Call to serve in South Carolina was clear, say Hollingsworths

Gwen Hollingsworth was watering flowers last September during a moment of quiet time with the Lord. She knew a South Carolina Baptist Convention search team had approached her husband about his possible candidacy for the state’s open executive director-treasurer position.

A few months earlier, Rick Lance, executive director of the State Board of Missions and treasurer of the Alabama Baptist Convention, had contacted the South Carolina search team and recommended Gary Hollingsworth. After a Skype interview with the search team, Gary said, “I didn’t have a real call at that point. Gwen and I prayed about it. I was happy in my church.”

But the Lord had begun to whisper. As Gwen watered her flowers and prayed, she told the Lord, “We just want to be where you want us to be and to clearly hear your voice. If it is South Carolina, I just need to know clearly.”

As she prayed at home, her husband was on a mission trip to San Diego, where Immanuel Baptist was involved with a church plant. “The Lord spoke to me,” Gary said. “He spoke to me and told me to get ready.”

When he returned home, the Hollingsworths talked and prayed with one another. Within a month, they heard from the South Carolina search team again. The committee’s chairman, Marshall Blalock, pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston, asked, “Has anything changed?”

Something indeed had changed, and, on Jan. 14, the Hollingsworths stood before South Carolina Baptist Convention messengers at Shandon Baptist Church in Columbia and accepted the call of God to lead the SCBC into the state denomination’s next chapter of missions and ministry.

Gary, 58, was raised in a Christian home. His father, a civil servant, was an orphan at 11 and did not grow up as a Christian but came to know Jesus when he got married. Gary’s mother, a homemaker, was a Methodist. The young couple went to a Baptist church because they didn’t own a car and could walk to Northside Baptist Church in Anniston, Ala.

“I believe strongly that discipleship begins in the home,” Gary said. “Parents are the primary disciple-makers of their children, and I am a blessed beneficiary of that. My parents loved Jesus, and my two sisters and I knew it. We were a ‘Leave It To Beaver’ kind of middle-class family.”

It was through that family commitment to faith, Gary said, that, at 7 years old, “I came to understand Jesus [and] that I was a sinner, and I was led to Christ by my parents in our home.” He was baptized at Northside Baptist Church.

When he was in the ninth grade, his dad was transferred to Huntsville, Ala., and worked at Redstone Arsenal, a U.S. Army post. The family joined Highlands Baptist Church where Gary, a teenager, sensed the call to full-time ministry.

“I knew God was calling me to something,” he said. “The church was very active in ministry and gave me an opportunity to serve. John Bob Riddle came to preach a revival, gave the invitation, and said he knew there were people wanting to give their lives to full-time service. I responded to that call at 17.”

It was at the church that he also met Gwen, who was a year younger. They carpooled together to high school, sang together in an ensemble, and were in youth choir together. Their first date was her school prom in April 1975.

Gwen said she started praying as an eighth-grader that God would send her a godly man to marry, “and that I wouldn’t miss him when he came.” The two were married in December 1978. Gary was ordained to the ministry at Carrollton Baptist Church in Carrollton, Ala., in 1979. Over the next three-plus decades, Gary served several churches and spent two years as senior director of cultural evangelism for the North American Mission Board. He and Gwen have served at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock since 2007.

Gwen, who teaches Bible study at Immanuel, looks back on the last few months, listening and hearing from the Lord regarding the leadership opportunity within the South Carolina Baptist Convention. She knows the Lord has spoken, and any tears she sheds are not from sadness.

“When you love deep in a place, you hurt deep when it’s time to say goodbye,” she said. “Any tears are more for the dear friendships we have made in Arkansas. In ministry, you sow a part of your life into a people and place, and now it’s time to begin sowing in South Carolina.”

— Scott Vaughan is interim communications manager for the South Carolina Baptist Convention.