Thrive
Voices

Finding Peace

Bonnie Solivan, a proud “Nuyorican” – a term denoting a Puerto Rican residing in New York City – has a unique journey shaped by her parents’ missionary work across diverse locations such as New York City, Michigan, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, and South America.

Bonnie’s parents were not only missionaries but also pastors and scholars – the first in their families to obtain college and graduate degrees. Bonnie, baptized in a South American river by her father, experienced a shift in her faith during her time at a predominantly white Christian college in Michigan. “I stepped away from some of the norms and traditions I grew up with,” she says.

Yet God assured her during challenging times: “There’s purpose. I have a road for you,” she recalls hearing from Him.

After facing personal challenges, including marriage, two children, and divorce, Bonnie sought a tangible connection with God. “I said, ‘Lord, I’m wrestling. I’m wrestling with whether You really truly exist, or whether I’m a pawn in this and You actually don’t care,” she expressed. She made a pact with God, listing five specific needs, and witnessed God fulfilling each one, bringing profound peace and a sense of His presence into her life.

Voices

Today is the Day

In the throes of teaching full time, taking Asbury Seminary hybrid courses in Orlando, and raising her two teenage daughters by herself, Yamilka Sena began a house church. 

“I feel the call, the tug, that the time to get into ministry is now,” says Yamilka. “The Lord said, ‘Today is the day. Let’s go.’”

Long before her sense of calling became clear, Yamilka wasn’t focused on what to do; rather, she was “just being, with the emotion of being in love with Jesus,” Yamilka says. “I was just relishing, lost with abandon, with the purity of His love.”

Yamilka then entered a period of intense hunger in her spiritual life, which was accompanied by “a thousand questions” about texts in the Bible. It was a Tuesday night Bible study with her pastor – what John Wesley would call a “class meeting” – that helped Yamilka make connections in the Bible. “It was just a miraculous experience of how it opened this thirst for knowledge, for more of God.” The more Yamilka walked with God and engaged with people, the more she was shown that she was more than a teacher and a counselor – she was someone who preached the Word and helped lead others to Christ. “Whenever I preach, there’s a response to the gospel from the people that I can see,” she says. Through these experiences, and through the confirmation of others, God showed Yamilka that His will for her is pastoral work. 

Voices

Singing Jazz

Gabby Black grew up in the Messianic Jewish movement in Long Island, New York. Her dad grew up Baptist, and her mom grew up Catholic. “My mom got in trouble with the nuns for asking too many questions,” says Gabby. And her dad was interested in the connection between early church worship and the Jewish synagogue. So her parents left their respective churches and joined a Messianic congregation.

Gabby was a year old when, according to her parents, she sang for the first time. “I was just singing to jazz radio stations,” she says. As she got older, she loved music. “As a child who was very structured, it was nice to have a place of freedom and creativity. That’s what music was.”

Gabby loved the Messianic music at church. She tried singing with her mom and aunt in front of her congregation when she was eight years old. Her part was the bridge. “I couldn’t even start it. I was just overwhelmed,” she says. Gabby bawled, partly because she was nervous, and partly because she could physically feel the presence of God for the first time.

Gabby succeeded in singing in front of them when she was 10. When she was 12, she joined a worship team at her church. She went to a Catholic high school and did “musical theater, choir, and all that kind of musical stuff.”

Voices

No Matter What, God is With You

Penny grew up in Tennessee as one of seven children raised by her single mother and her grandmother. “I always remember my grandma saying, ‘No matter what, God is with you. No matter, just talk to Him.’”

So Penny talked to God. By age nine, she sensed there was something special for her life. She knew this because she would always go out of her way to make sure others were okay. “I always wanted everybody to be happy. Everyone deserved to be happy,” she says.

