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“A pharmacist and a minister” may sound like the start of a bad joke, not necessarily an intuitive vocational pairing. But to Reverend Dr. Leonard Edloe, long-time community pharmacist and pastor of New Hope Fellowship in rural Hartfield, Virginia, the two go hand-in-hand.
For Dr. Edloe, both vocations are about fostering the spiritual and physical health of his communities–predominantely Black communities historically underserved by the American healthcare system.
“I just love serving people,” Dr. Edloe said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “I believe in making life better for people.”
Dr. Edloe has been serving people as a minister for over twenty-five years, and as a pharmacist for over fifty.
Pharmacy runs in Dr. Edloe’s family. His late father Dr. Leonard Lacy Edloe, also a pharmacist, opened his own business, Edloe’s Professional Pharmacies, in 1945. A Black-owned business in segregated Richmond, the pharmacy became a bedrock of the community.
When Dr. Edloe’s father opened his pharmacy, Black people were even less proportionately represented in the healthcare profession than they are today, and healthcare discrimination against Black patients was even more blatant. From pharmacies to hospitals, every realm of healthcare was segregated, with Black patients routinely subjected to substandard care and worse health outcomes.
Inspired by his father, Dr. Edloe wanted to be a pharmacist in the third grade. He attended his father’s alma mater, Howard University College of Pharmacy. During his first year, he started preaching. His first sermon was about loving your neighbor and yourself, a message he sought to direct specifically toward Black communities.
Once Dr. Edloe graduated pharmacy school in 1970, he joined his father’s pharmacy. After his father’s passing, he took over the family business, eventually expanding it to four locations across Richmond.
Through his work in the community, Dr. Edloe made a name for himself in state pharmaceutical circles. In 2022, he became the first Black pharmacist to serve as president of the Virginia Pharmacy Association, an organization that once rejected his father from membership because of the color of his skin.
Alongside his burgeoning pharmacy career, Dr. Edloe continued to preach. In 1997, he started preaching at a nearby church, eventually becoming involved in its prison, HIV, and nursing home ministries.
His ministry never felt totally separate from his work as a pharmacist. Members of the community told Dr. Edloe that he was doing a sort of ministry as he practiced pharmacy. One pastor even named Dr. Edloe’s pharmacy “Edloe’s Baptist Church.”
Dr. Edloe closed the family pharmacy in 2012, in part to focus his efforts as the pastor of New Hope when the congregation was in its infancy.
But he has never stopped practicing medicine. To this day, he works part-time at Daily Planet Health Services, maintaining his career focus on underserved communities by providing health care for people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity.
Especially in this later stage of his career, Dr. Edloe seeks to empower the next generation of Black healthcare professionals and clergy. He has found a mentee in Reverend Dr. Duran Williams, known to many as “Dr. Duran,” a fellow pharmacist and ordained minister.
Dr. Duran decided to pursue a career in pharmacy in part to increase Black representation in the field of pharmacology. He wants to be a healthcare provider that his communities can trust.
“We’re breaking down the stigmas and barriers that have existed in the past, where people were afraid of doctors,” Dr. Duran told the Daily Yonder in an interview.
Dr. Duran was referring to the ongoing history of racialized medical trauma in the white-dominated health care system, which has fostered distrust among many Black Americans.
He cited the 1932 Tuskegee experiment as one of far too many examples of this trauma. Conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, the 40-year-long experiment involved 600 Black sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama: a group with untreated syphilis and a control group without. Researchers deceived the men about the nature and length of the study and deprived them of the widely available cure. Over 100 died as a result.
Racialized medical trauma persists in the American healthcare system to this day – Black people continually report mistreatment, discrimination, and abuse when seeking medical care.
In the midst of that trauma, Dr. Duran is working to make healthcare feel safe and accessible for people.
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He discussed his holistic approach to healthcare on an episode of “Dr. Duran’s Pharmacy Podcast” – a podcast he started to increase access to healthcare information – featuring Dr. Edloe. For Dr. Edloe, getting behind the mic harkened back to his days as a radio talk show host, where he discussed topics related to health, politics, and religion.
In the episode, the duo shared a desire for pharmacists to be viewed as a resource that people can use to better understand their health.
“It’s not just about giving drugs to people,” Dr. Duran said on air. It’s about helping them understand what they’re taking and why they’re taking it.
