LYNCHBURG, Va. — Author's note: The video above is on file from a separate story that aired on March 10, 2022.
For the first time in its 112-year-history, Quaker Memorial Presbyterian Church has a female pastor.
Anghaarad Teague Dees took over the helm last fall and was officially installed as pastor in a service late last month. She said there needs to be a place for people to be themselves and hopes the church at 5810 Fort Avenue will be that for Lynchburg.
“Anghaarad” — pronounced An-hare-ad — is Welsh, meaning “the voice of angels.” Dees knows the name comes with some funny looks and exaggerated attempts at pronunciation.
Dees, 48, and her husband, Zane, have been married for 13 years and they have two dogs and two cats. She said she occasionally does karaoke, enjoys getting outside, parades, antiquing, festivals, history, reading and movies.
Dees attended Mississippi University for Women and majored in vocal performance.
“I was a voice major on my way to doing opera and being a professional singer, but I don’t really have the ego for that work,” she said.
So, she went on to seminary at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Texas.
“And when I got there, it was like I had come home,” she said. “I loved my time in seminary, I loved the reading, I loved the work that I did when I was there. It was a great time.”
Growing up in First Presbyterian Church in Tupelo, Mississippi, there was a female pastor in the church from the time Dees was in elementary school.
“I never knew that women couldn’t be ministers,” she said. “I had seen a woman in the pulpit. I had seen a woman doing the work of ministry and I came from a family of really strong women.”
Dees’ father died when she was young. She described her mother as a phenomenal force who helped to raise her with the help of five great aunts who never married.
“It was like a movie of all these strong women raising more strong women,” she said. “So I just had this amazing experience and childhood of being surrounded by strong faithful women.”
She believes it’s OK for people to wrestle with their faith and have questions for God because He can handle all of it.
“I was raised that Scripture is this beautiful, authoritative witness of who God is and God’s story with God’s people and that there’s room for all of us,” she said. “And so when I would butt up against fundamental attitudes, I’d be like, ‘No, God is great and good and loving and all are welcome.’”
Her class in seminary was the first that had more women than men, and it felt like she was a part of a turning point.
“I love the voice of women and whenever people have pushed against me, I said, ‘You know what, the first apostles were the women,’” she said. “The first to tell the news that Jesus was risen from the dead were the women. I mean, if you’re not going to listen to the women at the grave, then you’re missing out on opportunity.”
Dees said women bring a voice for the underdog to the ministry.
“They bring a different voice to the table and they bring a different voice to the Scripture,” she said.
Dees has served congregations in Mississippi, Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and most recently in Valdosta, Georgia for seven years before accepting the position at Quaker.
During the pandemic, she was approached about applying for a new position elsewhere.
“COVID has been a really hard time for pastors, and I know that every profession out there can say that it has been hard on them and made their lives difficult, but everything that pastors do was completely cut off by COVID,” she said. “We couldn’t go see our people. We couldn’t worship with our people. We couldn’t feed our people. We couldn’t go and take our people into the community to do the work of Christ.”
Pastors became the place where everyone took their frustrations and anger, she said, and though she wasn’t unhappy in Georgia, she said she was simply exhausted.
“Everyday you’re getting a hard phone call or nasty email,” she said.
When she was asked to consider a different position, her file was placed on an online Presbyterian hub, where churches around the country saw her application and began reaching out.
“I got bombarded. I had never received so many requests for interviews,” she said. “And I just remember calling my husband and saying, I think there’s something to this. I think we need to listen and I think we need to maybe do some of these interviews.”
Dees loved the committee from the Quaker Memorial congregation and said they were excited and ready for a pastor with energy who offers something different.
“This church reminds me of the church I grew up in, and not only are the personalities of the people very similar, Lynchburg is very much like my hometown in Mississippi,” she said.
Susie Hubbard was one of the committee members who hired Dees last year. She said Dees was positive and showed tremendous energy.
“She was looking for a place where the smallest of the babies and the oldest of the church would all interact together, which was something our church was looking for as well,” she said. “She definitely thought outside of the box when it comes to traditional church.”
Bringing in the first female pastor into the church’s 112-year history at first carried some skepticism among members, Hubbard said.
“But that first sermon she did, she walked in and it was just, ‘Wow,’” Hubbard said. “I knew the church would embrace her, but you can’t keep everybody happy and we were a little concerned there would be people who would voice that but we didn’t get any of that. When she finished and it was over, you could just see the people in the pews going, ‘Wow, This is gonna be a good thing.’ I think that our congregation is very excited about what the future is going to bring for us.”
Prior to Dees joining Quaker in October last year, the church had an interim pastor for three years and had been searching for a new leader.
The church completed a capital campaign in the middle of COVID, exceeded its goal and renovated the entire downstairs of the building.
“So this is what I love about so far at my time at Quaker and what I experienced as a child growing up: They love their pastor, they need a pastor, but they don’t have to have a pastor to tell them how to be the church,” Dees said. “They need me and they want me, but they don’t need me to tell them how to be the servants of Christ.”