Ann Fitzgerald Brown's family was in the telephone business. Her great-grandfather put in a telephone from his house to his store and a telephone company was started. It was all about people getting connected with one another in the rural area around Gretna. Although she moved away to college and lived in Richmond in the early years of her marriage, she and her husband, Kent, moved to her hometown of Gretna to work for awhile in the telephone business.
Fred Anderson
Today as the new president of Woman's Missionary Union of Virginia, Ann is still involved in helping people get in touch with others. “I think the most exciting thing I have seen in WMUV,” reflected Ann in a recent interview, “is how ready people are for getting connected and becoming involved personally in missions. Sometimes I have been speaking to a WMU group and I actually have felt something change. I was at a church talking about the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women and I could just feel the excitement. When I got home there was a message waiting from someone who wanted to know how to get in touch with the chaplain at the prison. I think our big need is to connect people, WMU groups and churches with the needs across Virginia and the world.”
She sees the desire for getting connected even in the very young. “Kent and I went to Camp CrossRoads two summers ago to talk about our missions experiences in India and the needs in that land. We had the GAs to make Christmas cards to send to the children in India and one of the little girls came up to us and said quietly that she wanted to get her canteen money — the money which she would have spent on candy, snacks and drinks at camp — and send it in the card to a child in India. It is important to get people to see that they can make a difference and this young girl wanted to help.”
Kent and Ann Brown are connected themselves to the missions opportunity which Virginia Baptists have found in the children's home, seminary and prison ministry conducted by the remarkable Kunjumon Chacko in Southern India. In April, the Browns expect to make their fourth visit to India. It has become a family affair and several members of their family have participated in missions trips to India. The children and adults in that faraway place have become friends.
The Browns also made an awareness tour of China under the guidance of Lynn Yarbrough, the Virginia Baptist ambassador. “It was an eye-opening experience,” says Ann, “and we thought that we would start going to different places on missions trips; but when we went back to India the second time, we discovered that the people remembered us and were hoping for our return. It was an easy decision to go back to India. It has been good for our family to have the connections with India.”
Ann Brown
The Browns have worked in Bible schools at Chacko's Precious Children's Home. When the state president is at her home in Gretna, she enjoys perusing art books for ideas to use in a future Bible school in India. In their visit in 2007, they met many of the seminary students and the Indian students asked about the couple's son, Robert, who also had visited India. The students would say, “Robert is my friend!”
After the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late November, some folks reckoned that Ann and her family would not want to return. “It does make you see the situation in a different way,” says Ann, “but a tragedy can happen anywhere. What has been hard for me is to hear about religious persecution in India. The people would say, ‘Please remember us, please pray for us.' The church grows when persecuted. I have wondered what has happened to those persecuted people. When you hear the news coming from that land, you remember the faces of the people you have met.”
Ann has been picturing the faces of people in other lands ever since she was a Sunbeam. About all she remembers today about Sunbeams is that famous song which became forever imbedded in the memory of every former Sunbeam. She says, “My strongest memory of WMU missions organizations was the GAs.” Her mother, Emily Fitzgerald, was her GA leader and it was in those experiences that Ann first learned to memorize Scripture, to understand other cultures and countries, and to participate in missions activities. Her mother encouraged the girls to complete all of the “Forward Steps.”
Ann was a regular attendee at GA camp and the destination usually was the Cedars, but she does recall going to Baptist Lodge in its last year at Virginia Beach. Today she promotes CrossRoads as a place not only to train children and youth but also for adults to come for conferences and retreats. “It is a place where other distractions of life fade away.”
Ann lists several mentors in her missions pilgrimage, including both grandmothers, Anna Woodford of Mentow Church and Winnie Fitzgerald of Gretna. “One was the best missions study leader and the other was the person whom you would call if someone in the church was sick or in need.” She also remembers her grandfather, a beekeeper, who would take her along on missions to deliver his honey to a nearby children's home. She also credits her aunt, Sue Fitzgerald, of Mars Hill; and of course, she values the life-long relationship with her GA leader, her mother, who for sentimental reasons wore one of Ann's grandmother's scarves when Ann was elected as the state WMU president.
Ann and Kent are proud of their two sons: Robert, who is a student at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, and Will, who is studying at Yale Divinity School. They have not fretted about living in an empty nest and they stay happily busy. They joined the Danville Symphony Orchestra. Kent is busy as the minister of music at First Church, Gretna, and Ann is chairman of the board of the Danville Community College. And now there is the presidency of Virginia WMU. In April, there will be another trip to visit their friends in India. Truly, for Ann Brown it is all about getting connected.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.