During Sunday's installation of Dennis Foust as senior pastor of St. John's Baptist Church, the chairman of the deacons compared the new union to an arranged marriage.

But it looks like love at first sight.

St. John's, a moderate Baptist congregation with a reinvigorated vision of itself and its future, went looking for a leader who could help it turn new dreams into broader action.

Baptist Women in Ministry invites all Baptist churches to make plans now to have a woman preach on any Sunday in February 2012. Visit their website for more information.

MOUNT AIRY, N.C. -- Two churches in Mount Airy, N.C., have withdrawn from the local Surry Baptist Association in response to its dismissal last July of an affiliated church which called a woman as pastor.

Piney Grove Baptist Church voted unanimously Nov. 30 to leave the 66-church association, centered on Surry County northwest of Winston-Salem, N.C. Four days later, on Dec. 4, First Baptist Church also voted, 145-34, to end its ties.

Both churches cited the association’s July 26 action to dismiss Flat Rock Baptist Church in Mount Airy two weeks after its new female pastor, Bailey Edwards Nelson, began her ministry there. But they added Surry’s move was only the latest indication of growing disagreement with the association’s direction.

Fred Craddock was a young preacher trying to find his voice when he received a call from his mother one day.

"You need to go see your father," she said. "He may not live longer."

Craddock found his father in a VA hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Fred Craddock Sr. had whittled down to 73 pounds. Radiation treatments had burned him to pieces. He couldn't eat or speak.

When he saw his son, he picked up a Kleenex box and scribbled on it a line from Shakespeare's "Hamlet": "In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story."

"What is your story, Daddy?"

His father's eyes welled with tears. He wrote: "I was wrong."