Latest / Called to Serve / Joyce Hancock

Transcript

Joyce Hancock · Called to Serve

• 0:01
  Hello and welcome to another episode of called to serve
• 0:04
  today, you will be hearing from Joyce Hancock.
• 0:07
  Joyce was ordained. In 1987, she served as director
• 0:11
  of Christian education. At First Baptist Dartmouth as
• 0:14
  well as a missionary overseas in Indonesia and Brazil today,
• 0:18
  Joyce works with Northwind family Ministries in Thunder
• 0:21
  Bay, Ontario Joy, spoke with dr. Melody Maxwell and her research,
• 0:25
  assistants immediate about her Ministry to Brazilian youth
• 0:28
  living on the street. Some of the challenges and
• 0:31
  advantages of serving as a single woman and how she's been
• 0:34
  mentored and encouraged by the support of other women in
• 0:37
  Ministry. I I felt the call at a really
• 0:41
  young age. I can't say exactly what age but
• 0:44
  I often talked about it. Follow my parents were we're
• 0:47
  very clear on the fact that my decision to follow Christ had to
• 0:50
  be mine and I had to make that decision myself when I was in my
• 0:55
  very early teens or even before that, I would tell everybody
• 1:00
  when they say, what are you gonna do?
• 1:01
  When you grow up? I'd say I'm going to be a
• 1:03
  missionary and because many of my family members were teachers,
• 1:07
  I felt that that's But I must be equipped to do.
• 1:10
  So I always said I was going to be a missionary teacher.
• 1:13
  My real goal was to work in Christian education, I taught
• 1:16
  for a little bit and not very long, just substitute teaching
• 1:20
  after University CBM had recruiting weekend and they
• 1:27
  needed the teacher in Indonesia to teach the children of two
• 1:31
  families that were there at the time.
• 1:33
  So as a brand new teacher, I probably took on a really big
• 1:36
  mouthful but I was sick. Excited to get going and to get
• 1:40
  into missions and I said, oh yes, I'll do that even though it
• 1:44
  was a world away and my parents said, could you possibly go any
• 1:48
  further away? And I said, I don't think so.
• 1:51
  I think I'd be on my way back. If I went any further, I was
• 1:55
  working with two families, the only single person there and
• 1:59
  actually, that was a really stretching experience.
• 2:02
  For me, I found it lonely many times and the only others that
• 2:06
  were anywhere near my age. Where the students There was a
• 2:09
  lot of incentive to try to learn the language.
• 2:11
  I learned a lot, I learned in some ways to to speak up for
• 2:15
  myself because I grew up assuming that when God calls you
• 2:19
  somewhere he calls you forever to the same place that wasn't.
• 2:24
  So at the end of the four years that was the end of that at
• 2:28
  first. It was what did I do?
• 2:29
  You know what happened? But I see as I've carried them
• 2:33
  on and now as I can look back, I can see that God had other
• 2:37
  plans. When I came back from Indonesia,
• 2:40
  I'd already registered at Acadia because I just had to get that
• 2:43
  Christian education degree. And so I started in January of
• 2:47
  84, I found at 80 ad. See the professor's were
• 2:51
  extremely encouraging which is excellent because there's no use
• 2:56
  offering please for women in Ministry.
• 2:59
  If they will, never be able to get a job.
• 3:01
  I started at First Baptist Dartmouth in 85 I believe that
• 3:06
  as their Christian education, director.
• 3:08
  I remember that the senior pastor there at the time wasn't
• 3:11
  really anxious for me to go into coordination right away.
• 3:15
  Little bit of a feeling that that was not particularly
• 3:18
  important to him. And I was also called director,
• 3:22
  I was not called Minister subconsciously.
• 3:24
  I assumed it was because I was a woman.
• 3:26
  I think it came up not from me because I never had the fighting
• 3:31
  Spirit to bring it up, but I think it came up in the
• 3:35
  congregation sometimes because I remember hearing, The things
• 3:38
  around it. Why is she not called Minister?
