The day in March 2006 when Nick Seaver and Bill Rigsby met for lunch is a day that still remains in Seaver’s memory five years later.
Bill Rigsby, pastor of North Anderson Baptist Church in Anderson.That was the day that Seaver and Rigsby, the pastor at North Anderson Baptist Church, talked about God over a plate of meat and vegetables. In the course of that lunch break, sandwiched into Seaver’s normal work day, the 35-year-old father found answers to questions he’d never before thought to ask.
Seaver’s commitment to church and to God changed that day as the two drove from the restaurant to Seaver’s office.
“Right there, in the car, Pastor Rigsby led me to the Lord,” Seaver said. “He baptized me a week or two after that.”
Ever since that time, Rigsby is Seaver’s go-to man. When Seaver was wrestling with what the Lord’s will was for his job, he called Rigsby. When Seaver’s 4-year-old daughter, Kiley, was in the hospital in October, it was Rigsby who went to the hospital room to visit the Seavers every day.
It was Rigsby’s guiding hand that lowered Seaver’s 7-year-old son, Trenton, into the baptismal pool at North Anderson Baptist Church.
“Besides my father, Pastor Bill is my No. 2 man,” Seaver said.
For 20 years, Rigsby has filled that role for others who’ve walked through the red doors of his church’s sanctuary on North Main Street in Anderson. Like Dewey Bramlett.
After spending 15 years away from church, Bramlett and his wife walked through those red doors. The Bramletts arrived about 30 minutes late. But it didn’t matter. They still felt at home, Bramlett said.
“He just made us feel at home,” Bramlett said. “He didn’t judge us. He didn’t look down on us because we hadn’t been going to church. He made us feel like part of the family from day one. My own dad is probably the only man I respect more than Bill Rigsby. That’s how big a difference he’s made in my life.”
But Rigsby hasn’t always thought he’d be a minister.
It was not a call he felt in his heart as a young boy. In fact, he went to New Mexico State University to become a grade-school teacher. His first job was teaching history and social studies to students at Camden Middle School in South Carolina. The school is where he met his wife, Lynda.
“I wanted to be a principal, and my wife was going to be a school secretary,” Rigsby said. “And we were going to have summers off.”
But in the mid-1970s, he said, God began moving him in a different direction. At the time, Rigsby was involved in his local church and was speaking on behalf of Gideons International, a ministry that focuses on evangelism.
“God began speaking and saying, ‘I want you to be involved in ministry full-time,’?” Rigsby said. “He wanted ministry to be my focus 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
He and his wife moved to Texas in 1976 so he could attend Southwestern Seminary.
Now, at 63, he has been in ministry for 36 years.
He was born in Roswell, N.M., and was raised the son of a father who was a member of the U.S. Air Force and a firefighter. Most of his childhood was spent on a military base in Puerto Rico. He learned how to be a friend to others through the example that his father set.
“My dad was one of those guys who could do anything,” Rigsby said. “He taught me how to be a friend. I saw that in my dad a lot.”
That knowledge of the military and public safety shows itself in Rigsby’s life as he ministers to Anderson’s law enforcement and firefighting community. He’s a chaplain at the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, the Anderson Police Department and the city of Anderson Fire Department.
He was called to North Anderson Baptist Church in 1991, after serving as a hospital chaplain and a minister of education at several upstate churches.
As the leader of this church, Rigsby doesn’t have summers off, like he thought he might so many years ago in a different role. He receives calls in the middle of the night. Sometimes he can be seen in the midst of a tragedy where someone has lost a child in an accident or at a hospital emergency room, praying with an officer or his family.
Sometimes he might even be found sitting in the passenger seat of a car, being a reassuring presence to a new Christian.
But he has no regrets.
“You have the chance to see how God uses your life to touch other lives. And you see how things change,” he said. “It’s absolutely amazing.”
– Reprinted with permission of Anderson Independent-Mail.