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As a student at Kent State University in the late 1970s, Angelique Walker wanted to do something so shocking, so contrary to her upbringing that she could hardly bring herself to tell her Baptist preacher-father, the Rev. Roosevelt V. Walker.

An obedient, high-achieving daughter, she worried that her father would be disapproving, even outraged.

She wanted to become a minister.

True, her dream doesnít exactly sound like a frightening act of rebellion for a young adult ñ especially these days, when parents might discover their college student has a pierced tongue and skipped finals to follow the band Phish ñ but the Rev. Angelique Walker-Smith, 39, has never been quite typical. She not only defied Baptist tradition by becoming an ordained minister, but she continues to defy traditional boundaries with her ministry.

Walker-Smith is the first black and first woman executive director of the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, one of the worldís oldest ecumenical organizations and a touchstone for non-violent response to the cityís violence problems. Without a permanent pulpit, sheís nevertheless found a congregation among thousands of viewers of the Odyssey Channel, a national cable television network. With actress Mariette Hartley, Walker-Smith provides commentary on the networkís daily Odyssey Big Screen and Odyssey Matinee movie offerings.

During her monthly jaunts to New York for three or four days of filming "wrap-arounds" ñ the few minutes of discussion of faith and values before and after Odyssey movies ñ Walker-Smith impressed Jeff Weber, president of Odyssey Productions, who hired her a year ago to co-star with Hartley. "Rarely have I met someone who is so in touch with popular culture, who has a background in theology and who has such an infectious nature," says Weber. "It really comes together with Angelique."

Add to those roles that of host of her own local television show, Faces of Faith, on the ABC affiliate WRTV/Channel 6; chaplain to inmates at the Indiana Womenís Prison; and wife and mother of a preschooler, and it becomes obvious that Walker-Smithís then-unconventional career choice has shaped her life. But to fully understand how she came to that choice requires an understanding of her faith and a belief system that was forged in childhood during the racial turmoil of the 1960s.

ÝOf Faith and Prejudice

Perhaps because she grew up in a religious household, headed by an ex-Marine Corps officer attending Bible college in Cedarville, Ohio, little Angelique Walker had a strong sense of her own spirituality at an early age. "When I was a little kid, I would swing so hard, I really thought I would jump into the sky and everyone who believed in Jesus would be there," she recalls. "I accepted Jesus Christ at age 9. I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted Christ first in my life."

Despite the presence of the Bible college, rural Cedarville in the 1960s wasnít exactly filled with the spirit of brotherly love. Walker-Smith recalls that her family was the first black family to live outside an especially impoverished area unofficially designated for black people. Worse, the Bible college forbade interracial fraternization. Her most vivid recollection was walking past homes of white people and feeling their stares as she walked to school, where her mostly white classmates largely ignored her. Only one little girl talked to Walker-Smith after class, but only out of the view of her mother, who once shooed Walker-Smith off the steps of their house.

Her teachers dealt firmly with all their pupils, but Walker-Smith felt they often set her up to fail by imposing even higher standards on minority students. In the Walker household, however, the values of "God, family and education" ruled supreme, and Walker-Smith learned to not only adapt, but to excel under the pressure. "What was meant to be evil ñ the teachers who were extra hard on me ñ was actually good because I worked harder," Walker-Smith says.

When the family moved to Springfield, Ohio, they again faced prejudice. Rev. Walker continued to be outspoken in his community and became a target of racism: A brick thrown through their front window one night shattered glass and barely missed Walker-Smithís grandmotherís head.

It would have been easy to become bitter, but Walker-Smith also learned an early lesson that she credits with permanently changing her perspective. Her fourth-grade teacher was a white, Greek Orthodox woman who saw a spark in Walker-Smith and nurtured it. She encouraged her at school, introduced her to the Greek Orthodox faith and recommended her to a private school that Walker-Smith eventually attended. "It was like, ëWow, there are other churches out there, and there are good people at those churches,í" Walker-Smith recalls. "It opened my eyes to a wide world out there, and that we are all Godís people."

Call to Ministry

Walker-Smith studied telecommunications and dance at Kent State, but during her junior year she took classes in religious studies and philosophy. It was then that she began to feel a calling to the ministry.

That proved a radical thought in the late 1970s. Mainline churches were just beginning to see women in their pulpits, and a strong bias remained against women in the ministry within most black denominations. So strong were the injunctions against women taking the traditionally male leadership role in her own Baptist church that Walker-Smith at first felt betrayed by her feelings. After all, sheíd never known any women pastors; she had been shocked when a college chaplain told her that his denomination routinely ordained women. "I went through a whole guilt trip, because what I was doing was taboo in the black Baptist church. It went against the grain of what I had been taught," Walker-Smith says. "I struggled with the decision for years, and when I did come to terms with it, I didnít tell my dad at first."

At the same time, her then-boyfriend, R. Drew Smith, was earning his degree at Yale Divinity School. She visited, hung out with a group called the Black Seminarians and was, so to speak, converted. Things further came together when her father surprised her by throwing his support behind the endeavor, and then Smith proposed marriage.

Walker-Smith got married and enrolled in Yale Divinity School at age 21. After a year of field ministry in a Harlem church, she graduated with her husband in 1983 and later that year was ordained at Convent Avenue Baptist Church in New York City. By then, things had loosed up considerably, and Walker-Smith became an associate pastor at an inner-city church in Hartford, Conn. "On the East Coast, it became the vogue to hire women as associate pastors," she recalls.

Walker-Smith also became increasingly involved in ecumenical and international efforts. She took a job as the executive director of the Trenton, N.J., Ecumenical Area Ministry and served as a consultant to Operation Crossroads Africa, a community development effort in South Africa, Namibia, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Lesotho.

