he um placed me at a place that I had where I had grown up and loved, and that was Chaco Springs Conference Center. And uh I worked there 10 summers, okay, and then uh when I finished seminary, he worked in all the timing and planted me there, and I served there 38 years in a variety of roles and just loved seeing our Alabama Baptist family there and loving on them and just learning about ministry all over our state.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

I think that's where we first met.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

It is where we first met, yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

We were frequent flyers back then.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

You're not you're still a frequent flyer, I'm sure. Um both of y'all. So it's it's good that good to have seen you there and met you there, and just learn about all the ministries that are going on in our state. Um, the connections that we have in common with each other are amazing. In the workshop I taught today, someone knew someone, and I told them about somebody, it's just crazy because there's all kinds of connections. Absolutely, absolutely. So God just weaves and has mingled and tangled up our lives in so many ways, and we cross paths with people again. One of your pastors here, I don't know if I want to call his name or not. I'm mad at him today because he didn't send anybody but to the workshop. But Ray Jones at Ridgecrest, we knew each other in high school. So I mean, thank that's that is a long way. And so um, you know, he's really old. I don't know about me, but he's really aging. So but he's a great guy and it's a wonderful church. We were uh blessed to be at your annual meeting there last year, and it was a wonderful, wonderful event. So I think um when I drive when I drove in today and I saw all the buildings you have here and the ministry center and the thrift store, you are really serving your community. And it's so awesome.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

God's been good through the years, and folks have been faithful to serve and share the share the gospel. That's why we do what we need.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Exactly. That's the purpose of it all. And lost people are everywhere, and they have needs, and if we can meet them, that's a way to introduce them to Him. Yes. Um it is, it's it's awesome. Yeah, we find ways that we can connect.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Well, you're let's uh jump into your tenure now at the Alabama Baptist Historical Commission.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Okay, good job getting the name right.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Yeah, tell us how you when you started there and what that job looked like, what that ministry looks like.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Okay, well, I started there in July of 23 as executive director elect, and I had the honor of working alongside my predecessor, Lonette Burke.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

I'm sure that was very helpful.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Oh, it was very helpful, and I still call upon her at times like okay, this hadn't ever come up, so what is this about? And she's willing to help, even though they've moved out of state, but she's gracious to help help me with things that I don't know anything about. Um so our our mission is to assist churches and help them in really everything related to history. Uh, one of the main focus and the purpose of our workshop today was to connect with churches in this district five, which includes several associations. Um, and I was in coffee association yesterday, so in these two days I've been in two different associations, so it'd be closer for some people to attend. And they might have an church anniversary, a milestone anniversary uh this year, next year, or 2028.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

And today uh the people who attended were mostly for 2027, which means they are starting early with the church.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

You can't start too early.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

You can't start too early because you get these ideas about things and it sounds great. And then as we all have multiple responsibilities at home and church and just life, you can't squeeze it all in. It's better when you're not on the time crunch, and it can um can be very effective. One of the things that I focus on so much in the workshop, and um, I have to tell you about a church in the Dale Association in Daleville, not too far from here, a Providence Baptist Church, two years ago had a major anniversary, and they were 175, I believe. And the lady in the church wrote this tagline that I think is so descriptive of what a celebration should be. Okay, and it was celebrating the past, rejoicing in the present, and embracing the future. Wow, that's really good. It's powerful, and so what we look at in history is not just all old things, but it's a time to evaluate where are we as a congregation? How has our community changed? What do we need to do differently to meet the current needs of the people around us? How can we reach those lost people? So many churches do their anniversary, but they may incorporate a community-wide outreach event like a Saturday and then and just open it up to the neighborhood and see who's in your neighborhood. Um, it just helps you think about okay, we're celebrating this 25-year increment anniversary, but like at the next one, where do we sense God leading us as a church to go to reach the the people around us now, the community? So it really is not all just about the past, it's about a challenge for the future.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

And that the lady at Provence was just the bomb in creating that one. And I have repeated that many times because it's so good. She understood another unique thing about that church, since it's in this area, and as we have workshops, we talk about every church's story, it's different. They're not they're all unique, and they have different strengths, and across the years have done different kinds of ministries. And and they told me when I met them at a workshop a couple years ago, she said, Well, our ministry has been to soldiers over the years. And she said, transient soldiers come through here, and we know they're temporary, they know they're temporary, but for many years they would come to church, they never knew how many would come or anything, but families in the church took one home with them for Sunday lunch.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

How about that?

