VIDEO: Buddy Gray: 30 years of leading, feeding Hunter Street Baptist Church

Buddy Gray started working at Hunter Street Baptist Church in 1978 as a part-time youth minister while he was a student at Samford University and the church was still in west Birmingham.

A year later, he was made associate pastor and held that job for a year until he went off to seminary in Texas.

He knew that someday he’d like to return to Hunter Street, but he never thought it would really happen, he said.

That chance came six years later. Gray was pastoring Bush Memorial Baptist Church in Troy in 1986 when he got the call from the Hunter Street search committee, asking him to become their pastor.

And this weekend, the congregation is honoring him for 30 years as senior pastor, having led them through a relocation to Hoover, decades of growth and transformation into a megachurch with 4,500 active members.

Thirty years is a long time for a pastor to stay at the same church. The average Protestant pastor remains at a church only three to four years, according to research from the Southern Baptist Convention.

So how did Gray wind up staying 30 years at Hunter Street?

“The grace and the goodness of God and the grace and the goodness of the people of Hunter Street,” Gray said.

Early days of ministry

To understand the connection between Gray and his congregation, it helps to go back to the early days of his ministry.

When Gray was called to Hunter Street, he was 29, but the average age of the members at Hunter Street was 70.

A once-thriving congregation that had more than 1,600 people attend the opening of a new sanctuary in 1958 had dwindled to about 300 people by 1986, according to a video on the church’s history.

Many people who were members of the church had moved out of western Birmingham into the suburbs, especially young families, so the congregation was aging and declining numerically.

They were looking for fresh leadership, and Gray seemed just the right fit, said Wayne Dunlap, one of five people on the search committee that unanimously recommended hiring Gray as senior pastor.

“His personality meshed with that of the congregation,” said Dunlap, who is now 81. “For his age, he was very mature. He was a fine example of a Christian young man.”

Gray had a strong work ethic and preached straight from the Bible, Dunlap said.

“He did not take away or add to the verses he was preaching from. He preached through a chapter in the Bible. He didn’t leave anything out,” Dunlap said.

Plus, Gray is honest and has the ability to interpret the Bible in a way that can be understood by everyone, from pre-teens and up, he said.

“His message was always clear and has been for 30 years,” he said. “As the years went by, he just endeared himself to the congregation more and more.”

Relocating to Hoover

Gray also realized something had to be done to stop the church’s numerical decline. Dunlap recalls a crucial sermon where Gray challenged the congregation, asking them whether they wanted to be caretakers and take care of what they have, undertakers and bury the church or risk takers and step out on faith and relocate.

There was some resistance, but after much prayer, when the day for a vote came, all but four people voted in favor of the move, Gray said.

Their last service in Birmingham was in September 1987, and the 220 or so active members made the move to Hoover. For 18 months, they met in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Lorna Road in Hoover while they built a new building on 11 acres off Alabama 150. Their first service was on Easter Sunday in 1989, with about 300 people attending the new worship center and educational space designed to accommodate 600 people, according to the church’s records.

Paul Huckeba, the current chairman of the deacons who has been a member of Hunter Street for most of his life, said it was a big step for a young pastor to convince a senior adult congregation to relocate. “I think the church embraced Buddy for having the courage to do that,” Huckeba said.

Gray said the move just made sense because so many Hunter Street members had already relocated their homes in the general direction of Hoover. Hunter Street was able to sell its building in Birmingham to another church — Sardis Baptist — that was growing and needed more room.

Gray said he asked that church’s pastor, the late Rev. Samuel Pettagrue, what his congregation thought about buying Hunter Street’s building and Pettagrue said they told him if they waited long enough, they might get it for free. Gray told him he might be right, but Pettagrue said God told him if he let Hunter Street die, then God would let Sardis Baptist die.

“He said, ‘Our job is to give y’all enough money to get started again, and y’all’s job is to get out of the way so we can use that tool the way God designed it,’” Gray said. “It was really a God thing for us to be able to start again.”

Explosive growth

The growth in Hoover was explosive. By 1994, Hunter Street was opening a new 1,800-seat worship center and since has added recreation space and new buildings for children and youth, as well as gone through several renovations.

Hunter Street now has an annual budget in excess of $9 million, about 18 people on its ministerial staff and about 100 full-time and part-time employees. The membership rolls swelled to about 7,500, but many of those were inactive, so church leaders last year had everyone rejoin and culled their rolls down to about 4,500 members, Gray said. Average attendance on Sunday mornings is about 3,000, he said.

