The Rev. Dan Ivins, who is being installed tomorrow as the 36th minister of the First Baptist Church in America, in Providence, rides his motor scooter to work.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — The Rev. Dan Ivins says he still has to pinch himself occasionally to make sure he isn’t dreaming.

How is it, he asks, that a “born, bred and buttered Baptist” like himself, a man who gets around on a motor scooter and preaches with a Tennessee twang, can end up in New England pasturing the church founded by Roger Williams?

Mr. Ivins, 64, whose installation as the 36th senior minister of the First Baptist Church in America is set for tomorrow, thinks he’s incredibly lucky.

“I’ve always admired this church. It’s the most open church I’ve ever been in,” he says with a grin, adding that he thinks that he and the Baptist founder have much in common.

“I think Roger and I are cut out of the same mold. I’m a good fit for this church and the church is a good fit for me. Fit matters.”

After all, he says, he’s a strong believer in religious liberty and is a founder, too. In 1988, he and 30 other Southern Baptist ministers upset with the fundamentalist takeover of their denomination met in Charlotte, N.C., to form the Alliance of Baptists, a more moderate group that, among other things, believed that churches should accord equal rights to women and gays.

And just as Roger Williams had to move about — fleeing Massachusetts to establish a haven of religious freedom in Rhode Island — Mr. Ivins has been a traveler, too, ministering at Baptist churches in all four corners of the United States, including an eight-year stint as pastor of the Birmingham, Ala., Church of the Covenant.

That was another church he always admired, going back to when he was studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., and heard about a church in Birmingham that was created when 300 people walked out of the city’s First Baptist Church because members there wouldn’t allow a black woman to join. For the first few years afterward, the “walkers” — who eventually became Mr. Ivins’ congregation — met in a Jewish synagogue.

These days Mr. Ivins makes it a point of erecting a sign in front of every church he pastors: “This church reserves the right to accept everyone.”

He says he got the idea from Jesus Christ.

FOR ALL OF its striking architecture and rich history, though, the First Baptist Church here is supported by a relatively small congregation — about 80 to 90 people attend a typical Sunday service, up from the 50 people it had when Mr. Ivins stepped in on an interim basis about 18 months ago.

While some ministers might be bothered by those numbers, Mr. Ivins is not.

“Some ministers don’t like to go to churches that are small numerically, but I got over that a long time ago,” he says. “As I see it, big churches have big problems. In a little church you won’t have near as many problems because you don’t have near as many people. Yeah, and you have more time to do what you need to do.”

Looking back, Mr. Ivins recalls moments he will always relish — such as when the sitting president of the United States, Bill Clinton, and his wife, Hillary, showed up at his church in Silver Spring, Md. Mr. Ivins preached his regular sermon that day and gave the president and his wife communion.

“I even have a picture of it, not that I could really show it around. At my church in Sun City, Ariz., the congregation would have fired me because they were Bush supporters and didn’t like Clinton or [former Vice President Al] Gore at all. This church here may be the one place I can get away with showing it.”

It was while serving at another church in Maryland in the early 1980s that Mr. Ivins began riding a motor scooter. He explains that he and his wife, Libby, had two grown daughters and, as it turned out, not enough cars. He let the kids take the cars and he rode the motor scooter, which he discovered was a fun way to travel.

“You can park almost anywhere and get to places pretty quick,” he remarked.

He commutes on his motor scooter the three blocks or so from his apartment at Avalon at Center Placeto the church, and has also done some long-distance travel. “I’ve gone all the way to Milwaukee and back on my bike,” he said.

In addition to his degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mr. Ivins holds a doctorate in ministry from Carson-Newman College, in Jefferson City, Tenn. He is also the author of several books, among them God’s People in Transition and God’s Surprising Goodness.

NOT ALL OF his pastoral assignments have been so sweet. His ministry at a Baptist church in Portland, Ore., became a nightmare, he says, because “although they said they wanted change, they really didn’t.” The congregation wasn’t as liberal as he had assumed, which is one of the things that prompted his move back East.

In 2004, he took a post as interim pastor of Warwick Central Baptist Church. A year and a half later, as he was about to leave Warwick, the Rev. James Miller retired as senior minister at the First Baptist Church in America. Mr. Ivins agreed to fill in temporarily.

But the interim post took a different turn when First Baptist members gave up trying to find a new minister and asked him if he’d take the job. He jumped at the opportunity.

As he sees it, First Baptist is a “good church” though it is also a “hard church.”

Hard, because there’s so little space for parking on weekdays, and too few children in the congregation. Hard, because the church has had to repair the wall at the rear of its property more than once because the church sits at the bottom of College Hill and some cars end up flying over the wall.

It’s a church that some families travel to from as far away as Newport, and where there’s no local neighborhood except for the campuses of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

“It used to be that college kids came to church, and some still do, but by and large not very many,” Mr. Ivins said.

Then there’s the museum aspect of the church.

“It has that aspect because many people do come here because of our history. I can’t deny that. But we are also a church,” he said.

He says First Baptist has had an undeserved reputation of being filled with liberals and elitists who don’t believe the Bible. The reality is that what members like most about his preaching is his stories of Jesus, and they want those stories “more and more,” he says.

The minister says he doesn’t really get into politics. “I’ve found that if you tell stories of Jesus, that’s all the politics you need . . . . Can you really see Jesus with a sword in his hand, or with a machine gun? I think most people can think for themselves and get the point.”

True, the church has drawn a line on some issues. Last fall, after taking up the issue of homosexuality, the church decided not to declare itself a welcoming and affirming church for gays, deciding it was sufficient to restate its acceptance of “everyone.”

Mr. Ivins says there’s a distinction to be made. “Welcoming and affirming suggests approval,” whereas, he says, acceptance doesn’t have to go that far. “I think our approach is more stringent because we’re not focusing on one group. We’re open to everyone from gays to cross dressers to Southerners.”

At his suggestion, the church started an Inquirers group two months ago for people thinking about joining. Since then it has signed on 10 new members and had 3 baptisms.

The baptisms weren’t exactly easy. The baptismal vessel hadn’t been used for years, and when members tried to fill it with water before the ceremony on Easter weekend, it leaked. Mr. Ivins had to baptize people in the shallow water face down rather than face up.

But it’s all been quite fun, says the pastor. “There are two things I like to do — to make people think and to help them laugh,” he says.

The Rev. Roy Medley, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches USA, will be the featured speaker at Mr. Ivins’ installation, at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the church at 75 North Main St., Providence. There will be a reception afterward in the Fellowship Hall.

rdujardi@projo.com