Photo by Erin Nelson.
Beth Thomason, the new pastor at First Christian Church on Valleydale Road in Hoover, stands in the sanctuary Nov. 29.
Becoming the senior minister at First Christian Church was a homecoming of sorts for the Rev. Beth Thomason, along with the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
“When I was in high school, I said I was going to be a minister,” Thomason said. “I had a wonderful youth minister all during the time I was in the youth group and felt like that was the calling that I had.”
Thomason grew up in Homewood and graduated from Homewood High School in 1984. She attended the University of Montevallo and graduated with a degree in theater. Her first career was a school teacher at Parker High School where she taught public speaking and theater for five years.
The summer between high school and college, Thomason worked at Hargis Christian Retreat and met her future husband, Tim. They were married while she was at Montevallo. Tim had grown up attending First Christian Church, and Beth had previously served as the volunteer youth minister there. They worked together at Hargis Christian Retreat and later married.
“I was a member of this church, and my husband is a lifetime member of this church,” Thomason said. “When we married, I moved my membership to this congregation. I was a teacher and served as the youth sponsor at the time.”
While in her volunteer youth minister role, Thomason casually mentioned to the associate minister that if she didn't have another job, she could be at the church working with the youth all the time.
“He turned around and handed me a seminary catalog,” she said. “Within a year I had resigned as a teacher, and the congregation commissioned me to go to seminary.”
She left her teaching job and began to explore her call to ministry, attending Lexington Theological Seminary, where she earned her Master of Divinity degree and was ordained at FCC in 1999.
For the next 20 years, Thomason served at churches in the Huntsville and Madison areas. In 2020, the family moved back to Birmingham after she became the new senior minister at FCC.
“FCC ordained me to ministry, but I went immediately to serve at FCC Huntsville and served there for 12 years as youth minister,” she said. “I then served for nine years as the solo pastor at Madison Christian church before coming home.”
“I feel like teaching really prepared me for ministry. I love teenagers and spent my first 12 years of ministry as a youth ministry,” she said. “Teaching really was a part of that journey toward ministry. Not like a side journey, but an integral part to their journey.”
FCC has been ministering to the Birmingham community for over 147 years and now has two female ministers: Thomason and associate minister the Rev. Robin Blakemore. Thomason said being called back to minister at FCC was a homecoming for her and her family.
“It’s not something many ministers get to experience,” she said. “This is the church that nurtured and helped form my faith, so it feels like a sacred privilege to be able to lead them in ministry.”
When Thomas began as senior minister on May 1, 2020, she couldn’t present her sermons to the congregation in-person due to the pandemic lockdown.
“I could not actually meet my congregation face to face,” she said. “That was the most challenging thing that's ever happened to me in ministry, starting a ministry in a church where it was almost a year before meeting people.”
The church had to adapt to the circumstances and raised money for equipment to be able to livestream services. At first, services were filmed on iPhones and compiled in a computer program. Then, the sanctuary was revamped to include monitors and technology to livestream services.
Thomason said they did not record the service in the sanctuary because it felt so empty and big, but instead filmed in the church library, filmed communion at table at prayer garden and during prayer time, they would create voiceovers and show visual effects.
“We wanted to be able to livestream until we could come back and do live services in the sanctuary,” Thomas said. “We first began livestreaming from the sanctuary on Christmas, so it's been over a year, and we continue to do that now.”
As someone with a degree in theater and public speaking, Thomason said she is used to speaking to an audience or congregation of people, so she had to change the way she presented her sermons.
Looking for a bright side of the pandemic, Thomason said, “If you can call it a gift that came out of not being able to be together, people began to understand we needed to move in a forward direction so we could be together. The church is still the church whether we can physically be inside the building.”
FCC had its first in-person service on Easter Sunday 2021. It is the church’s highest holy day and was even more emotional for everyone to be back together.
The Thomasons have found a home in Irondale that they have renovated and hoped to move in over the holidays. The couple have two daughters: Celia, who lives with her husband and daughter in Mineral Wells, Texas; and Sami, 20, who works on the audio/visual team at FCC.
In her free time, Thomason loves hiking and said it’s where she feels the closest to God. She also loves theater and is looking forward to attending performances at community theaters around Birmingham.
