Leading 101-year-old St. Luke Baptist Church in Baton Rouge for more than 29 years has allowed the Rev. Gus Washington to fulfill a dream — his grandfather's dream.
"He founded it. He built it but did not have the opportunity to pastor it very long," Washington said of his maternal grandfather and the church at 240 Van Buren St. "He was an elderly man and just after he built the church, he became very ill."
In an effort to regain his health, Washington's grandfather went to live with relatives near Hammond, where he soon died.
"He never came back to that church, so it was given for me to fulfill his dream and go into ministry and to be pastor of the church," said Washington, 78.
It took a while for Washington — who holds degrees from Grambling State University (law and political science), Southern University (master's in political science), and LSU (associate in management supervision) — to even go into ministry. Though he said preaching was always in his "genetics" with ministers on both sides of his family, Washington spent 37 years as a plant safety coordinator.
He served several years as a Sunday school teacher and superintendent before finally answering his calling to preach.
"One Sunday, I just felt deep in my heart the Spirit had a calling on my life to be a minister and to preach the word of God," he recalled. "When I told my pastor, he just smiled and said, 'I knew it.'"
Washington was ordained, attended New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and served as an itinerant preacher.
"I met a lot of great men of God who have gone on to be with the Lord, and they really helped me and gave me encouragement," said Washington, who lost his father at an early age.
When his pastor died a few years later, St. Luke chose Washington as the fifth pastor in the church's history.
"God placed me here, and I'm here to do the work of God," Washington said. "The church belongs to God. The ministry belongs to God. The message belongs to God. And all those pastors before me stand there in a statement of faith."
His passion for bringing hope through preaching continues to burn.
"If there are three people in the congregation, I have to preach just as hard as if the church was because that's what God sent me there to do," he said. "They're perplexed. They want to hear what God has to say. You stand before a complacent group and prayerfully and hopefully, God will give you something to give those people a ray of hope, to let them know their hope is in Christ."
It's heartwarming for Washington to hear stories about how a message has positively impacted someone, especially young people.
"One of the greatest blessings in ministry is for a child to come up and say, 'Thank you, I enjoyed that. It really helped me.' That's priceless," he said.