Ecumenical Indianapolis

When Indiana University invited her husband back to teach at his alma mater, Walker-Smith found herself returning to the Midwest, despite the fact that sheíd begun work on her doctor of ministry degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. She completed the degree long-distance over five years; in 1995 she finished her dissertation and became the first black woman graduate in the seminaryís history.

Being the "first" leaves her with mixed feelings. "I donít think it should have taken until 1995 to graduate an African-American woman ñ and I donít think it was necessarily a race thing because Princeton was accepting African-Americans in the 1800s. It was more the woman factor than the race factor," she says. "But sometimes you see institutionalized racism and sexism, and you have to assume that everyone is working on those issues. Weíre all going to struggle."

Walker-Smith became another "first" when she became executive director of the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis. Sheíd already begun making a name for herself in the ecumenical movement, first in Trenton, then as ecumenical liaison to the National Baptist Convention USA and finally as one of the youngest individuals ever elected to the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.

After serving as the interim director from 1993-í94, Walker-Smith took over the post full-time in 1995. As executive director of the 86-year-old federation, Walker-Smith works with six denominations, 150 congregations, 11 staff members and a $275,000 annual budget. The federation calls itself a "joint Christian ministry committed to addressing neighborhood issues that challenge our diverse community," and sponsors a variety of programs, including projects for at-risk children, a network of chaplains at the Indianapolis International Airport, a ministry to women at the Indiana Womenís Prison, and police and community relations efforts. In Indianapolis, the Church Federation has made headlines over the past two years by sponsoring the Prayer Network, which gathers for a prayer vigil at the site of every violent death in the community. The prayer vigils have become all-too commonplace, as Indianapolis has seen record and near-record homicide rates during 1997 and the first half of 1998.

Walker-Smith says the prayer vigils were an ecumenical response to violence in northside neighborhoods in 1995. Later discussions with inner-city youth, she says, revealed their pain over the violence that touched their lives on a daily basis. For the past 2-1/2 years, the Prayer Network has gathered within 48 hours of a violent death ñ whether an accident, suicide or homicide ñ to organize a vigil so that members can read scripture, recite prayers and sing a hymn.

On May 7, members of the Prayer Network gathered at 7:30 a.m. at the Key Bank branch in Carmel to remember Penny Schmitt, the 51st victim of violent death in the Indianapolis area during 1998. At the same time, a separate vigil was held just a block away for Antoine Whitehead, the alleged gunman in the bank robbery that took Schmittís life. "Some people would see him [Whitehead] as a perpetrator," Walker-Smith says. "But weíre Christians. Weíre commissioned, as hard as it is, to be witnesses to what is holy in the midst of profanity. I believe that Jesus would go to both vigils."

Yet Walker-Smith doesnít see prayer vigils as the answer to violence in Indianapolis. Sheís realistic ñ and experienced ñ enough to know that the stresses, problems, and racial and economic issues at the heart of violence are not easily solved. Still, she expresses conviction that the more we reach out, the better we will be.

She also doesnít give up on the power of spirituality. An assistant chaplain at the Indiana Womenís Prison since 1991, Walker-Smith is an inspiration to the inmates there, including those on death row and in segregated units. "They love to listen to her," says Chaplain Wanda Alejandro-Gonzalez of the 100 or so women who gather on Sunday mornings at the prison. "The women are receptive to her message of hope."

An Odyssey

Walker-Smith probably reaches her biggest audience via the Odyssey Channel, a cable channel offered by about 1,500 cable systems nationwide. Walker-Smith sent the folks at Odyssey a videotape of her local Faces of Faith program nearly two years ago. They promptly shelved the tape, until Odyssey began looking around for someone to pair with Hartley to introduce and discuss the films the network would air. "We were looking for someone who had a theological background, who was telegenic and would come off well," Weber says. "Someone remembered Angelique."

The gig comes remarkably close to combining Walker-Smithís original interests in both telecommunications and religion. Once a month, sheís coifed at Odysseyís New York studios, works out talking points with an Odyssey writer and then sits down with Hartley for a non-scripted chat about more than 30 movies ñ many originally made for TV ñ such as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Right to Die and Second Sight: A Love Story. Through her publicist, Hartley recently praised Walker-Smithís example of faith. "When I share the stage with her, I am constantly inspired," Hartley says.

Walker-Smith, too, finds personal gratification in her role. "Movies have meaning," she says. "The movies on Odyssey are stories of people and how they have some opportunity for healing and learning. What we try to do is ask what God has to do with these stories, to make an abstraction applicable to our everyday lives."

In her own life, Walker-Smith is mother to 2-1/2-year-old Asha Genevieve. She and Smith, a professor of political science at Butler University and a visiting scholar and researcher at Morehouse College in Atlanta, share parenting duties with Smithís parents and extended family in Indianapolis.

Yet the couple undergoes the balancing act willingly, particularly because, until a few years ago, they assumed they might be childless for life. Both wanted to finish their education and launch their careers before having children, and it wasnít until they had been married for more than a dozen years that they seriously contemplated whether they were being "called" to start a family. In much the same way that Walker-Smith listened to the inner voice directing her to the ministry, the couple decided to take on a new role as parents.

The leap of faith paid off. Asha, who will attend a northside cooperative preschool this fall, is well-traveled in church circles as well as on her motherís travels in this country and throughout Europe. Her involvement in her parentsí careers seems only natural: Walker-Smith recalls accompanying her own father as a child when he attended to his church activities. "In the African-American church, children and family are part of your faith, part of your testimony," she says. "Asha brings a whole other dimension of family to our lives. She has been a wonderful symbol of our ministry."