Carolyn DeArmond Blevins.

Shurden, Kay W. ; Shurden, Walter B., Sr.

In the introduction to his best-selling book, The Road to Character, David Brooks identifies two hands of virtues. The first he calls "resume" virtues. (1) These are the skills one brings to the job market and that contribute to vocational success. The second he dubs "eulogy" virtues, and these are the moral attributes they recite at your funeral. We have walked through darkness and delight for half a century with Carolyn DeArmond Blevins, and we are witnesses both to her external accomplishments and her internal character.

Biographical Overview

Born into a Baptist pastor's home in Maryville, Tennessee, on December 27, 1936, Carolyn Jane DeArmond Blevins has spent most other life in beautiful East Tennessee, near her beloved Cade's Cove in the Smokey Mountains. The daughter of Ruth Wilson and Raymond DeArmond, her father served as pastor of Baptist churches in Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama. Blevins graduated from Young High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1955. Like her father and mother before her, she entered Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, in 1955, graduating in 1959.

At Carson-Newman she fell in love with William (Bill) L. Blevins. They married in 1959, and eventually had four children: Suzanne, Art, Alan, and Kym (now deceased). Three granddaughters and two grandsons have enriched her family life. Before becoming a college professor, Carolyn Blevins spent fourteen years in full-time homemaking in which she discovered "a lot of pluses and minuses in the role of housewife." She said, "I enjoyed the package of tasks called homemaking." Given her devotion to her family, one is not surprised at the struggles she encountered upon becoming a professor. What is surprising, however, is the number of resume virtues she accumulated while continuing to teach with family as "a top priority." (2)

In the fall of 1959 both Carolyn and Bill matriculated at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Again, like her father before her, she graduated from Southern. She received her master's in Christian education from Southern in 1961. An inveterate student, she later returned to Carson-Newman where she studied history, political science, and German. She also studied advanced history courses at the University of Tennessee and Baptist history at Regent's Park College in Oxford, England.

Blevins supplemented her academic education with the practical experiences stemming from broad travels. A relaxed traveling companion who zips through the largest of airports with ease, she has spent time in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Costa Rica, South Korea, Russia, and China. An energetic traveler, she is also an avid and hungry reader, focusing much of her interests on history, biography, religion, novels, mysteries, and women's studies.

Carolyn and Bill Blevins returned to Jefferson City and Carson-Newman College in 1966 when Bill began his career as a college professor. They have remained there until the present, fifty faithful years in the same town and at the same college. Carolyn Blevins joined her husband on the faculty of their alma mater in 1976. She taught in the religion department for three decades, until 2006, specializing in church history.

When Carolyn Blevins entered young adulthood, women were not involved in professional roles as ministers in Baptist life. Had they been, she should have been ordained--like her father and husband--to the gospel ministry. But she lived during transition years; she began her adulthood when white Baptists of the South had no women ministers, and she lived to see the emergence of women ministers in her denomination. She not only lived to see the transition, but she also was in the middle of it--nurturing it, encouraging it, and modeling it.

Born into a Baptist home, married to a Baptist minister, teaching in a Baptist college, Carolyn DeArmond Blevins has exemplified the best of Baptist life throughout her many diverse roles in life.

Teacher

On a September day in 1976 Blevins answered a phone call in which she was asked to teach a course in the religion department at Carson-Newman College. In a bit of stupor and later panic, she said, "Yes." It had been sixteen years since finishing her graduate work, but she knew that "here was an open door I did not want to shut." She loved to teach and "teaching at the college level," she said, "was a dream come true." (3)

Obviously she loved college teaching, and the students loved her. In 1984, only eight years after becoming a college professor, she received the Distinguished Faculty Award at Carson-Newman. Some professors never receive that award, and others wait a lifetime for that high honor. In 1996 she received the Faculty Creativity Award. Administrators, professorial colleagues, and college students attested to her talents both in and out of the classroom.

