CBS has a new shepherd

Kimm Carr to lead Community Bible Study

The following is a story that I wrote for the Oconee Enterprise about Kimm Carr becoming the new director of CBS. 

Before David was anointed the king of Israel, he was a shepherd boy, far from the palace.

Before Kimm Carr was named the next executive director of Community Bible Study, she was a wife, a mother and a shepherd to a local Bible study.

Carr, a member of Faith Presbyterian Church in Watkinsville, was recently announced as the new executive director of CBS, an international Christian ministry based in Colorado Springs, Colo. In the spring she will succeed Camilla Seabolt, a native Athenian.

Community Bible Study suportsnearly 700 classes across the nation and more in 70 countries around the world. Carr will be only the third executive director in the 38-year history of CBS.

For the last six years she has been the teaching director of a study that has met on Thursday mornings at Athens First United Methodist Church for 13 years. There are 275 adults participating, some in directing the children’s Bible studies that run concurrent. A separate evening class meets Monday evenings at Milledge Avenue Baptist Church in Athens. [I am the teaching director for this study.]

Rather than employ a head hunter, CBS looked internally, asking its regional and area directors to suggest candidates. Carr knew through newsletters and the like only what other teaching directors and volunteers knew about the search for Seabolt’s successor. Not until October did she learn that her name had been submitted for consideration.

Seabolt was not involved in the process of finding her successor, but she knew Carr well.

“We have been good friends for a long time,” Seabolt said. “When Mother died, Kimm was over at the house that day, so we had a good relationship. I have known in my heart that some day she would be in this role, but I actually thought there might be someone else in the middle.”

Carr said that CBS “saved my life.”

She explained, “As a Christian, I was drafting off my pastor or off my girlfriend, what she had learned. My association with God and the Bible was second hand. That can be easily shaken.

“After investing time in reading God’s word myself, what I learned about Jesus and the heart of God, Who He is, that is what saved my life,” Carr said. “Being a wife, a mother, a daughter and a friend, I had a support system that enabled me to see how Jesus would process different situations. I stumble all the time, but I have a plumb line as opposed to a second-hand faith.”

Carr was trained as an audiologist and meant to start a private practice after her son entered school. But her commitment to CBS kept delaying the start to her career.

When her husband Steve was transferred a year ago to the marketing division of Georgia Power in Atlanta, the Carrs looked for a home in between so she could commute to Athens to teach. Their purchase of a home in Covington was canceled at the last minute, which seems providential now.

“We have been living in a 700-square-foot garage apartment in Good Hope,” Kimm Carr laughed.

Her husband’s willingness to give up his executive position with Georgia Power is testament to the fact that they consider the position a call on both of them.

“God has been so clear in this calling,” she said. “Steve is an engineer, and he looks at things black and white. But he puts that underneath what God is telling him. He is walking away from a company that he loves. Steve knows this is a calling on the family.”

The Carrs will be introduced to the ministry during an annual teaching director’s conference in Colorado Springs at the end of the month.

Carr said the vision of CBS is clearly stated in its mission statement: “To make disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ in our communities through caring, in-depth Bible study, available to all.”

“I am one of those whose life has been transformed,” said Carr, “because a group of women in Athens followed that mission statement.