Editor’s note: According to LifeWay Research, the average tenure of a Southern Baptist pastor at a single church is seven years, and the median tenure is four years. Many pastors stay longer, and a very small few serve one church for a lifetime. This is the third in a series of articles profiling a remarkable brotherhood of South Carolina pastors who have led their churches for 40 years or more and continue to do so. We know of three such actively serving pastors: Boyce Whitman, Richard Alderman and John Arthur. If you know of others, please share their names with us by e-mailing butch@baptistcourier.com or calling 1-888-667-4693.
Displayed prominently on its Web site, the motto for Gap Hill Baptist Church, Six Mile, proclaims: “Standing in the Gap for Jesus.”
Boyce WhitmanBoyce Whitman has likewise been standing faithfully in the gap for nearly 47 years as pastor of the rural, red-brick church nestled in South Carolina’s scenic foothills.
Whitman says he knew at age 10 that God was calling him to preach, but it wasn’t until he was a senior engineering student at Clemson University in 1961 that he answered the call and committed to serve the rest of his life as a minister of the gospel. For two years previous, he had been assisting the itinerant pastor at Gap Hill, and when that pastor retired, the small congregation (there were 32 members on the roll in 1961) asked Whitman to become their part-time pastor.
Then a 21-year-old husband and father, Whitman accepted the church’s call, but continued his education. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and took religion courses at Furman University and correspondence courses offered through the Baptist association office. (He later led Gap Hill to begin offering seminary courses at the church, which it still does today. Whitman eventually earned three doctorates.)
For the next 23 years, he served Gap Hill as a bi-vocational pastor. When he retired from engineering in 1983, he accepted the church’s invitation to broaden the scope of his and the church’s ministry by becoming its full-time pastor.
Whitman witnessed steady growth at Gap Hill in the last half of the 20th century. When he led his first worship service in 1961, there were eight people present – three of them being the pastor and his family. Today, Gap Hill has about 600 members and averages upwards of 150 in Sunday school.
The church’s facilities have expanded to accommodate the larger membership. Whitman remembers a sobering day in the first few weeks of his pastorate when the church received a foreclosure notice on its mortgage. Church members rallied to avert the crisis and went on to fund four building programs over the next four decades. Some building costs were paid for by a creative financing plan in which the church borrowed money from its own members, paying them back with interest rates that exceeded those offered through certificates of deposit at banks. “And we always paid off early,” Whitman said.
But it wasn’t putting up new buildings that has sustained the vitality of Gap Hill Baptist Church. Whitman said the “biggest change” in the last 20 years has been the involvement of church members in missions work, first in Haiti from the 1980s through the mid-1990s, and more recently in the Dominican Republic, where Gap Hill members have planted 13 churches and constructed three more.
A church that Gap Hill members are building now will eventually seat 400 and will double as a medical clinic. The church has started a seminary in the Dominican Republic, which serves about 45 students. A recent mission trip saw 1,948 decisions for Christ and 6,700 people receiving treatment at a medical clinic.
“We have a group of people who are sold out for missions,” Whitman said.
Church members are also active in ministry endeavors at home, he said. “We’ll do anything in the community we’re capable of doing.”
Whitman, 67, has had opportunities through the years to pursue career options in other places, but never once did he “feel the Lord was in it.” “If I were to die today,” he said, “I would be where the Lord wants me to be, and I’m having fun doing it.”
He has no thoughts of retiring. “As long as the church is growing and blessing, I really don’t know how to retire from preaching,” he said. “We’ll continue to seek his will for our lives everyday.”
“It’s amazing to see what God can do right here in Six Mile,” he added. “It’s all God, not us.”