The Rev. Donna Whitehead, a pastor at Lovers Lane United Methodist Church in Preston Hollow, credits an Southern Methodist University course by a local rabbi as a key turning point in her relationship with faith.
In her memoir, out this month, Whitehead describes how the late Rabbi Levi Olan told her that “truth is found in paradox.”
Whitehead, 78, took Olan’s class in her late 20s. She was struggling with a number of paradoxes in her life. As she put it in an interview, those included being a strong woman and staying connected to her husband, reconciling faith and science and connecting with others while being true to herself.
Olan’s message helped her find clarity and gain the confidence to pursue a career in ministry in the 1970s, when there were few women pastors in her denomination.
Whitehead became one of the first woman ministers ordained in the United Methodist Church in North Texas. She was the first woman to hold a number of leadership roles within the denomination in the area. She has served in Christian ministry for 44 years, and helped found Lovers Lane UMC, one of the largest Protestant churches in Dallas.
I Am Enough, published Oct. 1, chronicles Whitehead’s spiritual and life journey and includes messages of hope and inspiration for others looking to discern God’s path for them.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Why did you choose “I am enough” as the unifying idea of the book?
As I began to think about it on a deeper level, I realized that the journey I really was going on was growing my soul, and that it was about — I could not go on the journey unless I looked at my flaws and my shortcomings. And because I am a person that likes to be very positive, very upbeat, it was not easy for me to do that.
I was driven to be first, to be right, to be successful.
That had been good in the first part of my life, when I was learning how to do a lot of things to grow a church and saw myself as really good at all that.
Once I got into the second part of my journey, I really began to open up and be honest and uncover my flaws.
[God] loves me with my flaws. He’s not telling me to get rid — he is loving me in the imperfections, with the imperfections. And that’s not true just of me, it’s true of everybody. So “I am enough” became kind of a natural way of saying that.
How have readers reacted to that theme in the book?
Today, the person at the Welcome Center here at Lovers Lane was telling me that she grew up with a mom who really — it was a dysfunctional family, like all of them, all of ours.
Her father tended to be an alcoholic, and her mother was in an unhappy marriage. And then she said to me, ‘[My mother] was always putting me down.’ And I said, ‘Well, you were the vulnerable one in the family system.’
The person that was telling me the story said, ‘I am now seeing that I am enough. I am enough.’ She said that, I think, twice.
She didn’t get it just from the book, but I think the book helped her name it.
You talk about your family in the book. How does your family support you as a minister?
My husband was very supportive, interestingly enough. He knew that I was restless.
I was restless and wanted — I just wanted more. And so he supported me pretty much from the beginning, as it became more apparent that I would move into the local church and be a pastor on a staff. That was another step. But I think my children would say they enjoyed it… They were even proud of their mom being a preacher.
My son Trey said, ‘The church was the only place I could ever really be genuine and real growing up.’
What do you wish husbands of women in ministry understood about how to support their wives?
So much of our language, talk, prayer, life and so forth is centered around Jesus. I think we need to say ... that Jesus does not replace our husbands. It’s a totally different kind of relationship. We very much need the feedback and the affirmation and the support of our spouses.
It is a new arena. It is a frontier. There’s still a lot of things to be worked out about spouses of women ministers. That’s new enough still that there’s an uncomfortableness often that goes with that. But we’re growing into it, and I think that, again, the key is having good self-esteem, on the part of both the spouse and the minister.
If you could say one thing to the younger version of yourself that was preparing to take this uncommon path into ministry, and enter a field where there were very few women, what would you say to her?
Work on your close relationships. Because the relationship with God has a lot to do with the way we relate to the people that we’re the closest to and that are around us.
As important as the academic part is — and it was wonderful to be able to study and to learn from these people that were so wise and so biblically grounded, it was like a treasure. I knew to be appreciative of that, and I was. And as important as all that is, the more important thing is that we keep balance in our relationships and in our own families, as well as in the community of faith that we end up being a part of.
In the end, it is about relationships. And it’s about receiving God, being able to receive God’s love and live that out in relationships.
Adrian Ashford covers faith and religion in North Texas for The Dallas Morning News through a partnership with Report for America.
