As Jane Ferguson looks back on her life, she sees God’s hand at every turn, even if the turns were unexpected.
Ferguson, who recently retired from her role as minister of community ministries at First Baptist Church, Montgomery, spent more than 28 years serving the “poor and hurting” in the Montgomery area.
A native of Webster’s Chapel, she graduated from Alexandria High School and attended Jacksonville State College (now Jacksonville State University). She met and married her husband, Barney, in 1959 before completing her degree and the couple moved so he could serve as pastor of Sixth Street Baptist Church, Alexander City. With another move or two and serving other churches along the way, Jane Ferguson became a mom and a supportive wife to her pastor husband. More than a decade later while her husband was serving a church and attending seminary, Jane Ferguson felt called to help “solve problems” she and her husband saw at the inner-city church they served in Louisville, Kentucky. It was then that she went back to college to finish her undergraduate degree and continued on to earn a master’s degree in church social work from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
In 1988, Dale Huff, then pastor of First, Montgomery, invited Jane Ferguson to start up the church’s community ministries program, making her the first social worker to be hired on a local church staff in the state.
During her first six months in the role she observed the existing strategy to find out what various ministries were doing in the area already. She then worked to find ways to walk alongside them, “train the saints that would do the work of the ministry” and make an eternal difference.
Jane Ferguson became an expert not only in Montgomery but grew the church’s ministry to the tricounty area. She spoke at statewide and national conferences on how to start and maintain community ministries through the local church.
“My passion and strongest convictions come out of the knowledge that there are a lot of human beings that can only begin to comprehend God’s love when they see it and feel it and touch it,” she said.
Through First, Montgomery, Jane Ferguson was instrumental in starting multiple community ministry outlets including a conversational English school, the Caring Center, the Children’s Learning Center and the Nehemiah Project, all thriving programs that help church members look “outward” instead of “inward,” she said.
When her husband died six years after moving to Montgomery, Jane Ferguson said she knew “it was God’s plan to have me in Montgomery. … God took a little country girl from Alabama and used me in ways that I could not even fathom.”
‘National best practice’
Jay Wolf, pastor of First, Montgomery, said Jane Ferguson “has guided our community ministries to be a national best practice. … (She) has marshaled an army of volunteers to assist in the holy quest of ‘offering a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name.’”
And as for her plan in retirement? When The Alabama Baptist spoke with Jane Ferguson she was driving a church van to pick up internationals for a conversational English class and said she’s open to whatever God would have her do. (Neisha Roberts)
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