Understanding Discernment – Sep 26, 2025
A message from a Richmond Hill community member on how they see it from up on the hill as we seek God’s transformation of Metropolitan Richmond through prayer, hospitality, racial healing, and spiritual development.
I walked into my mother’s bedroom early on a Sunday morning in October 1973…
Invited by my middle and high school best friend, Kent Parks, I had become actively involved in the youth and music ministry of Richmond’s First Baptist Church. It was also the beginning of my contemplation (a new word for my teenage vocabulary) of a vocational path. Not only was I wrestling with vocation, but I was also discerning a weightier decision to become a permanent member of First Baptist.
How would this congregation, who four years earlier had rejected the membership request of four Nigerian students attending Virginia Union University because of their skin pigmentation, respond to the same request from a black sixteen-year-old from Richmond’s Northside? When I awoke on that sunny October morning, I was at peace with what I would later interpret as the movement of God’s Spirit; the first steps in a ministry sojourn that has now entered its forty-third year.
When I told Mom my decision, she looked at me… smiled… and hugged me.
I was sharing this conversation with friends and Richmond Hill colleagues a few weeks ago at Church Hill’s Riverbend Café – a popular Richmond Hill hangout. During the conversation, I reflected with them on the impact the decision had and continues to have on my life and the life of my family. Historically, to the best of my knowledge, I became the first black American to become a member of this congregation. A congregation that not only supported slavery but helped to form the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, a body of believers that did not confess their guilt and sin for the act of slavery until the mid-2000s.
Forty-one years later, continuing to live into my call of racial reconciliation that began, unknowingly, in the halls of First Baptist, I begin my second year of ministry at Richmond Hill. It is my prayer and desire that the passion and love for all of God’s people that embraced the sixteen-year-old teenager from Richmond’s Northside remains consistent and strong in the now sixty-eight-year-old father and grandfather. Many of the issues facing our society are still the same, yet the faces and actors have changed. We still ignore the lynching of young black folks while simultaneously honoring and defending the individuals whose speech and actions ignite the hate fueling these acts of violence.
Amidst all the turmoil and injustice, I find hope in the words of the late Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dreams shall never die.” May It Be So… Thanks Be to God.
– Tom Baynham, formally an interim co-pastoral director at Richmond Hill, now works as the Director of Outreach and Spiritual Formation and is currently in his second year of working and living as a resident at Richmond Hill.