The pair also agreed that serving patients should not be a sterile transaction. Sometimes, they’re serving multiple generations of patients in the same family, which requires maintaining long-term relationships with patients.
For as long as structural barriers have existed for Black Americans, Black healthcare professionals like Dr. Duran, Dr. Edloe, and his father have worked against them.
So too have Black churches. Dr. Edloe wrote about the historical role of rural Black churches in his 2023 book Restoring the Glory: Breathing New Life into the Rural Black Church.
He wrote the book after studying theology under Katie Geneva Cannon, the first Black woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and a pioneer of Black womanist theology, an approach to Christian social ethics that centers the perspectives of Black women.
In the book, Dr. Edloe discusses the emergence of the rural Black church during the mass enslavement of Black people in the American South. Enslavers tried to use Christianity as a tool of oppression; in resistance, many Black churches reclaimed the religion, using it to protect and uplift their communities.
“In many instances, the [church] building was located on the land of the former plantation,” Dr. Edloe writes.
“It was in this rural space where many of the formerly enslaved worked that the rural Black church became an institution unto itself.” For many communities, Dr. Edloe writes, the rural Black church was “the only institution that Black people controlled.”
Dr. Edloe has roots in the rural Black church himself. Growing up, his family returned to his mother’s childhood church each summer during Homecoming, a tradition for parishioners who moved away from the church to return and reunite. Homecomings gained prominence in many Southern rural Black churches after the Great Migration of the 20th century, when millions of Black Americans moved to urban centers in the North and West, fleeing racial violence in the rural South.
In the face of oppression and diaspora, rural Black churches have endured as sites of community healing and empowerment.
Dr. Edloe became a pastor at New Hope Fellowship in 2010, which started as a congregation with a pastor and a small community of friends and families, but no building.
The group worshiped primarily in a Hampton Inn conference room for the first two years of the church’s existence. In 2013, they moved into the building they now call home, a red-brick chapel with a little white steeple along a county road in Hartfield.
A tight-knit group since its earliest days, New Hope is led by the community. Distinct from the hierarchical structure of many churches – where power is reserved for the hands of an elite few clergy at the top – Dr. Edloe distributes power in the hands of his congregation.
This decentralized approach is a hallmark of rural Black churches. According to Dr. Edloe’s book, many rural Black churches have “numerous centers of power.” This means that it’s not just the pastor who holds power; it’s also the deacons and trustees, the treasurers and church administrators, the ushers and the choir.
Photo: New Hope Fellowship Sanctuary. [Photo by Rev. Dr. Leonard Edloe]
Everyone has different gifts to share – for Dr. Edloe, it’s just a matter of identifying them. In his words, it’s about “letting people know that they can just bloom and be what God wants them to be.”
Dr. Edloe takes pride in empowering congregants to use their gifts and step into leadership roles, especially people who have not been encouraged to do so in the past. This empowerment involves dismantling patriarchy from church spaces.
“It’s about empowering people who have been told for so long, ‘you can’t do anything,’” Dr. Edloe said.
Edloe has ordained seven deacons at his church, five of which are women.
One of those deacons is Gloria Burnett. Burnett loves being a deacon, but she hates the word itself – “servant” feels more accurate to her understanding of the role.
“Being a deacon is really about serving the community,” Burnett said.
At New Hope, deacons are assigned to different families within the church. They check in on those families, provide support when needed, and ensure that there is unity between the family, the rest of the congregation, and the pastor.
A parishioner of Dr. Edloe’s for 28 years, Burnett describes Dr. Edloe as a pastor who promotes leadership and advocates for everyone in his congregation equally.
“He is for everybody in the church,” Burnett said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “If there is a need, he helps.”
Blending his pharmaceutical and ministerial expertise, Dr. Edloe has made New Hope a place where congregants can receive information and resources about health and wellness.
During services, he incorporates health education in his sermons, sometimes displaying facts and figures from national health organizations on the church projector. In the church’s kitchen, Dr. Edloe offers information about nutrition and healthy food options. Outside the church, congregants have cultivated a vegetable garden and gathered together to play volleyball, croquet, and baseball.
The effect has been profound. According to Dr. Duran, who has preached at New Hope several times over the past few years, congregants not only had an understanding of health and wellness, but they also had an understanding of the resources available to them.
“[Dr. Edloe] really has a heart and an interest in rural church and the health of the communities that rural churches serve,” Dr. Duran said.
