The Rev. Joe Stiles sits in on a Vacation Bible School class at First Southern Baptist Church, 4300 W. Sixth St. Stiles will be installed as the senior pastor Sunday.

The Rev. Joe Stiles has been with First Southern Baptist Church since 1985. He has served as the pastor of discipleship.

For 23 years, Joe Stiles has been a familiar face at First Southern Baptist Church.

Now, he’s the face of the church.

At 4 p.m. Sunday, Stiles, 48, will be installed as senior pastor at the church, 4300 W. Sixth St.

The church received 138 resumes for the position, which opened when former pastor James Bush quit more than a year and a half ago to start a business consulting firm. One of those resumes was from Stiles, who had served as the church’s pastor of discipleship since 1985. As part of that job, he worked with the church’s youths.

“I felt very much led to work with students and education for all those years,” Stiles says. “And, yet, (I) just began to sense God moving within me and directing me in a different direction and equipping me to do some different responsibilities, specifically being a pastor.”

Becky Garcia, who chaired the search committee, says it was clear to the seven people paging through all those resumes that Stiles was right for the job. Garcia says the committee took a survey of church members on what they wanted in a pastor and then used a grid to keep track of which qualities were embodied in each applicant. Eventually, the committee recommended Stiles, and the church voted for him.

Stiles, Garcia says, got no special treatment.

“His name was in there with names from all over the country,” Garcia says. “(He) just had a lot of characteristics that the church was looking for, and that’s how we came up with the recommendation. The church voted for him, received him as our recommendation and accepted him, and so now we have a pastor.”

Alden Schoeneberg, the church’s pastor of worship and music, says many in the congregation were hoping Stiles would become the pastor.

“I think that there were many who hoped that the search committee would be led that way and would agree that God was calling Joe,” Schoeneberg says. “And they were excited that was the way it turned out.”

Schoeneberg says he himself also is pleased that the search turned out the way it did.

“I was thrilled and very excited to get started working with him in that capacity,” Schoeneberg says. “Joe has an obvious heart for the people of the church and for the community.”

Both the church and community factor into Stiles’ main goals for his new position.

“My goal would be to see our church grow spiritually and a goal to see our church grow numerically,” says Stiles, who now leads a church that has an average Sunday worship attendance of about 250 people. “I would hope to see our church continue to reach out to the community and beyond and become more and more involved and just hope to see those things carry out even further, continue to reach people.”

Stiles, a father to three grown children – Katie, 24, Andy, 22, and Matt, 20 – with his wife, Becky, says he believes that the path God has given him has meant for him to be in Lawrence and with the same church for so long. That way, he says, he was able to believe that no matter whatever happened with the pastor search, he would be in the right place.

“I was just going to trust God through it all. And I knew if I was supposed to be the senior pastor it would all come about,” Stiles says. “And if I wasn’t, then that was fine, and I’d work with whomever was going to be in this position.”

Garcia, though, is more concrete in her assessment of Stiles.

“He was ready then to take the next step of being a senior pastor of a church,” she says. “We were very pleased that he came out the top candidate.”