Charlotte Wyckoff said nursing has always been on her heart — she was taught from an early age to help people.
It started right in her home — she was the oldest of 12 children.
“We lived in a small community in Kentucky, and we loved, and we gave,” Wyckoff said.
That took on a lot of different forms over the years. She started helping at a local hospital when she was still a teenager and became a nurse’s aid in college.
“When I was around 18 or 20 years old, a neighbor ran down to our house for help, and I was able to help with the delivery of their baby,” she said.
Seeing God’s purpose
Even with all that exposure to the medical field, she said she never would’ve guessed where her path would lead — that one day she would lead Baptist Nursing Fellowship, a national organization that serves as a compassion ministry of Woman’s Missionary Union.
But looking back, Wyckoff — a member of West Mastin Lake Baptist Church in Huntsville — said she can “just see the intertwining what God has purposed for my life.”
“I came from humble beginnings and have asked the Lord to continually lead and direct me, that I’d be in His will,” she said.
Wyckoff first worked as a medical technologist, then later went to school to become a registered nurse.
“Nursing has always been my love and my dream, but I got sidetracked,” she said. “God brought me back to that.”
That eventually led her to BNF, and in November 2023, she was voted the organization’s president-elect. She will serve as the organization’s president starting in 2026.
Helping others through healthcare
The purpose of BNF is to equip and empower members spiritually, be involved in planned nursing and health care programs and use their skills to help people around the world on missions trips. Though it focuses on nurses, anyone who has a background in healthcare can be a part.
Wyckoff said for her, the helping part and the nursing part came early, but the passion for missions outside of her own community came later when she and her husband moved to Huntsville and joined West Mastin Lake Baptist.
“After we joined that church, we became more involved in more missions-oriented things,” she said. “For about 10 years, I was a coordinator of March for Jesus, and that was a big community event we helped on a yearly basis. It’s those kinds of things that I feel like the Lord was using to prepare me.”
She joined BNF in the mid-1990s and fell in love with the mission.
Over the years, she has held a variety of positions in the organization, and she has helped people in other ways, such as starting labs for sickle cell disease in Maryland and in Alabama.
Wyckoff said she’s also loved being a part of BNF’s health fairs and missions trips and talking to people about their physical and spiritual health.
‘Fulfilling the Great Commission’
“As a part of the health screenings we offer, we’re able to talk with them and explain how important their lives are and how important it is to be in compliance with what the doctor recommends,” she said. “We’re also able to pray with them — so many people are broken these days, and they need someone to care for them.”
With that in mind, Wyckoff said she doesn’t take her new role lightly. She wants to involve as many people as she can in the mission.
Right now, BNF has members from 31 states, and she wants to see that expand to all 50 and to see more ethnic diversity and get more men involved.
“We want to get as many people as we can exposed to medical missions work,” Wyckoff said. “We like to say that we are fulfilling the Great Commission; this is a calling upon our lives that we feel God has called us to be able to do to fulfill His mission with the skills that He has given us.”
For more information about national BNF, visit baptistnursingfellowship.org. For more information about Alabama BNF, visit alabamawmu.org/baptistnursingfellowship.
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