My God’s Love Is Real

I was sitting with my three sons when my youngest son, Timothy, asked me when I started in ministry.

When I was 11 years old, I accepted Jesus as my Savior, and I felt a call to tell people about Jesus. I started stuffing tracts in tenement mailboxes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, including my name and address and telephone number. The U.S. Postal system contacted my mother, and she questioned me. I didn’t know it was illegal. Then, I started mailing tracts to people using a telephone directory.

When I was 13 years old, I taught a Sunday school class of immigrant Italian children in Leominster, Massachusetts. 

Then, at 15 years old, I went to East Boston, Massachusetts, two or three times a week with Pastor Joseph Bombara. Pastor Joseph was planting a new church. I played the piano or organ, taught Sunday school, cleaned the church, and played my accordion in the park for street meetings.

When I was 17 years old, my boyfriend was pioneering a church in Medford, Massachusetts. I went with him on Saturday nights to clean the hall on the second floor behind the theatre that was full of beer cans and cigarette butts. On Sunday morning, I played the piano, taught Sunday school, and was also the church secretary and treasurer. I borrowed my father’s station wagon to transport people.

At 18 years of age, I was a pastor’s wife. I stopped working when I was expecting our first child.

Then, at age 19, I was playing the organ for our children’s day program. Our Sunday school superintendent was timing my labor contractions as I continued to play the organ. After church, I went to the hospital and our first child, George, Jr. was born. We took our Italian wedding gifts – close to $5,000 and purchased the ex-mayor’s home in Medford, Massachusetts.

We purchased land next to the expressway to build a new church building. In the interim, with the second and third child arriving, we purchased a beautiful church building on Hillside Avenue across from Tufts University.

At 24 years of age, with three children, my pastor husband, George, decided to leave the church, turn in the real estate deeds for all three properties, and we were off to Erie, Pennsylvania, as George served as an interim pastor.

About a year later, we moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, to pastor Calvary Evangelistic Center. The Jesus People Movement burst upon us, and we opened the first coffeehouse in New England.

At 35, I took a trip to India speaking in churches and women’s conventions. At 41, I was on my way to Haiti to live in tents. At 58 years of age, we moved to the Dominican Republic. George passed when I was 65. I continued on in the DR until 2014.

At 84, I am blessed to join up with my sons on mission events, and write for our ministry. The mission is in my heart wherever I am. When I was 11 years old, my prayer was incessantly, “God, please use me.” He has answered my prayers. “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Mark 8:36  ~Jeanne DeTellis Loudon