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Isn't that awesome? That's awesome. So you just go to church and you end up going home with somebody and you connect with somebody local, and a more opportunity to share our faith with them in a deeper way than just them coming to worship. So I thought that was really, really unique. It is. So y'all appreciate that in this area.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Oh, sure, because we have quite a few of our churches that reach out into that area as well. Uh, but you're you have to look at it that way as we're kind of training and equipping missionaries wherever they end up, that's right. They carry it with them. That's right. That's a great way to go.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

And those soldiers, who knows where they all are. But I don't believe they'll forget that those churches in rural Alabama took them in and loved on them and shared the gospel with them or helped prepare them for life or whatever. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Well, one of the things I recently heard uh was that a lot of the folks who come through Fort Rucker for training or teaching or whatever they may be, their role is a lot of them look at coming back here when they retire or getting close to retirement because they had a good experience in the area. And so they come back here to settle down. That's amazing. And so obviously, churches, I'm sure, have a significant area.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Yeah, there are many other churches with stories like that that minister to them.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Uh that that speaks well. Um that want to come back to this part of Alabama and experience all of our heat and humidity and southern hospitality going on with that. Uh, but that you know, but I'm glad to hear that uh Delville did a good job of that. Uh process of getting people to come back and relocate.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

That's right, and that the church that started them celebrated 200 that same year. And so that church at 25 years old planted a church in Delville. So it's like, wow, what you know, we think church planting is a new thing, it's not really a new thing. No, many of our churches have roots in other churches where communities were starting to grow out in other areas, and so it's not a new thing, of course, it needs to continue because we need to assess what the needs are and see how we can reach the lost.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Well, along with um helping churches celebrate their anniversaries, what else do you folks do?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Okay, well, there's I have a wonderful group of commissioners who live in the districts around the state. Your commissioner here actually is from Barber Association, and she attends the anniversaries that happen in this district. Uh sometimes we may have three or four on the same Sunday, so we have to borrow from the next door association, or I come, or you know, we have to work it out because inevitably there's a lot on the same day sometimes. Um, but we help churches facilitate preserving their church records. A church today brought me their records. I had no idea they were going to bring them. They registered, but they came and they brought me the minutes from the very beginning of their church.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

About that.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

They brought, I haven't even looked through all of it, but ledgers and you know, leather-bound, you know, old binders, oh, fabulous stuff. So I'll be taking that back with me to the Stanford University Library. There's a special uh collection in their archives that handles our Abama Baby's history. And so they will preserve those records. We are currently in the midst of transitioning to digital from microfilm.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Microfici was it forever.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Well, it is forever, and it's still the gold standard, and institutions still use it. But last year, the uh only company who was still making 35 millimeter film decided at the end of last year they weren't going to even make it anymore. So you can't even buy the film to do it. Now they purchased some ahead, they're kind of in the middle of some projects, but they're wrapping those up, and we're working on how to make that happen. You're talking about equipment change, purchasing, you're talking about procedures, has to be handled differently. Uh, one of the most interesting things about the digital is that they tag the keywords as the best way I can describe it. All these technique people will know that it's called metadata, but like on one page, there might be a hundred keywords, and so it's tedious to mark those, but the purpose of that is for research in the future years, somebody can type in Brother John Thomas and they can find him every time he's mentioned. So hopefully it's all good.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Well, yeah, we hope so.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

We hope so. But if they're looking for where you served or what happened in these years, it's going to be easily found, and so it is awesome. It just changes the process.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

I'm assuming by it being digital that it can actually be accessed online at some point. It can be, yes, it will be.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Uh-huh. And so we're working on a way to um find a way to make it kind of password protected so a church can be given a code to look at all their stuff. But if somebody's searching for research for any purposes, and people use the collection now for so many different things, people out of the United States are researching churches in Alabama and our Baptist movement and just how things are done is amazing. And people that are writing papers and students, not just Sanford students, but students in general, all kinds of ways that the that the history is being used. So the history is not just about today, but we're making it today for the people in the future, and then of course we're challenged for the future as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Well, I I know there are you you've heard the stories in well, I think we've had a couple in the association through the years that a church is burned or something happened, they had a flood, and records were lost.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

And so that history is gone. And so what you like folks offer to help preserve that is uh invaluable. Right, and so appreciate the ministry that you do because it does help future researchers or people just trying to dig in and find out details about how things were to learn from them. Maybe they are searching for somebody. I know we get calls a lot for yeah, well, brother so-and-so used to serve in your association.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Where is he right now?