Indicative of the respect that the administration and faculty had for her, she was asked to teach an honors class at Carson-Newman, a prestigious assignment. For twenty-seven years she and Professor Joe Bill Sloan, a professor of political science and eventually the interim president of the college, team-taught that course. Sloan said, "I learned from her how to get students to discuss and think more than just listen. That helped me become a better teacher in my other classes." His teaching with Blevins made "for the best time I had in my forty-one years at Carson-Newman." (4)

Dr. Eileen Campbell-Reed, now co-director of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, studied with and worked as a student assistant to Blevins at Carson-Newman. In reflecting on that crucial period in her life, Campbell-Reed said:

   I think it is fair to say that the first course I had with Carolyn
   set me on a path to deeper understanding of the fracturing of
   Baptist life, which we were living through while I was her student
   in the early 1980s. That became the topic of my dissertation and my
   first academic book. The multi-generational support that Carolyn
   provided literally nurtured hundreds and hundreds of students for
   vocations of teaching and ministry. I will always count her among
   the saints and cheerleaders for my own journey. (5)

During her three decades on the faculty of Carson-Newman, Carolyn Blevins taught at least twelve different courses in the religion department. In addition to the introductory Old and New Testament courses and the history of Christianity, she focused her teaching on two themes: Baptist history and women in the Christian tradition.

Some of the Baptist courses she taught included "History of the Baptist People," "Baptist Biographies," "Baptist Principles," and "Baptists Around the World." Weaving the critically relevant theme of the role of women into all of her courses, she taught two specific courses on the subject: "Women in Christian History" and "Women in the Biblical Tradition." Because of her thirty years of faithful teaching, hundreds of students graduated from Carson-Newman challenged by the Baptist vision of Christianity and the indispensable role of women in both Baptist life and the larger Christian tradition.

Writer

Over her professional career, Carolyn Blevins wrote extensively and helpfully for both the scholar and the non-professional and in vastly different genres. While most of these writings have been in the area of Baptist historiography and the role of women in Christian and Baptist history, some of her earliest writings were Sunday School curricula materials for youth and the teachers of youth. In 1987 the Baptist Sunday School Board gave her a Writing Excellence Award for these endeavors.

Blevins contributed scholarly essays to numerous books and encyclopedias. She published award-winning historical articles in serious academic journals, including Review and Expositor, The Theological Educator, and Baptist History and Heritage.

Two books and two booklets reflect in capsule form her passionate concerns. Her first book, Women in Christian History: A Bibliography, published by Mercer University Press in 1995, attests to her serious research of women within the Christian tradition. Her 2002 booklet, Celebrating Our Freedom, Faith, and Future: The 10-Year History of Tennessee Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, echoes her concern for preserving the local and regional Baptist story.

At the turn of the twenty-first century the Baptist History and Heritage Society published a valuable series of booklets called "The Baptist Heritage Library." The society asked Blevins to write the essay titled Women's Place in Baptist Life. In that 2003 piece she asks the question, "What is women's place in Baptist life?" After identifying the biblical and cultural issues involved and surveying the role of women in Baptist history, her answer was emphatic: "to do whatever God calls them to do." (6)

Her most personal book, published in 2012, describes her saga of sorrow after the murder of her youngest daughter in 2004. A Journey of Pain and Peace: Lessons from Loss has a five-star designation by it on Amazon.com. Unlike anything else that Blevins has written, it is a cry of the heart that is theologically grounded and bubbling with practical help. This book will be given more extensive attention in the last section of this paper. (7)

Leader

In 1970 Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phrase "servant leadership," distinguishing it from traditional leadership. Servant leadership is not designed to accumulate and exercise power for oneself but to enrich lives, strengthen organizations, and fashion a more caring and just world. Carolyn Blevins has embodied servant leadership throughout her career. In whatever context she found herself--home, church, denomination, campus, or community--she emerged as a reasoned voice and a willing hand to improve the status quo and bring about needed change.

Blevins has put down deep roots. A member of the First Baptist Church of Jefferson City since 1966, when she saw a need in the church she either volunteered or accepted calls to service. Her areas of involvement in her local church are too numerous to catalog, but two long-standing commitments have been teaching a youth Sunday School class and serving as deacon. She led the youth department for thirty-seven years because she believed it to be a critical place in Christian education.

