Voices: A call to surrender

Editor’s Note: The following was written June 10 after the conclusion of the 2026 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting and published June 11.

Mom and Dad tried for years to get pregnant. Once they finally did, they miscarried. After delivering the gut-wrenching news, the doctor informed my mom she would never be able to have kids of her own.

While Mom and Dad were driving home from the doctor, grieving the child they had lost and the doctor’s declaration they would never get to bring a baby home from the hospital, they pulled over to the side of the road to pray.

Through their tears, they cried out to God: “God, we know that children are a gift from you. If you choose to give us the gift of children, we promise to entrust their lives completely to you. They’re not ours, but yours.”

Every time Mom and Dad found out they were pregnant with my older brother, me, and my younger brother, they prayed: “God, we remember the promise. They’re not ours, but yours.”

New life in Jesus

I first experienced the love of Jesus through my parents—in their love for each other and their love for me and my two brothers. The love of Jesus was never something I had to buy into or be convinced of. Rather, it was something I knew and was familiar with.

When I was 7 years old, a preacher came to our small town in New Mexico to preach Jesus every night for a week, and my family was in attendance. I remember bringing a chapter book based on a popular ’90s television show Full House to keep me entertained when the sermons ran long.

Every night, toward the end of the service, the preacher would invite people to come to the front. It was at that moment each night, I would look up from my book to see people around me get up from their chairs and go to the stage in front. Growing up in children’s choir and musicals, I loved being on stage. So, I asked my parents, “Can I go?”

Each night, Mom and Dad said, “No.” And each night, I followed up with a one-word question, “Why?” They told me it was because I did not understand why they were going.

I am grateful I grew up in such a way that every night my parents would tuck me in, read me a bedtime story, and pray with me. That week, we read a children’s book that explained in story form what it meant for someone to decide to follow Jesus. Mom and Dad said this was why people were going to the stage at the end of the services.

After the story ended each night, I would ask my parents a series of questions. If you know me, you know I love to ask questions. Finally, after asking questions one night, I was ready. I prayed: “Jesus, I love you. You know that I love you. But I want to be yours forever.”

I am fully convinced that was the night God adopted me as his daughter by grace through faith in Jesus. That was the night the Holy Spirit made a home in my heart. And no doubt, those prayers of surrender Mom and Dad lifted on my behalf since before I was born—and praise God, still today—played a role in God drawing me to know him.

One month later, I was baptized in our Southern Baptist church to let the world know I belong to Jesus.

Last night, I was meeting with a new believer as we worked together to learn how to share her testimony of what her life was like before she knew Jesus, how she came to know Jesus, and what her life is like now that she knows Jesus.

In our conversation, I mentioned I loved Jesus from a young age, and while I cannot remember a time I did not believe in Jesus, I do remember when I surrendered to Jesus at the age of 7.

Making his name known

From the moment Jesus set me free at 7 years old and onward, I have desired with all I am for others to desire God—not just with their head or with their heart, but with everything. That God-given passion has motivated me in every season.

At the end of the day, I want nothing more than for you to know Jesus. It is grace God made a way for me to know him, and it is grace God makes a way for me to invite you to know him, too. Every time I open my Bible, God writes truth on my heart he compels me to share with someone else.

I thank God for the gift of getting to grow up in a church that sent me as a teenager to partner with local churches around the world to proclaim the good news of Jesus—the gospel that is the power of God for salvation for all who believe. From a young age, God taught me that my whole life is a mission trip until he carries me home.

I wrestled with God’s call to ministry the last four months of my senior year of high school. My older brother had already surrendered to God’s call to ministry, and I was not interested. I had my own dream of writing for Teen Vogue magazine. Praise God, he had a better plan for my life to bring him glory.

I often thank God for making a way for me to have who I consider the world’s best youth pastor growing up in our Southern Baptist church in Texas.

My youth pastor recognized God was calling me to ministry, but he was gracious enough to allow the Holy Spirit to be the one who revealed that truth to me in his perfect way and time. Rather than pointing out the call to ministry himself, my youth pastor spent the spring semester of my senior year pointing me to Scripture God used to illuminate the path of surrender before me.

The week after I graduated high school in 2008, I surrendered to God’s call to ministry at our church’s summer youth camp. I remember praying: “God, I gave you my life when I was 7, but these are my dreams, my future, my ambitions—they’re yours. I trust you.”

