In the pastor’s office at Bethel Baptist Church one afternoon in February, laughter radiates from the open door.
Inside, Bonnie Cassida and her co-pastor, Carl Kenney, sit side by side. Their banter is relaxed, the kind that applies to people who have an easy friendship.
“We’re basically twins,” Kenney jokes.
They haven’t always been so closely connected. Cassida is white, Kenney is black and they are changing what Bethel’s congregation looks like.
In January, the Bethel congregation appointed Kenney as co-pastor, creating a biracial partnership in a deliberate effort to diversify the church.
Cassida said she has never heard of a pairing like hers and Kenney’s.
“It’s sad that it’s rare. I don’t know of any other church that’s doing this,” she said.
“When I was in seminary, I took African-American church worship and church history, I told the professor I wanted to be the pastor of a diverse church,” Cassida said. “He told me it couldn’t be done.”
Kenney said the scarcity of such partnerships speaks to the difficulty of their expansive vision.
“It says this kind of work is hard,” Kenney said. “We fit best within our normative culture. It’s easy to remain locked in what we believe to be safe.”
An established church
Bethel Church on Old Plank Road was built in 1858 with membership in both the Southern Baptist Convention and American Baptist Churches USA. It broke its ties to the Southern Baptist Convention in 1967.
The congregation today is small, with 125 active members and still predominantly white, although Kenney and Cassida said a half-dozen black worshipers have been attending services.
On a gray Sunday morning in February, the warmth of the sanctuary pulled the congregation in through a set of double doors, a welcome shelter from the chilly air outside.
As worshipers walked inside, ushers greeted them and handed out bulletins with the day’s hymns and scripture readings. The co-pastors sat at the front of the room, sharing the space behind the pulpit.
The service began with a hymn, and a small but dynamic worship band played backup to the choir. At the end of the service, Cassida and Kenney flanked the doors, shook hands and gave hugs as the congregation exited. The pastors’ teamwork looks effortless, but it is the result of a strong, steady friendship.
Kenney and Cassida met in December 2013 at a lectionary group — Bible study for clergy — in Columbia. At the time, Cassida was experiencing health issues and needed to find someone to fill in at Bethel Church when she switched to part time. She was later diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease caused by inflammation of the thyroid gland.
Kenney moved to Columbia in 2013. He holds a master of divinity degree from Duke University and was named a fellow in pastoral leadership development at the Princeton Theological Seminary on May 14, 2005.
He was invited to help Cassida for a three-month period as an associate pastor in June 2014 and ended up staying for six additional months. He was officially hired on Jan. 10 as Bethel’s co-pastor.
Cassida initially came to Bethel Church in 2002 to co-pastor with her husband, David Casto, who died of cancer in 2008 at the age of 47. She studied at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
At the seminary, she said she encountered some disdain because of her gender.
“I can understand how you would read the Bible and see scriptures and say, ‘Oh wow, it says women are supposed to learn in silence,'” Cassida said. “Learn in silence really means everyone be quiet so they can learn.”
She didn’t buy it.
“If we’re gonna talk about sexism, if we’re gonna talk about rape, if we’re gonna talk about something that people wanna whisper about, let’s just talk about it and be real,” she said.
Kenney is similarly candid.
“I do know that my heart is such that when there’s something that needs to be spoken, I will,” he said. “Because I can’t be anything other.”
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SOURCE: The Missourian
Rebekah Hall
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