Russell Stanley says there was a distinct time in his life when he recognized the call to pastoral ministry.
And there was another distinct time when he realized that didn’t mean he couldn’t also be a doctor.
“My father was a physician, and I was raised in a medical home,” said Stanley, who grew up in west Texas. “I thought I wanted to be a doctor, too, before I felt called into the ministry.”
He felt like it was an either-or situation, so he went to seminary and began serving at a small, rural church in west Texas.
‘Great things’
“A lot of great things happened there — we had some people get saved and baptized,” he said.
But Stanley felt God nudging him again to get outside the walls of the church in a different way. So he did. He enrolled in some night courses, then went to medical school. And in the meantime, he didn’t stop preaching.
“God began to morph my understanding of calling into bivocational ministry,” Stanley said. “For small churches, it’s the way of the future.”
Becoming a doctor limited his ability to be at the church during the day, but it added capacity for different kinds of ministry. What he found was the same people who made up the backbone of many small, rural churches — widows and other senior adult women — were the ones he got to help with managing important life issues in his urogynecology work.
In his general OB-GYN work, Stanley got to minister to women who had lost babies or were battling cancer.
He — along with his wife, Lauren, and their six children, including two sets of twins — brought that calling to Alabama recently to do a fellowship at UAB Hospital, and he became pastor of Center Hill Baptist Church, Jemison, too.
He says he sees his medical work not only as a ministry itself but as a way for God to move him around to different areas.
And he’s glad it brought him to Alabama.
“It’s really interesting the way your calling can put you in different places,” Stanley said. “God has changed my understanding of calling over the years, that it doesn’t have to be one way or another. When God calls you to preach at 18 like He did with me, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s all you may be called to do. It may be, but it may not be. He can use you in different ways that complement each other in ministry.”
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