Ed Litton has vivid memories of hiding in the closet as a young boy while his father raged violently through the house.
“My dad was a drunk,” Ed said. “That’s the world I lived in.”
His father had lied about his age to join the Navy during World War II and turned 17 in combat in the South Pacific. It was there he started drinking and became an alcoholic.
“We never darkened the door of a church,” Ed said.
But one day his father ran into a Southern Baptist pastor at the grocery store and they struck up a conversation. They kept running into each other and eventually developed a friendship. One day the pastor invited Ed’s father to church.
So the family went.
“But he got very angry because he thought my mom had called this pastor to tell him all the bad things my dad had been doing,” Ed recounted. “And he said, ‘We’re not going back.’
“But then my dad’s world fell apart, and when it did, he turned to that pastor.”
He shared the gospel with him, and Litton was dramatically saved.
“He was delivered from his alcoholism and never went back, never turned back,” Ed remembered. “In a good way, I say he was radicalized for Christ. He basically just began to build our whole life and our family on God’s Word.”
It was seeing the power of the gospel in his father’s life that made the appeal of Jesus Christ undeniable for Ed, and would continue to make it undeniable throughout his life even as the road became difficult.
“I fell in love with Jesus,” he said.
And it was the investment of that Southern Baptist pastor that showed Ed what he is convinced is at the core of the Southern Baptist Convention — a heart for seeing people changed by the power of Christ.
Running from God’s call
That conviction for Christ and soft spot for the SBC continued even as Ed experienced hurt from the unkind words of people in the church as a young boy and teenager growing up in Tucson. His father, now allowing the absolute truth of the Bible to guide his life, was a “truth teller,” Ed said, and would call out sin when he saw it. People didn’t always respond well to that.
“It was pretty stormy,” Ed remembered. “I tell people it’s a miracle I do what I do, because I’ve seen a lot of hurt as a child from things people would say.”
What he does now is serve as pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, where he’s been for the past 27 years.
He also was elected SBC president at the annual meeting in June — only the third president from Alabama since the SBC’s founding in 1845. (The other two were Jonathan Haralson, who served from 1889-98, and Jaroy Weber, who served in 1975 and 1976. Weber, though he was serving in Texas when elected, had recently served at Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile and been prominent in Baptist life in the state.)
Ed felt the call to serve in ministry when he was 17, around the time the last SBC president from Alabama was wrapping up his term. It was the same age Ed’s father was when he ran away to the South Pacific to lose himself in combat.
For a little while, Ed tried to lose himself too.
“I said, ‘There’s no way I’m doing this,’ and so I ran from the Lord,” he recalled.
Though he believed in the power of the gospel, Ed didn’t think he could sign up for a life of the kind of hurt he’d already faced in the church.
“I was actually trying to prove to Him why that was a mistake,” Ed said. “I tried to disqualify myself. But from His grace and mercy, He reissued that call at a point of brokenness in my life where I was repenting.”
Ed said he didn’t expect a second chance, but when he got one he took it. He went to Grand Canyon University in Phoenix — then a Southern Baptist school — and to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth to get a master’s degree.
He says that, in a manner of speaking, as he and his wife Tammy were pulling into Fort Worth with their U-Haul trailer, another couple was pulling out with theirs — Rick and Kathy Ferguson, who would become a greater part of his story than he could imagine.
Ed would see that God had been preparing him from a young age to trust that, even when it hurts and things are difficult, God is worth it and at work.
The road to Alabama
After he earned his master’s, Ed worked for nine months at the Home (now North American) Mission Board and was mentored and trained to become a state evangelism director.
But he soon realized it wasn’t for him — God had called him to shepherd a local church. So Ed and Tammy headed back to Arizona to plant Mountain View Baptist Church in Tucson, and he brought all that evangelism training with him. He focused on making sure each person in the church was equipped to share the gospel anytime, anywhere.
“God really blessed, and it just exploded,” Ed recalled. “Half of the congregation had never heard the gospel.”
The church is still vibrant and active today.
In 1994 he answered the call to serve at First Baptist Church of North Mobile, which changed its name to Redemption Church in 2015 when they moved to a multi-site model and the North Mobile name didn’t fit the campus in west Mobile.
“We prayed through and had a team of folks who helped find that name,” Ed said. “And when we did, we realized our name was now our message.”
In the years he has been there, Redemption Church has grown to be more and more missional — they support 10 church plants through the Send Network, and have sponsored missionaries through the International Mission Board and independently.
At the end of each Sunday service the people are sent out to be a missional force in the community, Ed noted, adding they’re the most generous people he’s ever known. For years, they’ve scattered from their gatherings to find neighbors in need of hope — the broken, the hurting — and minister to them throughout the week.
Along the way, God walked Ed through another round of learning how to identify with those who have experienced deep hurt — a season of the deepest kind of loss he could imagine.
A shared journey
Around the time Ed and Tammy moved to Saraland to start a new chapter of their ministry, Rick and Kathy Ferguson were living in the West with their three children planting churches.
In 2002 their lives suddenly changed dramatically. While on a family vacation they were in a car accident and Rick was killed.