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah, and so we you know, we can we Judy especially is really good at being able to access that information and try to help them out, try to track them down where they are currently and what years they serve, that kind of thing. So, but having those records is is uh certainly a huge help. Otherwise, you gotta recall, hope people can recall that information, and after so many years, you just can't.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

It gets lost, it gets lost. Well, and I'm your transporter for your records. I'll pick them up, I'll get them to Sanford. You probably don't want to try to go there and park there and get in and get out. And Birmingham's a long way from here, so I'm down here frequently enough to pick up and return records. And one new feature of this digital process will be, and we're not there yet, but we're working toward it, is that a church will have the opportunity to have a copy of the digital records. So, not just be stored in the Sanford archives of all our churches, but they can have it in their hand, and so then when we move away from jump drives and whatever we're storing on now, they can continue to modernize it, but it will have been scanned digitally. On a microfilm uh scanner bed, you could put three or four pages of documents because they're big, but in digital it's one sheet at a time, and so it's gonna be more time consuming, but it will last longer, and it means you can do so much with it without losing the quality through microfilm. So it's it's gonna be great. I hope a a year or so from now we'll say we've made the transition and things are going well, and the staff there has gotten real familiar with it and doing well, but they've already been doing it, they have one camera, uh, digital camera. Okay. So then they have one microfilm camera that they're limping by with. You can't find parts, you can't so they kind of put the parts of several together to have one to continue projects that they're on, and then once they complete that, then it'll kind of be put to bed. So, but there's reels, hundreds of thousands of reels of microfilm there. So one process, one project for the future will also be to transfer those that were already filmed into digital. But that's not as pressing as us being able to get the equipment in place and continue to preserve right now, but that'll be a project on the table that will need to be, you know, done over time.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Well, you've mentioned Sanford several times. Tell us about that connection. How does that work with Sanford being a part of this process?

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Well, they actually are the official repository, is the word that's used, of Alabama Baptist history. And um, I've read old notes from conventions and annuals from way back, and as early as in the 1880s, people then who we look back on as being prominent and spreading, you know, the growth of Baptist and our faith in our state, um, they wanted to preserve because they knew something really important was happening as things developed. And so um I was reading a you do you know that the library at Sanford is named for Harwell Davis, Harwell Goodwin Davis, his name's up there, so I see it all the time. But I found in minutes from the 1940s of Sanford, Howard College at the time, he said this, and it was so interesting. He said, Alabama Baptist history is Sanford history, and Sanford history is Alabama Baptist history because they grew kind of together. And he said if anyone wanted to separate this collection in the future, it would be like trying to unscramble an omelet. Yeah, and so he just recognizes that they they've been mingled all these years. Um, so that's that's why our office is there, and of course, I work closely with the library staff, and they are just awesome, and they care about every little church and every document. Um, just this week I had an inquiry from a church in Geneva Association, and the director of missions said, You have this church on the list for an anniversary, but they think they're much older than that. How can we find out? So I just emailed the person at Sanford and said, What can you find on this church? And she emailed me back and said, Well, yeah, they were 60 years older than what you thought because they started in another association, and things just so you have to trace it back, but they've got the tools to do that researching and help us find those records. So that's a big step of what they do, and I'll say servicing the collection by being there to answer questions, sure, and they know how to do that, and so um our our um commission is an entity of the state convention, and we are um supported by cooperative program funds, and we're grateful for that. That makes our ministry possible, and we are small. Um currently I'm the only full-time employee, and I have two part-time people helping me with different things, and then I have these 16 wonderful commissioners that go everywhere on our behalf, and um we've already had five, I think, anniversaries this year, and some Sundays in the summer and the fall, we might have six or eight on the same day all over the state. Yeah, so they are just wonderful commissioners who are willing to travel and go, and um, that's a blessing because they make the work possible. One person or two can't do be in all these places, especially when they're on the same Sunday. Yeah, those just not possible.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Well, if if folks wanted, if they they look at their church history and they can they know they've got an anniversary coming over the next couple of years, uh, obviously we'll try to board them and we've got training workshops going on. But if they needed to get up with you, what's the best way to do that?

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Okay, well, should I just give my email and my just give it and they can rewind and write it down?

SPEAKER_01 20:28

That will put it right on the bottom.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Okay. Well, my email is W Wester, W-E-S-T-E-R-H. It chops off my last name at samford.edu. And then um our web address is abhconline.com. And there's a a general tab when you open it up, there's an anniversaries tab, and right now that's where all the workshops I'm doing currently are listed. And I've done uh six, I think, of it. I have 20 or 18 more to go. So they're all over the state, and we're trying to do two per district, and um, so we can reach more churches. And in those uh January, I sent a letter to all the churches with the milestone anniversaries in these three. There's 382 churches that we're trying to reach, and we're not gonna reach them all, but we are trying every way we can think of. We'd like good email addresses, sometimes that's available, sometimes it's not, or it's not been updated. So I sent a snail mail letter to every church with a list of the workshops so they've at least heard about it one way, and then we're emailing uh the people like you and the association staff and your wonderful helpers to try to track down people in these churches so that you can get the message to the right person so they'll know. And the people that do come are very appreciative and say it helps them, but we still got to work hard to get that word to them. I haven't Add in the album Baptist this week. We've never done anything like that. So we'll see if that changes who we reach just to let people know. And so we're just trying really hard to connect with folks because that's what we're here to serve.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Well, you're you're doing a great job uh serving in that role.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Well, thank you, John.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Of course, you've always been fun to be around, be with, and bubbly personality. And so is there anything else that you'd like folks to know about Wendy or about the historical?

