By Yuniya Khan

On Sunday morning, Reverend Doretha Lindsay Ward gets into her car to drive from her home in Delaware to St. Peter’s Church of God, in Philadelphia, the church she pastors. For the past two years, she has been making this commute—one hour each way on a good day—at least three days a week, plus Sundays. Not an easy feat, especially with her current schedule and commitments.  

On this particular Sunday, as she drives off, she reflects on her roots and the ways in which her life has been shaped by God’s hand and God’s plan for her life—a plan that, at least for the moment, does not include an end to the challenging commute. “God has not released me yet,” she says. And with a robust laugh, she adds, “When that happens, I’m going to shout ‘Hallelujah! Thank you,  

 Doretha grew up in Accomac, Virginia, in a family of 14. Active in her church from a young age, she showed up at every service and event, prompting her mother to declare, “Girl, you’re going to lose your mind right in church.”  

 When Doretha was 17-years-old, a revered pastor, a woman named Reverend Washington, approached her one Sunday as Doretha was leaving church. Reverend Washington took a good look at Doretha and said, “All right, Pastor, I’ll see you later.”  

 Doretha brushed it off skeptically, saying, “I’m not a pastor.” Reverend Washington just nodded knowingly. God had given her a vision about Doretha’s life, though Doretha couldn’t yet see it. “There was a wild side about me,” she recalls. “But not so wild that I would do crazy kinds of things. When God ‘s hand is on you, you’re only going to go but so far before God pulls you back in.” 

 Still, it would be many years before Reverend Washington’s vision came to pass. 

 As a young girl, one of Doretha’s biggest dreams had been to graduate high school and carve out a future for herself. But that dream hit a snag when she became pregnant before she could graduate. It was the 1960s, an era when out-of-wedlock pregnancies often brought shame not only to the pregnant woman in question, but also to her family. To escape the brunt of judgment, Doretha’s parents sent her to live with one of her sisters in New York. Feeling disgraced and chastened, Doretha accepted her fate and settled in with her sister. 

 During one of her first prenatal checkups, the doctor informed Doretha about a New York law mandating that teenage mothers return to school after giving birth. Immediately, she felt hope rise within her and lodge itself in her heart, a hope she guarded closely throughout the long months of her pregnancy.  

 Doretha gave birth to her daughter, Karen, in May 1964 in New York, and happily embraced her new role as mother to her tiny infant. Even as she gave herself over to caring for her child, she still held on to the hope of finishing school in New York and obtaining her high school diploma.  

 But it was not to be. 

 Instead, Doretha’s father insisted that she return to Virginia. Despondent, she obeyed his mandate and returned to Virginia, where she remained for several years.  

 Even now, decades later, Doretha still feels the weight of that disappointment, that sense of a dream snatched from her hands. “I always think,” she muses, “that had I been allowed to stay in New York, my life would have been very different.” 

 Not one to languish in self-pity, Doretha made the most of her time in Virginia. But she struggled to support her child as a single mother without a high school diploma and, for a short while, went to live with the family of her child’s father. By that time, her mother had separated from her father and relocated to Philadelphia.  

 When Doretha reached the end of her rope in Virginia, she sought to follow in her mother’s footsteps. It was her mother, after all, who always told her, “Can’t nobody tell you when you had enough. But you will know it.” And Doretha had had enough. “Mama, can I come live with you in Philadelphia?” Her mother opened her arms and home to Doretha. And from that moment, Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, became Doretha’s home, as well. 

Doretha thrived in Philadelphia. She had learned and internalized the value of self-worth from her mother, a woman who, despite her lack of formal education, overflowed with deep wisdom. It was this sense of self-worth and her innate sense of ambition that drove her, years later, to pursue her GED. When the opportunity presented itself, she enrolled in a program, sat for the exam, and finally received her GED in 1976. 

 With her GED in hand, Doretha set out on the journey she had always envisioned for herself. It was as if, after having her hands and feet tied for so many years, she was suddenly set free and given wings. She enrolled at the Community College of Philadelphia and studied marketing, with the hopes of becoming a successful businesswoman in the community. Shortly after, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Urban Theological Studies and following that, an MBA from Phoenix University.  

 As she worked to establish herself academically and professionally, God was carving out a path to full-time ministry in Doretha’s life. She had been an active member at Friendly Friends Baptist Church in Philadelphia where she taught Bible studies and preached on occasion. 

 One Friday evening, Doretha was asked to stand in for the scheduled preacher who had been unable to attend that evening. Unbeknownst to her, as she stood at the podium sharing God’s word that night, two members from the search committee of St. Peter’s Church of God sat in the congregation taking in her message. At the close of the service, they approached her and explained that their pastor, Carrie Smith, had fallen ill and had been unable to pastor for the past three years. They asked Doretha for her assistance: “Will you come and be our pastor?” 

 This was no small ask for Doretha. She questioned her skill, her readiness, her capability to take on such a significant role. She was that 17-year-old girl again, saying, “But I’m not a pastor!” But once again, she chose to accept the challenge. There would be no backing down. “I went over and began to work with them,” she recalls, “even though I had not a clue as to what I was doing, since I had no prior training as a pastor. But my heart was ready.”  

 Shortly after that initial invitation, Doretha was installed as the pastor of St. Peter’s Church of God in Philadelphia in February 1996. It was not an easy journey. With no mentors to support or guide her, Doretha spent the first eight years in the pastorate traversing a steep learning curve, figuring things out on her own by trial and error.  

 She also found herself floundering at home. In the early days of her ministry, long before she accepted the pastorate at St. Peter’s Church, a church mother had advised Doretha to marry. “If you’re going into ministry,” the church mother said, “you should get married.” Doretha took her advice and married for the sake of the ministry. But it was a decision Doretha would later come to regret. Though she remained married to her husband for 31 years, she struggled. “It was 31 long, hard, suffering years,” she admits. “He was a deacon in the church and probably knew the Word better than I did. But I was the breadwinner. I ran the house, did all the shopping, paid all the bills.” 

