Heather Daugherty has had 14 years of experience in different roles within campus ministry before she was hired to be Belmont’s new campus minister.
But Daugherty’s journey to campus ministry took a different path than one might expect. She graduated Boston University with a degree in Biology.
“I felt called to ministry my sophomore year,” Daugherty said. “But because I had been kind of going to medicine direction, I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll do medical missions or something like that.’ By the time I figured out I didn’t want to go to med school, I only had two classes left.”
Daugherty then got a Masters of Divinity from Boston University School of Theology. After 10 years as the associate chaplain at Trevecca Nazarene University, Daugherty decided she was ready to take the next step and search for a larger leadership role in university ministry.
“I tell students to just keep walking until you feel like God closes a door. The whole time I was in the application process at Belmont I’m like, ‘I don’t know if this is really what I want to do, I don’t know if they will hire me, but I still felt like the door was still being kept open, so I kept walking through the doors that were opening.’”
A controversial topic within ministry is should women be allowed to be preach. The Church of the Nazarene, in which Daugherty was ordained, does accept women as pastor, but that doesn’t mean Daugherty hasn’t had encounters with people who have never heard a woman preach. Most encounters, she said, have not been negative.
“When I, as a woman in ministry, live out my call faithfully, God uses that to really impact lives,” she said.
This article was written by Will Norton.