As you take each step of the journey, we pray that you will find the stories below to provide you strength and encouragement along the way.

God is working in the life of our Church and in the lives of our members. Share your experience! Download this simple form to help you get started. When you are ready, submit it to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , along with any pictures that would help share your story.

Journey - Tour Guides

While thinking about what to write for the Journey, I kept coming back to the word “journey” and how that aptly describes our relationship with God.

Our life on Earth is a journey to an everlasting relationship with God. But God does not let us wander, guessing which way to turn. He has provided his Son to open the path to Him, and the Bible as a road map. Plus he has given us fellow Christians to serve as our tour guides.

My paternal grandfather, Henry was one of my tour guides. I have come to realize that his guidance and influence has led me to Stephen Ministry.

For the last 12 years, I have been a Stephen Minister. Stephen Ministry is about loving others unconditionally, being willing to listen to others share their concerns, and not judging others.

As a very young child, I could not say Henry; instead, I called him Rennee (Ren-Nee). Because I was his first and only grandchild, for the remainder of his life Henry’s name was unofficially changed to Rennee.

As I reflect upon numerous phases and steps in my spiritual journey, I recall memories of my Christian pilgrimage.

Like many of you, I was born into a Christian family. My early years were enriched with worship experiences in traditions modeled by family and friends who were Pentecostal Holiness, Baptist and Methodist. My nuclear family and I have deep roots in the Methodist Church. I was baptized at Wilson Temple Methodist Church and began worshipping there with my family as a young child. My dad’s grandparents were among founding members of Wilson Temple United Methodist Church (Wilson Temple Methodist Church prior to 1968). The church was founded in 1867; it is located in west Raleigh in an area once known as Oberlin Village, a thriving enclave of African-Americans.

ONE OF THE DAYS THE HOLY SPIRIT GOT MY ATTENTION

I had been a member of the same church for 53 years. It was the same church my parents, my grandparents, and on and on forever had attended. Now that my parents and grandparents had died and just about all the rest of my really close family had died or moved away, I found myself wanting something new and exciting in my faith. I began the search for the possibility of a new church home and church family. My biggest problem was that 53 years in the same church was a real comfort zone!

Hayes Barton UMC became my new church home, and that “new and exciting in my faith” did not take long to start happening. However, little did I know that “new and exciting” would include 4 pilgrimages to the Holy Land in the next 8 years. All four of these trips were fantastic and I could never put one above the other, but the one I share with you now was, as you probably anticipate – the first one, in February of 1992.

Two years ago my husband of 58 years died. He had been ill with caner, which was in remission, and with dementia which became increasingly worse over a period of five or six years. With constant prayer, God’s strength and a supportive family, I was able to keep him at home until the last six weeks of his life which were spend under hospice in a nursing home. His death was a blessing and God gave my family and me comfort, peace and guidance as we faced our loss.

The time came for me to sell my home of over fifty years and move to Raleigh where my two daughters and their husbands live. Deciding what to sell, what to give my family and others and what to keep was a very traumatic experience! God was with us, guiding the decisions we had to make.