Photo by Neal Embry.
Jim Auchmuty, pastor emeritus of Shades Crest Baptist Church, holds his latest book, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Funeral.” Auchmuty has served as pastor of First Baptist Church of Roebuck Plaza since 2001, after leaving Shades Crest in 1999.
Jim Auchmuty was at a store in Pelham when he received a call that a pastor had failed to show up for a funeral, and the church needed to know if the longtime Shades Crest Baptist pastor could come.
Auchmuty, miles away from home and from the church, said he could, but it’d be a little while.
“We’ll sing until you get there,” Auchmuty recalled the staff member saying.
By the time he got to the church, the one surviving relative of the deceased had been courted by the flower truck driver and the two had set up a date, said Auchmuty, now pastor emeritus of Shades Crest Baptist in Bluff Park.
That’s just one of the stories detailed in his new book, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Funeral,” released late last year.
“People encouraged me,” Auchmuty said.
Auchmuty has previously written two other books and a pamphlet. His latest work details stories — some of them funny, some of them heartbreaking — about his time leading funeral services, which he’s done both through his pastoral ministry and through his organization, Funeral Partners Ministry.
Auchmuty said he was called to ministry 69 years ago at the age of 15. He attended Howard College and then went to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina. Since then, he’s served four churches as pastor, including 27 years at Shades Crest. Auchmuty has served as pastor of First Baptist Church of Roebuck Plaza since 2001, after leaving Shades Crest in 1999.
“I’m kind of a weekend warrior like I was in college,” Auchmuty said of his work with the church in Roebuck.
When Huey Hudson retired from serving as the on-call pastor at Elmwood Cemetery, Auchmuty took over.
“It started out as a trickle,” Auchmuty said.
Now, he’s spent the last 25 years preaching more than 100 funerals annually, and last year was his busiest yet. As of March, Auchmuty had preached at eight funerals in nine days.
Auchmuty doesn’t know the majority of the people whose funerals he’s preaching, he said. Most of the time, it’s an older person who hasn’t been able to go to church in the years leading up to their death, so they don’t know any current pastor. Many others are non-religious, he said.
Because of that, Auchmuty has tried to come up with a “one-size-fits-all” model of funeral sermons, revolving around three focal points: remembering the deceased, taking an inventory of our own lives and connecting with the good resources of God.
Auchmuty said he was proud to have a lot of second-generation families who, although they didn’t know him before he preached at a relative’s service, asked him to come back and preach at another family member’s funeral.
His book is partly instructional, partly challenging and, he said, partly a lesson of what not to do at funerals, such as stories of pallbearers tripping over bushes or families fighting during the service.
During his first year at Shades Crest in 1972, Auchmuty said tragedy struck the church. First, four young church members were killed in a train wreck, followed by a 3-year-old and her grandmother dying the same way. Within the next two weeks, another high-school student and a middle-school student were killed in a car wreck, followed by the sudden death of another woman due to a heart attack.
It was a life-altering experience for him.
“I was a preacher before then,” Auchmuty said. “I was a pastor after [that].”
Auchmuty said preachers who speak at funerals should, on the first anniversary of the person’s death, send a note to the family reminding them of his love for them and that he is thinking about them.
“A lot of people say [the pastor] is the only person that remembered,” Auchmuty said.
Auchmuty’s book, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Funeral,” can be purchased online at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
