The Rev. Carol West waves to the crowd during the 2017 Tarrant County Gay Pride Parade. (Tammye Nash/Dallas Voice)

The Rev. Carol West, senior pastor at Celebration Community Church since August 1998, has announced that she will be retiring by the end of this year, and the church’s Pulpit Search Committee announced Sunday, July 8, that the search for a new pastor has begun.

“Our beloved Rev. West has announced her retirement for later this year and the Pastoral Search Committee has begun soliciting applications for the Senior Pastor position at CCC,” the committee announced on Facebook. “It is with mixed emotion that we announce the Pastoral Search process has begun.”

To meet the church’s minimum requirements for senior pastor, an applicant must be an ordained minister, have experience pastoring church of similar size or larger, and be an advocate for the LGBT community.

The senior pastor’s responsibilities include planning and executing weekly worship services; expanding church membership; developing outreach to encourage community and expand the ministries of CCC; recruiting, employing and evaluating staff and volunteers; assisting the board of directors in developing and managing an annual operations budget, and participating in LGBT community-related activities and organizations.

Celebration Community Church was founded Jan. 10, 1993, as a satellite congregation of Dallas’ White Rock Community Church, but soon became an independent church. When west became senior pastor, the church had 35 members.

In the 20 years since, under her leadership, Celebration purchased its own building (an historic church building at 908 Pennsylvania Ave. in Fort Worth), started a satellite congregation on Cedar Creek Lake that has since become an independent church (Celebration on the Lake), expanded to include Barron House Counseling Center on adjacent property (purchased and donated to the church by members, then renovated with grant funds from Black Tie Dinner), and most recently, the church built the Rev. Carol A. West Community Center, a state-of-the-art building with room for dinners, events and more.

The church today has a membership of more than 500 people.

West, who taught English before entering the ministry and being ordained in 1990, joined the staff of what was then the Dallas Metropolitan Community Church (now Cathedral of Hope) as the AIDS chaplain at the height of the AIDS epidemic in North Texas. She has been involved in the North Texas LGBT community in many ways, and in 2009 was one of the leaders in the community’s response and growing activism following the raid on the Rainbow Lounge, and in 2010 she received Black Tie Dinner’s Kuchling Humanitarian Award.

West was diagnosed last September with an aggressive form of breast cancer, and began chemotherapy in October. But in June she announced via Facebook that her “scans were good” and that she would no longer have to undergo chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

West loves going fishing, and she loves going to the Dallas Wings basketball games. In September 2016 she married her partner of 30 years, Angela King.

(On a personal note, I want to say that Carol West is and always has been one of my heroes. She has always been calm in the face of the storms, and has always been a source of comfort and hope for me, and I am sure, for many many others. And I hope I get to go fishing with her some day soon.)

— Tammye Nash