The famous writer Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again.
Larry Lee, who returned 21 years later to the first church he led as pastor, said he dispelled that statement.
Fresh out of seminary, Lee served as pastor at Gilgal Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa for seven years, from 1973 to 1980.
“I was really green when I went there,” he said. “It’s where I performed my first baptism, wedding, funeral, everything as pastor.”
Twenty years and a few jobs later, Lee returned to Gilgal Baptist to serve as the interim pastor.
“Except for a lapse of time, it’s as if we picked up where we left off,” he said.
“There were new members but a lot of the older ones were still there. I baptized children of children I had baptized when I was here before. It’s great to see another generation — I can see characteristics in them of their parents. I know who they belong to. It’s very rewarding.”
What was supposed to last just a few months stretched into nearly two years. Lee served as interim pastor from December 2001 until September 2003.
“No one, including myself, thought I’d be there that long,” he said.
Church member Terry Colburn asked Lee to lead him and his wife, Glenda, in renewing their vows since Lee had been the one who married them at Gilgal Baptist in 1978.
“We renewed our vows on our 24th anniversary because I didn’t think he’d still be at our church for our 25th, but he was,” Colburn said. “We would have waited if I’d known he would’ve still been here.”
Elizabeth Dockery, who has been a member at Gilgal for 55 years, said she was tickled to death to have Lee return to the church.
“It seemed like he never left,” she said. “He stepped right back in the pulpit and it felt so comforting.”
Dockery said it was Lee and his wife, Wanda, who is the executive director of national Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), who helped revive the missions program at Gilgal when they first served at the church.
“They gave it the spark it needed,” she said. “They have always been so involved in missions and our church is missions-minded.”
Lee said one of the things he admires most about the church is its passion for missions both locally and abroad. “They nurtured us into a missions lifestyle,” he said.
In fact, this love for missions is what led the Lee family away from Gilgal Baptist when they left the church in 1980 for the missions field. They served for a year on the Island of St.Vincent off the coast of Venezuela until their son got sick and had to come back to the United States for medical treatment.
Once they returned home, Lee served as a pastor of a church in Columbus, Ga., and then as the director of pastoral care at a hospital for 10 years. The Lees moved to Birmingham three years ago when Wanda accepted her position with WMU.
“I moved to Birmingham without a job and for the first year it was a hard transition,” he said. “We had done a role reversal — we moved for her job without anything for me to do. It was a down time for me in that period.”
About that time the pastor at Gilgal left the church for the missions field and the pastoral search committee called Lee to serve as interim.
“They ministered to me,” he said. “It was definitely a two-way experience. They loved, nurtured and supported me.”
During his interim period, Lee said the church lost six members who had been especially active years ago when he first served the church.
“It was interesting to be the one to do their funerals because I had known them when they were core members and younger and healthy,” he said.
Terry Colburn, who served on the pastoral search committee, said everyone in the church wanted Lee to stay as pastor but they knew that he wanted the freedom to go with his wife as she travels with her job. “So although we wanted to, we didn’t pursue him too hard,” Colburn said. “But everyone would’ve liked for them to have stayed.”
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