Meet Your Missions Team: Karen Ann Keathley

West Heights Baptist was Karen Ann Keathley’s beloved church. It was a place of refuge, a place of acceptance and love, and a place of affirmation by a remarkable group of people. Karen says, “I found that so many of the things I always enjoyed at West Heights are actually very rare, almost non-existent anywhere else. But these were things I needed. And God gave them to me through that church.”

Karen was born, raised and still lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. The same with her brothers, one older one younger, born, raised and still living in Little Rock. Except for her father, Karen’s family attended West Heights until she was nine years old when they left to join another church. 

But at fifteen Karen returned to West Heights where, she says, “it was the close-knit, loving, accepting family I needed so desperately. And God blessed, protected and ministered to me through West Heights for over 40 years.”

She was saved at the age of seven, so, she says, “I have known God and he has been a refuge throughout my struggles, although I did not really know how to trust him or anyone.”

Growing up she always enjoyed reading biographies, but not just any biography: She loved the missionary ones. In fact, she says, it was pretty much the only reading she did, and it created in her a strong desire to be a missionary. It would be a while, however, before she had the chance to know what it was like on the mission field.

After graduating from high school, she worked in bookkeeping at Spartans then Woolco department stores. After Woolco closed its doors, she began working at M. M. Cohn then heard that Buddy and Martha Johnson, missionaries in Mexico, needed English tutoring for their boys. So for ten months from 1982-1983, she lived with the Johnsons and taught their boys, particularly eight-year-old Eric and three-year-old preschoolers Jon and Ben. 

After Karen returned to the States, she began working in bookkeeping at a Little Rock hospital until 1989 when a friend, Barbara Tidwell, who knew about her love of missionaries, mentioned a bookkeeping job where she worked: the BMA Missions office. She applied for and was offered the job and has been serving BMA Missions as bookkeeper for thirty years.

During the decades of her professional life, Karen’s deepest desire was to have a child, but having never married, she came to accept that it would likely never happen. God had been preparing her for motherhood even still: Her greatest love was teaching and working with children at her church. She served in just about every area of ministry to children and young people including missions lessons to young ladies in GMA, young adult Sunday school classes and children’s church.

Through the years, she considered domestic or foreign adoption, but nothing ever worked out. In 1997, however, God put a young lady in her life who needed help with a baby she was not able to provide for. After finally realizing this herself, she told Karen, who had been caring for him since he was a year old, to move forward with adoption. Although there were bumps, hitches and almost derailments along the way, it was official on July 7, 1999. 

Karen Ann Keathley had become a mother. She says, “The only thing I’ve ever really wanted was a child of my own. I had concluded that I would just work with other people’s children and enjoy them. Through any normal channels I never would have been able to adopt a child, but through God’s amazing love, I am a mother, I have a child to love, to teach, to learn from and to enjoy.”

During this transition time of her life, however, God began gently preparing her for the greatest loss she would endure: the end of West Heights Baptist Church. But God worked everything out while she wasn’t even noticing and provided Zachary just when she needed a distraction from that loss. She now attends Oak Park in Little Rock where she continues to teacher where needed.

Karen credits God’s marvelous grace and provision for giving her a special, life-changing church, a way to serve the missionaries she loved reading about, and a child she never thought she’d have.