Blevins chaired many significant committees that shaped the direction and ministry of her local church. Among these are: Personnel, Mission Vision, various search committees, Children, Christian Life, Computer, Historical, Church Advisory Council, Stephens Ministry, and Wednesday night supper team. She has also preached often in her home church. Her faith, vibrantly personal and concretely grounded, has always found expression in a local congregation of believers.

East Tennessee Baptist churches often made Blevins the first choice as a competent woman and a good preacher to supply the pulpit. Wanting church members to see a woman in the pulpit so as to shatter existing prejudices, she accepted almost every invitation to preach--even if inconvenient to her personal schedule. Deliberately, intentionally, she chose to be part of the change she desired to see among Baptists: more gifted women preaching the gospel. She wanted women's perspectives on the gospel to be heard.

Carolyn Blevins' leadership and influence transcended her local church and the churches in East Tbnnessee to the wider Baptist denomination, including both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Her writing ministry certainly constituted one of the major ways of serving the Baptist people at large.

As with her writings, Blevins contributed primarily to denominational leadership in the two areas of Baptist history and the role of women in Baptist life. A leader in the major Baptist professional historical associations, she served as a trustee and president of the Historical Commission of the SBC, as a board member of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, and as president of the William H. Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society.

The Historical Commission, now the Baptist History and Heritage Society, awarded her its prestigious Norman W. Cox Award. Presented to the person deemed to have published the best article in a given year in Baptist History and Heritage, the society honored Blevins in 1994 for her article titled "Baptist State Papers: Shapers or Reflectors of Southern Baptist Thought?"

Two years later, in 1996, acknowledging her significant contributions to Baptist history, the Historical Commission presented her with the W. O. Carver Distinguished Service Award. This annual award recognizes and pays tribute to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the cause of Baptist history.

In 2006 the Baptist History and Heritage Society named its meritorious award the Carolyn Blevins Meritorious Service Award. The award is presented annually to an individual or organization considered to have provided commendable and exemplary service to the society.

While committed to the discipline of Baptist history in general, Blevins' preeminent passion has been the neglected role of women in Baptist life. As mentioned above, when the Baptist History and Heritage Society wanted an author for the booklet, Women's Place in Baptist Life, it turned to Blevins. A member of Baptist Women in Ministry since its founding in 1992, she served on the board and the initial planning group that organized Global Women in 2000. The Tennessee Cooperative Baptist Fellowship honored her in 2005 with the Betty Galloway Advocacy for Women in Ministry Award.

Always sensitive to the need to do a job well, Blevins followed the first rule of organizational participation: "show up." She worked diligently, often quietly behind the scenes, to provide places of leadership for other women who otherwise might go unrecognized. As she did on the college campus, she mentored scores of women who later became executives and leaders themselves. Maybe Carolyn Blevins' most significant role has been as an exemplar for women seeking to find a place of ministry and service in Baptist life.

Pam Durso, currently the influential executive-director of Baptist Women in Ministry, spoke of meeting Blevins in 2002:

   She was everything I was hoping to be when I grew up (and I was 41
   years old at the time and still wondering if I would ever
   "arrive."). Carolyn was a well-respected, published Baptist
   historian; a much sought-after preacher and speaker; a long-tenured
   and well-loved professor; and a warm and caring wife, mother, and
   friend. Plus, Carolyn spoke her mind--and I really liked her mind.
   (8)

Carolyn joined the Carson-Newman College religion faculty in 1976. Her leadership skills quickly became apparent on campus. Among many other faculty committees and activities, she directed the honors program, led a team of teachers in China, chaired the Center for Baptist Studies, and chaired the committee for celebrating the 150th anniversary of the founding of Carson-Newman. Because of her wide-ranging efforts to improve her community and to engage students in academic and service learning, she received the Lane Bryant Award for Community Service in 1978 and the faculty award for creative service in 1996.

In addition to her leadership in churchly and campus roles, Blevins has been an active citizen in her community. Her style of leadership in all her endeavors is worthy of note. Visionary and hard working, she is anything but dismissive of the ideas of others. She wants her voice to be heard, but not at the expense of drowning out the voices of others. Her ability to get along with those who differ with her has gone a long way in securing a leadership place at the table and in the pulpit for Baptist women.

