Larry Gipson, pastor of First Baptist Church, Oneonta, recently performed a funeral with his good friend, congregant and predecessor Dan Sims. They shook hands, prayed and talked.
But Gipson didn’t get much out of Sims about his recent trip.
He never really does. Sims has always been fairly tight-lipped about the international pulpit circuit.
“He’ll tell me a few stories here and there, but he’s a man of humility, so he’s not going to share much,” Gipson said. “He wants to stay out of the spotlight and just do what God’s called him to do.”
But what God has called 74-year-old Sims to do is just so … spotlightable.
On April 16, he and his wife, Glenda, returned to Oneonta after spending a little more than three months in Tanzania. Specifically Dar es Salaam, a city of roughly 2.5 million in the East African nation. They weren’t there to sightsee or do research.
Sims was just filling in at another church. It’s kind of what he does best.
After 20 years in the Air Force, Sims started his first full-time pastorate at a church in Michigan in 1972. He spent much of the ’70s bouncing back and forth between churches in Oneonta and Birmingham.
It wasn’t until the early ’80s that Sims got a taste for the circuit while attending services at a church that met above a Burger King near the American military base in Germany where his son was stationed.
“I realized at that time that that was probably what I needed to be doing,” Sims said. “We began to look into that, and they had needs for pastors over there so I applied.”
Two and a half years later, the phone rang. It was long distance. Really long distance. Goodbye, Oneonta — hello, San Vito, Italy.
But the English-speaking San Vito Baptist Church closed, and Sims was called to Baumholder, Germany.
And Baumholder is hilly country, hilly enough to blow out a pastor’s knees.
“So I came back and had the knees replaced and then went to First Baptist, Oneonta, as interim and about three and a half years as full-time pastor,” Sims said.
Then it was 2003 and he sighed and said it was time to retire. And Sims went at it almost as if he meant it. But in 2004, he got an e-mail and the jig was up.
“It was someone wanting to know if I was interested in coming to a church at an island off the coast of Portugal called the Azores,” Sims said.
He was.
“We just take it as it comes,” Sims said of his and his wife’s attitude toward the international interim pastorates. “We look at it like it’s an opportunity, and if we feel like the Lord’s in it, we pursue it until He closes it or opens another one.”
So when International Baptist Church in Dar es Salaam, a congregation with members representing at least 15 countries, called looking for an interim pastor, the Simses looked at the opportunity. They prayed and packed their bags.
Sims just can’t help himself.
“Well,” he said, laughing, “I can see all my life up to this point has been in preparation to be able to do these kinds of things. We’ve been extremely blessed healthwise. I feel very humbled to be able to do these things, but it does a lot for us to know that the Lord’s still using us, that we’re still on the Lord’s mailing list.”
Or His airmail list.
“It’s an exciting place to be doing the Lord’s work,” Sims said of Dar es Salaam. “I conducted a funeral, baby dedication and a baptism while I was there.”
That was in between the weekly power outages, of course, and reworking the water supply system to actually get running water at the church and parsonage.
“I was scheduled to officiate at the wedding of a young Kenyan man to a local Tanzanian girl,” Sims said. “I purchased the required license to marry them; however, the family and cultural traditions required more time to work out. It was an interesting time.
“The young man met several times with some of the church leaders to set a bride price,” he explained. “The fair price was determined to be two cows and three goats.”
You just don’t get that kind of action at First, Oneonta.
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