Seaborn takes helm at Shades Crest Baptist Church

Shades Crest Baptist Church welcomes a new pastor to the pulpit on Aug. 1. 

Nic Seaborn, who has been the senior pastor at Raleigh Avenue Baptist Church in Homewood for 7½ years, is scheduled to preach his first sermon at Shades Crest Baptist that day.

Seaborn is filling the shoes of Brian Lee, who retired at the end of August 2020 and moved to Jackson, Tennessee, after 7½ years at Shades Crest.

The pastor search committee reviewed more than 200 resumes, and Seaborn’s name kept rising to the top as they went through the search process, said Cathy Bearden, a member of the committee.

With the Bluff Park community experiencing an influx of young families, church members in surveys and focus groups — from teenagers to senior adults — indicated they felt it was important to bring in a young pastor to help connect with those families and lead Shades Crest Baptist into a new chapter, Bearden said.

Seaborn is 32, and he and his wife, Rachel, have two children: a daughter Darcy (3) and son Elliot (1).

The committee was also looking for someone who adheres to the classic doctrines of the Baptist faith, will be involved in the community, is an expository teacher of the Word of God, committed to missions, energetic and extroverted, Bearden said.

Seaborn met all of those criteria, and the search committee also received several unsolicited recommendations from people who said Seaborn would be a good fit for Shades Crest Baptist, she said. “We are beyond excited.”

The church’s search committee was a diverse group of people who don’t necessarily agree on every single issue, but they all felt the Holy Spirit leading them toward Seaborn, Bearden said.

The excitement and energy in the sanctuary was clear on June 27 when Seaborn preached in the Sunday morning service and the church voted to call him as their pastor, Bearden said. “We all felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in that room.”

Seaborn is a native of Guin and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Christian studies from Union University in 2011, a master’s degree in divinity from Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in 2014 and currently is pursuing a doctorate from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He began serving at Raleigh Avenue Baptist Church, which has about 100 members, in 2012 and was named senior pastor there in February 2014. 

Shades Crest Baptist has about 670 members and had an average attendance of 440 people in two services prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and is growing back toward that number now, Bearden said.

Seaborn said what drew him to Shades Crest Baptist the most is the love the church has for Christ and the Bluff Park and Hoover community. “That’s evident from the get-go,” he said. “They radiated that.”

The church has a passion to see Christ’s love shared with anyone and everyone, and he and his wife share that same passion, he said.

Shades Crest’s heart for missions also played a part, he said. His wife grew up on the international mission field. Her parents were missionaries in Indonesia, and her family stayed in a missionary house next to Shades Crest Baptist when they were home on furlough in 1994 and 1998, he said. She was 4 and 8 during those times, he said.

Now, Seaborn and his family will live in that same house temporarily while they search for a home in the Bluff Park community, he said.

Shades Crest Baptist has shown great concern for his wife and children, and that meant a lot to him, he said.

“Our hearts are just overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement at what the Lord is doing in bringing us together,” he said. “We cannot wait to get started.”