Between instructing theater students at Greenville’s Fine Arts Center and taking care of her 1-year-old son, Teri Parker Lewis has found time to be involved in her church in a unique way.
Teri Parker Lewis directs a drama student during a rehearsal at the Greenville County school district’s Fine Arts Center.At Earle Street Baptist Church in Greenville, Lewis has created and performed dramatic depictions of the lives of two women who were foundational in the formation of women’s mission work as it is practiced today: Annie Armstrong, the mother of the Woman’s Missionary Union, and Hephzibah Jenkins Townsend, a 19th-century self-made philanthropist from Edisto who founded the Home and Foreign Missionary Society, the first such mission of Baptist women in the South.
The Annie Armstrong depiction was a “completely improvised one-woman show,” Lewis said. She put the performance together after being approached by WMU member Joanne Cothran.
The following year she was asked to stage a production about the life of Townsend. Lewis performed the show with one of her former students, Noah Garrett, also a member at Earle Street. She said she learned a lot about both women in her preparation for the productions.
Lewis grew up in Laurens with two older brothers who were “quite the characters,” and she still draws on her experiences with them in her acting. Her parents were musically inclined, and the family started singing as a group while her dad was in seminary. Lewis was terrified when she sang her first solo at age 3. She remembers getting her first impressions of performing when her father did monologues from “The Greatest Salesman in the World.”
Lewis did one-act plays while in high school and won a state award for acting during her senior year. After high school, she attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and graduated with a degree in theater.
She worked in New York for a year before moving back to Greenville to work an apprenticeship at the Warehouse Theatre, at which time she met Roy Fluhrer, director of the Greenville Fine Arts Center. He helped her prepare her audition for New York’s Columbia University, where she would later earn a master’s degree in fine arts.
Soon after, she received a surprise phone call from her eighth-grade boyfriend, William Lewis. They met for dinner, and “it was love at first sight – again.” They were married two years later.
At about the same time, Lewis recommitted her life to Christ. She remembered her parents explaining salvation to her, and she believes she was saved as a child of 8 or 9, but after leaving home to attend college, Lewis said she strayed from her faith. She gives credit to a graduate school friend, Liz Cunningham, who “helped bring me back.” Lewis was baptized on July 9, 2006, and she and William joined Earle Street.
Lewis had earlier contacted Fluhrer about a possible position at the Fine Arts Center, and he told her that his theater teacher had just resigned. She took it as a sign from God that she was to take the job and move back to the Upstate.
In addition to her one-woman shows on Armstrong and Townsend, which she has performed at other churches, Lewis has done dramatic readings during worship at Earle Street. Also, she is working to get the Annie Armstrong script transcribed and published so the story can be told by others.
Lewis said she loves the idea of performing for something bigger than herself, and she trusts that God will use her testimony and talent for his glory.