It wasn’t always a given that Rev. Jennifer Deaton would end up in ministry.
There was a good chance the South Carolina native would end up in the pulpit one day, given her family’s history with the Episcopal Church.
Her father and stepmom are both ordained ministers in the church, as are her stepbrother and his wife, and her uncle and his wife.
When she was young, she lived in Sewanee, Tennessee, the home of the University of the South, where her parents attended seminary.
Now the rector at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Indianola and vicar at St. John’s in Leland, Deaton actually majored in anthropology when she enrolled in classes at Emory University.
But of course, she also took religion classes there, and that would eventually become her major.
Even before college, Deaton couldn’t help but feel called to the ministry.
When she was in high school, she attended a summer program, and while getting to know some of her peers, she started talking about her involvement with the church and how much she enjoyed it.
“One of the people in that group I was getting to know said, ‘Oh, so you’re going to be a priest one day,’” Deaton said.
And she immediately thought to herself, “Well, of course I am.”
She didn’t become a priest right away, but she did become a youth minister at a church in Florida.
That’s where she met her husband, the now Rev. Charlie Deaton Jr., who had a deep connection to the Delta. He grew up in Greenwood, where his mother still lives today.
Charlie is now the full-time rector at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Clarksdale.
The two dated for a year in a long-distance relationship, while Charlie attended seminary.
Then they were engaged for a year before getting married.
“We got married right before his last year of seminary in Sewanee,” Deaton said.
Shortly after he finished seminary, Charlie was placed in Oxford, Mississippi.
“That was my first introduction to living in Mississippi,” Deaton said.
Charlie served at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford and was also assistant chaplain at Ole Miss for four years.
Deaton worked on a counseling degree at the University, and the couple would give birth to a son, Charlie Deaton III.
It was also in Oxford where Deaton began to feel a stronger pull toward the ministry.
“While we were there, I formally began the discernment process to go to seminary,” she said. “It’s a beautiful, intentional process of prayer and reflection and conversation with a small group in your church and with your priest and with your bishop.”
With a strong family support system, she began to narrow her seminary options.
There was Sewanee of course, the place she had lived for a time as a child and where so many in her family were educated on the Gospel.
But it was New York’s General Theological Seminary, located on about a city block in New York City’s Chelsea district that Deaton finally settled on.
“It have a strong academic reputation and strong liturgical life I was drawn to,” she said. “There were also people I could meet in New York that I would never have met anywhere else.”
Her first day in class just happened to be September 11, 2001.
“That shaped everything, theologically, liturgically and in terms of our community life and how we were pulled together as a community,” Deaton said.
Deaton and her husband were no strangers to the ministry, and very quickly, she went from being a seminary student to also helping the people of New York City during a time of collective grief.
“A couple of days after 9/11, we ended up being involved in different ways, in volunteer efforts,” she said.
She was among several volunteers who visited St. Paul’s Chapel, an Episcopal church had been converted into a care center for recovery workers.
Deaton would eventually finish at General and return to Mississippi.
She was placed at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Meridian, which was within walking distance of the local hospital. She was the assistant rector at the church.
“I absolutely fell in love with doing pastoral care,” she said. “I loved visiting hospitals. I loved visiting parishioners at their homes. I was given a lot of opportunities to do that.”
After two years, Charlie was called to be the rector at St. Peter’s By The Lake Episcopal Church in Brandon.
The family moved to Jackson and stayed for over a decade.
During that time, Deaton became the chaplain at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, where she served in that role for nearly three years.
After that, she remained at the school in a new role as canon for pastoral care for 11 years.
While she was in Jackson, Deaton would often supply preach in churches all over the state.
One was the Church of the Advent in Sumner.
“I’ve spent a lot of time visiting the Delta and getting to know it,” she said.
When Charlie was called to become rector at St. George’s in Clarksdale in December of last year, the couple thought they would continue to serve in Jackson and the Delta.
Charlie had actually served at St. Stephen’s in Indianola on an interim basis, and when that church and St. John’s in Leland began their search for a new priest and vicar, respectively, Deaton was called to the Delta permanently.
Serving in two small towns is definitely a change from the large school and congregations she had become accustomed to in Jackson, but she said the transition has gone smoothly because so many of the churches’ members have been supportive and serve their churches so well.
“It’s different,” she said. “Everybody is on staff. Everybody is engaged. Everybody is part of the life of this place.”
Deaton said the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted some of the churches’ outreach in the communities, but she looks forward to using her gifts in pastoral care and service to grow the churches outside their walls.
“We worship in this space, and we read the Gospel here, but that Gospel is lived outside these beautiful walls, outside these doors,” she said.
The Deatons are settling in to life in the Delta, and they are enjoying being close to Charlie’s mother in Greenwood and being able to see their son, Charlie II, who is currently a junior at Ole Miss.