 As with every challenge she had faced to that point, however, she stood up and faced all of it head on. She took all of those experiences—the challenging and painful ones, as well as the uplifting and rewarding experiences—and transformed them into another major achievement: in 2016, a Master of Divinity degree from Reformed Episcopal Seminary, where she was one of the first Black women pastors to graduate from the institution. Reverend Washington’s vision, from so many years before, had come full circle. 

 While she grew and evolved as a minister to the church and her congregants, Doretha began to expand her ministry to the broader community beyond the church walls. Her daughter, Karen, had been attending college in Philadelphia, and took note of the hardships and harshness of life in some of the communities around her. Moved by these realities, she designed a program as  part of her thesis, entitled, “Building on Opportunity for Sound Training,” or BOOST, focused on addressing key challenges through educational and economic interventions. Over the next few years, she transformed it into a nonprofit organization called BOOST Community Development Corporation.  

 Now run by Doretha, her two daughters and her granddaughter, BOOST specifically targets at-risk youth in a low-income area of Philadelphia, providing summer youth employment programs, education support, and economic assistance for those struggling to keep up with bills. This year, for example, they worked with 30 youth in an academic program designed to stimulate interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, as well as encourage greater involvement in community development work. 

 BOOST also organizes giveaway programs at Thanksgiving and Christmas, converting their office space into a Christmas village every year for families with kids to enjoy. In addition, one of their goals for the next year is to launch the GED program they have been in the process of building. 

 Ultimately, their collective vision is to bring life back to this community and transform it into the thriving center it once was. For Doretha, Philadelphia is the city that once took her in and embraced her. Being a part of BOOST and helping lead it creates another full circle moment for her—a rich and rewarding opportunity to give back, to commit her time, effort and resources to bring the light and life back to under-resourced areas of Philadelphia.  

 As the scope of her ministry expanded and she gained more confidence in herself as a minister, Doretha realized the time had come to make some changes in her life. After years of praying about it, she divorced her husband in 2018. Leaning once again on her mother’s wisdom, she knew it was time to move on, and she was ready to take action. Getting to that point had not been easy; she had to face and overcome fears, insecurities and self-doubt. But this became the basis for one of the principles she often passes on to the young women she mentors: “As women, we have to know our own worth. We ought not to settle.”  

 Today she uses the lessons learned on her journey to teach and mentor young ministers, particularly Black women pastors. In her experience, they often lack the kind of support that many male pastors receive. “If I can do anything to assist them, to help them on their journeys, to help make their work a little easier, I do that,” she says. “But I wish that we as Black women pastors did more of this, that we reached out to each other and helped each other more.” 

 She often advises aspiring female pastors to seek out mentors. “Find someone you can walk with, that will help make your journey easier,” Doretha says. “Because when you have people God has given you to minister to, they come with all their problems, and you cannot take that lightly. It is a great responsibility. So, find somebody to walk with you. Don’t walk the journey alone.” 

 It was this desire to support upcoming pastors that compelled her to accept the invitation to be the moderator of the Baptist Fellowship of the Northeast, a CBF regional organization comprised of churches and individuals in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhoe Island and Vermont. T 

She had been involved with CBF for about five years at that point, and she happily stepped into the role in May 2022. During her year as moderator, she sought opportunities to mentor, to build relationships with churches and provide guidance where needed. Now, in her role as past-moderator, Doretha hopes to use her experience to help the moderator role evolve into an even more effective, efficient and far-reaching model.  

 In 2021, a new phase of life and ministry unfolded. Doretha remarried and left Philadelphia for Delaware to live with her new husband, who is a true blessing in her life, Donald G. Ward. Soon after relocating to Delaware, she took over the management of her husband’s fleet business, overseeing 15 part-time employees, as well as the administrative and operations elements of the company. Contracted to deliver fuel for the buses at Philadelphia International Airport, the business operates seven days a week, though, according to Doretha, it can often feel like a twenty-four/seven operation.  

 Though the job can be a heavy lift at times, Doretha sees it as an opportunity to minister. Many of her employees are seniors whose financial condition requires them to keep working. “It’s an opportunity to assist,” Doretha says. “They still need that additional income. We can’t help everybody, but we can make a small impact because we’re able to give them meaningful employment.” 

 It’s evident Doretha lives a busy life as a mother, wife, pastor, professor, manager of her husband’s small business, co-director of BOOST, and past-moderator of CBF. But she embraces all these roles as God-given opportunities to minister, to reflect the light and love God wants to share with the world.  

 Her dreams for her life do not end here, however. For the next chapter of her life, whenever God determines the time is right to turn the page, Doretha’s plan is to get back to traveling the world, something she enjoyed doing in her younger years, but which time has not allowed her to do in recent years. As soon as God releases her from her current obligations, the first stop will be Greece. “Hopefully I’ll have enough money!” she says, laughing. 

 Hers has been a full, rich life, Doretha reflects. Pain and sorrow, gladness and joy, have all been woven into the tapestry of her life, creating beautiful patterns and textures that have made her life more meaningful than anything she might have dreamed for herself. “The Word teaches us that God knew us from the foundation of the world,” she reflects, “even before we were formed in our mother’s womb. And I believe that. God knew me even before I was born, and God had a great plan for me. When I look at where God has brought me, from a single mother to where I am now, I know God had a plan for my life.”  

God has blessed Doretha with three wonderful children. One boy and two girls. Her life scripture is: Isaiah 61:1 The Spirit of the Lord  God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; (KJV).