This week is my second venture into the leadership of the Methodist Church in our fair town. Another column featured Rev. Susannah Grubbs-Carr, Pastor of Decatur United Methodist Church, whereas this week I am featuring the Rev. Kathy Butler, assistant pastor of the church. I learned that the position of deacon in the Methodist church is not a lay position, as in the Baptist church, but it is a pastoral position, with a more specialized ministry focus.
The youthful deacon, daughter of Jamie and Dianne Butler, and wife of Jarod Saucedo of Tennessee, was reared in Florence, Miss., from her birth on Aug. 17, 1988. She had one brother, who has since passed away.
Kathy’s father was an engineer at Sieman’s in Richland, whereas her mother was a schoolteacher and is now a private school librarian who travels to about 30 different schools in the summer as a storyteller!
Kathy was baptized as an infant at a local church. The church of her childhood, where she experienced “some of my closest moments with God” was Marvin United Methodist Church in Florence. One of those moments was
when she was four. She said, “I was very curious, a wild child, into everything.”
One Christmas the church presented a drive-through nativity, and Kathy had the part of Mary in the children’s area. She recalled hearing the Holy Spirit speak to her, as she sat there, with hands folded. He said, “Be still. This is a very important time. You can be still right now.”
She remembers the stairwell of the church, where she and her friends would “hang out,” eating the food from church fellowships. “Even now, when I am doing meditative prayer, I think of myself being there.”
Confirmation, when she was in the sixth grade, was “where we learned about the church, about Methodism, the beliefs and doctrines, about God’s grace. At that time I made the decision to profess Christ as Lord and follow Him. Even though I knew Christ, this was a way to profess that in front of the congregation, knowing exactly what that meant.”
Rev. Kathy graduated from McLaurin High School in 2006, going on to Mississippi University for Women, from which she graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. While at MUW, she was involved in the Wesley Foundation, the Methodist ministry to college students. She stayed an extra year, working with Wesley, after which she worked at the Wesley United Methodist Church as secretary. Doing church work was “life-giving,” whereas applying for graduate school to work in scientific research was “nerve-wracking.”
Finally rejecting secular work, she said that she could not see God calling her into pulpit ministry. “It became apparent He was calling me into the Order of the Deacons.”
She explained, “Elders are called to shepherd the church, and deacons are called to connect the church to the needs of the world.” I thought of the first deacons in the Book of Acts, who were chosen to meet the needs of the widows.
Rev. Butler attended Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., and earned her Masters of Divinity (M.Div.) in 2016.
Rev. Butler and Rev. Susannah were both placed in Decatur by the United Methodist Church in June of 2016. Though deacons usually do not get placed, the district supervisor called and told her of the Decatur Methodist Church, which needed a dedicated person to work with children, youth, and the Wesley Foundation at East Central. Her passion for this ministry and the fact that it was near her parents helped her choose to accept the position.
She and Jarod Saucedo met while at seminary and were friends for a couple years. Jarod was called to preach as a teenager, even being told by the Lord that he was called “to minister within the cracks of society.” After graduating, Kathy moved back home while Jarod stayed in Kentucky. Then she began serving here in 2016, with Jarod’s placement as a Methodist pastor in Stonewall and Hopewell, near Quitman, following soon after.
Rev. Saucedo came in the fall of 2016, pastored about a year there, then they were married December 2017. Though there is a parsonage where he ministers, they live here in the old Methodist parsonage because of her work with all ages of young people. It was recently announced that they are to stay here at least another year.
I asked if she had experienced anything she would consider a miracle. As I scribbled her answer, she recalled an experience about 10 years ago. She said, “Personal faith is a process. Even though I had accepted Christ and knew Him as Lord and Saviour, I still had parts of my heart that needed surrendering. So in 2008 began a sequence of events that led me to that full surrender.”
“One of them was a mission trip over Spring reak of 2008, to Greenville. For this trip, anything we needed and prayed about, God provided.” Working from a house in a lower-income neighborhood, they were to minister to the children through a vacation Bible school that week. After praying for protection, they went door to door with fliers to advertise for the VBS. At one door, a man shot a gun through the door, but no one was hurt. Some stayed and talked to the man, and the situation became a good witness to the community.
Another incident she said was a miraculous answer to prayer also took place that week. The youth were to clean an old building so that it could be used in ministry. The water was off, and it would be quite inconvenient to try to haul water in to clean. They prayed, someone went in and tried a faucet again, and the water came on!
As we finished our conversation, Rev. Grubbs-Carr entered the office. In answer to my request for her comments, she said, “Rev. Kathy is a joy to work with. She has a passion for college ministry, and that’s a gift to our community. Also, our leadership styles are very different, which works very well.”
It has been a pleasure meeting these young women who both serve God and their community as they minister in the Decatur United Methodist Church.
You may contact me at lagnesrussell@gmail.com or 601-635-3282.
