Brenda Sheets, member of St. Andrews Baptist Church, serves CMBA as the 2022 Treasurer. In this role she is also a member of the Visionary Leadership Community (VLC) which meets almost monthly to conduct CMBA business and share ministry updates from our Family of Church across the Midlands.
A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Brenda and her husband Tom have been married for 49 years, have two adult daughters and six grandchildren. She started her college education at the University of Tennessee then took a break to raise her young family before completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia College.
“I have always worked with numbers – first for a certified public accountant in the internal audit department at Seibels Bruce Company and then as a middle school math teacher,” Brenda says of the very ability that equips her in her current VLC role.
After leaving the public schools, Brenda was a volunteer director of St. Andrews Baptist’s Kids Café, an afterschool partnership ministry the church had with neighboring H.B. Rhame Elementary and Harvest Hope Food Bank. During the 40 years Brenda and Tom have been members at St. Andrews they have also been active in the church’s ministry presence in Honduras through medical missions trips.
“Tom and I love to travel. Long before it was a ‘thing to do,’ we ziplined in Costa Rica, took a helicopter tour of Kauai and spent a week rafting down the river in the Grand Canyon,” she says of their interests and hobbies. “I also enjoy spending time with family, sewing, embroidery, reading and spending time in the mountains.”
In terms of her service within CMBA, Brenda says she joined VLC about six years ago and served one year as its moderator. After taking the next term off, Brenda returned to serve as treasurer and is now in her second year of that role.
“I have learned that CMBA is a diverse collection of churches and ministries but that doesn’t create any issues because we really are one family. CMBA is not just a place for member churches to send their money to, it provides many services to the member churches,” she says of her experience on VLC.
“One way that I see God at work in CMBA right now is through the association’s work with churches like ours to discover God’s specific plan for their future. Another is through the racial reconciliation dialogues that CMBA is sponsoring. I firmly believe that God has great plans for the future of CMBA,” she says.