Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church

Rev. Jeri Katherine Warden Sipes, our pastor since July 2010, shares about her call to ministry and continuing to hear God’s voice and discern her call as she serve WMUMC.
 If you read the front cover of the April's Newsletter you’d have learned that our history as United Methodist is speckled with splits, merges and disunity. One of the issues that continues to split the church—not just the UMC—is the issue of the ordination of women. I grew up with an ordained United Methodist mother, so I never knew that some people had major objections to women clergy. One day when I was in middle school a girl in my class made a comment about the Bible forbidding women to teach and preach. This little girl even said women are to be silent in the church, and when I argued with her citing my mom as a living, breathing example of a woman called by God to preach and teach the little girl said, “Well, your mom is a sinner and breaking the law of God.” Angry, crying and confused I went home and asked my mom about this little girl’s claims. She read 1 Timothy 2:8-15 to me, and then we talked about women in the pulpit. I was only 11 or 12 years old, and I never imagined this issue of ordination of women would continue to be an issue that people confront me today. I still think and pray about my calling as a woman clergy. Does God call women to lead churches? Does God call women to preach and teach? Yes, is my emphatic answer. Absolutely yes!  And this is my brief story of why I believe God has called me and calls many women and men to preach and teach. As Wesleyans we not only draw upon our experience to affirm our beliefs, doctrine and theology but we engage the Wesleyan Quadrilateral which also draws upon Scripture, tradition and reason. This month my witness moment is my call narrative, based solely on my experience of hearing God call and me responding, “Here, am I, Lord.” Next month maybe I’ll look at this same subject though the lens of Scripture. 
 
When I was 5, 18, and 21 I distinctly remember sitting in church feeling and hearing God’s voice speak to my heart. He said, “This is where I want you. This is home.” I heard God over and over speaking to me. One day when I was a junior in college I was running with my dad, talking about post-college plans and I mentioned this call to him. There were a million of other things that I could do and wanted to do, but I kept hearing God’s voice calling me to vocational ministry. It is very hard to ignore God, but I had tried for a long time. My dad simply said, “Look into it.” So, I began to look into different seminaries and the more I looked into seminary the more peace and excitement I felt in my heart. In seminary I remember reading theologian and pastor, Howard Thurman, for the first time. He wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” The Dean of the BU chapel, Robert Allan Hill, reiterated this point at my first matriculation Sunday in September 2007. He asked, “Where is your passion for living? Where does your deepest passion meet the world’s greatest needs?” God enlivens me and God’s church makes me come alive; church is home. As an army child I traveled all over the world, but there are church people everywhere. The church is not one particular place, but the church is people, and anywhere I have gone I have found home among church. I have a deep passion for God’s holy church, and spreading the love of God that I came to know through church. I want our world that is so desperate for good news to know and experience the Good News of Christ and God who continues to reach out to us and wants us to be in relationship with us in this world.
 
I know God has a plan for my life, and His plan is to serve Him and others through the church. I sing with the psalmist in Psalm 139, “For it was you who formed me inward and outward; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” I believe I have been made in the image of God and called into ministry even as I was being formed in my mother’s womb. I’ll close with one more story of my earliest call into the life I am living now. In 1984 the General Conference of the United Methodist Church was meeting in Lubbock, Texas. The General Conference is a global gathering of United Methodists that meets every four years. My mom and dad, two ordained United Methodist pastors, were in Lubbock for the conference. On the last day of the conference a bishop from Africa approached my mother, laid his hands on her stomach, flipped her a silver dollar and said, “That child is going to be a minister. When she hears God call, give her that silver dollar.” My parents wrote a note to me that day and put the silver dollar in an envelope to give to me when and if I went into the ministry. In July 2007, only a month before I moved to Boston to go to seminary, my parents sat me down and told me that story. “For it was you, O God, who formed me and knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Pastor Sipes and Mother (Pastor Patricia Warden) Killingsworth Gala 2012