Reverend Diane Mosby, A Call to the Ministry
Interview by Rebekah L. Pierce

There are very few people you will meet in your lifetime that leave you breathless and more in love with God then when you first walked into their presence. Rev. Diane Mosby is the Church Business Administrator at St. Peter Baptist Church in Glen Allen, VA. This woman of God has a story that is powerful and inspiring. How did a woman survive abuse as a child, uterine cancer, and her fear of the unknown to become the woman God meant for her to be? Read her story to find out. 

Tell me about yourself

I grew up in Hanover County. I graduated from Patrick Henry High School in 1975.  My childhood was very volatile. My stepfather was very abusive. However, one of the things that I always felt deep in my spirit was that God would remove me from that and give me a life where I would be able to raise my children not to be in fear of being abused. He did. I married my high school sweetheart. We married early, had three children, and now 3 grandchildren.  This past June we celebrated our 30^th wedding anniversary; I am very thankful for that.

How did you find your purpose?

I went through a process of dealing with coming through the abuse, of trying to determine who I was as a woman, finding who I am and what God had for me to do. There was a lot of wrestle and uncertainties, but I always knew that God had a calling on my life; I just didn’t know what it was. The second year we were married, we moved to the Glen Allen area and I joined St. Peter Baptist Church. I started working in different ministries in the church not really knowing where I fit or what I needed to do. I just knew that I had a work to do.

So, I kept working, and God kept opening doors. I was part of the choir and part of the finance ministry and different ministry organizations helping wherever I could. In 1988-89, God put it in my spirit that we needed to have a ministry developed for youth who were out of school for the summer and did not have anything to do. I talked with my pastor, worked with a committee of persons here in the church, and we developed the first Summer Youth Ministry. It is a ministry that operates during the summer months for 8 weeks, Mon-Fri from 7:30am-5pm for youth 12-15 years old. The county social programs stop at age 12 and so there’s nothing for our teens between the ages of 12-15 to do for the entire summer. It’s now in its 15^th year.

Although I am not chairing it any more, I feel that that experience was a calling in my spirit. I also believe it was the first area of my life where I felt God speaking and defining my purpose.

After that ministry, I thought I was taking a break, but God said no. So, I developed a Transitional Ministry, which caters to our young adults who are away from home. It allows us to keep a link with them while they are away in college, or the military, or incarcerated. We send packages each month with tapes of the services, bulletins, community outreach, and announcements of job openings coming up for the summer so that they can get a head start on looking at what they want to do when they come back home. It also gives them a connectedness with their church while they are away to let them know that just because we don’t see you, it’s not that we are not thinking about you.

I thought that was it. But God said no again, “I want you to go deeper.” So, I talked with my pastor and shared with him that I really felt there was a calling on my life to go deeper in bible study and to understand the Word. So, he suggested that I look into the Evan Smith Program at Virginia Union University (VUU), which is a leadership program. So, I entered the program and graduated in May 2001.

However, it was in the last year of the program that I accepted my call to ministry. In fact, I preached my initial sermon in April 2001. From there, I knew that God wanted me to move on; I just didn’t know how, when or where. But I knew that Evan Smith was not the end because as I journeyed through this period of my life, I gained a truer and deeper understanding that obedience is better than sacrifice.

How did your family feel about your call to ministry?

It was really a wonderful experience because I think my family knew before I acknowledged it. I ran for years and that comes back to the area of when I was just working in different ministries in the church and I would get involved in this and get this up and going and then I’d move to something else. I was really running from my calling. I just felt being busy was enough; as long as I was working in the church, being active and helpful in the ministries, that was basically all I needed to do. So, when I accepted my calling, I started to talk to my family and talk to my pastor about it. It wasn’t a surprise to them. I think they were waiting for me to say, “Okay God! You have my attention. I’ll do this.” Their support was very uplifting, very warm and inspiring. I have been just blessed with tremendous support from my family: my children, my husband, and my mother. They have all been just wonderful, supporting me with the endeavor of not just being called to ministry, but even with my endeavor to continue my education.

So how did you then get into Seminary?

When I left Evan Smith, God placed in my spirit that I needed to go to Seminary. I said, “Okay God, how does that work because that’s a Master’s program and I don’t have an undergraduate degree.” But the Lord said, “You need to go to Seminary.” So, I went to Dean John Kinney at VUU, School of Theology, and I’ll never forget the day I sat in his office. I looked across the desk at him, and I said, “Dean Kinney, I am here because God sent me and I am supposed to be in Seminary.”

At that time, I was so naïve. I didn’t know there was a non-traditional hours program and a day program. I just knew I was supposed to go to Seminary. In going to talk to him, I also did not know that VUU had a program where they allowed a certain percentage of the enrolled class to come in without an undergrad degree. You have to go through a process of application with the school, the admissions board and the Department of Education as well as submit your work, church experience and any college credits and educational endeavors that you have achieved to determine whether or not they equal a bachelor’s degree. If everything was accepted by the Board of Education, they allowed you to come into the Master’s program.

