Nate Adams
I’ve now written a column in The Illinois Baptist for 19 years. But my father Tom Adams wrote a continuous column in this same paper for the previous 34. Dad went to be with the Lord one month after I started my service with IBSA. But I have always felt that I stand on the shoulders of his reputation with Illinois Baptists.
Today, though, I’d like to offer a brief tribute to my mom, Romelia Ann Hooks Adams, who joined my dad with the Lord just four days before Christmas. A summary of her life and ministry was published in the February issue, and of course her obituary can be found online, so I won’t repeat those details. But this does seem an appropriate place to celebrate how deeply intertwined her ministry life was with Southern Baptists and Illinois Baptists.
My dad’s typing skills were hunt-and-peck at best. One of my parents’ regular and shared ministries for decades was for my dad to write, cross out, and rewrite his columns on a yellow legal pad. Many of those “original manuscripts,” and then Mom’s neatly typed versions, are now treasured remembrances of their faithful partnership.
The format of Dad’s columns over the years were mostly question-and-answer (Ask Tom Adams) or opinion (Speaking Out). So, he and Mom also answered a lot of letters. As you might imagine, Mom was his sounding board, his research assistant, his editor, and sometimes his balance in the biblical wisdom he sought to share.
In going through the house that Mom and Dad lived in since 1978, my siblings and I are seeing countless other ways that Baptist church life shaped, and also benefitted from, their ministries. Dad’s connections to Baptist life were more public. But Mom would want you to know that since she surrendered her life to Jesus as a 9-year-old girl that faithful women, especially through the Woman’s Missionary Union and beginning with the GA and Acteens organizations, shaped and blessed and equipped her life richly.
Along with her Baptist Student Union at Murray State University (where she met my dad, and was also college yearbook editor), these biblically faithful, Great Commission motivated organizations planted within her lifelong commitments to missions, and to church service. Then for many years, Mom reinvested those passions in girls and young women.
In Mom’s house I found many letters from those she had discipled and encouraged in missions over the years, and from many of the missionaries she had known and prayed for faithfully. I continue to meet those women, some of whom are now leading ladies in our Illinois churches. Still, Mom sometimes worried aloud to me that the influences and opportunities she enjoyed aren’t as prominent today.
The Lord granted my mom more than 94 years, and in the second half of her life she invested missionally in the public schools she served, and in an extraordinary amount of correspondence, both handwritten and electronic. Going through her house now, it’s newly amazing to me all the Baptist “inputs” that we’re finding, from Lifeway published Bibles, studies, and books, to missions periodicals from WMU and our mission boards, to her church newsletters and marked-up directories, to practically every issue of The Illinois Baptist since the 1960’s.
I also see her “outputs”—her prayer lists, her giving statements, her boxes of past and current correspondence, her to-do lists. I see a faithful woman’s substantial and lifelong ministry, both alongside and independent from my dad. I see it in her family, her church, her workplace, her neighborhood, and her mission fields. Well done, good and faithful Mom.
Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association. Respond at IllinoisBaptist@IBSA.org.