Penny was in her late 20s when she began to dive deeply into her faith through a discipleship class, Bible teachers, and personal study. She became more and more amazed by Jesus and the things He did. She learned not only about Jesus but about the Holy Spirit and the Triune Unity of God. Penny was blown away when she learned that we have the authority to do even greater works than Jesus did (John 14:12). “I can do more than Jesus,” says Penny. “But the thing is, you don’t have to die like He did; you just have to die of your will.”

While at a conference at age 28, a minister prophesied that God wanted to do great things through her. A few years later, a female minister told her, “You’re like a wildflower. Wherever the Lord plants you, you’re going to bloom, because you’re yielded to His will.”

Penny was baptized in the Holy Spirit at age 31. Early the next morning, a woman in her discipleship class called her and told her to read Acts 2. While reading it, Penny understood that her baptism in the Holy Spirit meant she was commissioned to go and share what Jesus did.

Penny, who went in and out of the foster system twice as a child, has a special understanding of what Jesus did.

The Rescue Mission

When Penny was four, she and her siblings were placed in foster care. Penny’s mother was later able to come and bring them back home. But three years later, they were placed in foster care for a second time. Once again, Penny’s mother was able to come and bring them back home.

During her time spent in the foster system, Penny noticed that all the children had something in common: they wanted to go home. Penny now finds an analogy in her childhood to what Jesus does for everyone: He rescues people and brings them into a new family, just as her mom “rescued” her twice and brought her home. “Jesus already took care of the rescue mission. He secured it,” says Penny. “All you gotta do is just trust, and God’s going to put you in a place and cover you and protect you until He comes and gets you.”

In her studies about Jesus, Penny noticed a theme in the Gospels: people were lost and looking to be found. Penny says, “What was that void? What can make us happy? And I found that it was Jesus. There’s a God that loves us so much that His son died for us, that we can be part of this community and learn how to love this God that loved us first.”

Penny, who from childhood wanted people to be happy, found Jesus to be the key to that happiness.

Voices

The Chaplain at the Hospital

Ready for something different, Daphne Stephens went back to school at age 54 after a long career in corporate America. She sensed a nudge from God to major in religion. Her concentration was Christian counseling. 

Her second year in college, she had fibroids that became life threatening. One evening, she was bleeding heavily, and she and her husband called an ambulance to get her to the hospital quickly.  

Daphne’s experience at the hospital was a whirlwind. First, she was pressured to get a surgery on the spot. Denied the opportunity to take time to pray or talk to her husband, Daphne declined the operation. When she was finally able to see a specialist, her blood count, which was supposed to be 11, was only four. The nurses and doctors asked her how she was still alive and walking around. Then there was a mixup with her charts, and the staff wanted to start the questions and paperwork all over again. Feeling desperate, Daphne called for a chaplain. 

As Daphne cried and poured out her heart, the chaplain just listened. “There was such a peace in the room like I had never experienced in my life,” Daphne says. “Even my husband said he felt the peace in the room.” After the chaplain prayed for her, Daphne went right to sleep. 

The specialist determined that Daphne needed only to have her fibroids removed and not a major surgery. When Daphne came back the next day for the procedure, something special happened. Her doctors, nurses and surgeons got in a circle around her hospital bed and prayed for her. “That experience solidified for me that there was a calling on my life. I didn’t know what the calling was, where it was going to take me,” says Daphne. 

Voices

Demons and Devils

Stacey McDonald grew up in a very devout Pentecostal family, the youngest of three siblings. During those years, this meant maintaining an outward standard of no makeup, jewelry or worldly dancing. For the women, it means always wearing long skirts. Weekly, Stacey and her family went to church Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and three to four times on Sunday. Stacey has wonderful memories of services filled with handclapping, foot-stomping praise, worship and fellowship. Her church experiences were also characterized by tent meetings, all-night prayer, evangelism on street corners, signs, healings, and exorcisms.  

Stacey, who is now a school psychologist and mental health speaker and writer, wasn’t thinking about psychology then. “I did not become aware of mental health at that point; I became aware of what was all demons and devils.”

