Stephanie Suggs
Deaconess and Missionary
I was commissioned as a Deaconess in 2002, so I’ve been doing this work for almost 12 years now. I wish I had done a better job of capturing my calling story as I was living it! I never thought it would be so difficult to recall the details, and the intense feelings, of getting that call from God to do community work. In twelve short years, I’ve worked with five organizations as an employee and countless others as a volunteer; I’ve supervised 45 employees, managed about 1,200 clients and worked with 70,000 (give or take a few) volunteers; I’ve written grants, created newsletters, rebuilt accounting systems, created new programming, managed two different housing repair programs and a meals on wheels program, did case management for housing repair, meals on wheels and disaster long-term recovery, led art journaling workshops and trained therapy horses in three different locations: Atlanta, GA; San Bruno, CA; and now Espanola, NM.
What I do remember about that initial call (because, let’s be honest, I’m still being called—it’s an ever-changing, always in-process thing) is that there was no major or single extraordinary “conversion” moment for me. I grew up as a United Methodist in a church just outside of Atlanta with strong music and youth ministries, and history tied to missionaries, home missionaries and Deaconesses. In fact, after I was commissioned, I met a retired Deaconess who had worked at my home church and was present at my baptism as a baby.
My personal movement toward doing the work that I do was slow and full of small “a-ha” moments. When I was nine years old, I announced to my family that I wanted to be a pediatric missionary when I grew up. It was the early eighties, and I was heavily influenced by the images being broadcast from Ethiopia of the famine happening there. I remember convincing my friends that pretending to be missionaries behind the Berlin Wall or in South Africa would be so much more fun than playing house. I remember having to explain them what “apartheid” meant. I also remember my family trying not laugh at me when I prayed at dinner time because my pleas to God for the homeless, the sick, and the poor made them uncomfortable.
By the time I reached high school, it was clear that I would never be very good at math. I very nearly flunked out of Geometry, Chemistry and Physics. So much for that dream of being a pediatrician. Despite my dyslexia, I was very good at English and Literature, and I loved to write, so that’s what I stuck with. At some point in high school, I began dreaming of becoming a writer and I eventually graduated from college with a BA in English Literature/Creative Writing with a concentration in Religion.
It was my religion classes that brought me back around to doing some kind of community work. My senior year I took a class called “The Prophetic Tradition.” We studied the Old Testament prophets, the writer of Mark as a prophet, and modern day prophets such as Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, Myles Horton, and Gordon Cosby. During our Spring Break that semester, our class took a trip to Washington, DC, where we visited a Catholic Work House, the Sojourners Community, and the Church of the Savior. We also had the opportunity to meet and speak with Gordon Cosby.
Less than a year after graduating from college, I landed my first job in non-profit as the Development Director at small, grassroots, popular education organization called Project South: Institution for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. As you can probably imagine by the name, my first job in non-profit was trial by fire for a middle-class, southern, Christian, white woman – and I loved every minute of it. The best way I can describe my time at Project South is that I only worked there for two years, but it took me ten years to process the experience.
While I was working at Project South, I attempted to make a place for myself as an adult in the church where I grew up (Tucker First United Methodist). Members who had known me as a child and youth were gracious, and tried to make space for me—and I am so thankful for that—but I had a hard time reconciling my “Sunday” life in a white, middle-to-upper class, conservative suburban community with my “weekday” life in the heart of poor, urban Atlanta. I felt like I was living two lives – by day I was writing grants and newsletter articles about campaign finance reform, the prison industrial complex, the continuing fight for Civil Rights, and TANF reform; and then one evening a week and on the weekends, I was leading the Young Singles Ministry.
My mother encouraged me to be a part of her UMW group, and it turned out that they changed my life, quite by accident. One night at a group meeting, a woman from the leadership team walked in and dropped a thick yellow envelope on the coffee table. As it happens, I was sitting on the floor at the other end of that coffee table, and as she said, “GBGM sent us another packet of brochures, if anyone is interested,” a brochure on the Deaconess program slid out of the envelope and landed in my lap.
Check out the McCurdy School Website here.
