Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 26, 1995 TAG: 9503100004
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Pastor of Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church on Lafayette Boulevard Northwest since 1993, she also is part of a clerical couple, the mother of a 3-year-old son and a student of black American religion and culture. She also is a focal point for her own family, which hails from Cincinnati, Ohio.
On Christmas Eve, Cornett-Scott lost an important part of that family when her father, James Cornett, died in Roanoke where he had come for his last weeks of life.
It was her parents, the pastor recalls, who taught her as a child to care for people and encouraged her aspirations to become an ordained minister. As early as age 7, Cornett-Scott dreamed of preaching and helping through the church. She learned of female leaders such as the Rev. Jarena Lee in the historic black denomination.
Today, Cornett-Scott passes on a heritage of black pride though a new library, a revitalized youth group and plans for an Ebenezer unit of Rights of Passage, a national A.M.E. program in which children are paired with older mentors.
Cornett-Scott says she also has made some changes in the staid liturgy the black Methodists picked up in the days when racial integration meant copying what white churches did. African worship is naturally a blend of pulpit and pew, she says, and more spontaneity in worship is not inappropriate.
As the wife of a pastor, Cornett-Scott must adjust to her own busy schedule as well as to that of a husband who says "I-81 is my life."
Her husband, the Rev. Dr. Edward Scott, teaches at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton and Virginia Tech and serves a small parish in Blacksburg.
They manage well in the care of young Edward Kennedy Ellington Scott with a lot of help from their congregations, she says. During her father's final illness and at other stressful times, people like Barbara Easley, an Ebenezer steward, have made themselves available for the child's care on a 24-hour basis, she says.
In contrast to his wife's upbringing in an active A.M.E. home, with ancestors going back several generations in that church, Edward Scott grew up in a rough housing project in Pittsburgh. His mother, wanting a good education for her two sons, sent them to a Roman Catholic school. In time, the family started practicing that faith.
By the time he was a teen-ager, Scott had grown sick of the church and enrolled in philosophy at Slippery Rock State University. He pursued his academic interests, married too young, he says now, and soon had two children, Naima and Jacob, over whom he fought two custody battles. Eventually, after completing studies for a doctorate from Duquesne University, he grew into a relationship with the A.M.E. Church.
This was helped along, he says, by his mother becoming an A.M.E. pastor. He found a "happy balance" of Baptist ancestors and Catholic upbringing in the denomination.
He spent two years in Nigeria teaching philosophy at the University of Calabar. Returning to the United States, he won the right to rear his children who were then 7 and 10. He became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
One day, Scott's wife recalls with a smile, she met his two children. They lived in the same apartment house she did when she was a student at Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce. She asked who they were. When their father appeared, she jokingly told a mutual friend, "He's the man I'll marry."
Three years and many family encounters later, Edward Scott and Andrea Cornett were married and began the adventure of a ready-made household. Cornett-Scott says the bonding was strong from the beginning. Naima Scott, now a student at James Madison University, is especially close to her father's wife.
Little Ellington goes to Northwest Development Center, but his mother says he has so many friends in both his father's Blacksburg church and his mother's Roanoke church that "he's everybody's lap baby."
After their marriage in Ohio, the couple moved to Monmouth, Ill., where Edward taught at a college. Andrea, who had been ordained an A.M.E. elder following graduation from the Wilberforce seminary, worked as black student coordinator while seeking a pastorate.
It was anything but easy, she recalls, despite long official approval of women clergy in the A.M.E. denomination and an assignment system that should have quickly won her a place in a pulpit.
"The old-boy system definitely prevailed in Illinois. I was harassed and humiliated," she says. This was especially true after she asked at an a annual conference why no women were part of the assignment process. She perceived that she was branded as a troublemaker, and the couple sought to relocate.
The story is vastly different among Virginia A.M.E. leadership, both say. Though Cornett-Scott was first assigned to the smallest A.M.E. congregation in the state - Bethel in Harrisonburg, where fewer than a dozen people worship - the church grew in two years to a vital place for students.
Meanwhile, Scott took the Mary Baldwin job and remains there, commuting more than 150 miles three times a week. The other two days he drives an 80-mile round trip to Blacksburg for his church duties and teaching at Virginia Tech.
Because Cornett-Scott did so well at tiny Bethel, she was assigned to the considerably larger Ebenezer parish in Roanoke, where she serves about 150 members with 75 attending on an average Sunday. The membership is growing, she says.
Although vowing never to combine teaching and preaching after his stint in Illinois, Scott became interim pastor at St. Paul in Blacksburg. In May he was asked to remain for a permanent appointment. Now, he says, despite his far-flung travels, he loves the academic community, adding, "the beauty of [Interstate] 81 makes it worthwhile."
He has started a choir at St. Paul to fulfill his love of music and interest in students.
Cornett-Scott, who also has taught a black history class at Virginia Tech, says she has a feeling that "God has brought us to the right place."
by CNB