“Demons and devils” is exactly what Stacey’s church community thought when her family life took a dark turn. When Stacey was four years old, her father, who had been present and loving up to that point, began exhibiting bizarre and even abusive behavior. Their church community did not attempt to understand his behavior or refer him for help. Instead, he was ostracized. 

Stacey didn’t understand what was going on. She says she would ask herself, “Why does my dad not care about me? Why does he not love me? Why is he not there the way that he was there?” He ended up at Eastern State hospital with a Schizophrenia diagnosis. When the family visited him, Stacey saw there were others at the mental hospital, not just her dad. It dawned on her that no one wanted to be in there.  

This was a lightbulb moment for Stacey, who looks back and says, “If we can understand the signs of mental health and mental health disorders, we can help heal – as the church should and always should – rather than ostracize.” 

A Safe Place

When Stacey was in her 20s, she began the process of forgiving her father. She would write letters about her feelings and tear them up, finding this exercise cathartic. “And this was before I ever took a psych class,” she says. “I was just writing letters and tearing them up. And the more I began to think about it and process it, I said, ‘I want to go to school for this.’” 

“This” meant the study of psychology. Stacey obtained a Masters degree in School Psychology in 2007 and then an Educational Specialist Degree in 2009. She now practices full-time as a school psychologist providing testing, diagnosis, and psychological counseling for grades K-12. “We deal with mental health disorders every day,” she says. 

Stacey began pastoring the same time she began her school psychology career. As one in five adults in the U.S. suffer from mental illness, Stacey sometimes encountered church members and their loved ones who were suffering in this way. Since Stacey happened to have the skill set, resources and empathy for such people, they found her to be “a pastor who understands.”  Stacey realized that the church needs to be a safe place for people to say they are struggling, and the pastor needs to be safe enough to say, “This is beyond my purview. Let me refer you to a psychotherapist, someone who can perhaps treat you,” she says.

Stacey’s experiences from her childhood, career, and ministry converged. She began McDonald Ministries International in 2022, through which she offers “The Gospel of Mental Health” in the form of a book, seminars and an annual conference. Through her website, she also offers Mental Health Mondays, a podcast, a blog, mental check-ins, and resources for help.

Voices

A Book by Shirley MacLaine

Liz Haley grew up in Ohio in the Russian Orthodox Church. Until her teenage years, the services were in Russian, and she didn’t have knowledge of Jesus outside of the rote prayers and hymns of the services. Her family didn’t talk about Jesus outside of church, and she didn’t know what questions to ask to go deeper. Liz felt called to ministry when she was in the ninth grade, but, at that time, she didn’t really understand what that meant.

Liz moved to Atlanta in her late 20s. It was then that she really started to wonder at the role God played in her life. She looked around for churches, but nothing connected with her. Meanwhile, she was working for a Fortune 500 company, and someone at work handed her a book by Shirley MacLaine. The book was about McLaine’s journeys in New Age spirituality. It left Liz with a curiosity about God, but this curiosity took her in a direction she didn’t necessarily intend to go. “I ended up stumbling into the New Age movement and hung out there for about eight years,” she says. 

Liz then moved to Florida, where the New Age movement was not as easy to find as it was in Atlanta. Nevertheless, she found like-minded people to connect with and felt led to do hands-on healing. “In the state of Florida, in order to put hands on anybody, you have to be certified in something,” Liz says. So she decided on massage therapy as the avenue through which she would use her hands – and New Age practices – to be a channel of healing. 

An Inferno 

It was 1995. Liz was ten days away from starting massage therapy school in Miami. Then something happened that derailed her plans. “I had this desire, a burning desire, to read the Bible,” says Liz. “Never in my life had I opened it at all.” 

The desire followed her everywhere. She walked into the bookstore of a Baptist church and was given a Bible. When she went home and started to read it, a strong sense of oppression grew within her. “Things started to happen, physically. Internally it felt like there was an inferno. It was burning. I couldn’t get rid of it. I ran, I did whatever I could to try to shake this thing, and it wouldn’t. And it got greater and greater and greater.”