I went through the process and was accepted into the School of Theology in their Master’s program. It was just an awesome experience.  First of all not knowing that the program was even available, and then just watching the hand of God move and open doors that man said should not be open. You see, when I started talking about going to school, people told me I couldn’t go to school. They said, “You don’t have an undergrad degree.” ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that,’ but God said yes. And I was foolish enough to believe that if God said it would happen, it would.

I graduated from Seminary in May 2004. I was the first graduate of the school coming in through the Special Admissions Program to graduate Summa Cum Laude and Valedictorian. It was truly God!

During this time, you were working for Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). So how did you manage to go to school, preach, and work full-time?

It wasn’t easy. It was a sacrifice. I had to juggle my family, my job, my church commitments and school, but God continued to bless me in spite of myself.  When I wanted to give up, He would send me the encouragement I needed to press on. When I was tired and felt I could not go on, the support system He put in place would renew my strength. In that process of going through Seminary, God was speaking to me and sharing with me that when I graduated school, I would no longer work for VDOT. I would question God and say to him, “I have 23 years. Where am I going?” I had worked for VDOT for 15 years and State government for 23 years in total. But God kept placing it in my spirit; “you’re not going to be at VDOT when you finish school.” Still, I just kind of dismissed it.

So, when I graduated in May, there was a pressure. I knew that I was not in the right place. It was such a tug and a wrestle in my spirit about leaving my job. I had advanced and was still advancing and looking forward to a prosperous career. In fact, I had just three years prior to leaving, accepted a management position and I was working as a manager in the Transportation and Planning section. I really did not have any intentions of going anywhere. But God said there was a work for me to do in the Church full-time; I just didn’t know what or where.

I truly felt that everything God had allowed me to learn and experience through working from the business administration perspective was what the Church needed. So, stepping out on faith in September of last year, I resigned my job and waited on God. I had no idea what, when, where or how I would end up. I just knew God had it. It was a scary move to go from a steady paycheck on the 1st and 15th and having benefits to nothing, or so I thought.

Let me tell you about the day I really wrestled with leaving my job. I was always raised to believe that you do not make a decision without information. You make an informed decision. So, I remember [going] down to the HR department and getting a lot of my paperwork together, then calling the Virginia Retirement System and getting my retirement information. I was going to try to figure out a way to retire.

So, I went home that evening with my little papers and I sat at my kitchen table and pulled out my little calculator, and I was sitting there with my papers spread out, and I said, "God you got to show me how this is going to work." At that moment, a wind came through my room and blew off every piece of paper that I had on that table onto the floor. At that moment, God spoke to me and said, “Who are trusting? What you can see that man says you have on that piece of paper or what I promised you in the kingdom of God?” It was at that point that I knew that I had to leave my job. The next day, I went in and turned in my resignation. I just prayed that whatever it was God wanted me to be, or do, that He would help me to see.

Again, I was to take from my experience in management with State government and my Seminary training and apply it to church business administration. God wanted me to pull the two experiences together and use them to help the Church. I just didn’t know where. I had applied for a few positions that were open around the City, but the whole time God was saying to me, “you are to be at St. Peter.” The problem was that St. Peter didn’t have a position. I was like, "Okay God! How’s that going to work? They don’t even have a position. They aren’t even looking at a position.”

Well, during the budget process last year, the church decided to approve and advertise for two positions. One was for a part-time youth minister and the other was for a Church Business Administrator. They approved the position in December. I marveled as I watched God unfold His plan. I applied in January, and on March 7, 2005, I started at St. Peter Baptist Church as the first full-time Church Business Administrator. Only God can do you like that.

What was the hardest thing for you to deal with during this process?

From September to March (6 months), God and I wrestled because part of my struggle was my control. I have always been a person that planned, got the facts, and once I had the best information available, I made my decision and mapped things out, but God said wait. He said, "Are you walking by faith or walking by sight?” So it was a true walk of faith and obedience because I saw nothing on the horizon.

But I can also tell you that during the 6 months I was unemployed, God sent me a paycheck every month to cover the expenses for my household as if I were working every day. I have never experienced such provision. God would either open up a door for a speaking engagement or workshop, or He would just place it on someone’s heart to bless my family. I cannot tell you how God took care of me and my family through my walk of faith.

But like I said, it wasn’t easy. I struggled with, “Okay God! The first of the month is coming up and the mortgage is due and the coffer is empty. How does this work?” And God said, “Take your hand off of it and know that I promised you I would take care of you,” and every month, when I would sit down with my husband’s paycheck and the checkbook, and with whatever opportunities God had allowed me to do, not only was it enough to pay the bills, but it was enough for me to have money in my pocket to put gas in my car, to take care of my own personal needs.

