Rev. Susan Lockwood will be our guest preacher on Sunday, April 12. Some of you may recognize her as the former Senior Adult Minister at Faith Baptist Church, who helped us organize our partner events with them!
Susan is an Appalachian Kentuckian – her ancestry rooted in early settlers to Boyd, Lawrence, Owen, and Carter counties. Her other ancestral links are to Georgetown, Lexington, and Frankfort. But her life experience has taken her beyond Kentucky.
She has been an ordained Baptist minister since August 23, 1983, and has served eight congregations as Senior Pastor or Interim Senior Pastor in Metro Chicago, Georgia, Ohio, Connecticut, and Kentucky. She has also served as Associate Pastor of FBC Morehead and as Minister to Single Adults at FBC Gainesville, FL, and Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville. Her most recent position was Interim Administrative Pastor and Minister to Senior Adults at Faith Baptist Church, Georgetown, KY, which she left in January of this year.
Susan was one of the first handful of women pastors in the SBC in 1983, and is featured in the recently released documentary, Midwives of a Movement. She faced opposition on many fronts within the SBC, and eventually moved her credentials over to American Baptist Churches, USA, in 1994. In addition to pastoring ABC churches, she moved to New York City following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center to serve as 9/11 Disaster Response Coordinator for the American Baptist Churches of Metro NY and then as Director of Disaster Planning & Training for New York Disaster Interfaith Services.
Her theology and praxis are deeply grounded in God’s radical and transforming love that she was taught in SBC Sunday School at an early age, and the vision of God’s kingdom as inviting and inclusive.
She and her older brother, Chip, are graduates of Georgetown College – and of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They grew up in a pastor’s and home missionary household. Chip went into campus ministry, her younger brother John into pharmaceutical quality assurance, and Susan into pastoral ministry, following in her father Quentin Lockwood’s footsteps.
She is married to Bruce Landis, a Library Technology Consultant, and they share three adult children, five grandkids, and currently an English Springer Spaniel rescue, Katee. They live in Jeffersonville, IN.