After 17 Years Of Ministry & Volunteering, Rev. Bautista Departs

Emmanuel – Mel – Bautista looks around his small office at Frenchtown Baptist Church and sighs. So many books to pack or give away.

In 17 years as minister at the church, Bautista is leaving. His wife has taken a new job in Virginia.

Bautista has served Frenchtown Baptist since 1996. As a Philippino native, he’s not the typical image of a New England pastor. Yet, he’s been a fixture both at Frenchtown Baptist and in East Greenwich for all these years.

He recalls his thoughts when he got the “call” to ministry in East Greenwich.

“There was no doubt in my mind that this is where God was calling us. We are a mixed-race couple going to an upper middle class extremely professional community – how in the world can God be calling us here?” he thought at the time. 

But he and his wife, Lucie, and their five children settled in East Greenwich and Bautista in particular embraced the town.

“Church needs to involve itself in community life,” he says. In New England, “it's not in the public square, it's somewhere off on a side street. So, Bautista’s attitude has been: “Whenever you have an opportunity to be involved in community, you jump at it.”

He has served as chaplain of both the EG Police Department and the EG Fire District (now “department”) and has marched in many, many Veterans and Memorial Day parades. Bautista has also served on the town’s Juvenile Hearing Board for the past 10 years, the last six as chair.

Participation in the parades started soon after he arrived and he smiles recalling the first time he was asked to say a prayer at the war memorial on First and Cliff streets.

“I just knew I was saying a prayer at Cliff Street,” he says. But Bautista didn’t realize the route the parade took and he was blocked from parking close by. “I literally ran from where I was parked to Cliff Street, and I was still dumb enough … to be wearing Sunday shoes.”

He made it and in subsequent years, he became parade organizer Carl Hoyer’s go-to minister. If Hoyer couldn’t find someone to participate, he’d call Bautista.

Bautista feels strongly about honoring the military, something he attributes to having grown up in the Philippines.

“I'm kind of partial to the fact we need to honor these men and women who've given their lives or continue to serve,” he says. “Someone coming from the Third World can maybe appreciate what the U.S. means. It’s a way of saying 'thank you.'”

Bautista moved to New York with his family in 1971, when he was 17 years old. He was pre-med in college, but started to question that path midway through.

“I started thinking, ‘How can I make my life more useful?’” he says. So, instead of medical school, Bautista got a graduate degree in theology at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colo. The school suited him because it did not tell students what to believe.

“I don't tend toward extremes,” Bautista says. “Balance is a word I really like a lot.”

He brought that balance to his role on the Juvenile Hearing Board.

“The one thing that's always disappointed me,” he says of his time on the board, is that “parenting is sorely lacking, at least in the cases we've seen.”

Bautista said many children who come before the board are not, as some may presume, from “below Main Street.”

“A lot of our cases were drug abuse and alcohol consumption of kids with parents who are doctors, lawyers. They give them too much.... It's the parents who have to be indicted,” Bautista says.

“I don't think they are uncaring. I think they are too busy with their own careers maybe. They don't realize there are a lot of things happening under the surface that they don't track.”

Bautista is also frustrated by the culture.

“It's amazing how oblivious society is to the lack of sexual morays among our young people right now. It's scary to me, the lack of sexual controls with our young people today,” he says.

“That's where the church has to step in, not to try to control morality but to help parents manage their families in a lot better way than seemingly they're doing now.”

Bautista has no job waiting for him in Virginia. This time, he is following Lucie, a certified nurse midwife, who has already begun her new job there. He’s not quite sure what his next step will be.

“God has permission to change my plans,” he says, “but I'm not really looking for pastoral ministry at this point. I can't turn the switch off when I get home. I can't transition out that quick. It takes its toll.”