Remembering Tommy Boland

Thinking of Tommy Boland reminds me of a poem by James Whitcomb Riley. Some workers are mourning the death of a colleague. One man, wiping tears from his eyes, says of his friend, “When God made him, I bet he didn’t do anything else that day, just set around and feel good.”

Well, when God made Tommy Boland, he made one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. Tommy could do anything well. He had unusual gifts of discipline and commitment. He could move with all classes of people. He was a consummate leader. I bet the day God made Tommy, he didn’t do anything else, just “set around and feel good.”

I have known few people as smart, few people as perceptive, few people as hard-working, few people with as deep a faith, few people with as strong a commitment to his God, his church, his family and his friends, and few people who put love into action in quiet ways to the degree Tommy Boland did.

At a personal level, few people have had more impact on my life. He was chairman of the pastor search committee that brought me to First Baptist Church of Chamblee, Ga. He was a close partner at Chamblee, especially in the tough decision to relocate the church and rename it Johns Creek Baptist Church. And long after we had moved to Virginia, he recommended me to become pastor of Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta. Without him, the course of my life would have been entirely different.

“Few people have had more impact on my life.”

Tommy did things like that for many people, without advertising it and without drawing attention to himself.

He had rare gifts of leadership. These abilities catapulted him to the very top of the banking world. When I came to Chamblee, I knew Tommy was pretty senior at First National Bank, but I didn’t know quite how senior until a bank officer called me at Tommy’s request. He was calling to help me arrange a bridge loan so I could buy a house. He began our conversation by saying, “I am with First National Bank, and I work for Tommy Boland.” Then after the slightest pause, he said, “Well, actually, everybody at First National Bank works for Tommy Boland. I’m just one of them.”

Tommy not only was a leader at First National, which later became Wachovia, he was a leader in the banking world. In fact, he was a leader in every world he put his foot in.

Leadership for him was simple. He saw where he was going more clearly than most others, and he saw how to get there more clearly than most, and people just naturally followed. There was something in his demeanor, in his unpretentious certainty, in his clear vision, that pulled you along.

His obituary speaks of him as an extraordinary administrator, and rightly so. It was no accident that one of his many titles at the bank was chief administrative officer.

When I was a young minister, I became aware that pastors needed administrative skills, so I thought I would go to seminary and learn church administration. Well, it turned out they didn’t know anything about it, so I just learned it from Tommy.

Tommy applied to the church what he learned in business. Now, to be honest, that makes most of us ministers uncomfortable. We don’t cotton much to the business model for a church. After all, a church has a very different purpose than a business. A church is not intended to make a profit, it isn’t competing for market share — or at least shouldn’t be — and a church’s workers are volunteers who need to be cajoled, not employees who can be coerced.

“Tommy applied to the church what he learned in business.”

But Tommy knew intuitively that churches and businesses are both made up of people trying to work together, and that leading them turns out to be very similar regardless of the setting. Tommy understood how a church was like a business and how it was different from a business. And he used that knowledge to the particular benefit of his church.

Tommy also was an extraordinary churchman. He loved his church. When its doors were open, he was present. When it needed his time, he gave it. When it needed his leadership, he offered it. When it needed his gifts, he made them available. He had more church sense than just about any layman I ever knew, and more than most pastors.

Two things stand out to me about Tommy’s churchmanship. First, he had an amazing ability to cut through complexity and break it down into simple pieces, making the right course of action obvious to just about everybody. And second, he was unusually perceptive about the under-the-surface dynamics at work in a congregation. He knew instinctively how the congregation would react to an idea or an event, and he knew just how hard to push them. Without those two gifts, First Baptist Church of Chamblee never could have become Johns Creek Baptist Church.

One more thing: Tommy never held back on the energy he invested in the church and its mission. Whether it was establishing and running Camp Rutlege, that influenced so many lives over 50-plus years, or being the hardest-working church treasurer who ever lived, he gave himself unreservedly to the task.

Most other people would have worn out their welcome after 53 years as treasurer, but not Tommy. He knew how to use the influence of a treasurer for the good of the kingdom. He was the guardian of the purse strings, to be sure, but he knew one thing a lot of people don’t. He understood that to do ministry on a large scale you have to spend money. Tommy insisted that it be spent wisely. If you had a well-thought-through strategy that had a chance of growing the church and extending its ministry, he was on your team. If you did not, he was on your case.

