June 27, 2024
COLUMBUS, Ga. – Tony Dickerson is known as a Baptist statesman, an anointed expository preacher, and a loving pastoral shepherd about to enter his 52nd year as senior pastor of Pinehurst Baptist Church in Columbus. He is also a proven leader and a genuine man of God.
Pastor Dickerson’s tenure is remarkable. His record of pastoral longevity exceeds great men like Charles Stanley (First Baptist Atlanta), W. A. Criswell and George W. Truett (First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas), Rastus Salter (Second Baptist Warner Robins, Ga.), and Bob Baxter (Mount Harmony Baptist Church, Mableton, Ga.). He has also served as president of the Georgia Baptist Convention.
Dickerson has been a pastor since he was 12 years old, serving churches in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Among those early years of pastoring, Dickerson recalled, a couple of stories stand out.
In a recent conversation with Dr. Dickerson, he mentioned that he was the pastor of one church for only one day. He had served Soutel Drive Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., as a teenager. The church had services on the second, fourth, and fifth Sundays. However, while at Soutel Drive he received a call to become the pastor of Southside Baptist Church in Blakely, Georgia. He moved to Blakely, placed his very few possessions in the church parsonage, and preached his first sermon on a Sunday morning in the South Georgia church.
That afternoon he received a call from one of the leaders in the church he had just left in Jacksonville and was informed that the church had taken a vote that very morning and the expressed desire of the church was for him to return as their pastor! They also voted to have worship services every Sunday, a welcomed decision that made their invitation to return to Jacksonville even more attractive. So, Pastor Dickerson preached at Southside in Blakely that same Sunday for the evening service and then resigned after having been pastor for one day.
One might ask, “Why would anyone accept a church’s call to be their pastor and just stay for one day?” The reality of his one-day stay in Blakely is not as noteworthy as the fact that Soutel Drive voted for him to come back to be their pastor on his first Sunday away. He surely must have impressed them with his devotion to Christ, and it takes no imagination to believe that the Jacksonville church was remarkably blessed and inspired by his preaching.
It is likely that Tony Dickerson holds the record for the shortest and the longest pastorates in Georgia.
Another interesting chapter from Pastor Dickerson’s life is that when he became the pastor of an Alabama church that had services on the first and third Sundays of each month, he was informed that his pay would be 70 percent of each Sunday’s offering. On his first Sunday at the church, the collection amounted to only five dollars which provided Dickerson with $3.50.
However, over the months the church began to grow. On a certain Sunday, the church was packed with worshippers, many of whom had come to see their family members and friends baptized in the river following the morning worship service. There were 64 new believers baptized that day, and the offering was more than $700. That offering, based on the original agreement with the pastor, would have provided more than $500 for that one Sunday.
That prompted the deacons to meet with Pastor Dickerson. They said, “We realize that we have not treated you fairly by failing to offer you a consistent salary. Therefore, we have decided that we want to provide for you a weekly salary of $35.00."
It was not long until another church expressed an interest in Dickerson becoming their pastor and offered him a weekly salary of $50. He accepted the call to serve their church, whereupon he told the lay leadership at the previous church that they needed to call a full-time pastor and pay him $50 a week and they did exactly as Pastor Dickerson had suggested.
Those events helped shape Dickerson into the pastor he has become and prepared him to serve at Pinehurst. He arrived as a 28-year-old with 16 years of experience, and despite his current health challenges he is still faithfully preaching and proclaiming the Word of God 52 years later.
