Rev. Bob Shrum leaves a lasting legacy at Oakland Baptist

Sunday, worshipers at Oakland Baptist Church will see a sight they’ve seen every service for 32 year, – senior pastor Bob Shrum standing in the pulpit.

The difference is it’s Shrum’s final sermon as Oakland’s pastor.

Shrum leaves a church that has seen major changes in its membership, its denomination and its wider mission in the community.

Largely due to Shrum’s efforts, Oakland stands apart from other churches in its approach to both theology and many controversial issues churches across the country have grappled with recently.That approach led Oakland to leave the Southern Baptist Convention a few years ago.

Reflecting on his pastoral career, Shrum stands firm in the convictions he’s always used to minister to his flock, inside and outside the church on Oakland Avenue.

“My underlying goal or conviction has always been to be more like Jesus, and not more like other churches in the area or others in our denomination,” Shrum said. “That means being accepting of everyone, regardless of labels.”

Nurtured in the church

Shrum’s career has brought him almost full circle, from his birth in Charlotte to his retirement in Rock Hill, with a few stops in between.

He moved to Florence when he was 9 years old when his father, the manager of what at the time was the only Goodyear tire store in Charlotte, was transferred to South Carolina.

“He had been with a few other stores before that,” Shrum said. “A few years later, the company wanted to move him again, and he said, ‘I’m done moving. If you want me to stay with the company, you’ll leave me here.’”

Shrum recalls the Florence church he attended through high school kindled a desire to serve God and his people. It also gave him the blueprint for how a church should operate in the world.

“My family nurtured me in the church,” Shrum said. “I was brought up to believe in it. ... That church there in Florence was highly educated, and socially progressive even in the 1950s and 1960s.”

When Shrum went to the University of South Carolina, he wasn’t planning to pursue a life in the pulpit. He started as an engineering student. In his junior year, he changed his major to philosophy and thengraduated from the Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Shrum was an associate pastor in Sumter and head pastor of a church in Pendleton before he was recruited in 1983 to fill a vacancy at Oakland.

June Neal, who served on the pulpit committee that recruited Shrum remembers, “back then, we didn’t have instant communication or computers. If you had a person you thought would be a good fit, you had to go see them preach in person.”

After watching him preach in Pendleton – a sermon in which she recalls he somehow worked in the song “Send In the Clowns” – Neal was convinced the committee had found “one of the most unique, original, off-the-charts people we’d seen.”

“I walked out of there and told the others, ‘I think we’ve found our man,’” she said.

Shrum said he was attracted to Oakland because of experiences he’d had with Clemson students who came to First Baptist in Pendleton. Shrum hoped to have something similar at a church just off the Winthrop University campus.

“I loved that environment, and when (Oakland) expressed an interest, I knew they had that proximity (to Winthrop), so I thought it would have the same vitality.”

Shrum and his young family that included two children with special needs moved to Rock Hill.

“His wife in particular needed assurance that they were coming to the right place,” Neal said.

The Red Letters

Oakland describes itself as a “theologically moderate” church on its website.

Where other churches have gone in what Shrum calls a “hard tack to the right” in recent years, Oakland prides itself as being a “red letter” church, focused intently on the words of Jesus, usually denoted with red text in Bibles.

“If you pay attention to those, you won’t go wrong,” Shrum said. “Jesus said to a lawyer who asked which was the most important commandment, Jesus said ‘love God,’ but just as important is to ‘love your neighbor.’ All else is secondary.”

That attitude allows Oakland to “be open to all points of view, at both extremes and anywhere in between,” Shrum said. “We have ultra-conservatives and ultra-liberals, and they get along.”

The red letters have also led Oakland to reach out to the surrounding community. The church was one of 12 congregations that started Family Promise of York County, which provides housing and food assistance to needy families. Church volunteers have built several homes for Habitat for Humanity. Oakland also hosts weekly English-as-a-second-language classes, something Shrum credits with boosting the church’s diversity by introducing it to people from around the world.

In 2006, church members with a medical background started Palmetto Volunteers in Medicine, offering free medical services. That group has evolved into the independently operated York County Free Clinic.

“This is the birthplace of the clinic,” said longtime church member Dr. Hartwell Hildebrand . “We saw a need for it, so we came to (Shrum), and he’s always been very supportive of the idea.”

“He and three other members sat in a room down the hall, and started something that morphed into a clinic that’s now supported by local businesses,” Shrum said.

