Our nominee for deacon, Ken Routh, previously served as a deacon in a Baptist church in Baytown where he grew up. He met his wife Tammy at Texas A&M and they have two sons, one in Austin and one in Baytown. They have three grandkids. As an engineer, Ken worked for Exxon in Baytown for 32 years, and continues to work part-time from home on projects for the oil and gas industry. Ken is gifted especially in mercy and service, and he hopes to be able to develop our mercy ministries even more to help those in need. He enjoys volunteering with Elder Aid in his free time.
I actually met Jim Thomas at a football game. Elder Aid was running a concession stand. He told me about Elder Aid and then when we joined this church, there he was!
We had been Baptists all our adult lives. We bought some property up here which we later built a house on in 2008. We had to come up here and mow it and do maintenance and one weekend when we were driving home, a Sunday afternoon, we were listening to the radio, and Renewing Your Mind came on – RC Sproul – and he was doing his series on apologetics. We got the whole series and listened to that, and then we started listening to a lot of the other tape series that RC Sproul had, and we became convinced that the Reformed view of predestination was correct. We stayed at our church, we really didn’t want to cause any waves because I was a deacon there, and there really wasn’t a PCA church anywhere close to where we were anyway, in Baytown. So we stayed there and when we moved here, we hoped there was a Reformed church. We went online and found Westminster, and that was it.
I grew up in a Christian home. We went to Baptist church every time the doors were opened – we were that kind of family. I made a profession of faith when I was six, and I began to doubt that when I was in my teens because my thought life didn’t really measure up, so I made another profession of faith when I was 17. I’ve shared in my testimony that I still struggle with assurance to some extent, and I think some of that is due to the Baptist upbringing where part of your salvation is you having faith, or really meaning it when you ask Him into your heart.
I think my gifts that are strongest are service and mercy, so I think that fits well with what a deacon role should be. You know, a deacon in a Baptist church is a little bit different because it’s more of a combination of elder and deacon, but I actually think the deacon role in this church fits me better than that role. I hope to be able to do things in the deacon ministry that mirror what we do in Elder Aid — help people in need. The elderly seem to be particularly needy.
