Nicole Guns arrived at First Baptist Church of Gary in October 2025, after more than thirty churches had turned her down. She applied to every one of them and was rejected by every one of them. Then the oldest Black church in Gary, 118 years old and never led by a woman, brought her name to its congregation and voted ninety percent yes.
A year on, more than 250 members are on the church’s rolls and about forty percent of them are new. Jessica Sullivan-Wilson, 39, a longtime member who sat on the search committee and drives in from Chicago every week, said Sunday attendance has nearly tripled since Guns took the position. The church had run a search that failed before it hired a consultant, Charity Ware, and tried again.
Guns is a sixth-generation ordained pastor and a former nurse. Her father, Geoffrey Guns, spent 43 years as senior pastor of Second Calvary Baptist Church in Norfolk, Virginia. Her grandfather, Frank Guns, could not attend her installation. She has served on mission efforts in Kenya and Nigeria, and she is assistant general secretary of the National Baptist Convention USA Inc.
On being the first woman in the job, Guns said being a woman changed what she pays attention to. “I think that being a woman pastor, I’m much more intentional about the needs of everybody,” she said. She put the point about who is watching more plainly. “I hope that young girls will be able to see that they can be preachers because they’ve seen me,” she said.
Gary itself is part of the sermon. When a derecho knocked out power on Aug. 11, Guns told the congregation, “We may have been in darkness, but we never lost power because we had the power of God.” She is blunter about the city’s prospects than many of the people who write about it. “I truly believe that God is restoring Gary, and God will restore Gary,” she said.
Sullivan-Wilson, who has belonged to First Baptist her whole life, put the year in her own terms. “This is the first chapter but not the last chapter,” she said.
