or Felicia Brown, a senior deputy probation officer with San Diego County for the past 18 years, getting a master’s of divinity degree is but one more link in “a whole chain of events” that is preparing her to move from social services to pastoral ministry. In addition to her work as a probation officer in 19 San Diego schools, Brown is associate pastor at Imani Temple Church of God in Christ in Temecula, California, and says that she can “see things happening that are going to lead me to that full time. It is almost a given.”

Though she already has a master’s degree in counseling psychology, Brown sensed God’s call back to school. “After being called into ministry, I was called to prepare,” she says. “It is just one of my philosophies that if God calls you, He also calls you to prepare.” At the recommendation of her pastor, she chose to attend Bethel Seminary San Diego. “Attending Bethel is basically the obvious way to prepare myself,” she explains. “The diversity of Bethel appealed to me, and my personality seemed to fit here.” She also appreciates Bethel’s emphasis on spiritual formation. “Attending Bethel has been a deeply spiritual experience for me,” she notes. “I have to look at my spiritual growth and put academics together with faith.”

Job as ministry

Brown’s career as a probation officer began 18 years ago in the probation department of San Diego County. Over the years she has been involved in all areas of the field. “Adults, juveniles, gangs, investigation, institutions—I’ve done it all,” she says. “But right now I’m working with the intervention programs in a specific school district in San Diego.” She works with children who have been targeted as “at risk,” providing their families with communication and support in an effort to keep the children out of the criminal justice system. One of her main objectives is to keep kids in school, she explains, since “poor school attendance is a signal of other problems.” But her commitment goes much deeper than that. “I feel my job is a ministry,” she says. “It’s reconciling youth back into the school setting and looking at the problems and issues they have to deal with that keep them from being in the school setting. At the same time I’m being an advocate for the student, I’m letting them see the love of God that motivates what I’m doing.”

As an advocate for struggling children and their families, Brown often looks to local churches for help. “My job is to utilize the community as a way of assisting the child and the family,” she says. “The church has a definite role, a part in the community, in assisting families. We can’t just rely on the government to take care of them.”

“Say I run into a family where kids are not going to school because their needs are not met—meaning they don’t have food, or there is drug abuse in the home,” she continues. “Instead of me trying to depend on an agency where there are no resources, I should be able to call the church on the corner and say, ‘Pastor, this is a family that needs help. Can your church pick up the pieces here?’”

Church must collaborate

Brown’s commitment to cooperation between social service agencies and local churches is central to her understanding of her ministry call. She sees God leading her to “prepare the church to do social services.”

“Agencies are collaborating, but what’s missing in the collaboration is the church,” she explains. “The church was designed originally to be the social service component for the community, but the government stepped in and the church relinquished most of its duties. I see the church going full circle to the point where it will be the agency to pick up the pieces that the government is dropping. And at the same time the church meets the needs in the social services arena, it will reconcile people back to Christ.”

Brown’s own church focuses on ministry to the local community even though it does not yet have a facility of its own. Specific targets of the church’s efforts include a local tutorial program for students of all ages. The program incorporates an academic component in which students are accountable for their grades and rewarded for their progress. In addition, tutors pray with the students and offer support and guidance.

Brown’s passion is to help other churches find ministry opportunities right in their own neighborhoods, as her own church has successfully done. Her experience, training, and education have prepared her to do just that. But it’s not all about preparation. Brown has already made a difference in the lives of countless young people. “I just want to show them that if they seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, that all these things will be given to them as well,” she says. And she’s prepared to do it. •

Anna Nissen is a Bethel College senior from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with a double major in communication and writing.