Wanda Kidd is a retired campus minister, campus ministry coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, and Collegiate Specialist for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
By Missy Randall
Laughter is my love language. And while I’ve been fortunate in life to be surrounded by more than my share of gift-givers, few hold my wonder and admiration quite like Wanda Kidd.
If humor is, as she says, “like my brown eyes, they just came with me,” then so did her heart for ministry. And if the message during her childhood was that her gender limits her gifts, she missed that lesson. As she stepped out of her pew each week at the end of the service to walk alongside the preacher after his benediction, it never occurred to six-year-old Wanda that she shouldn’t be the one standing at the back of the sanctuary, shaking hands and greeting parishioners as they departed.
Wanda believes the pulpit and the comedy stage are places for truth – and she delivers it each time she approaches both. After once hearing, “I never sat under no woman preacher before” as she was approaching a pulpit, she turned and said, “I thought I was just here to spread the gospel, but if you need me to sit on you, I guess I could do that.”
With a belief that humor should be observational and not at someone’s expense, she has a gift for communicating with love and laughter.
Wanda spent the bulk of her career working with students, and her impact on a generation of young people is immeasurable. Serving others while making them laugh comes as naturally to Wanda as breathing, so it is no surprise that she has taken a break from retirement to serve as the Helene Disaster Response Director for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina.
—Missy Randall is program coordinator and co-host of Good Faith Media’s Good Faith Weekly podcast.
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