Heritage Column for January 19, 2006
By Fred Anderson
She was asked to teach a Sunday school class as a temporary substitute for six weeks. Forty years later, Connie Showalter is still teaching the Friendship class at River Road Church, Baptist, in Richmond.
The class began as “the Doubles class” and was among the few double gender classes available for Baptists; but in time the “young couples” gently aged, marital status changed for some and the name “Friendship” just seemed appropriate.
“It always was a very atypical class,” says the teacher. “Most of the young professors of the UR religion department were members and they lined out the curriculum. I learned so much from those guys. The class never had traditional literature. It was ‘off the wall' and my mother was not sure that she approved!”
The class majored on discussion. “We spent a year debating whether or not a Christian can be a hermit,” laughs Connie, who charts her own course and designs her own lessons, sharing from her wide reading. Often it's a new book or an old favorite.
Long-time class members were never promoted. The class stayed together and newcomers were easily accepted. Today the members still claim to be “young people who also have grandchildren.”
Connie explains her early attraction to the class: “Vernon Richardson, the pastor, knew that the class members were perfectly capable to take care of the social and caring aspects and that I would be free to do teaching. It suited me to a ‘t'.”
Connie and Merle Showalter had come under the influence of Vernon Richardson when they joined University Baptist Church in Baltimore, where he was pastor. They liked his keen mind and formal worship style. When they moved to Richmond in the fall of 1964, they began to “shop” among the churches. One day a friend from Baltimore telephoned to say that Richardson had resigned to accept a pastorate in Richmond. “Where ?” Connie asked. “River Road? I don't know it.” She immediately jumped in the car, map in hand, drove across the James from her new home in southside Richmond, and found the church. The next weekend the Showalters returned to Baltimore. Richardson asked them if his new church would be convenient and her reply was, “No, but we are coming any way!” They joined on the new pastor's second Sunday in January 1965.
Connie Showalter had found her perfect church home. She describes River Road as “intellectually honest, ecumenically open and, at the same time, warm and personable.”
Cornelia Herring Showalter was born into a Baptist family in North Carolina and her father was a pastor. She affectionately describes her father as “a radical and rebel who marched to a different drummer.” It is obvious that Connie Showalter is her father's daughter!
She frequently spices her lessons with stories about growing up with father. Robert Hughes Herring grew up on a farm in Surry County; and his mother's people, the Johnsons, were “educated Baptists.” He liked to tell folks that he sold his mule and went to Wake Forest but he neglected to tell them that he lived with his uncle who was a professor. His biology professor was a Darwinian who influenced the young collegian; and Herring, even as a Baptist preacher, was on Darwin's side. But he found an accepting and loving congregation at Zebulon. At first, he had not intended to stay and even told his wife not to hang her pictures; but the Herrings remained there the rest of their lives.
“My father had open communion, accepted people on their statements of Christian experience and practiced any number of things that were not consistent with other Baptist ministers of that era,” remembers Connie. Once when Connie and her mother visited the local Methodist church, she raced home to tell her father that her mother had recited the Apostle's Creed and said that she believed “in the holy Catholic church.” The father replied: “Well, young lady, you need to learn what that word ‘catholic' means.”
The father believed in education. When sons were born, there was no question but that they were destined for Wake Forest. When Connie was born, it was predetermined that Meredith, the North Carolina Baptist college for women, was her destination. She graduated cum laude.
Along life's journey, she earned two master's degrees and taught emotionally disturbed adolescents for 17 years in the Richmond Public Schools. At River Road, she was the second woman to serve as chair of the board of deacons. She was among the group who assisted in writing The Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention, the most widely-published and distributed analysis of the controversy. She quotes a statement she heard recently: “If you are going to teach, you must learn all the time.” And that's exactly what she does.