The Reverend Doctor James Donald Ballard is a second generation preacher and native of High Point, North Carolina. Reverend Ballard was called to ministry in 1955 and has been in ministry for sixty-seven years. He received his ministerial training at Shaw University and Duke University Divinity School where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Divinity Degree, respectively. He was the salutatorian of his graduating class at Shaw and one of the first two African-Americans to enter and graduate from Duke. Shaw University conferred upon him the honorary Doctor of Divinity Degree in 1978.

Doctor Ballard has served on several boards and councils, including the General Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. Inc., the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the Lott Carey Foreign Missionary Convention. Since retiring from the active pastorate in 2004, Doctor Ballard has served as interim pastor of twelve different congregations. 

In 1965, Pastor Ballard led the First Institutional Baptist Church of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to merge with the West End Baptist Church of the same city to form the United Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church where he served as senior pastor for forty-five years, before retiring in 2004.

In March 2012, Doctor Ballard published his first book, They, Two, Became One: The Life of a Pastor, the Birth of a Church. Doctor Ballard has been happily married to Eleanor Pearl Adams Ballard of Apex, North Carolina for sixty-four years, and the two of them have one son, Derek Durrell Ballard; a daughter-in-law, Maria Antoinette; and four granddaughters, Carmen Pearl, Sara Camille, Madison Rose, and Schuyler Marie.