Most people don’t know that Evelyn Blount was offered a spot on a professional women’s basketball team when she graduated from high school in Winder, Ga., in 1960.
Evelyn Blount retires after 23 years as executive director-treasurer of South Carolina Woman’s Missionary.However, many who work with her wouldn’t be all that surprised. The required focus and teamwork that made her a standout high school player have served her well in a lifelong career of ministry and missions education. Blount, 66, steps down Dec. 31 as executive director-treasurer of South Carolina Woman’s Missionary Union after serving more than 23 years in the role.
Blount turned down the pro basketball offer, but says she sometimes wonders how her life might have turned out differently had she accepted. She chose instead to honor her late father’s dream for each of his five children to go to college. She enrolled at the Woman’s College of Georgia (now Georgia College at Milledgeville), where thoughts of serving in ministry began to take form, thoughts that began as inklings in the mind of a young girl whose family was at church “any time the doors were open” at the First Baptist Church of Winder. “I can’t remember a time when missions wasn’t part of my life,” Blount said. “My mother was WMU director, and I was in every education organization. Missions has always been a part of who I am.”
While in college, signing up for every sociology course she could, she thought she might like to work with people in a “skid-row” ministry, although women weren’t allowed to do such work in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, she was sure that no matter what she decided do in life, it would involve missions.
After graduating from college, she taught for two years at Blue Mountain College, a Baptist school in Mississippi. Recognizing that she could easily become too comfortable working at a Baptist school, she left “because I knew I’d never know what God wanted for my life.” She taught the following year at an experimental high school in Gwinnett County, Ga., then enrolled at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in 1966.
While earning her master of religious education degree at Southern, she worked at Baptist mission centers in Louisville practicing inner-city ministry, a choice that would seem to echo her earlier desire to work with people on skid row. After graduating from seminary in 1968, she joined the staff of First Baptist Church of Auburn, Ala., as minister of education.
In 1970, she began what would become a 38-year professional association with WMU when she was named Acteens director of Georgia WMU. In 1973, she joined the national WMU office in Birmingham, Ala., and served in several roles over the next dozen years. In her last move, in June 1985, she was named executive director (later changed to executive director-treasurer) of South Carolina WMU.
Blount has been instrumental in solidifying WMU as a “true auxiliary” to the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Up until the mid 1990s, WMU staffers were employed by the state convention. With WMU re-incorporation in 1994-95, the “gray area” between the state convention and WMU was “cleared up,” with WMU emerging with its own governing board and paid staff.
Despite its independent, auxiliary status, Blount is quick to point to WMU’s “partnership” with the state convention to advance missions. “We’re not separate people going our separate ways,” she said. “It is essential that we see ourselves as people working together for the cause of missions.” When the SCBC launched a statewide initiative in the 1990s, “Empowering Kingdom Growth,” it was South Carolina WMU that provided $40,000 from its reserves to help fund the program in its first year. WMU also provided funding for disaster relief efforts following Hurricane Hugo, as well as money to support South Carolina Baptist Ministries for the Aging when the state’s two Baptist retirement centers were in danger of closing. “We are working partners and financial partners” with the state convention, she said.
WMU’s impact in South Carolina has flourished under Blount’s two-plus decades of leadership. The goal for the Janie Chapman offering for state missions has grown from $700,000 to $2 million. The annual Women’s Lifestyle Evangelism Conference was instituted. Churches have started 1,400 WMU organization units. A partnership with Christians in Jamaica opened doors for South Carolina women to be leaders in volunteer work. Debt at Camp La Vida for girls was paid off and a new multipurpose center was built. A Christian Women’s Job Corps program was begun in South Carolina and became a national model. WMU stepped forward as a faith-based component of a state government program to deal with issues of teenage pregnancy, infant mortality and family health. Also, through a partnership with the state’s juvenile justice system, WMU members today have an organizational outlet to help at-risk young people through prevention, rehabilitation and reentry programs.
Evelyn Blount, left, chats with Maxine Bumgardner, executive director of West Virginia WMU, at a Dec. 6 reception at the Baptist building to honor the retiring South Carolina WMU leader.“WMU is stronger than most people realize,” she said. “It is still a central part of a lot of churches. What we do has changed, but our purpose has not changed: to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to people outside the walls of the church.”
Blount said there is a direct correlation between the vitality of a church’s WMU program and the strength of the church’s giving through Cooperative Program and missions offerings. “Studies show that those churches with WMU involvement consistently give more,” she said.
Yet, ask Blount to talk about the most memorable event or achievement of her career, and she doesn’t talk first of programs, goals or money raised. She talks first about people. “The staff with whom I’ve worked, the people with whom I’ve worked – church people, associational people – that’s what’s made the whole thing memorable,” she said.
In her job, Blount has traveled widely. She has been to Alaska, which she calls a place of “pristine beauty,” six or seven times. But of all the places she has lived, there’s no place like home. In the next few months she will be moving back to Winder, Ga., to live in the house where her mother lived, and where she plans to cook up some of her mother’s jam cake and other favorite recipes for her brothers and sisters and their families, something she has done on birthdays and holidays for most of her adult life.
There, in her mother’s kitchen, she may recall coming home from school and sitting at the kitchen table with her siblings, parents and grandparents, enjoying cookies or popcorn and talking about the activities of the day. It was at her mother’s table that she learned how to cook, but also how to love and appreciate family – how to value church – how to help share the love of Christ with people all over the world.
For Evelyn Blount, Miss South Carolina WMU, working for missions won’t end with retirement, although maybe she’ll have a little more time to practice her set shot.