Griever/Forgiver

A historian, teacher, writer, and leader, Carolyn Blevins is also a human being who has known deep, dark suffering. She cannot be understood without recognizing the impact of the death of her daughter Kym on her life.

Saturday, August 28, 2004, dawned as a day draped in devastating darkness for Carolyn Blevins and her family. During the week her mother-in-law had died, and relatives were gathering at the Blevins' home for lunch before the funeral service that afternoon. Earlier that morning she received a call from her mother's retirement home saying her mother was being taken by ambulance to the hospital because of hemorrhaging. Rushing to the hospital to be at her mother's side, she stayed until relieved by her brother. She dashed home for the meal with relatives only to discover that her daughter Kym was not present. Kym's two brothers went to their sister's duplex apartment and found her dead at the hands of a home intruder. They called their dad and gave the unbelievably horrible news. "Kym is dead," Carolyn Blevins would later write, "are the three most knee-buckling, heart-crushing words I have ever heard." (9)

Carolyn Blevins began a process of grief that transformed her in many ways. In A Journey of Pain and Peace: Learning from Loss, she described that arduous transformation. With the uncanny foresight to keep a daily journal tracking her emotional upheavals after Kym's death, she utilized those pages eight years later to write her book.

Learning to live with the loss of her beloved youngest child, Blevins entered the depths, questioning her Christian faith of sixty-plus years. She cried and walked and prayed, taking comfort from friends and family. Eventually she came to a place of peace, but it was a tortuous wrestling match.

She wrestled with stubborn reality: the permanent loss of her unique, spunky, lively daughter who brought so much life to their family. She wrestled with multiple losses: her mother-in-law, eventually her mother, and her daughter in the short space of three months. She wrestled with guilt, being unable to be fully available to her mother in her mother's last weeks of life because of her own gut-wrenching grief. She wrestled with bitterness and anger toward someone who had willfully taken her daughter's life. She wrestled with forgiveness, the need to forgive the murderer of her child. If she continued living in bitterness, she thought, the murderer would kill her spirit as surely as he had killed Kym's body.

Independent by nature, she faced the reality of her need for support from her community. Every hug, every word, every note, every flower, every dish--all expressions of love for Kym and grief at her death--became absolute necessities for her to move on with life.

What did she learn from this excruciating experience? What transformed her? She wrote it down for her own therapy and to help others in similar situations.

She learned to hug people who were hurting. Hugs mean more than words.

She learned that it is never too late to help someone in grief. Days, years, or months later, grieving people accept gratefully every remembrance of a loved one.

She learned that capital punishment would not bring closure. Causing another mother the grief of killing her son would not heal her and her family. To the contrary, it would only add to the grief of another family.

She learned that grief is a community affair. Everyone is affected when a family member dies, especially when the death is sudden and traumatic. Families and communities of care, she learned, must find ways to cope with the loss.

She lost illusions that the world is a safe place, that life will move along as expected, and that tomorrow will be much like today. She now lives in a more realistic world with a faith that can withstand the worst, because the worst has happened. History, she learned, is not an abstract discipline. History is something you endure and embrace.

Notes

(1) David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), xi-xvii.

(2) See Carolyn DeArmond Blevins, "Career Resumption," in Shurden, Nutt, Dinwiddie, and McEwen, eds., Women on Pilgrimage: Crisis /Choice/Change (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1982), 49-57.

(3) Ibid., 50.

(4) Email from Joe Bill Sloan to Kay Shurden, 13 October 2015.

(5) Email from Eileen Campbell-Reed to Kay Shurden, 15 October 2015.

(6) Carolyn D. Blevins, Women's Place in Baptist Life (Brentwood, TN: Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2003), 42.

(7) An extensive bibliography of Carolyn Blevins' writings can be found on pages 113-115.

(8) Pam Durso, "Thrive: Pay Attention to Forgiveness," nextsunday.com, 24 March 2014.

(9) Carolyn DeArmond Blevins, A Journey of Pain and Peace: Learning from Loss (Jefferson City, TN: Mossy Creek Press, 2012), 10.

Kay W. Shurden and Walter B. Shurden Sr.

Kay W. Shurden is retired as associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Mercer University School of Medicine.

Walter B. Shurden Sr. is minister-at-large for Mercer University.