“We were just a few weeks away from our 26th wedding anniversary. Our kids were 17, 18 and 22,” Kathy recalled. “Quite honestly, his death just sent me on a trajectory that was extremely difficult. I learned a lot of things about my faith.”
One of those was that what she believed in the “light” was more difficult to believe in the “dark.” Another was that God understood her broken heart.
“I wouldn’t trade that experience because my faith has become more real to me and not less in that journey,” she said.
Fast forward to 2007 when Ed found himself on a similar journey. In August Tammy was driving their 14-year-old daughter, Kayla, to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to an audition, and they ran into the back of a semi truck parked in the middle of the road.
Tammy was killed.
“We were introduced to grief,” Ed said of himself, Kayla and her two older brothers, both of whom were in college. “As a pastor you know all about grief; you’ve read books about grief; you’ve counseled grieving people. But when you experience it, it can be a very dark place.”
Walking through the valley
Ed soaked in Psalm 23 in that season, he said, asking God how long he was going to be in the valley of the shadow of death.
“He didn’t give me an answer, which kind of made me mad,” Ed remembered. “But really He had already given me an answer. It was in the text. It said, ‘I will be with you.’”
And miraculously, though he started out angry, Ed came to a place where he told God he could stay there forever, if that’s what God wanted.
“The power of His presence is what saved us,” he said. “That’s our story.”
By “us” and “our,” Ed means him and his children, but he also means him and Kathy. After Tammy’s death, a mutual friend suggested Kathy call Ed’s church to see if she could offer help with supporting a bereaved staff member.
She did, and they ended up connecting her with Ed as well. They talked about their similar journeys, and the two eventually married in 2009.
Kathy noted they’ve been able to share their story with a lot of widows and widowers over the years.
“We spend a lot of time with people who have death in their life, and you see the redemptive work” of God in using their story to help others.
“Cooperating with [God’s] purpose has been a part of our own healing.”
She calls it a “stewardship of suffering,” a term Ed said resonates with him too.
“That stewardship is important because we all suffer,” he said.
Sometimes believers “argue against health and wealth theology, but we are practitioners,” Ed noted. “When something bad happens, we tend to get pretty upset and say this isn’t fair, this isn’t what I counted on. But in truth our whole theology is based on suffering, the suffering Savior. Suffering in life is actually ‘street cred’ for the gospel, because everybody understands what it means to hurt on some level.”
Grief tenderizes a person, Ed explained, and it’s one of the most humbling experiences.
A heart for the hurting
As time went on, Ed also became “tenderized” to a different kind of reality in his city — racial strife.
“Our city has a very painful past,” he noted. “The last lynching in North America was right here. The last slave ship to offload was here.”
And that’s just the historical markers, he said. As he watched the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 he started to be more aware of the daily pain some people in his city faced.
“It was after Ferguson that a group of local pastors and leaders said, ‘We’ve got to talk,’” Ed remembered. “So we sat down and started talking. It was awkward, as it often is, but you just learn to get used to awkward. You have to cross the bridge of awkward to get to the reality of what needs to be done.”
It became known as the Pledge Group — basically people who pledge to engage those who “don’t look like you, think like you or maybe even vote like you,” Ed explained.
“For us in this city, it has led to becoming friends and working together to try to expand and get the Body of Christ in this city from all different denominations to set aside our differences for a moment and say, ‘How can we reach people for Christ in this city?’” Ed noted. “The most obvious way is we can demonstrate what Jesus said: ‘By this they will know that you are My disciples, that you love one another.’”
Often that can start with a smile — to bridge the gap and extend love to someone different.
That’s in essence what changed Ed’s life and the life of his family — a pastor who was willing to smile and extend love to his father in the grocery store decades ago.
Investing his life
These days, Ed continues to pass that along to others. He feels called to shepherd his church to continue loving people in the way Jesus demonstrated and instructed.
He and Kathy are deeply invested in their ministries — she just celebrated 10 years of working with NAMB, serving as director of planter spouse development for the Send Network. And he is “very passionate” about following God’s call to lead well in the places God has put him.
The Littons also are deeply invested in their children and 11 grandchildren. Ed said he’s proud of Kathy’s strength not just as a mom and grandmother but also “in her convictions about the gospel and helping people who are on the front lines.”
Kathy said her husband is a man of courage and honesty.
“Ed has rich character, and he does not back down,” she said. “He does that with softness. He’s not a hard person. There’s much respect when you’re married to a man like that.”
Ed and Kathy love hiking and being outdoors, and he said at times there’s a big part of him that would love to spend his days sitting on top of a mountain somewhere or fly fishing. But God has called him to lead, even when it’s difficult.
He said what he’s seen ever since he watched God change his father was this: Jesus has the power to change lives.
“He’s moving in this world,” Ed declared. “We can look around and see doom and gloom, but the reality is that Jesus has people in this city He wants to save. Our job is to say, ‘Put me in their path, send me to them; bring them to me, help me to find them.’”
Until that’s done, there’s still work to be done for Ed, his family, his church and the SBC.