Shrum also pushed Oakland to open more leadership roles to women.

It’s not like Bob came in and said, ‘at the next deacon election, we’re going to have women,’” said Judy Mobley, current chair of the deacons’ fellowship. “We did a lot of research, looked at biblical passages, formed a committee... It was not a decree, it was a paradigm shift.”

Today, Oakland has a female minister and a majority of the serving deacons are women.

“He came to our last deacons’ meeting, and I asked, ‘if not for Bob Shrum, would we have all these women as servant-leaders in our church?’”

Shrum said that attitude as a part of his legacy at Oakland.

“I’m proud of what we’ve done and what we stand for, and that we’ve bucked the cultural and social streams,” Shrum said.

“You’ll get in trouble”

Shrum’s activism led to a split between Oakland and the York Baptist Association. The deciding moment came in 2005, when Shrum testified before the state Legislature, opposing a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Shrum said he made that decision after receiving a phone call from a man he didn’t know, but who grew up at Oakland and whose parents still attended the church. As someone living in a long-term relationship with another man, the man asked his family pastor to publicly oppose efforts to stigmatize their relationship.

“While he was talking to me, all I could think was, ‘Don’t do that. You’ll just get in trouble,’” Shrum said. “Then as soon as he was done, I said ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ Then when I put the phone down I thought, ‘What have I done?’”

Shrum’s opposition to the amendment – and openness to including gay members in the congregation – led to other Baptist churches accusing Oakland of straying from their accepted interpretation of homosexuality as a sin.

Oakland was on the verge of being voted out of the local Baptist association when the congregation voted to remove itself from the Southern Baptist Convention. It now belongs to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. The decision passed – after “a great amount of prayer and hardship,” Mobley said.

“We’ve always been more moderate than a lot of Southern Baptists,” Mobley said. “There was some conversation starting in 1985... Then we we began to look at it, we formed another committee. Baptists are good at committees.”

Shrum says the separation was ultimately a good thing, since he said he believes Oakland has more in common with other churches of various denominations they are now partners with than with their fellow Baptists.

“Part of it was social and cultural. As the country moved to the right in the 1980s and 1990s, churches in the South tracked the same way, and the gap between us became wider,” Shrum said. “I think churches have a tendency to be judgmental, but I think that’s above my pay grade... Jesus caught heat in his day for including people in his inner circle the religious authorities considered to be sinners.”

Of his fellow Baptist preachers, Shrum said, “They do good work. We just do things differently.”

The church family

Through all the turmoil, Oakland’s congregation has stuck with their pastor, mostly because of the strong personal connection they feel with him.

“This is someone who has had open-heart surgery. He’s been divorced. He’s brought up children with special needs,” said Tweet Curtis, a 56-year member of the church. “Anybody who has that life situation, he can give you an extra hug.”

While his adult son Jason lives in a group home for the disabled in Dillon, Shrum has tried to keep him a part of his church family.

“Bob goes and gets him and brings him to church on holidays,” Curtis said. “We love Jason. We all embrace him.”

Shrum has been married 18 years to his second wife, Rosie, and has been an active stepfather to her children. He’s now looking forward to the birth of his third grandchild.

As he transitions from his role with the church, Shrum hopes to spend more time with his grandchildren. He said he will stay active in the Rock Hill area, but wants to step away from Oakland long enough for another transition committee to find a replacement.

“More than anything, he’s taught the church to face outward,” said member Jimmy Johnson. “He’s modeled an inclusive church, not an exclusive one.”

“We’ll continue to be a community-servant church,” Mobley said. “It’s good to be able to see beyond our own needs... He’s convinced me it’s not about the numbers. Just because another church may have more members doesn’t mean they’re doing the right thing.”

Most members say parting with their long-time pastor will be difficult, especially because he has been involved in so many of their lives.

“He’s such a great Bible teacher,” Johnson said. “I told him, I don’t care if you retire, but you’ve got to keep coming to Bible study.”

After so many years in the pulpit, Shrum said he is looking forward to life in retirement.

“I’ve had so many people tell me they want me to do their funeral,” Shrum said. “Now I’ll tell them, ‘Sorry, you waited too long.’”

This story was originally published November 21, 2015 at 8:15 PM with the headline "Rev. Bob Shrum leaves a lasting legacy at Oakland Baptist."