About Us

Our lives are our stories of how we came to be, who brought us into the world, how we come to understand who we are, and whose we are, that is important to know as well. Our stories answer the “why” questions of our lives. I write this telling of my call story, 31 years into practicing my call. I often joke that I am still trying to discover what I will be when I grow up, but nah, I know, I am Michael Rowe, and I am being made by the Spirit of God as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, at peace practicing and living out my story in the United Methodist Church.

I am the third living child of Billy and Linda Rowe, a farmer’s son from Sherman, Texas and a rancher’s daughter from Denison. They fell in love during the dawn of the Vietnam war and God saw fit to bring this dyslexic man home from war to marry his high school sweet heart and to start his life out as a blue-collar worker and a lay preacher in a Baptist faith community in Garland, Texas, and Linda his wife, to be a home maker, and a Christian educator.

After two live births and two miscarriages, this young couple thought they were finished bringing children into the world until an Evangelist and his wife, the Reverend John R. Rice, came to Garland, Texas for a revival. During a meal, Linda and Billy dined with the Evangelist and his wife who insisted on inquiring about Linda and Billy’s family status.

As painful as it sounds, Linda shared the names of her two children and then grieved the two children lost in utero. Yet this nosey pastor’s wife took Linda’s hand and told her that night that God was not through with her womb, there was a Servant of God yet to be born.

This may sound outlandish, but this is the story that my mother shared with me after Bishop William Oden laid hands on my shoulders and commissioned me for pastoral ministry. Yet my call story is a bit more muddled than this event alone.

Up until I completed 5th grade, our family was at church every time the doors were opened. We attended a large and growing evangelical Baptist church with its own k-12 school. We not only went Sunday morning and evening, plus Wednesday nights, but since it was our school as well, and mom taught there, we practically spent more time at church than we did at our home. Susanna Wesley and Timothy’s mom weren’t the only ones who dragged their kids to church every time the doors were open.

My Father preached multiple times a week at the local nursing homes as well and we would accompany him and my siblings and I served as his weekly special music trio. I still cannot sing certain hymns like Blessed Assurance, without the image and visuals of the “Wheelchair Saints” flashing into my mind. Yet even with the fond memories, drama struck our family, my parents experienced a deep betrayal by their church and as a family we left the church. The actions of the pastor and leadership of this community would take over 18 years of healing before my mother could return to church.

My six-grade year of school, I was physically abused by the school administration in retaliation for my family leaving the church. The trauma haunted my subconscious for years. Wesley’s call for his preachers to do no harm always rang emphatically in my ears. I have fond memories of my childhood but I had a great pain that drove me from organized religion from seventh grade until I graduated 12th grade.

Yet, through all the above, I thought I heard God claiming me and guiding me from 6th grade until the summer I graduated high school in 1992. I was supposed to be a lawyer. God had placed a burning desire to help people and I thought surely that was going to be fulfilled as a public defender, or so I thought. In 7th grade, my parents gave me permission to join the local scout troop with my next-door neighbor. I thrived in scouting, and I set my eyes on becoming an Eagle scout, and I did. My junior year of high school I learned of a Pre-law Explorer post starting in Garland and I was there.

My senior year of high school, I lost around 90 pounds, I started talking with the local army recruiter and he offered me a path that would let this lazy C honor’s student go to boot camp, attend a West Point preparation program and then be able to study military law at West Point. Well, it sounded good on paper as he laid it out but what he offered me was really boot camp, and then infantry. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t reject military service because I didn’t want to serve, but I was trying to find my path to study law.

By the grace of God, during high school, while my family still grieved their brokenness from their experienced betrayal of their church, I met my “David’s Jonathan”, my soul mate, in 9th grade and he started bringing me to this little Filipino house church over in Pleasant Grove. As I graduated high school, with little wind in my sail, and trying to discern why God would shut the door that I worked so hard to get ready for, I went to the only pastor I could trust. I made an appointment to visit Reverend Levy Laguardia, this kind, Filipino United Methodist Pastor from my best friend’s United Methodist Church.

