The Rev. Dusty Pruitt: LRAC’s first woman president

The Rev. Dusty Pruitt is the first woman president in the 33-year-history of the Lewes-Rehoboth Association of Churches, and she wants to accomplish two things as president.

First, she said, she wants to clear up any misconceptions people may have about how money from the association's New Life Thrift Shop is spent. All the money, except for the salary of a store manager, she said, is spread out among nearly two dozen charities in the local community. She estimated the money raised by the thrift shop generates more than $400,000 annually for those charities.

Second, she continued, the thrift shop, located behind Jiffy Lube on the northbound side of Route 1 in Lewes, needs to replace its decades-old carpet. Pruitt estimates it will cost about $45,000.

"We're losing out on business because people say the rug smells, and it just doesn't look nice," she said. "You can warn them I'll be coming."

Pruitt, 70, has short gray hair and glasses, and wearing a turtleneck and sports coat, she immediately comes across as a person who's welcomed strangers into her life, her whole life, in the name of God. She looks a person straight in the eye and her posture is open, almost leaning into whoever is talking to her.

Pruitt was ordained by the Metropolitan Community Church in 1976, but she learned the value of religion from an early age. She said her great-grandmother was a descendant of the Congregationalists who took the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock in the 1620s. Her grandparents were Baptists, and her father became a Baptist minister when she was 6.

There was all this extended family in Texas, but the family up and left after her father became a minister, she said.

"It was a nomad existence," she said. "I went to 10 different schools before graduating high school."

Her journey to the First State wasn't easy, and she saw many parts of the country along the way. She said she was married and divorced by the age of 20. She was engaged to another "fella," a Baptist preacher, shortly afterward, but he drowned before they got married.

"This is all before I was 21," she said, in a hard-to-believe-this-all-happened-to-me tone.

Pruitt then joined the Women's Army Corps, a woman's auxiliary branch of the U.S. Army that was disbanded in the 1970s. "That's how far I go back," she said, again laughing.

After five years as an officer, she joined the Army Reserves. In the 1970s, she said she came out as a lesbian while still a member of the reserves, which didn't have any ramifications until she was publicly outed in a news article. She said she knew as soon as she said something to the reporter it was going to be a problem.

Today, members of the LBGT community are allowed to serve openly in the United States military, but that became law only in 2011. Pruitt's revelation came long before that. She said as a result of the article she was made to leave the reserves.

She and three others who had been thrown out of the military for the same reason – being gay – sued the military and, after 12 years of court proceedings, eventually won. In the end, she said, it took so long that instead of getting back into the service, she was given a full retirement pension.

Through the trying ordeal, religion was never far from Pruitt's life. She was an MCC minister from 1976 through 2001, with stops in Fort Collins and Denver, Colo., Fort Worth and one in Long Beach.

Pruitt has been in Delaware since 2007 – the nine years makes this second longest she's ever lived anywhere; her longest was her 15-year stint as an MCC minister for a church in Long Beach, Calif.

"I've led a life on the move," she said. "Like my father."

She ended up in Delaware because her partner, Joanne Rhodes, wanted to live near her twin sister, who lived in Maryland.

Pruitt served as chaplain for Delaware Hospice for five years, 2008-13. She also founded the Safe Harbor United Church of Christ in 2007. The church meets twice a month in Milton's St. John's Episcopal Church.

Being the first woman president of LRAC isn't lost on Pruitt. She said she was honored to be appointed.

"There's been no resistance to me being there by anybody," she said, also making sure to point out it's the first time in the association's history that all four members of the executive board are women – Mary Makowski is vice president, Kathy Ebner is secretary and Florence Sulitzky is treasurer.

As Pruitt enters her 40th year of ministry, she's thinking about retiring, but she knows her role as LRAC president will consume a lot of her time in the next year. She filled in as minister for a brief period at the Metropolitan Community Church on Plantation Road in Lewes, but that's about to end. Meaning, she said, she'll be able to focus her attention on the thrift shop.

"I don't mind asking for donations of this kind," she said. "It's what Christians are tasked to do. Help and ask for help."