Through the efforts of church leaders committed to strengthening the health of their communities, New Hope is a beacon of healthcare information in rural Virginia.
Beacons like this are necessary to overcome the significant barriers to healthcare that exist for people in rural communities.
Gloria Burnett knows these barriers well, having worked as a registered nurse in rural hospitals for even longer than she has served New Hope as a deacon.
Early in her nursing career, Burnett worked at Dixie Hospital – later renamed Hampton General Hospital before it closed in 2002 – where three Black nurses made history in 1963 for taking a stand against the hospital’s segregationist policies by sitting in the hospital’s whites-only cafeteria instead of the cramped basement cafeteria designated for Black employees.
Burnett faced racism herself throughout her nursing career, with some patients refusing care from her based on the color of her skin.
She spent the majority of her career – nearly four decades – at Rappahannock General Hospital, a rural hospital in Lancaster County, Virginia, about a twenty minute drive from New Hope.
Burnett said many patients at the hospital did not have access to the resources they needed.
“When you’re living in a rural area, you don’t have a lot of resources, [especially] for the elderly,” Burnett explained.
To mitigate this need, Burnett and other hospital staff went beyond the scope of their regular nursing duties and provided case management services for patients.
Their job, said Burnett, was “helping people to navigate the system as far as resources that are available in rural areas.”
Coordinating with patients, their families, their primary care physicians, and third-party programs, Burnett and hospital staff made sure that patients were getting connected to the resources they needed for long-term health and wellbeing, not just quick fixes.
For homeless patients, this meant finding safe and affordable housing. For patients with limited access to transportation, this meant driving to their homes to check on them. For uninsured patients, this meant helping them fill out paperwork for Medicaid.
“We had to basically juggle and figure out what the patient needed, and put ourselves in their position and figure out what we could do to accommodate their needs,” said Burnett.
Much of the supportive infrastructure once available to patients at Rappahannock General Hospital has been gutted in recent decades, Burnett said, in large part due to federal funding cuts and company buyouts.
Even Burnett’s role was eliminated last year, a result of company “streamlining” of their case management services.
Now, Burnett works at Northern Neck Middlesex Free Health Clinic, just down the road from her former employer. The clinic provides free medical care, dental care, and case management services to pretty much anyone who walks through the door. Burnett says the hospital sees about twenty-five patients a day, many of whom are homeless.
As long as they meet the low-income requirements, Burnett said, “nobody’s turned away at the free health clinic.”
While resources like this are providing some relief to rural patients, they are too far and few between to bridge the access gap.
Dr. Duran saw how deep this access gap is upon his visits to New Hope and through his conversations with Dr. Edloe.
“A lot of times those individuals have to drive 30 and 40 miles just to get to a doctor’s appointment or get to a hospital,” Dr. Duran said.
Not just that – many folks in rural areas do not have access to high-speed internet in their homes or transportation to libraries where they can access the internet, an increasingly necessary resource to access information about public health and seek medical care.
“There’s a need to bring our professional skills and abilities to [rural] areas,” Dr. Duran said. “Or build things that are closer to them.”
Beyond the barriers to physically access healthcare are the barriers to pay for it. Virginians living in rural areas are more likely to rely on Medicaid for health coverage overall. And despite making up 18% of Virginia’s total population, Black Virginians make up 30% of the state’s Medicaid population. Thus, for Black Virginians living in rural areas, Medicaid is a particularly crucial resource.
Dr. Duran, Burnett, and Dr. Edloe have worked with many patients and congregants with Medicaid. In light of the federal government’s move to slash Medicaid this past July, they worry about the people who will lose coverage.
“I fear for them,” said Burnett. “I feel bad about the whole system, how it’s working, what they’re cutting, because they don’t realize a lot of patients depend on that Medicaid for personal care services and doctor’s office visits.”
“I think it’s really going to really create challenges for people,” said Dr. Duran.
With dwindling help from the government, Dr. Edloe, Dr. Duran, and Burnett remain committed to improving access to healthcare in their communities.
For Dr. Edloe, it’s all about caring for people. “I’ve seen a whole lot of pharmacists that don’t care for people. I’ve seen preachers that don’t care for people. If you find somebody that cares, they can do both,” Dr. Edloe said.
In Burnett’s words, “it’s all about love, really.”
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by Betsy Froiland, The Daily Yonder
September 25, 2025
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