Anna Anderson serves in Rocky Mount, N.C with her husband, LaCount, who is the Executive Director of the Eastern North Carolina Poverty Network. The Andersons work in the northeastern part of North Carolina with Together for Hope, the rural development coalition founded by CBF over 20 years ago. 

By Anna Anderson

The Baptist Women in Ministry of North Carolina held its annual Symposium on September 12, 2024 at Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. This is the church where Addie Davis was ordained in 1964, the first time a Southern Baptist congregation had ordained a woman to pastoral ministry. How appropriate that I had celebrated the anniversary of my own ordination just earlier that week on September 9, 2007. I am so grateful and humbled by that significant anniversary. But I am more grateful and humbled that God would choose me and place within me a calling and a purpose to pursue ministry, even a path to see that come to fruition. What a gift!

I won an award at this year’s Symposium, the Anne Thomas Neil award for excellence in ministry. A pastor, teacher, mentor, friend and missionary, Anne was involved in such holy work throughout her days. Ordained at the age of 80, this young girl from South Carolina became an emboldened leader for Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM). Each year BWIM North Carolina recognizes a person to receive this award named for this champion and first president of a group called Southern Baptist Women in Ministry, the forerunner of today’s BWIM. This year, I was honored to receive this extraordinary award, indeed a highlight of my ministry. 

I was nominated for this award by Rev. Aileen Mitchell Lawrimore, pastor at Ecclesia Church in Asheville, N.C. Aileen spent much of her childhood at my home church, Five Points Missionary Baptist, in Wilson, N.C where her father Harold was our pastor, and her mother Gloria, was both a partner to Harold and a friend to everyone. Only eight years my junior, I often babysat for Aileen and her brother and sister.

Because I was so interested in church music and was one of those people who took piano lessons, I could actually read music and was involved in things like children’s choirs, music leading in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and eventually playing the piano for worship services. I had Aileen in some of the activities that I led and classes that I was responsible for. 

I didn’t do anything remarkable or extraordinary. I was just there. I showed up. I answered when someone asked me to do something in the church because I loved it and valued its influence in my life. I loved the people who led the music ministry and the pastoral ministry and I wanted so much to be in the world where they lived and existed. Music was certainly my first entrance into ministry. It felt like something I could do and was modeled by others who did it so well. 

Aileen talked about how I played the soundtrack to many of her earliest church memories. She goes on to call me a leader (which I appreciate but never would have given myself that title as a teenager!) Aileen says, “Anna has been in ministry since before Baptist Women in Ministry was a thing. Just by following God in her own life, Anna taught me and so many other little girls that gender does not impact calling.” Perhaps the greatest compliment I have ever received as a minister. Just by following God in my own life.  Nothing outstanding. Nothing on any grand scale. Just being there.  

I have reflected on how just being there has eternal impact that you cannot know at the time or measure its meaning when you’re somewhere in the middle of it.  But by being there, by reminding yourself that continuing to show up means something to someone down the road is such a high and holy calling. Presence matters. It always has. I appreciate that someone in my life recognizes that. And I appreciate being reminded that I have to continue to show up for others. I have to continue to say yes to those opportunities God gives me all the time to follow where God prompts me to go. 

I am so grateful to Aileen. I am so grateful to Baptist Women in Ministry of North Carolina for this recognition. And I am so grateful to God for planting within me that calling, that nudge to follow God so early in my life. Thanks be to God.