Friday, February 7, 2025

Longtime Ash Creek Baptist pastor to retire

Shotwell to conduct final service followed by reception at church Jan. 26

Posted

AZLE — Dr. Wesley Shotwell has been at Ash Creek Baptist Church long enough that he’s officiated weddings for people who he baptized as babies. For 27 years, he has led services at 300 South Stewart St., and at the end of this month he’s retiring.

Shotwell was born in Dallas but moved to Tennessee with his family in high school. Growing up, Shotwell said the faith of his family — his father was minister of education at numerous churches — was influential in guiding him to ministry and leadership. When he was just a teenager, he said he already felt God calling him to some sort of ministry.

“I wasn't sure exactly why, but when I was 17 years old is when I really kind of made a commitment that this is what I wanted to do for my career and for my life.”

He began to prepare and study for this future role, moving back to Texas to attend Baylor University and then Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. While going to school, he was a youth and music minister for about a year and was a college minister in Waco for several years. After finishing seminary, he returned to Tennessee in order to obtain his Doctor of Ministry and pastor at churches in Clarksville and Nashville. When recalling where he truly got his start, Shotwell goes back to the summers of his early college years when he went to work for the California Baptist Convention, doing youth evangelism.

“That's kind of when I think about my start, and I guess that's the first time I actually got paid for ministry,” Shotwell said. “That was 42 and a half years ago.” 

In the late 1990s, Ash Creek Baptist Church found itself without consistent leadership after Gerald Cornelius left to re-enter the mission field. After a year with no pastor, the church’s search committee ultimately found Shotwell. Feeling that Azle was a good fit, he returned to Texas to give his first sermon in Azle Jan. 4, 1998. In the 27 years since, has overseen at least three major building projects and has guided the church longer than any other pastor in its 153-year history. Shotwell was also one of three local pastors to help revive the Community Caring Center, ensuring its future at a new location on Commerce Street. He has also been a key figure in “Let’s Talk Azle,” the Azle Area Ministerial Alliance and other local efforts. Shotwell said he has enjoyed being there for thousands of moments and major events in his congregation’s lives, from births to deaths, and every sorrow and every joy in between.

“My favorite memories of being pastor here are the people that I've been able to be a part of their life,” Shotwell said. “I've been so fortunate to just know so many wonderful people who have become my friends. A lot of them are not here now. They've gone on before us and I've had the privilege to be with them at the end of their lives and to minister to their families, as I've done their funerals. So, I've known lots of people that aren't here anymore, and I miss them, but I've loved knowing people. I've loved being able to be in a relationship with these people for a long period of time, to I guess, grow old with them, to see babies be born, and then I helped raise those babies and baptized them, and then married them.”

Shotwell is excited for the church to unveil a new pipe organ in the next few months, which will be the largest in town. While he hopes it may be played on his last day as pastor, he suspects an official dedication ceremony may not be held for another few months. While Shotwell and the church have spent years planning the instrument’s construction, much of the major work coincided with a recent multimillion-dollar remodeling project. With just a few final touches now left and much of the remodeling paid off, Shotwell said he has done what he can in building a brighter future for Ash Creek Baptist Church.

Shotwell said that while Ash Creek Baptist has been a joy to pastor, decades of being in charge and caring for others has resulted in a lot of built-up stress. Retirement has been on the horizon for some time but recent health issues have confirmed for Shotwell that it is his time to slow down. Shotwell is glad to have left the church in good shape for a new generation of leaders and worshippers. Now 63 years old, Shotwell said it’s time to finish his work and allow someone else to take the reins.

“I'm not quitting ministry, but I have finished this role,” Shotwell said. “There’s other things to do. When you're finished, you ought to be done and move on to the next thing because otherwise you're just wasting your time and you're wasting the time of the people that you're serving. I'm tired, and I don't have the energy that I had 20 years ago and there's a lot of things that still need to happen here in our church. I have vision for what needs to happen here, but I don't have the energy to pull it off and it's not fair to the church for them to have a pastor that does not have the energy to do what needs to be done. So, we need somebody that has that kind of energy to do what needs to be done.”

Following his last service Sunday, Jan. 26 and the 3–5 p.m. reception, Shotwell hopes to take a few months off from the church in order to let his congregants and staff adapt to life without him. When he does return, he said it will likely be strange to sit in the pews and listen to someone else preach. Eventually, Shotwell hopes to be an interim pastor at local churches when needed, teach young pastors, go on mission trips and travel.

While it will be difficult, Shotwell said he is confident this transition will ultimately be best for the nearly 300 who regularly attend and others who may do so in the future. He has spent many of the best years of his life at Ash Creek Baptist Church, but when it’s all said and done, he describes himself as one fish in a long stream.

“If church becomes about the pastor, you're in big trouble,” Shotwell said. “Pastors are not going to be here forever; they're not really the one in charge. Pastors, anything can happen to them. They can get hit by a bus, they can have a heart attack, they can quit, they can retire. You know, bad things happen and they do bad things sometimes. If it is about the pastor, when the pastor goes down, or when the pastor retires, or when the pastor gets hit by a bus, then the church can't survive that. The local church can't survive that. So, it's not about the pastor, and it's not about me at all. Number one, it's about Jesus, but institutionally, it's about this body of people that exist throughout the years and the decades and the centuries, in this case, that provides a light of hope to a local community. We, who are here for a little while, get a chance to be part of that.”