Fresh out of college, Louise Adamson felt called to become an overseas missionary.
Her dedication to her calling resulted in her serving 57 years in mission work. According to the the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board, a check of its records turned up no one who served longer.
However, Adamson never went abroad to serve. Instead, she spent the first seven years in St. Louis-area slums, then the remaining 50 in Atlanta’s inner city, just south of downtown.
In his 2008 book “Finding God in Unexpected Places,” author Philip Yancey described Adamson as a full-time Good Samaritan who led her life according to Scripture.
She told Yancey: “You know that Isaiah 40 says, ‘Wait upon the Lord.’ Well, I’ve taken that as my motto. I wait upon the Lord like a waitress waiting on tables. I want to serve him every day.”
Louise Propst Adamson, 88, died May 28 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the home of a longtime friend and recent caregiver, Jeff Densmore of Danielsville. A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church. Her body was cremated at Strickland Funeral Home, Lavonia.
Densmore was a toddler when Adamson cared for him and his siblings during a crisis in his family, and 20 years later he joined her in her mission work. “I became the son she never had, and she taught me to be a true servant of God,” he said.
After earning a master’s degree at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., Adamson accepted a mission assignment in St. Louis, where she met and married her first husband, the Rev. Fred Propst.
In 1957 he became pastor of Capitol Avenue Baptist Church, and they settled in Atlanta. Two years later, Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist agreed to help fund her inner-city ministry, a sponsorship that lasted 50 years.
The Rev. Charles Qualls, associate pastor of Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist, said Adamson invested her life in neighborhoods where few others felt safe — principally Peoplestown, Pittsburgh, Mechanicsville and parts of Grant Park.
The areas she served are much improved now, Qualls said, but they were hardly welcoming when she began her ministry. Gradually, the hostility subsided.
“Gang leaders recognized the good she did and put the word out on the street that Adamson was not to be harmed — in other words, don’t mess with Louise,” Qualls said.
Adamson went beyond evangelizing, Qualls said. “She demonstrated a genuine Christian witness by striving constantly to meet people’s basic needs.”
For years Adamson taught children’s Bible classes on weekdays. She also asked parents of abused children to let them stay with her and served as a guardian to children assigned to her by the juvenile court.
The Rev. Chad Hale, executive director of the Capitol Avenue Community Ministry, said her focus each week was the regular Wednesday lunch she and others arranged year after year for 50 to 100 hungry people.
“Louise would spend most of the rest of the week in what became her office — the vans provided her over the years by Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist, he said. “She went all over visiting members of her flock in their homes, in hospitals or in jail, checking on their needs, even helping to pay for rent and utilities.”
At one time she owned four houses in Grant Park, Hale said, all of which were filled with donated furniture, household goods, etc., which she distributed to those in need.
Her first husband died in 1970. Two years later she and Joe Adamson, also involved in mission work, were wed. He died in 2007.
Surviving is a sister, Kathryn Whitlow of Anderson, S.C.
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