CityView Magazine

14 | March/April • 2014 I was 10 or 11-years-old when I first saw an ordained female minister. Her name was Reverend Pansie Evers. She was the pastor of the small Presbyterian church where my uncle, aunt and cousins had been members of for decades. I watched with great interest as she led my cousin and her fiancé through their wedding rehearsal and then through the ceremony itself. Somewhere deep inside, a part of me remembered and took note. Raised in a small town, I was steeped in the life of Tabor City Baptist Church. From my earliest years, I breathed in the stories of Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon, brave women who gave their lives to missions at home and abroad as full-time servants of Jesus Christ. Between Sun- day School, morning and evening worship each Sunday, Vacation Bible School and choir, it seemed that every time the doors were open…I was at church. Small wonder, then, that I absorbed the idea that I could and indeed should lis- ten hard for God's call upon my life and then answer it… even if it led into unconventional or uncomfortable paths. Imagine my surprise when my announcement that God was calling me to be a Southern Baptist minister met with silence and dismay rather than delight! Despite the fact that my church was one of the first in North Carolina to ordain women as deacons, ordaining a woman to pastoral ministry was a bridge too far for many. So, as a college stu- dent, I joined a Baptist church that took a different view. In 1992, while attending Duke Divinity School, I was or- dained at University Baptist Church in Chapel Hill where I served as College Minister. God was still in the business of surprising me and the Spirit later led me to become United Methodist. I was ordained an elder in 1999. Find- ing my home amongst the spiritual descendants of John Wesley, I have served congregations in Johnston County, Hope Mills and Fayetteville, and am presently "on loan" by permission of Bishop Hope Morgan Ward to First Pres- byterian Church in downtown Fayetteville. By rEvErEnd dr. dOnna FOwLEr-MarChanT faith Faith A WOMAN OF

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