The reluctant ordinand When Mary Nelson quit nursing and signed up to go to Tanzania on USPG’s Journey With Us programme, she was adamant that ordination wasn’t for her. But God had other plans. he year after her husband died, Mary felt that God was telling her to leave her job as a practise nurse. In January 2018, she handed in her resignation. ‘I had a blank diary and I felt very uncomfortable about that, because I like to know what I’m doing,’ she says. But then she received an email advertising USPG’s Rethinking Mission conference, and knew straight away that she had to be there. The conference was an eye-opener. ‘All my preconceptions about mission were stripped away,’ Mary says. ‘I spoke to Habib Nader
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at USPG, with a view to going abroad on the Journey with Us programme. Habib said to me, “Mary, I know exactly where I’m going to send you. It’s somewhere where women priests are welcome and it might well be that when you come back, you’ll want to be ordained”. At this point, I looked him straight in the face and said, “I do not want to hear that!”
'I had a blank diary and I felt very uncomfortable about that, because I like to know what I’m doing'