Which brings me to say, Tommy was a pastor’s friend. It began in the late 1950s when Cecil Sherman was pastor at Chamblee. Tommy and Cecil formed a bond that lasted as long as they both lived, and that friendship paved the way for his relationships with all of us who came after Cecil.

“Tommy was a pastor’s friend.”

He knew the pastor needed room to cast a vision and space to implement it. He made that happen. He never wanted to control the pastor, he wanted to enable the pastor and to keep the pastor from unnecessarily stepping into potholes. He always was your advocate. He never failed to tell you when he thought you were wrong, but you never doubted he had your back.

When I became pastor at Chamblee, he said to me: “When you need somebody to run flak for you, let me do it. You don’t need to make people mad, and I’m already used to them being mad at me.”

I haven’t had many offers like that.

Tom Jack gave me some advice early on. He said, “I’ve never known any proposal to fail in this church if it had the support of both Tommy and the pastor. On the other hand,” he warned me, “a proposal that has the support of only Tommy OR the pastor is probably doomed.”

Tommy was a Baptist leader. His service to Baptists, of course, is well known. He helped birth McAfee School of Theology. He helped grow and sustain Mercer University, the finest Baptist University in the nation. And he helped found the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

One personal memory: In 1991, just a day or two before moderate Baptists from across the nation gathered in Atlanta to establish CBF, four of us sat down in Tommy’s office: Duke McCall, longtime president of Southern Seminary; Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; Tommy; and myself. Tommy’s role in that meeting was to facilitate opening the first bank account for what was to become CBF. In a way, it was an administrative detail, but it allowed free and faithful Baptists to channel their missions gifts around the anti-Baptist, fundamentalist ideology that had taken over our denomination.

But I especially remember Tommy Boland as my friend. It began the day our moving truck arrived in Atlanta. It didn’t show up until dinner time, and they unloaded until four in the morning. We were spending the night at the Bolands’, so while Linda and I supervised the unloading, Tommy and Beth Ann courageously took charge of our twin sons on what was their second birthday. When we showed up at the Bolands’ house to go to bed about 4:30 in the morning., the boys were miraculously asleep, under the watchful care of Tommy and Beth Ann.

Our friendship was reinforced a few months later. We were in Michigan visiting Linda’s parents when her mother died unexpectedly. We had, of course, not packed funeral clothes.

Over the telephone, Tom Jack assured me he would send our clothes and they would arrive on time for the service. But the morning of the funeral, the clothes still had not arrived, and we were getting nervous. Then a car pulled into the driveway, and four men from Chamblee emerged — John Dixon, Tom Jack, Lawrence Pinson and Tommy Boland. They had flown from Atlanta that morning to be at the service and had brought our clothes with them.

“Then a car pulled into the driveway, and four men from Chamblee emerged.”

Not one member of our family has ever forgotten, even though our sons were too young to remember it personally. The story is so significant in our family that it served as a sermon illustration for our pastor son, Matthew, just a few weeks ago.

Another example of Tommy’s friendship: Long after I was his pastor, without mine or Linda’s knowledge, Tommy invited our son Matthew to lunch and asked him if he had ever considered becoming a pastor, mentioning that he had seen those kinds of gifts in Matthew. Tommy’s influence was added to others, but his effectiveness was clear: Matthew is now pastor of Central Baptist Church of Newnan, Ga.

And finally, Tommy was a man of simple faith. In faith, as in all things, Tommy cut through complexity to find the simple. His faith was pure, and he was quite literally faith-ful, that is, full of faith. His faith expressed itself in service.

Micah 6:8 comes to mind when I think of Tommy: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” To do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly. That was Tommy.

At about eight o’clock on Christmas Eve, he passed peacefully from this life, surrounded by his family. My first thought when I heard the news, I admit, was the pathos of his having passed on Christmas Eve.

But my second thought, and my better one, was that the timing of Tommy’s passing was a gift. Maybe I can express it this way:

On another Christmas Eve, in 1868, an Episcopal minister named Phillips Brooks made a journey to Bethlehem, a journey that inspired him to write, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” The third verse describes the scene at the manger: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.” As Phillips Brooks saw on Christmas Eve, God slipped silently and inconspicuously into to this world and brought with him the gift of life eternal.

Just so, on Christmas Eve, the very night we remember God’s gift of life, Tommy slipped silently into the eternal life of God.

 

David Sapp is a retired pastor of Baptist churches in Georgia and Virginia who now lives in Atlanta.