VALLEY FORGE, PA (ABNS)-In a long and distinctive lifetime as an American Baptist minister and missionary, the Rev. Veronica "Ronny" Lanier has gotten to do almost everything-except attend a meeting of the denomination's General Board.
So the Massachusetts pastor called up General Secretary A. Roy Medley and asked to come to this week's board session here, and he invited her to be a special guest. As such, "Ronny" (it's hard to call her anything else) has been a feature at plenaries and committee sessions, crocheting as she listens.
"I've had such a happy week here that I could burst-not bust, but burst," she says. "I haven't missed a thing." Which is not a bad record for someone nearing 88. But Ronny is unusual. Besides being the active pastor of the Lynn, Mass., First Baptist Church, she also prays for and supports a "mission house" for visitors to her area, and is campaigning for sponsors to raise $5,000 in the Step Walk program to aid orphans abroad, a program of International Ministries. She took the floor at a General Board session to ask the members to sign up-and since she exercises and walks daily she expects to do the Step Walk distance herself.
It could be called fantastic, a word Ronny likes to use to describe her life, which has included years in the Baptist home mission department, including service in Denver, Sacramento ("all Chinese"), and Chicago. She also was on the Massachusetts regional staff of American Baptist Churches USA for 25 years. (She was baptized in a Vermont river and calls herself "a New Englander from head to toe.")
"God has been so good to me, I don't know how he's had time for anyone else," she says.
Ronny still drives, but she's given up piloting the bus in which she used to carry Baptist youth and women's society members to camps and conferences. But she remains an active pastor, even though her church recently named her "pastor emeritus." "That was just so I could go on preaching," she says.
So what is she crocheting as she sits in on the General Board sessions?
"I'm doing a wedding in August and this is a doily for the bride." She makes a lot of them, she says, and always the same size and color so no one will feel slighted.
Fantastic!
Andrew C. Jayne American Baptist Churches, USA Mission Resource Development http://www.abc-usa.org/