The Reverend Doctor James Green Somerville, Pastor

Jim Somerville has been the pastor of First Baptist Church since July 2000. He holds a Master of Divinity in preaching and teaching and a PhD in New Testament studies from Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from Georgetown College, Kentucky, with a degree in Fine Art and from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Before coming to First Baptist, he was pastor of Wingate Baptist Church, in Wingate, North Carolina, for nine years.

Dr. Somerville regularly informs visitors that “At First Baptist Church we are trying to do the most important thing in the world: love God and love others.”  It is a cross-shaped mission, he says, with love for God forming the vertical axis and love for others forming the horizontal axis.  Every aspect of the church’s ministry flows along those lines, from contemplative prayer to serving at the soup kitchen.  Dr. Somerville also believes that the church’s mission begins where it is geographically, and moves outward to the world.

To that end, he makes regular forays into the Dupont Circle neighborhood—to have coffee at the Java House, to chat with people on the street, to pray silently for passersby, or simply offer his time and friendship as occasion arises. His biggest challenge: To live out an engaging, contemporary vision of the New Testament and “to do what Jesus would do as the pastor of a church in the center of the city that is at the center of the world.” If he had to choose a favorite Bible verse, it would be Luke 6.36.

Originally from West Virginia, then Kentucky, then North Carolina, Jim enjoys backpacking and likes to take at least one weeklong trip a year. When he is not lost in the outback, counseling with church members, answering e-mail messages, visiting the sick and the homebound, returning phone calls, or working on next Sunday’s sermon, he likes to spend time exploring the city with his family, rejuvenating his right brain through movies, or discovering new restaurants in the Dupont Circle area. His favorite new eatery to date is Vivo at 17^th and P (“That wood-fired oven is all warmth and comfort on a cold, wet night, and the pizza is sensational”).

Dr. Somerville is married to Christy Treadwell Somerville, who works as a Teacher at Murch Elementary School. Together with their two children Ellie, and Catherine, Christy is fully involved in the day-to-day life of the church and shares Jim’s passion to see First Baptist become “a healthy, thriving, bursting-at-the-seams community of Christ in the nation’s capital.”

Jim has been particularly influenced by the writings of Walter Brueggemann, Frederick Buechner, C. S. Lewis, Anne Lamott, Kathleen Norris, Eugene Peterson, Fred Craddock, Barbara Brown Taylor and William Willimon, but also enjoys a good Garrison Keillor narrative. A born storyteller, Jim likes to hold occasional fireside chats in the church fellowship hall during which he regales a charmed congregation with tales stranger than fiction. He also shares with presidential candidate Al Gore the peculiar talent and disconcerting skill of hypnotizing chickens. (He denies the truth of this.)

click here to contact Dr. Somerville