Gray said he never imagined when he came to Hunter Street that the church would grow so large.

However, “our goal was never to be a big church, and our goal now is not to be a big church,” Gray said. “Our goal is to be a healthy church. We believe that healthy things grow, (but) not everything that is big is healthy. … We want to be a healthy church and then trust God to bring about the good kind of growth that we need to have.”

‘Loving God, loving people’

When asked about his fondest memories at Hunter Street, Gray said it’s hard to pick just a few. What has brought him the greatest satisfaction is the relationships he has been able to establish with the people of Hunter Street, he said.

“They’re the most wonderful group of people I can ever imagine being with,” he said.

He has enjoyed being with people in all phases of their lives, from births and baby dedications to baccalaureate services and weddings, he said. He was present at the birth of many of the recent graduates and did their parents’ weddings, and now he’s performing weddings for the second generation, he said. He also has officiated at 1,200 to 1,500 funerals, averaging about one a week, he said.

Huckeba said one probable reason that Gray has been at Hunter Street so long is that he’s a very transparent person with a gregarious personality.

“You’ve got to be a leader that embraces people and relationships with people,” Huckeba said. “He enjoys being with groups of people.”

Gray, who is 59, also transcends the age demographics of the church, Huckeba said.

“He will meet with young teenagers to do Bible studies, and he connects with young adults, young marrieds, median adults and senior adults,” Huckeba said. “When you’ve got a person that can communicate with all the levels at any given time, that makes a big difference.”

Plus, Gray is open to asking people what they think about things, Huckeba said. “He gains consensus very well with other leaders of the church. He’s not going to go off and do something just because he thinks that’s the way it ought to be done.”

Denise Dean, a member of Hunter Street for 24 years, said there are not enough adjectives to describe the wonderful man of God that Buddy Gray is. “His heart and passion to preach God’s Word and love people surpass anyone I’ve ever encountered,” she said.

Amy Knight, a member for 12 years, said she’s so grateful to have Gray as her pastor.

“He points us to Christ weekly. He points us to the gospel,” Knight said. “He challenges us. What he tells us isn’t always what we want to hear, but it’s what we need to hear, and we just know that he is always going to be preaching from the Word.”

Dunlap said everyone knew 30 years ago that Gray was the right man for the job, “and after 30 years I’m still confident that is was the right choice that God had for us.”

How long will he stay?

Dunlap said Gray probably will remain Hunter Street’s pastor until he’s ready to retire, “and he will be pastor emeritus and stay on until they carry him to Elmwood, I guess.” Dunlap said he’s only one person, but as far as he is concerned, “the pulpit is his as long as he wants it.”

When asked whether he would be willing to give up his job at Hunter Street if God called him somewhere else, Gray said absolutely.

“This is His church, not mine,” Gray said. “This is not Buddy Gray’s church. You would not want to go to a Buddy Gray church. That would be terrible … I’d like to stay another five or six years if they’d let me and if God will let me, but if that’s not what they want or God wants, I’m OK with that.”

Gray said there are a lot of people that can be a better pastor of Hunter Street than him, and “if He has another place for me or somebody else to be the senior pastor here, I’m happy with that.”

He takes the job week by week, he said.

“I always tell the Lord that if this is the last Sunday that I get to do this, I want it to be the very best Sunday that we’ve ever had,” he said. “This has been by far and away the most joyful experience I’ve ever had.”

He wants to be a good steward with the resources God has provided and, under God’s guidance, leave the Hunter Street congregation as healthy as he can for whoever takes his place, he said.

“Whoever is next is going to be able to do things that I never thought possible,” Gray said.

Gray said every person who works is hired to do two things, and they have to figure out what those two things are. They should spend 80 percent of their time doing those two things and 20 percent of their time making sure the rest gets done by others.

Hunter Street has great people on the ministerial staff and a lot of great lay leaders that fulfill important roles in the church, he said.

“For a pastor, my main job is to lead and to feed,” he said. “I love people. I’m their shepherd. I’m not the CEO. I’m just a pastor, and love these people, and I want to be with them and know them.”

When he preaches, he cries a lot, he said. That’s because he knows what the people in his congregation are going through, whether it be good times or hard times, he said. He doesn’t want to be known as a preacher, he said.

“I want to be a pastor, and loving people is what a pastor does.”