The regular worshipers had come on a Sunday morning to Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., as had hundreds of others, some driving and flying in from across the country.
They filled the tiny sanctuary and spilled into the back room of the church to hear Jimmy Carter, a former president of the United States, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and, at that moment in 2019, a Sunday school teacher with a lesson about being friendly to your neighbors.
“You just kind of reach out to them,” Mr. Carter told the congregation, imparting his belief in the untold power of kindness. “Take a boy to a ballgame or something like that. Nothing big. That’s what I think would make America a better country, make you a better person and a better Christian.”
The crowd listened intently, many having traveled long distances and woken up well before sunrise for the chance to be within arm’s reach of a former president who always seemed so eager to shake hands.
Plenty of politicians cast themselves as an Everyman, and Mr. Carter, who died on Sunday, was certainly not the only former White House resident to start a foundation or spend some of his time in retirement hanging around a university campus.
But in the four decades after he left the White House, Mr. Carter became known for how strikingly accessible he was. He greeted fellow passengers on commercial airline flights, and hammered away with other volunteers building homes for Habitat for Humanity.
He mowed the church lawn. He lived in a simple house in Plains, Ga., his hometown, that was worth about as much as one of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.
And in his final years, as Mr. Carter went through numerous health scares and recurring hospital visits, many people could relate to his stubborn fight to fend off the wrath of time, a universal inevitability that transcends partisan divides.
Those who knew Mr. Carter well and those who had only briefly interacted with him agreed that his homespun small-town persona belied how unique he was. They described a fierce intellect and an unceasing drive that kept him going as his body slowed. At the same time, many said, his sense of humility reflected his genuine nature.
“I’ve been with him when he’s with some of the most important people in the world and some of the least,” said Jonathan Reckford, the chief executive of Habitat for Humanity International, a nonprofit group that builds housing for needy families and has long been associated with Mr. Carter. “He’s always the same person.”
His status as the longest-lived former president meant that Americans younger than 40 knew him exclusively as an ex-president, his time in office relegated to chapters in history textbooks and the grumblings of grandparents about something to do with malaise. He long ago shifted into the role of a national elder, active on the global stage with the humanitarian work that came to define his legacy and occasionally leaping into the fray to opine on politics.
Former presidents have signed development deals with Netflix and socialized with billionaires. Like others, Mr. Carter amassed wealth, as a landowner and as an author, earning royalties from his books. But he declined paid speaking engagements and invitations to join corporate boards, moves that had enriched some of his contemporaries.
Instead, he wrote — publishing more than two dozen books, about politics and policy but also about woodworking, faith and aging. He kept busy with Sunday school, sometimes teaching as often as twice a month. He was also a fixture at Emory University and its main campus in Atlanta, where he based the Carter Center and routinely interacted with students.
Josephine Mac-Arthur, who studied human health at Emory, said she struck up a conversation with Mr. Carter about Ghana, her home country. He mentioned his work there with the Carter Center, observing elections, fighting preventable diseases and ramping up crop production.
“There’s a human side to him,” Ms. Mac-Arthur said. With most influential public figures, she said, “We can’t imagine them being like us, being ordinary or having regular or normal struggles. We were able to connect with him on different levels.”
Mr. Carter joined Emory’s faculty in 1982, the year after his term ended. He lectured and held a town hall gathering with first-year students every year for 37 years. After all that time, Emory officials said, Mr. Carter would joke that he had racked up the kind of accomplishments needed for tenure: He was a published author, he noted to university officials, and had taught students from every school of the university. Finally, in 2019, he got it.
“I’m very proud it really wasn’t honorary,” said Claire E. Sterk, Emory’s president at the time. “There was rigor in the process. I think it meant a lot to him. It meant a lot to us.”
William Dewey, then a political science student, recalled a gathering where he and a few other students had a chance to talk with Mr. Carter and ask questions. “It was, at first, a little quiet,” he said. “I think people were a little scared and intimidated, even though he is the least intimidating human being I’ve ever met. You would think that someone who had been one of the most powerful people on the planet would exude an aura of intimidation, but once he started talking, he was like my grandpa.”
One of the students, Mr. Dewey recalled, dominated the conversation and even spoke over Mr. Carter. “You’re really interrupting the president!” he remembered thinking. Mr. Carter simply nodded his head and answered the student’s questions. “He didn’t tell him off,” Mr. Dewey said. “He didn’t say anything.”
In 2017, The Washington Post declared in a headline that Mr. Carter was the “most affable living president” after a video spread on social media showing him on a flight to Atlanta from Washington, grinning and wearing a bolo tie, apparently shaking the hand of every passenger before takeoff.
Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, spent much of their time in Plains, a speck of a town surrounded by farmland about 150 miles south of Atlanta. The couple lived in a ranch house that is not unlike their neighbors’ homes, except for the high fence and the Secret Service guard station.
As other small towns nearby shriveled or welcomed fast-food chains, Plains froze into a living museum of its most famous son. Plains High School no longer has students; it is now a National Park Service site where exhibits detail how young Jimmy and Rosalynn’s relationship began there. And there is the train station that served as Mr. Carter’s campaign headquarters in 1976, and a short drive away, his childhood home, looking as it did when he was young.
Still, residents said that the Carters tried to carry themselves as just another family in town. Visitors to their house say that after passing through security, they would be welcomed by the Carters, who answered their own door. One story often passed around town is about the motorist who pulled up to Maranatha Baptist Church while Mr. Carter was mowing the lawn and asked if this is where Jimmy Carter went to church, failing to recognize that it was Mr. Carter himself who replied that it sure was.
He started teaching Sunday school after returning from Washington in the early 1980s, and over time, it grew into a production that required the help of virtually the entire congregation: showing up at 3 a.m. to direct cars, herding hundreds of people through security and into the church, and managing the well-oiled assembly line of photographs that nearly every visitor took with Mr. and Mrs. Carter.
The Rev. Tony Lowden, a former pastor at Maranatha, said he treasured, and often played, the message left on his phone with the familiar voice of Mr. Carter offering him the job in 2019. (Just before hanging up, the former president mentioned, “This is Jimmy Carter, by the way.”)
Maranatha was formed in 1977 by a group of worshipers from Plains Baptist Church who splintered off when that congregation voted to uphold a ban against allowing Black people to join. Mr. Lowden was the first African American to lead Maranatha.
He found himself in awe of Mr. Carter, with his impulse to want to help people and the wherewithal to do so — whether through a large-scale humanitarian effort or making sure a new member of the church was looked after.
“There’s certain things that drive people, and he was driven by his faith,” Mr. Lowden said.
When he joined the church, he asked Mr. Carter — who he often calls J.C. or 39, for his place in the order of presidents — to stay around for another 10 years to help him guide the church. Even after Mr. Carter’s death, Mr. Lowden believes that, in a different way, the former president will still guide the congregation.
“He’s a true servant leader,” Mr. Lowden said, adding that he took one of his greatest lessons from watching Mr. Carter’s persistence up to his final days. “He’s leaving nothing on the field.”
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