One evening, at home alone in her bedroom, she saw a physical presence at the foot of her bed. First, he looked identical to Jesus. But in a blink, he turned into Satan and said, “I can be whoever you want me to be.” Liz was scared to death as she realized the presence had been Satan the whole time. “He showed me how beyond crafty he is at disguising himself,” she says. 

The next day, Liz “hightailed it” to the Baptist church where she’d gotten the Bible. No one there knew how to handle her when she opened up about her situation. “It felt like there were two entities in my body fighting against each other. I could physically feel it,” says Liz. She became suicidal. As a last effort, she went to a women’s Bible study hosted at the church. After it ended, she looked around, wondering who she could talk to. Liz was drawn to a woman by the piano with white hair and approached her. 

“You Switched Teams”

The woman listened without judgment as Liz shared what was happening to her. She then told the Bible study leader what Liz had shared. The leader came over and said to Liz, “Can you hang on for a couple of weeks? Just hang on.” Within those two weeks, she checked on Liz and said, “I have someone I need you to meet. Come back to this Bible study.” So Liz returned and, after it ended, a lady who’d once rescued people from cults was brought over to Liz.

They sat knee to knee, facing each other. The lady asked Liz a series of questions, and Liz answered them honestly. “And her eyes kept getting bigger and bigger,” says Liz. The lady then said to her,”You have absolutely no idea how close to Satan you truly are, just by doing what you did. And even though it was with good intentions, you switched teams.”

Liz wondered aloud how this had happened. She didn’t want to be on “that team.” She hadn’t signed up for that. She had done Reiki; she had touched crystals. Yet she had done these things in the vein of wanting to help people.

“Well a door was open, and the enemy came charging through,” the woman said to Liz. “I don’t know if I can help you or not. I’ve got to step out of the room.”

Voices

Orphaned in India

Abraham grew up in Madurai in Southern India. His Hindu mother and father were from two different castes. With the threat of murder, his father’s family insisted his father divorce his mother then marry within his own caste. To save his life, his father obeyed his family, leaving Abraham fatherless. When Abraham was four, his refugee home separated him from his mother and sent him to a home for abandoned orphans.

Abraham was taught Christian hymns and Bible passages at this home. Yet he first met Jesus when he was 15 and immobilized with severe jaundice. His treatment was not affordable, and he was unable to stand on his own. With no one to help him to the lavatory, he cried out to God, “I will follow You if You will heal me.” Abraham was cured one week after his prayer, although doctors had estimated that healing could take a year.

At age 16, Abraham said to God while walking on a terrace, “I want to eat fish today.” Someone was drying pricey fish (Macreal) nearby, and a bird dropped two pieces on the ground near Abraham. “God affirmed  to me that He was hearing. I started putting more of my faith in God,” he says.

God’s Provision

Abraham dedicated his life to the Lord’s service at age 17. After obtaining a political science degree in college, Abraham’s pastor told him, “It’s time to attend theological seminary and prepare yourself for the ministry.” The pastor suggested a seminary in North India near New Delhi.

Abraham told the Lord, “I don’t have any money, but You will make a way.” And God provided. Abraham’s four years at the Indian seminary were miraculously covered by donations.

His second year in seminary, Abraham was once again sick with jaundice and instructed by doctors to eat only bland foods. Idli is a famous rice cake delicacy only found in Southern India. Abraham asked the Lord for it, even though it was not found in that region. He spoke to the Lord, saying, “You provided for Elijah using ravens. Fill me up.” The next morning, someone brought Abraham a lunchbox with Idli. Abraham wept, saying, “Lord, You are always with me.”