• 3:41
  And as a woman initially, I didn't need to receive as much
• 3:46
  pay. I think it was some of the women
• 3:48
  in the congregation. When it came around to budget
• 3:50
  time, they made a big deal about the fact that I was earning
• 3:54
  much, much less. But what I heard from the lead
• 3:56
  Pastor later on was, oh, wow, you're getting decreased this
• 4:00
  time, aren't you lucky? I felt very loud in that church,
• 4:05
  and I felt very cared for in instances like this.
• 4:08
  I left Dartmouth in 93 and the church.
• 4:11
  People were very kind to say. The only reason why they would
• 4:15
  let me leave Dartmouth was because I was going back
• 4:17
  overseas. Thy heart was in missions.
• 4:19
  So 93, I went to Brazil. I was part of an experiment in
• 4:26
  language, education and Indonesia.
• 4:28
  I had to figure out how to learn the language on my own.
• 4:30
  And in Brazil, they just sent us to a School.
• 4:32
  But instead of going to the south of the country where there
• 4:35
  was a Baptist oriented school, they decided to send this to a
• 4:39
  Catholic School right in Brasilia because that's where we
• 4:42
  were going to be working and they thought we could learn a
• 4:45
  language and work at the same time.
• 4:46
  This time, I went to work with Street kids, who do not speak
• 4:49
  any English. So I really had to learn the
• 4:52
  language. So so then I was working with
• 4:55
  kids who really did live on the street and we didn't just call
• 4:58
  them Street, kids like him in Dartmouth and in order to
• 5:01
  survive on the streets, They generally got involved in drugs
• 5:04
  of some kind. Yeah, I'm fairly often alcohol,
• 5:07
  but the real kicker, was the drugs in the, in the area where
• 5:11
  I was working in. Brasilia.
• 5:12
  At that time, it was mostly cocaine.
• 5:16
  I went to be part of a team that was to try to reach out to these
• 5:19
  three kids and they really didn't know what they wanted us
• 5:21
  to do. They just kind of said, do what
• 5:23
  you can do to be a witness for them.
• 5:25
  So, I did that for 11 years, as time went along, I moved more
• 5:31
  from working. On the street, trying to get to
• 5:33
  know the kids who were living there.
• 5:35
  So running a rehab center along with some Brazilians.
• 5:39
  I and that was because the kids themselves said that they needed
• 5:42
  to things, they needed to get off the drugs and they needed to
• 5:45
  be able to learn some skills so that they could get into life
• 5:48
  instead of always being on the edges of it.
• 5:51
  And so our program was fairly different from other programs in
• 5:55
  the area in that we worked with teenagers under 18, that
• 5:59
  requires a lot more rules with the government.
• 6:02
  We worked with the young people, we fought for them in court.
• 6:05
  We tried to get them back into school worked as hard as we
• 6:08
  could to get them into church, we can see that if they did not
• 6:12
  try to make a change, a lifestyle change and, and we
• 6:15
  found a really could only do that, they'll by becoming
• 6:18
  Christians because that would change their whole way of life,
• 6:21
  it wouldn't go back to their old habits.
• 6:22
  They wouldn't go back to their old friends.
• 6:24
  If they could really make that change then they had all of life
• 6:27
  ahead of them if they couldn't make that change in went back to
• 6:30
  what they were trying to leave. Fine.
• 6:32
  They generally lost their lives in it for me.
• 6:35
  It was a different kind of ministry.
• 6:37
  It was a life-and-death Ministry, we had a lot of
• 6:40
  success and we had a lot of failure.
• 6:42
  That's how it goes with Road recuperation.
