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Alma Hunt continues active missions lifestyle


BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (BP)–The line of admirers waiting to hug, touch and retrace history with the animated octogenarian snakes around the giant auditorium.
“Do you remember the time you got in such a hurry that you accidentally used bug spray on your hair instead of hair spray?” laughs Bruce Oliver, an emeritus missionary to Brazil, who finally gets his turn.
“You tried to pay the senior citizen price when you bought ice cream in the Atlanta airport, and they didn’t believe you were eligible,” recalls Dale Hooper, now retired from the International Mission Board. “They even asked you to show your ID.”
“I hope I look like you 25 years from now!” raves Eveline Miller, a longtime missionary to Nigeria, who at last reaches the front of the line.
To these devotees, Alma Hunt responds as though each were the only person she ever knew intimately in her vast career that took her to 93 countries and spanned almost nine decades of teaching, writing and administering.
Affixing a giant kiss on the cheek on most everyone she greets — male or female — Hunt, known affectionately to most as “Miss Alma,” turns aside to a bemused photographer and explains, “At this stage of life, I can kiss ’em all!”
The same wit, incessant zest for living and unquenchable interest in people that distinguished Miss Alma’s 26 years at the helm of the Woman’s Missionary Union remain her trademarks in her retirement years — or in her case, the 24 years since she’s worked full time.
Hunt’s long relationship with Southern Baptist missions, and WMU in particular, is what prompted editors of WMU’s adult magazine, Missions Mosaic, to feature Hunt in the periodical’s May issue. May also marks WMU’s 110th anniversary. The organization was founded May 14, 1888, in Richmond. Va.
On March 10, Hunt was honored by the Virginia Missions Offering Committee, when it voted unanimously to name the annual state offering the “Alma Hunt Offering for Virginia Missions.” Hunt is a native of Roanoke and has spent the last 13 years of her retirement years there.
However, retirement is hardly a word that applies to Miss Alma, and she shows little inclination of slowing down. In a recent prayer before International Mission Board retirees at a ceremony where she received honorary emeritus missionary status, Hunt, 88, prayed, “Lord, invigorate us to do what we can at this stage of life.”
Afterwards with a childlike twinkle in her eye, Miss Alma said, “The people I feel sorry for when I wake each morning are those who can’t figure out what to do that day. The days are simply not long enough for me.”
Another Hunt maxim she volunteers is: “Any day can be better when I can laugh at myself.”
This grande dame of Southern Baptist life has plenty of laurels to rest on, should she choose to do so. Born to Christian parents in Roanoke, Hunt developed an early passion for learning and teaching, which took her first to the public school classroom, then to obtain a master’s degree from Columbia University and to be dean of women at William Jewell College in Missouri.
Miss Alma’s pilgrimage didn’t end in academia. Her years of working with Young Woman’s Auxiliary weeks at Ridgecrest (N.C.) Baptist Conference Center and her zeal for supporting missions in 1948 attracted the notice of a committee seeking a new executive secretary for Woman’s Missionary Union.
Although she felt inadequate for the job, she consented to be nominated to show the Lord she was “not trying to withhold anything I had to offer from his service.” After her appointment at the youthful age of 38, the vivacious, blonde Miss Alma astonished her sometimes traditional colleagues by wearing sporty gold sandals and toenail polish to her first WMU conference at Ridgecrest.
Miss Alma’s years at the helm saw WMU grow to more than 1.5 million women and young women, as she used her people skills to get others excited about missions. She began magazines to let members know about missionaries’ work and made countless encouragement visits to missions fields around the world.
Current WMU Executive Director Dellanna O’Brien told the group of present and retired missionaries gathered at Glorieta (N.M.) Baptist Conference Center for Miss Alma’s emeritus missionary award, “No one deserves this honor more. She has stirred up the hearts of people in the Southern Baptist Convention to give and to pray for you.”
Alma attributes her resiliency through years of international travel to “the ability to sleep anywhere” and to her iron stomach that sustained many unusual meals abroad.
Alma’s travels were far from over after her retirement from WMU in 1974. The IMB asked her to be a consultant for women’s work from 1975-78. She also was an officer with the Baptist World Alliance. The sprightly Miss Alma recorded 44 international assignments after she reached age 65.
“Alma can be a little exhausting to be around. I have never known anybody who had such enthusiasm for so many things,” Letha Casazza, former president of North American Baptist Women’s Union, wrote of Alma.
At 88, Alma has speaking engagements booked a year away, although she teases those who sign her for future engagements that they are “true optimists” for scheduling her long-range.
Miss Alma says she’s still blessed with excellent health, with only a touch of arthritis that she says keeps her from springing rapidly up from her chair. A twice-weekly session with a physical therapist in water aerobics helps keep her agile — and trim.
Keeping up with friends in far-flung places is one of Miss Alma’s biggest challenges these days.
“I feel inadequate if not defeated when a day has passed and I didn’t get around to seeing someone who needed a visit or writing a letter of encouragement,” she says. “I’m all but asphyxiated by mail.”
To help with Miss Alma’s personal correspondence, WMU enables her to issue a letter, “Baptist Sisters Around the World,” each year to missionaries in whose homes she stayed, to those she met through BWA and on international fields, and to other friends dear to her heart.
From a condominium in Roanoke overlooking her beloved Blue Ridge Mountains, Alma prepares her weekly Sunday school lesson for the older women’s class she teaches. She is active with her church’s Women on Mission groups. She tries to work each year in Vacation Bible School, inspiring pupils in the Alma Hunt Missions Media Center that First Baptist, Roanoke, established in her honor.
Still a self-described “people person,” Miss Alma opens her home weekly for potluck meals among friends. Her role in her close-knit family continues as doting, unmarried aunt for the adult children and grandchildren of her deceased brother and sister.
Alma, whose name appropriately means “soul” in Spanish, says her years since full-time employment “have been a glorious period for me. I attribute the state of my health to the fact that I continue to prepare for speeches and travel. These things give purpose to my life.”
Mindful of the many baby boomers nearing retirement, Alma believes the untapped potential among older women is vast. “Even if you don’t have the physical strength, there are ways you can encourage — by phone or by writing notes,” she explains. “Retirees who are lonely are largely responsible for their loneliness, because through the church and the Christian family are opportunities for all of us to have a vital part in the ongoing of the kingdom.”
Miss Alma advises that the secret of enjoying advancing age is to be useful: “I know of no purpose as fulfilling as feeling yourself used for what you believe to be the plan God created for you to follow.”

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  • Kay Moore