The Rev. Dr. Rusty Douglas brought a short set of talking points along when he and his wife, Betty, sat down in the parlor of First Presbyterian Church to speak about moving to Montreat, North Carolina, after 21 years in Greenwood.
Talking point No. 1: “I am not just leaving after 21 years here. I am retiring after 40 years of ministry,” Rusty said.
His last Sunday in the pulpit will be June 14. The service will begin at 11 a.m. The Presbyterian Women will host a reception afterward. Everyone is invited.
Talking Point No. 8, or maybe 9: Rusty’s statistical notations. He said that during his ministry, “I have climbed into the pulpit 1,444 times.” Also on his list are 132 baptisms and 201 funerals, including 53 of the latter for people who were not members of the church.
Betty laughed and said, “He writes them down!”
And he replied, “You have to do that — keep a register.” They smiled.
Together, they described the two decades in Greenwood as life-affirming — usually productive, occasionally frustrating, generally enlightening and inevitably nourishing. The place became a home, and its people drew them into a family not only from the church but from all around town.
They were called to Greenwood in 1998, just about 20 years after they were married. Betty’s roots are in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and she is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. Rusty, 66, comes from Charlotte, North Carolina, and he holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur. They have two grown children, Katharine and Philip, and two grandchildren. Katharine is a nurse in Cleveland. Philip and his wife, Marcie, are engineers, and he works for an aerospace engineering firm serving Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
Rusty has served congregations in Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia as well as Mississippi. In fact, he had a 10-week internship at First Presbyterian in 1977. He served congregations in Vicksburg and Meridian and, most notably, was an associate minister at the 11,000-member Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta immediately before the family moved to First Presbyterian and Greenwood.
They already were familiar with Mississippi and knew something about the Delta before they arrived. Rusty came six weeks earlier than Betty and the children in the fall of 1998, so he was still advising her on the community during the Christmastime ice storm that year. Most of the city lost electrical service.
“Our power was still on,” she said, but they left the house for a party at a member’s home that did not have service.
“Trees were breaking — like rifles,” Betty said. “They sounded like you should be hunkering down in your house and not going to a party.” But Rusty insisted that Delta folks love parties and everyone would be there.
They were. Candles were glowing. Everything was warm. She said, “There was a choir, and we sang. It was lovely.”
It was a good start for the Douglases. They learned, Betty said, that people in the Delta create their own fun by making activities more entertaining, food more delicious and conversation more compelling.
Living a small town — small compared to Atlanta — came to suit them. “In Atlanta, I never saw anybody in a grocery store that I knew. Here, you never go to the grocery store when you don’t see somebody you know,” Rusty said.
Betty said that in Atlanta, she used to fuss out loud to herself about the deficiencies of other motorists. She would scold, “It would be nice if you had used your blinker.” Then in Greenwood, “I was at a stop sign and said, ‘It would be nice if you had used the stop sign.’ And they waved at me! I had to hold back on that.”
They were surprised that race relationships in the Delta are more complex than they initially thought. “They are more complicated than most people realize if they don’t live here,” Rusty said. “Racial issues are endemic to this place.”
Betty talked about injustice and what it does to people. She said she realizes that “if you haven’t systemically experienced it, you can’t understand what it does to your psyche.”
They don’t have answers but they have tried to help. Among other activities, Rusty served two terms as president of the local chapter of the Fuller Center for Housing. He’s also served on the board of the Greenwood-Leflore County Chamber of Commerce, is a past president of the Rotary Club and was moderator of St. Andrew Presbytery in 2011.
Betty taught math and Bible for 15 years at Pillow Academy. She loved it. She especially liked teaching students who found math difficult. At the beginning of the school year, she would ask math students who disliked the subject to raise their hands. Then, she would say that she hoped by the end of the year they would like it just a little bit better.
Rusty said, “She had a heart for teaching the kid who struggled.”
Meanwhile, the church and the Douglases were a good combination. Rusty is proud of the church in a number of ways, including spiritual and benevolent growth. He said that in the Douglases’ time there, the church generated $23 million from its 350 members and other sources.
But Betty said,“It is an extraordinarily generous church without extraordinary ... wealth.”
Rusty explained than when he was associated with churches in Georgia and Tennessee he met many people with big money. “I have been at churches that had more millionaires per square foot than you could shake a stick at. You can match this group up with any of them.”
He talked about the fine staff and the worship space that glorifies God that members provide. He ran down a list of outreach activities, including support for missions in China, Mexico, Kenya, Iran, Guatemala, Belize, Lebanon, Russia and the Dominican Republic. The church has sponsored mission trips to Mexico, Belize and the Dominican Republic.
It also switched denominations from the Presbyterian Church in the United States to ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. The dividing issue was over the ownership of church property, Rusty said. “Since we came into ECO in 2018, we have had $1.8 million given,” he said.
Rusty talked about people in Greenwood who have inspired him.
They include the late Al Wylie, a Presbyterian with a longtime and faithful prison ministry; church member Johnny Jennings, who has “made me laugh for 21 years”; Elizabeth Melton, who served on the search committee that called him to First Presbyterian; the late Rocky Powers, whose steady work for Habitat for Humanity (the Fuller Center) resulted in better housing for many; and Dr. John Lucas III. “That guy is so smart and so well-educated. He could go anywhere in this country and be a surgeon, but he chooses to stay in his hometown and make the contribution he does at the hospital and to the Scouting program.”
And then there was Kent Hull, the late former NFL player who also chose to live where he grew up. Rusty officiated at his funeral services. Many NFL players came, including members of the Hall of Fame.
Hull had known he was declining.
“Who did Kent pick for his pallbearers? Nine hundred ninety-nine people out of 1,000 would, if they could, pick players from the Hall of Fame. People would have done that,” Rusty said. “He picked his high school buddies. That just impressed me. He never forgot this roots.”
He and Betty are heartened by seeing adults who were children when they arrived who also are serving in the community and in their hometown church, in the greater First Presbyterian and Greenwood family.
Rusty said, “I tell people when they come here that this church is full of people you want your children to be like.”
It’s going to be hard for the Douglases to leave the people, the buildings, the music and the pipe organ, the annual Kirkin’ of the Tartan celebration — the home in which they and others have worshipped God.
The Douglases love Montreat, which is a Presbyterian retreat and village in a mountain cove. The problem is that Montreat is 600 miles away. So they are hoping their home will entice their extended Delta family to the hills.
“We want to make it a place where people from this church, and from other churches we have served, can come and gather,” Rusty said. Maybe that should have been talking point No. 1.
• Contact Susan Montgomery at 581-7241 or smontgomery@gwcommonwealth.com.
