Mike Wolanin | The Republic Reverend Jane Sims gives the keynote speech during the annual MLK Day Breakfast at The Commons in Columbus, Ind., Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022.
Forty-seven years later, Bishop Charles A. Sims still remembers the first message he preached in September 1975 at then-Calvary Pentecostal Church in downtown Columbus. He believes the sermon title continues to resonate with the same solid truth as it did that morning in 1975: “This Job is Too Big For Me, But Just Right for God.”
The 77-year-old clergyman, among the longest serving pastors ever locally with his wife and co-Pastor Jane Sims, has been a big voice for racial equality at seemingly just the right time — when more minorities were moving into the area to take jobs with worldwide firms.
And Jane Sims has been an equally large voice for women in leadership, especially in churches. She and her husband each were part of the fight in which their own denomination recently decided women could serve as bishops.
“We’ve made some strides in those areas,” Pastor Jane Sims said. “And I believe we have been able to have some impact, including upon the general (church) relationships between males and females.”
The Sims couple, retiring from full-time church leadership but not from Christian ministry such as writing books and some teaching, will be honored at a celebratory community banquet currently being rescheduled as the elder Sims recovers from COVID-19. The pair’s final worship service, originally meant to be this Sunday at now-Calvary Community Church at 11th and Chestnut streets, also is being delayed slightly because of the health situation, according to staff.
The bishop, known to sometimes be playful in the pulpit for comic relief, chuckled when asked if either the banquet or his final service would be emotional.
“I don’t have any idea,” he said.
“(Banquet) organizers are keeping a lot of things under their hat,” Jane Sims said with a laugh of her own.
Before Bishop Sims entered the ministry, he served with the Indiana State Police and the Indiana Civil Rights Commission as director of investigation in the Department of Housing, Employment and Education. Before that, he worked briefly with then-Cummins Engine Co. and also worked as a counselor with Atterbury Job Corps. To this day, interested job corps students are brought to Calvary’s Sunday services.
Before Pastor Jane Sims began preaching in the 1990s, she worked as a journalist at The Republic and also served as editor of the worldwide Christian Outlook Magazine. As they depart their posts, longtime Columbus resident the Rev. Frank Griffin, pastor of Thy Kingdom Come Ministries in Greenwood and director of corporate responsibility for Cummins Inc., will assume the Calvary pastorate. The 58-year-old minister was a member of Calvary for 13 years.
“I’m not overwhelmed, but that’s only because I know this ministry well, and have known some of its people for as long as 20 to 25 years,” Griffin said. “I feel very comfortable and honored.”
Griffin is among more than a dozen local residents that Bishop Sims has trained and mentored for the pastorate just since the 1990s.
“That’s probably one of bishop’s greatest strengths,” Griffin said, also passing credit to Jane Sims for her teaching.
He and his spouse have been lauded for their unflinching manner in speaking often against racism, including when their building was defaced with a racial slur in 2004. And Jane Sims publicly said in remarks before a speech in 2017 that she worried that racism then in America was worse than in the 1960s during the heat of the civil rights movement.
The bishop who presides over 60 churches in such far-reaching areas as Nigeria and Cameroon knows humility well. Before he ever began the children’s Sunday School that formed the foundation of Calvary, the local Unitarian Universalist Church members had to agree to allow him to use a room in their building — now his own Calvary church.
“But I had no money for renting (space),” Sims said.
So he became the Unitarians’ weekly Friday night janitor, even while he toiled by day as a college-degreed, white-collar professional for Cummins.
“That didn’t matter to me,” he said of the extra work that some might have viewed as beneath them. “I knew God had called me, and I knew where I was going.”
He always has said that he is going where the wind of the Holy Spirit leads him, a concept symbolized by a mix of full-sail, model ships, seemingly proudly prepared to go anywhere, awaiting the right wind to escort them from his office shelves into uncharted waters.
Just their stay in Columbus is proof.
“We originally were going to be here only a few years,” Jane Sims said, adding that they will remain in Columbus.
They both know they are going to write books in semi-retirement, for starters. They originally planned to retire two years ago, but the pandemic changed their timeline since they wanted to guide the church through that challenge. Bishop Sims will continue his bishop’s role in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, at least for a time.
“We have seen Columbus grow and evolve a lot through the years,” Pastor Jane Sims said. “I would hope that we can believe that we have had at least some influence on that.”
