Pastor Renita Lamkin greets one of her church members Oct. 26 after the service at St. John AME Church in St. Charles, Mo. She was shot with a rubber bullet while standing with protesters in Ferguson, Mo., and it cemented her in the struggle for racial equality.

The first time the public heard the name Renita Lamkin in the same sentence as Ferguson was probably the day she was shot.

In early August, four days after Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, Lamkin, a pastor, stood with Ferguson protesters, attempting to mediate. Police had warned the crowd to disperse and in an effort to buy a little time, Lamkin shouted, “They’re leaving!”

“That’s when I felt a pop in the stomach,” Lamkin says now of the rubber pellet that hit her. The pellet left a ghastly wound — large, deep and purplish — and created a social media frenzy.

Tweet after tweet showed Lamkin, 44, with short, light-brown hair and a wide smile. She wore a T-shirt with an image of a cross that she lifted up just slightly to show off the ugly bruise. In the coming days, critics said police had already managed to shoot a white Christian lady.

Lamkin says she didn’t really have a plan when she ventured out to Ferguson but that “the whole being shot thing was probably the best thing that could have happened.” The injury had cemented Lamkin in the struggle for racial equality.

“They say, ‘You took a bullet for us.’ I have no sense of taking a bullet for someone. My sense is that I’m in the struggle. I’m in it. We’re in this together, and I was playing my role,” Lamkin says.

Fast forward nearly three months and Lamkin continues to deliver the same message of defiance as pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Charles. The AME denomination is a religious movement born out of the resistance to slavery with about 2.5 million members, most of them African-American.

“We can boldly resist those who try to silence us. We can and should be defiant,” Lamkin told her congregation on a recent Sunday at St. John AME Church. “There will always be those who discount the voice of the poor.” But “we don’t have to accept the conditions of this world.”

Although Lamkin is mother to two African-American children, her role as a white leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church is unusual.

“She’s a rare breed of person to be both white and female in an overwhelming black denomination where the ministry is overwhelming male,” said Michael Joseph Brown, academic dean at Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio. Brown said Lamkin, who graduated from Payne in 2014, was the only white person in her graduating class.

Dennis Dickerson, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who taught Lamkin, says the “social protest and social insurgency” ethos that’s “baked into the church’s DNA” clearly appealed to her.

While the church’s philosophy informs her work in Ferguson, Lamkin acknowledges the experiences her children had growing up in St. Louis also influence her decision to continue to be actively engaged in the protests.

“My kids would be suspended for things that other kids would just have a detention for,” Lamkin says when describing the treatment of African-Americans in schools.