I poured out my soul and my frustration, feeling like a ship without a sail, looking for a path to continue toward becoming a lawyer, and Pastor Levy, as all his congregants called him, looked at this awkward young man, and asked me if I had ever considered ordained ministry. He saw something in me that even then I was yet to be able to see. Truth be told, I was like Jonah who was just called by God to go to Nineveh, I may have said yes with my mouth, but boarded my boat to Tarshish.

Pastor Levy took me under his care and invited me to try out my call as his youth pastor. In the Filipino community, when you answer, or even flirt with a call to ministry, they quickly give you the title, and I became Pastor Mike in their eyes from that day forward.

The next three years flew by with me having the time of my life as a youth pastor but still trying to do everything else but say yes to God. In the eyes of this mentor, I discovered authentic faith and grace. He let me run the direction that I thought I needed to go but he never let go of me. Around 1995, I was invited to attend an Exploration Event in Richmond, Virginia. The North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church took this questioning Jonah and paid for my first air flight to go and explore my call.

The last night of the convocation, Bishop Leotine Kelly, our first female African American Bishop, got up to preach. Her closing invitation was, “if there is anything else in the world you can do, go and do it.” I walked the isle that night, got on my knees, and said, “God, here I am. I don’t know how I am going to get the education required, I don’t know why you would call me, I am over-weight, I am not the most eloquent, I am not the popular kid, there are so many other people that would be better at this, but here I am, use me.”

I returned from Richmond to find the doors to my path of ministry opening before me. My mentor pastor recommended a paying job that came open at First Presbyterian Church in Mesquite, Texas. I received the financial aid that I needed to attend Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, three years of roadblocks, as I tried to do everything else but follow God into ministry, fell away as I started my journey to Nineveh.

I mentioned earlier how God led me into scouting. I now look back at my time in scouting and realized that in our troop, I spent most of my leadership as the Chaplain’s Aide, and when I advanced into the Explorer Post, yep, I was the Chaplain there also. I had been leading Sunday morning worship and devotions since I was in junior high, someone had just forgotten to tell me.

Scouting is still an important organization for me. In scouting, I found the Church that nurtured me in my faith when I rejected “the Church.” Even though I walked the isle, professed Jesus as Lord and Savior, and received baptism at age 8, it was at Philmont Scout Ranch at age 13 that God revealed to me the Divine through a natural revelation, and my parent’s faith became my faith. Scouting, like church camp, has so much opportunity to be a vessel to welcome and nurture the non-churched.

I honestly feel that my call to ministry was always social justice. If you take a look at my resume, you will find that vein of social justice ministries through many of my appointments. During my first attempt at ordination, I found myself on a leave of absence to work through some issues. This time was a gift from God because my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and I was able to be there for her through all her treatments, making the long drives to Dallas.

Yet during this stage, God never let go of me. For the two years that I was not preaching weekly and leading a faith community in worship, God would not let me read or study the Bible without seeing the preached word. Preaching for me is a conversation between God, those who passed down the faith and the Bible to us, the church today where I have been called to walk beside and the community where we are called to live out our discipleship.

Up until I turned 45, I was always waiting for someone to walk into my office, or the District Superintendent to call me and say that there is some kind of mistake, “I was not supposed to be let in here.” I’ve heard many people express this professional doubt. But at age 45 God gave me a gift. God gave me the assurance that there is nothing else in the world I could be doing and be authentic and faithful to who God called and formed me to be. God, Godself, placed within me a well of wisdom and grace. God took me back to that prophetic word from a pastor’s wife who could see beyond the grief of a young mother and could speak what God is doing.

My name is Michael Rowe. I am practicing my vocation as a Minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the United Methodist Church because I believe that the prevening, justifying, sanctifying, and glorifying grace of God is for all people. God does not make mistakes, and all people are created in the image of God. I pray for the day, when our artificial labels for church fall away and are no longer necessary, but until that day, we, as United Methodists, are a globally connected church, by our constitution as a church working to unify the Body of Christ across time and space, and here and now in our real practice of faith in our communities where we live.