The following week, I got to participate in a week of ministry training through a Texas Baptist youth leadership camp. That winter, my home church affirmed God’s call on my life by licensing me to serve in gospel ministry.

Renewed obedience

Seven years later, when I returned from serving overseas as an International Mission Board Journeyman missionary, I tried to run from God’s call to ministry.

While I loved getting to share the good news of Jesus with college students in Europe who had never heard the gospel, I had been in an unhealthy team situation where I did not have a voice, and it left me more broken than ever. Praise God, he is a strong and steady refuge even in the fiercest of storms.

Although God’s power is perfected in weakness, I felt like I had nothing to offer in my brokenness. Even so, my favorite thing about working at Starbucks within a week of my return was getting to share Jesus with guests and coworkers alike. I guess you can take a girl out of ministry, but you can’t take ministry out of a girl.

Once my church’s summer youth camp rolled around a couple months later, I volunteered to serve as a small group leader, as I had done in summers past.

At camp, I found myself in the same room where I had surrendered to God’s call to ministry seven years before. Much like he had before, God spoke to me in the most gracious and direct way only he can.

I remember God’s gentle conviction and calling as he whispered to my soul: “I made you for this, I marked you for this, I put my hand on you for this. You said, ‘Yes.’ Why are you running?”

After experiencing the joyous highs and gut-wrenching lows of gospel ministry for seven years, I found myself in a place of renewed surrender before God—knowing the treasure and the cost of saying “yes” all over again.

Within two hours of that encounter with God, I was invited to join a team to help pioneer a campus ministry at Texas A&M University, and I have not turned back since.

I thank God for calling me to pursue my Master of Divinity at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. I came into seminary loving God, his word, and his world, but I came out loving God, his word, and his world so much more.

At Truett, I was not just accepted as a woman called to ministry, nor was I merely affirmed in my calling. At Truett, I was no less than celebrated by every student and faculty member as God’s daughter obeying his call on my life to serve him for his glory.

And that is what God’s call to ministry is: a call to obedience—a call to surrender.

The life of Meghan Hendrickson was brief—a mere seven years. On the night I prayed with my parents and surrendered my life to follow Jesus, I was crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And praise God, he made a way for me to live this life by faith, believing in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

Because Jesus set me free from the power of sin that leads to death, I no longer live for myself and my own fame. Instead, I am freed to live for Christ and his name.

I thank God that growing up in Southern Baptist life, no one ever brought up my gender when it comes to following Jesus and using the gifts God has entrusted to me for the building up of his body. In fact, I did not even know women serving in gospel ministry was controversial until my last semester of college when my professor said, “Today, we are talking about the issue of women in ministry.”

To which I immediately replied, “What issue?”

No matter the cost

I have often said I would not choose my call to preaching and pastoral ministry in this cultural moment. I do not like conflict and I want to be everyone’s best friend. Even so, God chose me.

God is the one who created me, God is the one who saved me, God is the one who called me, and God is the one who equips and sends me to proclaim the good news of Jesus. I pray I will continue to choose him—no matter the cost.

Praise God for the Great Commission and the promise of Matthew 28. Jesus said: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

I thank God for being with me always—including today.

Eighteen years after surrendering to God’s call to ministry through tears, I wept bitterly today. I grieved the cooperation of men and women rescued by grace through faith in Jesus—a cooperation that has raised me, baptized me, licensed me, and commissioned me—who overwhelmingly voted to stifle the gifts God entrusts to his daughters for his glory.

Nevertheless, I hold unswervingly to the hope of Jesus God created and called me to profess—for he who calls us is faithful. A convention’s vote cannot constrain our Almighty God. While there are still people in the world who need to know the hope of Jesus, God will continue calling his sons and daughters to surrender their lives to making his name known in every nation.

Much like the words of Jeremiah 20:9: “But if I say, ‘I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”

Whether that is sitting at the kitchen island with a new believer like I was last night, standing before thousands of people gathered in the name of Jesus, serving someone an iced caramel macchiato, and everything in between, I cannot help but share that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him.

Christ, be magnified. Christ, be lifted high. Christ, be glorified.

Meghan Hendrickson is discipleship pastor at Valley Ranch Baptist Church in Coppell. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.