It was such an awesome experience because one of my little idiosyncrasies coming up as a child was that I never wanted anyone to have to take care of me. So for me, the wrestle was not only leaving the job and not having my own income, but the fact that I might have to depend on someone else to supply my need. That was a very difficult position for me to be in. I’ve always worked and taken care of myself.

But God was breaking me and testing my trust and faith in Him. God said, “I am the God who created it all and I can move heaven and earth and at anytime I so choose to bless you I can,” and that’s exactly what he did. He moved heaven and earth and the heart of man to bless me, to bless my household, and to give me a period of rest that I didn’t even realize I needed. You see, what I realized in that 6-month period was that God was retooling and training me for a different vocation. He was moving me from the secular corporate mindset of how to work with God's people to a posture of ministering and how to take the principles of God’s word and the tools and experiences I have learned in the business world and bring them together under the Spirit’s guidance to help the Church.

It was awesome because every principle that we work with in the secular world is a biblical principal. We, in turn, oftentimes try to make the principles of the world come into the Church. In essence, we need to have the Church go into the world. The Church is the standard. So what God was showing me was what I learned and acquired in the world was a biblical principle.  He wanted me to bring it back into His house and show His people that it’s a biblical principle; to show them how the biblical principle can work to make the Church better as well as make the world a better place. And so here I am. It was a true faith walk.

How did you handle the wait as the Church went through the hiring process?

It was difficult. God was telling me to be patient and to wait on His promises.  However, being a member, watching and hearing the struggle, watching them go through the process was unnerving for me at times.  Even though I knew within myself that God told me that St. Peter is where he wanted me to serve, it was hard. I learned a valuable lesson through this process; if you are not careful, you find yourself caught up in the process and not dependent upon God’s promise. God told me to wait and be patient. So I kept praying, removed myself from the process and focused on God’s promise.

What’s your advice for women who feel that they’ve been called to preach?

My advice is to be faithful to God and not be consumed by the opinions of man. If you know that God has put on your heart a calling to preach and to proclaim His word, then stand on it because everyone is not going to embrace your call. It is between you and God, and the battle is not ours; the battle is God’s. Oftentimes, God is trying to get us to take our hands off of it so that He can fix it in a manner that He wants to fix it, not in the manner that we think it ought to be fixed. In all He does for us, God wants us to give Him the glory. So I would say that you don’t have to justify your call to anybody. You just have to be humble, faithful and obedient to God.

What else would you like to do with your life?

I know that there’s a call to pastor on my life. When and how that is to happen, I don’t know.  I am waiting on God. I know that this appointment right now is a period of preparation and it is a time for God to pour in me those attributes he would need for me to have to pastor. I believe that this is also a period of preparation for me to sit at the feet of my pastor, Dr. Kirkland Walton; to gain from his wisdom, experience, and love for God’s people. It is a time for me to learn how to manage a church and all of the aspects that comes with pastoring because pastoring is not just standing up to preach on Sunday morning. It is a call of administration, of counseling, of teaching, of evangelism, of preaching; being a pastor encompasses it all. I feel that this is just another part of my journey that God has for me.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I would like for my legacy to be that I was a person who strived in all of my endeavors to first honor God and to be faithful and obedient to what God had called me to do; to know that I had a love for God’s people and wanted to help them reach their full potential in Christ. That’s why God would not let me wallow in my own self-pity. I knew coming through the abuse I suffered as a child that if you are not careful, you can be a product of your environment or you can move out of allowing that to dictate who you become. My prayer was that God would give me wisdom that I did not allow the abuse to dictate who I am or who I could become. I thank God that he honored my prayer early in my life because I can definitely say that when I probably would have and could have succumbed to the pressures of being abused and being a cancer survivor, He kept me.

You were diagnosed in 1981 with uterine cancer. What brought you through it?

Prayer, a wonderful support system, and knowing that God loved me enough that even if I did not get healed on this side of glory, that if I was healed on the other side of glory, it was okay. That did not happen over night. I was angry. I was hurt. I was disappointed. I was facing leaving 3 small children and my husband, and for a long time, God and I wrestled with ‘why me.’ So, I went through a lot of the emotional upheavals and trying to come to a point of peace within myself and a fight within myself that just because the doctors say this is the end, it doesn’t have to be the end. I remember the many surgeries, wrestling with my finances, the doctor bills, trying to keep my household running and my family intact. I had come out of remission on several occasions where doctors said I would not be healed, but God said that I would and he told me to fight.

Balancing that with raising my kids to be strong in their faith, to be good upstanding moral individuals, to love God, to love family and to know that my husband and I were always there for them, that was my focus. When I look at my children and see who they are and whose they are, their faith walk, their love for one another and for people, I know that God has honored my prayer.

~Rebekah L. Pierce
 

Copyright © 2004-2005, Average Girl, The Magazine.  All rights reserved