• 6:44
  They were hard years but they were very good years now talking
• 6:48
  about women in Ministry, the Brazilian Baptist convention did
• 6:52
  not ordain women. They did not appreciate the fact
• 6:55
  that I was an ordained woman. So I found that I was very often
• 6:59
  on the rejection side of things. I was often Out of the loop, I
• 7:03
  don't know that. Even like the work that I was
• 7:05
  doing because I was working with marginalized kids, and
• 7:09
  troublemakers, really. I'm not sure that a lot of them
• 7:12
  even like the word that I had be nested because my work was very
• 7:16
  much in the community. I didn't insist on being called
• 7:19
  a minister or anything like that.
• 7:21
  But just knowing that I was and I was a woman and a single
• 7:26
  person on top of that it was just easier for them to pretend.
• 7:30
  I wasn't there then to have to deal with what they thought.
• 7:33
  Women engines. When I first went, there were a
• 7:35
  number of there was one family and one of CBM missionaries and
• 7:40
  one other single person has single person was soon.
• 7:44
  Moved to Africa, the family had been there for a number of years
• 7:49
  teaching in the bible school and then they moved back to the
• 7:52
  south of Brazil where they had been teaching before that.
• 7:54
  As so for a good number of those years, I was alone in Brazil.
• 7:58
  There were times when I wish there were others around and
• 8:02
  Other times I was quite happy. Just with the Brazilian
• 8:05
  colleagues. After the rehab work, a CBM said
• 8:08
  they told me to pass the work over to the Baptist convention
• 8:15
  and I began a work. The Lord had planted a vision in
• 8:19
  my mind, a few years before that to try to begin in a community
• 8:25
  around the area, to begin more of a preventative work to try to
• 8:30
  help kids, not go to the Great try to give them courses and
• 8:36
  introduce them to churches and and try to help them find a
• 8:40
  lifestyle. That would keep them off the
• 8:42
  street. Some of the Brazilians helps me
• 8:46
  form a work that carries on today and I'm still involved in
• 8:51
  it from a distance, to help a community, which is probably the
• 8:55
  most dangerous community in the area.
• 8:57
  It was the community that I'm most had kids coming into rehab.
• 9:02
  Habor met them on the street started out the first year,
• 9:07
  rented, a little place. And, and I said to the Lord, if
• 9:11
  this is really your will Lord, then you have to make the kids.
• 9:15
  Come we really don't have any money and so we said Lord you
• 9:19
  you just take care of that you show us what to do.
• 9:22
  We had a tremendous response outgrew.
• 9:25
  The the two little rooms that we were renting at crucial times, I
• 9:29
  seem to have to go home on furlough to CBM.
• 9:32
  About what I was doing said, I would leave CBM because that was
• 9:36
  the work that I felt God called me to.
• 9:39
  And the person who had that point was General director said,
• 9:42
  no, you're not going to leave, CBM will do something to help
• 9:45
  you out, keep your there. And so, I was 10 years working
• 9:50
  with this ministry and helping it to grow up, we started
• 9:53
  helping women with coursework so that they would be able to get
• 9:56
  jobs. And generally tried to minister
• 9:59
  in the community even though we were Baptist.
• 10:02
  Background. We tried to minister to
• 10:04
  everybody. So we were seen as an
• 10:06
  interdenominational entity, more than anything.
• 10:09
  And, and the staff members that we took on were from some of the
• 10:13
  different churches in in the town of Aguas Linda's.
• 10:17
  So, it really was an interdenominational iRun
• 10:21
  organization and as I said, I'm still involved in that today,
• 10:25
  but from a distance, I left in the latter part of 2014.
• 10:32
  My mom didn't know she needed Care at that point, but my dad
• 10:35
  had passed away several years before the Lord specifically
• 10:38
  said to me, through some of the things that she was asking me
• 10:42
  about and and complaining about the Lord said, you need to go
• 10:45
  home. First year that I was home
• 10:48
  helped with my mom. She was still fairly independent
• 10:51
  eyes. She wasn't quite sure where I
• 10:54
  got that idea from that. I should come and look after
• 10:56
  her, but it really didn't take too long for her to understand
• 11:00
  that. Yes, that's what that's what.
