Pastor Refuses to Give Up Pulpit Despite Legal Challenges

Orginally published on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 at 6:01 AM
by Todd Rhoades

For three years, a group of deacons from the Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church has tried to oust the congregation's pastor. And three times, the church leader has taken the case to the Georgia Supreme Court. Pastor Willie Bolden simply refuses to leave...

“I’m stubborn, especially when I know I’m doing the folk right,” Bolden said during an interview in his cramped office. “I’m here for a purpose. I truly believe God sent me here for a purpose.”

All through his life, Bolden has shown the courage of his convictions. He says he was arrested dozens of times protesting segregation in the South and once led 20 wagons – drawn by a pack of obstinate mules – from Mississippi to Washington to advance the plight of the poor.

Now he’s found a new cause: Clinging to the pulpit of the tiny black church in west Georgia, a campaign that has made him a frequent visitor to the state’s highest court.

It all started, Bolden says, because of a spat with the congregation’s most powerful member.

That would be Robert Barton, who also is its next-door neighbor. Barton once oversaw the church’s finances, led its deacon board, and ran the choir and Sunday school.

When Bolden became pastor 11 years ago, he started to carve up Barton’s duties and sought more oversight over the church’s finances. Bolden said that’s when the deacons became more “hellbent” to oust him – but he wasn’t going to budge for the sake of his congregants.

“To be quite honest with you, I think for a number of years they have been taken advantage of,” Bolden said of his congregation’s members, who number 30 on a good day. “Finally the Lord got tired and said, ‘I’m going to send somebody who I trained through the civil rights movement, who won’t mind standing up, being a man, who won’t scratch when he ain’t itching and grin when he ain’t tickled.’”

A former Atlanta public school administrator, Bolden started preaching on the side in 1986 and soon he was urged to try out for a full-time gig 60 miles away in Cedartown. After a few attempts, he landed the job in September 1995.

At first, he seemed a great fit. With a gravelly delivery, he always spoke of living a sermon, not just preaching it, and his church responded. Under his watch, the membership raised enough money to buy a church steeple, carpet the cozy chapel in a lush red, install new glass doors and buy a used van.

He said the honeymoon ended when he started demanding a weekly budget statement. The deacons’ lawyer, Mark Webb, said his clients were simply tired of the pastor “running the church as a monarchy.”

Either way, the deacons started to grumble.

At one of the church’s quarterly gatherings in 2004, they tried to call a vote to dismiss the pastor. Bolden caught wind of it and quickly adjourned the meeting and, weeks later, removed Barton and the other deacons from their posts…

Read more of the article here at The Church Report...

FOR DISCUSSION: Can you take a hint?  How do you know when and if it’s time to go?

Todd

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