Educator. Homemaker. Pastor. Lovers Lane United Methodist Church Associate Pastor Reverend Donna Whitehead’s restlessness to learn has earned her many titles. And now she’s added published author to the list.
“Growing up, church was the center of my life. (That), along with school, those were the two areas where almost everything happened,” Whitehead says.
Whitehead grew up in a small town in Louisiana, where her parents were teachers and church was a must.
“We all knew each other. We were all alike in the sense that we came from the same kind of economic background and cultural background, but I was loved and I belonged and I knew the church was a great place to be, so I was very blessed there,” Whitehead says. “But my mother said to me, and I didn’t understand it at first, that I was always restless when it came to learning. I was a lifelong learner.”
After graduating high school, Whitehead’s restlessness led her to leave the small town to study secondary education at the University of North Texas.
“I have the thirst of a teacher. I love to take complicated things and make them simpler,” Whitehead says.
After three years, Whitehead became pregnant with her first child and took some time off. Not too long, though, because she again became restless to learn.
She headed to Southern Methodist University where she got a master’s of liberal arts degree. That’s also where she met Rabbi Levi Olan.
“He was so well-known in Dallas, well thought of. He’s known as the conscience of Dallas because he took strong stands for justice and for doing what was right. This was right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. He was known for being very wise and very intelligent, very spiritual and that really appealed to me, all three of those things,” Whitehead says. “So I took his course, and in that class, he said something that I never forgot, which is ‘Truth is found in paradox.’”
For Whitehead, this was a turning point. Her life, it seemed, was full of paradoxes. And she’d been struggling with feeling like she had to choose an either/or option. Faith or science. Desire to learn or duty to family. Pursuing passion projects or submitting to other’s desires.
Armed with this idea, Whitehead became pregnant with her second child, and again, felt restless.
Whitehead looked at a catalog for the Perkins School of Theology, where a friend of hers, who aimed to become a community college chaplain, was attending.
“I knew that I wanted to go to school there, but I certainly didn’t think I was called to ministry. I had no idea even what that looked like for a woman. I’d never seen a woman preach,” she says. “But I opened up the Perkins catalog, and I thought, ‘I have to take these courses. These are the best courses I’ve ever seen.’”
Topics like the human condition, moral theology and introduction to who God is brought her into the university in a way she’d never studied before — all with a 3 and 6-year-old at home.
“I did not know where it was going to lead me professionally, I just knew I had to do it, and got a lot of resistance because this was unusual,” Whitehead says. “At this point, I was in the second wave of women who entered seminary, so we did a lot of sharing with one another and supporting one another. The community was fairly open to women, but it was a change.”
The next challenge came as she completed seminary, when she had to go before the United Methodist Board of Ministry and declare why she believed she was called to ministry. She struggled with having the confidence to say she had gifts, and felt it presumptuous to say she knew what God wanted for her, she says.
After talking to a friend, who told her she should feel affirmed in her abilities because of how far she’d made it, eventually Whitehead decided she’d set her sights on local churches, where she “could see God working.”
She did an internship at Highland Park United Methodist Church, and was the first woman to do so. And though she did not get a job there after her internship like the last four (male) interns before her, she did not lose faith.
She still didn’t lose faith when she lost her second job opportunity.
“I didn’t think it was just because I was a woman, but I was realizing it was different for people,” Whitehead says. “I was trying to be caring about the fact that a woman in this role was still very different for people.”
When a 6-month-old church in her area of Plano opened up, Whitehead finally caught a break and became the associate pastor at Custer Road United Methodist Church under the senior pastor, Reverend Mark Craig.
“He was very good at being efficient and effective and he made things happen,” she says. “I knew after working with him for one week that we were going to be a success because he was very good at a lot of things that really mattered to a local church, and he gave me the freedom to use the gifts that I had.”
Whitehead soon realized she was “a starter,” she says. She started small groups, Sunday school classes, ministry teams and infrastructure. She also had many firsts, like becoming the first woman to serve as chair of the Plano Ministerial Alliance in 1985 and the first woman to chair the Finance and Administration Team for the North Texas UMC Conference in 1988.
Fifteen years later, Craig moved to become pastor at Highland Park United Methodist Church.
“That’s what I call the end of the beginning because he and I had done everything together. We had hired a lot of part-time people, but we were very much a team and the church had grown tremendously because we did hit the ground running,” she says. “We were in the zone.”
Paul Goodrich came to the church to be senior pastor in 1995, and though she enjoyed working with him, his laid-back energy and comfortability in the status quo brought on a familiar feeling: restlessness.
Whitehead started to become open to leaving the church she’d been at for over a decade. And in 2000, Stan Copeland came to Lovers Lane United Methodist Church.
“He was more visionary, really, than I was. He was very strong in evangelism and kind of a change-agent,” she says. “That appealed to me because I was ready for that kind of challenge again.”
At 52 years old, Whitehead started over and headed to Lovers Lane UMC, where she’s been for 24 years, helping guide the church as it has grown in size, moved off Lovers Lane, started private elementary school Wesley Prep and merged with Walnut Hill United Methodist Church in 2020.
Though not restless in church service, Whitehead recently felt a pull for a new journey: writing a book.
“The book came out of five years of wrestling with being able to share my faith journey in such a way that other people would want to continue to go on their faith journey,” Whitehead says. “I strongly want people to get that just like we grow up physically and we grow up emotionally, hopefully we can grow up spiritually.”
I Am Enough: A Memoir for Spiritual Seekers was published on October 1 and is available on Amazon for $19.95. The book chronicles Whitehead’s life from growing up in a small town to becoming an educator, housewife and, eventually, an ordained minister. Despite all of these titles, she says, feelings of doubt and impostor syndrome continued to hold her back, leading her on a journey toward self-acceptance.
“We keep thinking that somehow we’ve got to do more and be more than we currently are and what I learned in my own journey is that it’s important to be honest and open and real and truthful about who I am, and once I’m authentic and real then I can name my flaws,” Whitehead says. “Once I can look at the things that are blocking me from connecting with God, I can feel that love and be accepted by God.”