Voices

I Didn’t Want Any Part of Church

Rev. Dr. Charles Galbreath grew up in the suburbs of Maryland outside of Washington D.C. His father, a businessman, discerned a call to ministry. This meant founding a church in their home when Charles was four years old. “Our basement was the sanctuary, the kitchen was the Sunday school room; our rooms were the childrens’ rooms. We started, really and truly, a house church,” says Charles. The church moved to a school for 10 years, during which Charles helped set up chairs and tables weekly, until the church purchased its own property in Maryland. 

“Through all of that, I saw church. I saw all of church. So as a result, I didn’t want any part of church,” Charles says. “I saw the struggle, I saw the sacrifice, I saw when folks were with you and then leave you. I saw the back and forth, the tensions, the always-on-call – all those moments.” 

Though Charles decided the pastorate was not for him, he always had a commitment to service in the church and community and never walked away from his faith, which he describes as deeply formed due to discipleship from his father.

In his college years, Charles looked at different avenues for serving God. He felt himself having “that negotiation with God” – telling Him, “I’ll still serve you, but let me do my own thing.” He graduated from college and planned to go into the business world and eventually into politics, with several job possibilities looming. 

Then, Charles had an encounter with God. 

Article

Dr. Thomas McCall shared his perspective for the Asbury Theological Seminary series Reflections on the Outpouring. The following excerpt has been transcribed from his testimony. The Outpouring began in Hughes Auditorium on February 8, 2023, and flowed into event spaces at Asbury Seminary. The Outpouring concluded over two weeks later on February 23.

“On Wednesday morning I heard about something unusual that was happening at Asbury University. I’ve been through a lot of revival meetings and camp meetings, and I’m a bit skeptical of hype and quite allergic to manipulation, but also happy to see the Lord move.

I walked into chapel, just wondering what I would see, and within a couple of minutes I was speechless. People who teach theology for a living are usually not speechless, but it rendered me speechless. The chaplain there, Greg Hasselhoff, greeted me on the side of the platform. I couldn’t even talk to him.

I saw students, several hundred students singing softly, many of them with their arms raised in worship. I saw students praying together in small groups. I saw students kneeling at the altar. I saw other students talking together in small groups, joy so evident on their faces.

I didn’t want to leave. I stayed there as long as I could on Wednesday afternoon. I came back Wednesday night. I came back Thursday morning, and I found that a small group of students had stayed and prayed through the night.

I came back Thursday afternoon. I came back Friday afternoon. Each time I saw these students, so hungry for God, so alive in God’s presence.

I understood immediately why people couldn’t wait to get there and didn’t want to leave. Students were running to chapel.

I’ve been around church all my life. My dad was a wonderful pastor. I’ve been in many, many wonderful environments of worship. I have never seen anything like this. It was a sense of calm serenity, of almost inexpressible joy and hope.

Many of these kids have known the Lord half their lives in political turmoil and fear of disease. Deep, deep anxiety everywhere; hostility and frustration; sometimes outright hatred and venom. And here they walk in this room, and they’re surrounded by this deep sense of holy love. They’re surrounded by this sense of wholeness and belonging. Of course, they wouldn’t want to leave that. This continued through Saturday evening and into Sunday morning.

What God is doing is undeniable. I talked to students both in and outside of Hughes, students who are already experiencing radical shifts of affection, what they’re caring about, what they want to do with their lives, how they want to serve. They are being dramatically transformed.

It’s just obvious to me God is at work, and there are of course what John Wesley called ordinary means and extraordinary means of grace. This is clearly an extraordinary moment. It doesn’t do away with the need for the ordinary. It doesn’t do away with the need for word and sacrament.

In no way does it replace the long road of obedience, the long road of discipleship. In no way does it discount or displace the importance of disciplined Christian living and joyful service of others. Most of our growth in the Christian faith is in these everyday moments, and it would be a mistake to look to one of these extraordinary moments to replace the ordinary ways that God works.

But wow, should we ever be grateful for the extraordinary!? We just need to recognize it, to celebrate it, to embrace it, to thank God for it.”