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Oh, about Wendy. I will tell you this. I have the honor of um I'm a foster parent with the Alabama Baptist Children's Home. And my license is not current now, but I just last year I I didn't need to keep it because I have a um child who lives with me who was four when he first came to me. But he's a senior in high school now. So he's been with me um about four years now again, and so he's a delight. And so um his name is Antonio, and I look forward to seeing him when I get home today.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

So that's a pleasure. It's been a delight to be part of that ministry and for us to stay in connection with him and his siblings and to maintain that. And uh, they're just wonderful children with a lot of potential. Right. And that's that's part of my personal life. Right. So that's an important part of it.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Yeah, absolutely. So that's that's a that's a very vital ministry in helping take care of those that uh need a little extra.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Just a little. Sometimes they just need a little.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Well, Winnie, thanks again for being with us today.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

You're welcome. It's my pleasure to be. Do y'all say SABA or SABA? Okay, I sometimes say Saba, and I know that's not right. SABA, okay. It's good when we can shorten it.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Yeah, well, yeah, it's uh it's a little bit lengthy mouthful to say it all. So we shortened it to SABA churches, and right it's it's about the churches anyway. So of course it is, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

I'm thinking of one more thing about the commission's work. Um, and I was just telling some people in one of the churches who just left that last year at one of our celebrations, there was a lady who was going to speak, and she was like the oldest member in the church, and she was going to have part of the program. Okay. And unfortunately, the week before the program, she got sick and passed away. But no one knew what she was going to say. And so that bit of history was lost before their celebration. So, with cameras in our phones, and even a voice memo audio, just put it down and say, tell me about the church and how what was it like when you first came, and who was a Sunday school teacher who influenced you, or do you have a favorite song or a preacher who you know meant a lot to you, and just get them talking because when opportunity is gone, it's gone. And you can put little snippets of clips like that together at a celebration, and and you'll be so glad that you have them. So we call those oral histories. And you get some people talking, like me, probably, and you just keep talking and you talk a long time, but you don't have to keep it all, but you'll get some real jewels of wisdom in there that people share about the life of the church and about their lives.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

That's right. That's awesome. Great, great tip. If you heard that, start recording, folks. Your your your history time will roll around at an anniversary time soon before you know it. And so it'll help you if you start gathering stuff as you go and not having to get all one time.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

So exactly right, John. You got it. You have got it. I think, man, you you need to I've hung around you a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

I've heard the time or two, so I get some of it.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

Well, we're trying to just get the word out and reach people, and a lot of times we're called uh uh in error or maybe not in error, people say hysterical instead of historical. So we can be both, and we enjoy that. So we enjoy people and love meeting people and hearing the stories because they're just fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

And what it is mainly is seeing God's hand. You can see how he worked in the early days and the founding of a church, and then you see him carry you through. Churches have lived through all the wars, they lived through the depression. You know, recent churches have lived through, you know, 2008, and I mean all kinds of world events that affect COVID, those stories are still being written about how it affected our people and us, and we probably won't know that for a long time, really, how it truly affected us. But those big things, and but churches are still out there doing their thing, and it doesn't mean God's finished working. That's right. And just because we had COVID and a depression and all that, he was still working, and so when you compile your history, you inevitably see the thread of his faithfulness in his hand, and that is so meaningful and helpful for people who are younger or new to the church who don't know where the where it got started.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Well, I think that somewhere in scripture it says you're supposed to share our share the stories through the younger generations, right? Pass it down, and so that's one way to do that is to make sure that it's not totally forgotten.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

That's right. Well, there's a verse in Psalm 102, 18, I believe, that talks about we we save our stories for that generation not even born. So, you know, here we are today, and we're alive and well, but you know, in 50 years we won't be, or maybe less than that, a lot less than that, I believe. And so the the stories will be so they can have it, and what does it show? God's faithfulness and as an encouragement to them. And we look back in the Old Testament and we think, how could those people have left God so many times? But here we are today, and people could look at us and it's the same, and we tend to make the same mistakes, but but we make those mistakes, but God does it, and he is faithful, and he is you know making a way for us, and and he, you know, uh provided a way for us to be his children. That's a blessing.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

It's a real blessing. Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Well, folks, thank y'all for tuning in to Leader Connect, and we will catch you on the next episode.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Thank you. Goodbye, Saba.