• 11:02
  God had in mind, the Lord has been really gracious.
• 11:05
  And that before I even came to Canada, he put it in my mind
• 11:09
  that I would be working with indigenous people.
• 11:11
  By the second year must have been 2016.
• 11:15
  I saw counseling course advertised online and it was
• 11:20
  talking about counseling, learning counseling skills for
• 11:24
  non counselors for people that are in the church and want to be
• 11:29
  helpful. And I thought that sounds
• 11:30
  interesting. I think I'll take Trap at that
• 11:33
  particular course I started hearing about North Wind and I
• 11:36
  thought I've never heard of that before, but doesn't matter.
• 11:38
  I don't know what that is and I know word for North Wind, they
• 11:42
  do professional counseling. They know now do a family
• 11:45
  strengthening program. That brings families from
• 11:48
  Northern Communities as well as families from the city mostly
• 11:51
  indigenous families, to be able to work through some of their
• 11:54
  issues together in a counseling situation.
• 11:58
  And on Sunday evenings, they have it's not really a joke.
• 12:02
  Church service, but there is study time and a meal time.
• 12:08
  They asked me to work in that area that needed developing.
• 12:12
  So now I have a couple of Bible studies going, I've started a
• 12:15
  worship evening. I have a prayer meeting with the
• 12:19
  older indigenous women in their language and I found that it's a
• 12:23
  phonetic language. So I can sing along with them
• 12:26
  because I can do the phonetics. I don't know what I'm, what I'm
• 12:29
  singing technically and I take part.
• 12:32
  A Sunday evening, they call it the Gathering.
• 12:35
  So, I am, I am just thrilled. God has given me best of the
• 12:39
  best. In this sense, I can teach my
• 12:42
  heart's content. Actually, since I've been there
• 12:45
  and had been helping to build more things.
• 12:48
  So that people from the counseling, aspect of it can be
• 12:51
  invited to come others from the community come.
• 12:54
  It has become more of a church in Contents.
• 12:58
  Not that that they don't do counseling.
• 13:00
  They certainly do but there's just much more More going on and
• 13:04
  the executive director, who is a wonderful Christian woman has
• 13:07
  said a couple of times amazed at herself.
• 13:10
  She said, I have always said, this is not a church.
• 13:14
  I'm beginning to think it is a little differently than what the
• 13:18
  traditional church is, but yes, it is.
• 13:21
  And I thought, wow, that's a big change for her in Indonesia.
• 13:26
  They said they they love the work I did but they would prefer
• 13:29
  that I was married and and that Not what I felt that God had for
• 13:33
  me. I always have wanted to be very
• 13:36
  much involved in Ministry. Nothing against being a wife,
• 13:39
  but I didn't feel that that was what God had wanted.
• 13:42
  Not me in Brazil. I think sometimes the church
• 13:46
  people expected to be working with a couple or, you know,
• 13:51
  married person. What they had worked with the
• 13:54
  church that I worked with the Baptist Church there.
• 13:56
  Grew out of Southern Baptist roots and Southern Baptists.
• 14:01
  Also, Did not ordain women but they had an awful lot of single
• 14:05
  women on the field. So they were not unfamiliar with
• 14:08
  single women working in some areas of service.
• 14:11
  But had I push the limits and, and wanted to be recognized as a
• 14:15
  pastor. I think there would have been a
• 14:17
  lot of trouble with that now being single, I think, in some
• 14:20
  ways opened doors for me because I was involved in Ministry and I
• 14:24
  was Freer to do things as they opened up for me, actually, when
• 14:28
  I worked with the street kids, when I first went to Brazil, I
• 14:31
  spent a Time on the streets, getting to know them, trying to
• 14:35
  help them to trust me. I often went to the places where
• 14:38
  they hid out. I was often out at night and
• 14:41
  technically dangerous, but God always took care of that.
• 14:45
  I could not have done that as a married person.
