Q102, Texas’s Best Rock. How may I direct your call?”
Getting up each morning at 6 a.m. to answer phones for a rock ‘n’ roll radio station was not my idea of using my seminary degree. Every minute seemed like an hour. Every day like a year. Each week an eternity.
Just a few weeks earlier I was enjoying a fruitful and satisfying ministry on staff at a large church in southern California. I often marveled at how God crafted my circumstances to land that opportunity right after graduation from seminary. Why me? I had asked God with gratefulness.
Yet after three years there, I was forced to leave the church due to a strained relationship, and I was answering phones for Texas’s Best Rock. Now I asked the same question—Why me?—but feeling defeated and broken.
Exit earthquake
As a single woman, I’d always put a large portion of my energies into my profession—prior to seminary a career in the YMCA and then a church ministry. But some undercover enemies had hidden themselves in the shadows of my heart. It was this “exit-from-ministry earthquake” that shook them loose and pushed them to the surface.
I had a deep desire to be wanted and needed. When hired to what I thought was a great ministry position, I felt better about myself. If I didn’t have a spouse, I reasoned, at least I was wanted and accepted by a church. When I entered ministry, my prayer was to please God and not people, but I was unaware of my need for approval, especially from important people.
Suddenly, when forced to leave that position, I discovered my work was more than just a job; it was my value, my worth, my significance, my everything. How quickly the calls requesting me to speak stopped coming. Just weeks before I was a somebody. As a telephone operator for Q102, I was a nobody.
After eight months of temporary work, I accepted a position as a property manager and chaplain for a real-estate management business in northern California. I felt the position came from God, yet wondered how it fit my gifts. True to my initial concerns, the position didn’t fit me. After several months of forcing myself to go to work, there was nothing I liked about it except 5 o’clock.
Why had God led me here? How could I have moved halfway across the country again for this? I knew I needed help.
Little missionary
Confused, I called a counselor in town. Instead of validating my victim role, this woman pointed out my destructive thinking. My attitude of discontentment, that “I deserved better,” was no longer justified.
Transformation began when I heard the counselor’s words in the core of my heart. She was the truth-teller I needed. In his grace God had led me to Chico, California, (in Spanish, Chico means “little”) to find him to be all I need.
If my ministry is gone tomorrow, I will still be Nancy, daughter of the King.
As I learned to be content in another misfit job, God surprised me, prompting the owner to invite me to quit the business and to start a ministry to women in the area. With pay! Several months later I was working out of my home, reaching out to women in the city and at my small church as a missionary. The ministry flourished, although not in terms of notoriety, numbers, or financial resources. The ministry flourished because I learned a new way of ministry— ministering in the name of Jesus rather than the name of Nancy.
As I died to my need to be needed, I began to serve those around me. I had been blinded to the women hungry for Christ and yearning to connect with each other. I couldn’t see them at first, because in my heart, I was looking for the “big ministry.” I was looking for the nameplate and title, while God was looking for a foot washer. I was looking to be paid my worth, while God was looking to meet my needs day by day. I was demanding God to get me out of little Chico, while God wanted to perform a heart change in me.
The focus of my energy for ministry changed when I saw what Jesus saw, and willingly went, with joy, where he wanted me to go.
Entrance into blessing
My mindset is quite different than it was eight years ago. I love my work with a new ministry in the Midwest and consider serving in a church a privilege, but if that were all gone tomorrow, I would still be Nancy, daughter of the King.
I continue to guard against the temptation to attach my worth to my work. In California, I wasn’t even aware of my problem, so now I regularly ask God to reveal to me what I do not see and to give me the grace to change.
I’ve noticed that the undercover enemies like to creep back into the shadows of my soul. These are the signals that warn me of their presence:
- When people’s opinions start mattering to me more than God’s,
- When I start listening to and believing my desires to be important in the ministry world,
- When I become so busy that I fail to have a balanced life,
- When my quiet times become ritual.
My brief exit from ministry was my entrance into enormous blessing. I’m learning Jesus Christ is the only one who deserves the tight grip of my hand. The joy is seeing God at work in women, as I simply go where he asks and do what he says.
Nancy Barton is director of women’s ministries at Wheaton Bible Church in Wheaton, Illinois.
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
