Karen Pendleton

Karen Pendleton keeps the books at St. Andrew’s, and the parish could not ask for steadier hands. As Treasurer she counts the offerings, pays the bills, and makes sure every gift, from the Sunday plate to the year-end tax statements, is handled with care. If you have ever received a giving statement from us, Karen is the reason it arrived.

She came to the role after a lifetime of exactly this kind of faithfulness. Trained as a social worker, with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montevallo and a master’s from the University of Alabama, Karen spent two decades as Clinical Director of the Chilton-Shelby Mental Health Center. Then, from 2000 until her retirement in 2021, she served as Executive Director of Shelby Emergency Assistance, the Shelby County agency that helps neighbors through crises with food, utilities, and rent. It is the same organization our Food Pantries page points neighbors to when a box runs empty, which means Karen spent twenty years running the safety net this parish still leans on. Here is one glimpse of that work, coordinating surplus food from the University of Montevallo to families who needed it.

Retirement has not slowed her much. She serves on the University of Montevallo Alumni Association Board, gardens, reads, and makes Zentangle art, the meditative kind of drawing where small patient strokes turn into something beautiful, which is not a bad description of parish treasury work either. She claims no NFL team, but she cheered for Weber State in college (yes, the cheer squad, in Utah), and her favorite music reaches back to Buckingham Nicks, the duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks formed before Fleetwood Mac.

Ask her about any of it at coffee hour. Especially the cheer squad.