• 14:48
  I don't think a husband would have allowed that.
• 14:50
  And as a mother, with responsibilities for children
• 14:53
  and that I would not have been able to be that free.
• 14:56
  And actually, I had many female single mentors at First Baptist.
• 15:02
  Dartmouth there were a couple of women who were older than me.
• 15:06
  So very much involved in Ministry single and had a great
• 15:10
  effect on my life. Even as a child, the lady who at
• 15:14
  that time was leading Dorian. Bible Camp was a single female
• 15:19
  missionary and she had quite an influence on my life.
• 15:23
  I think a lot of it was the dedication of these women being
• 15:27
  single. They were able to respond to
• 15:30
  situations or or Sins, even living in certain conditions
• 15:34
  because they were just taking care of themselves and not
• 15:37
  taking care of children or something like that.
• 15:39
  I can look back with real Delight in the friendships that
• 15:44
  I had with them. And the encouragement that we
• 15:46
  believe me. And I know if, for example, one
• 15:49
  of the ones in Dartmouth, was a lady that I shared an apartment
• 15:52
  with, she was alone at the point where I came and she said, if
• 15:55
  you're interested, I love to have a roommate.
• 15:57
  So, we did that shared expenses, she had a lot of exposure to
• 16:02
  See, she had been teacher for many years.
• 16:04
  She was very involved in the church and I found two, besides
• 16:08
  the wisdom, she could share with me and the way she did things.
• 16:11
  And the way she thought about things, I found that she often
• 16:14
  was the one that stood up for me.
• 16:16
  When I would come home and talk about something that happened or
• 16:20
  I didn't like it, I was feeling awful about it.
• 16:22
  Occasionally, she would say to me, that is not your fault.
• 16:26
  That's the fault of the other person who is responding to you.
• 16:29
  And I attended it was just kind of like a light on not that it
• 16:32
  Blame thing but to understand what was going on.
• 16:35
  But she, she recognized it right away.
• 16:38
  And so, there were a number of women that helped me out.
• 16:42
  I think, I think one thing I would really like to say, and I
• 16:44
  hope it's been obvious throughout the years.
• 16:47
  My path has changed. I feel like it has been of God's
• 16:50
  leading at least. Yes.
• 16:52
  As I look back on it, sometimes it's easier.
• 16:54
  Looking back. Then looking ahead, it has been
• 16:56
  of God's leading and I just praise the Lord for he.
• 16:59
  How he has taken the different situations.
• 17:02
  For good or for bad and work them out in my life and helped
• 17:05
  me to focus upon him. I tried to make sure that people
• 17:09
  in the ministry that I'm in right now understand that God
• 17:13
  can do a lot for them partly. Because with their history, they
• 17:16
  sometimes have difficulty believing that it's a lot of
• 17:20
  different problems to work through.
• 17:21
  But I trust that God has me there for a reason and part of
• 17:25
  it is because I have worked through some of the some similar
• 17:29
  difficulties. And I can testify that God It
• 17:32
  has the strength for all of that God didn't say that he was
• 17:36
  always going to lead me to easy things when I was young and, and
• 17:41
  probably not thinking about the number of years as they go by.
• 17:44
  I said, I think I was 18 and I said well I don't care how many
• 17:48
  years I live. I just want them to be exciting.
• 17:51
  God has made that very, very true in my life.
• 17:55
  Thank you Joyce, for sharing your story with us.
• 17:58
  You can find more information about called to serve at called
• 18:01
  to serve dossier or by emailing us at called serve at Acadia.
• 18:05
  U.C a thanks for listening. I look forward to sharing
• 18:08
  another woman's story with you next week.
• 17:55
  Thank you Joyce, for sharing your story with us.
• 17:58
  You can find more information about called to serve at called
• 18:01
  to serve dossier or by emailing us at called serve at Acadia.
• 18:05
  U.C a thanks for listening. I look forward to sharing
• 18:08
  another woman's story with you next week.