August 21, 2000
Through a hard life, all roads led to ministry
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___FORT WORTH--All the roads of Shirley Mann's life are leading to 2836 Hemphill St. in Fort Worth.
___Some of the roads are really paths--rocky and rough and dangerous. Others are hedged by thorns and brambles. Some are like the road in Robert Frost's poem and not often traveled by others.
___But many of the roads are smooth and level--King's Highways.
___In September, Mann will make a major life change and become director of the Debra Key Hospitality House on Hemphill, just off Berry Street in South Fort Worth.
SHIRLEY MANN
___"It seems as if all of her life, she has been being led here," said Key, the founder of the facility for families of people incarcerated in one of the many city, county, state and federal prisons that dot the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
___"Shirley coming to be here is one of those God deals," she said. "When we were looking for a new manager, everybody I talked to mentioned Shirley as an ideal choice."
___Most Texas Baptists do not know Mann, although many have talked with her. She is the cheerful voice which greets callers to the Baptist General Convention of Texas: "Good morning, Baptist Convention."
___For the past 12 years, she has worked as the BGCT's switchboard operator. She reckons she gives that greeting 200 to 300 times a day and connects the caller to the proper department.
___But on Sept. 29, she will hang up her headset and move in full-time as manager of the sprawling 6,000-square-foot house a couple of blocks from Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth.
___The house serves all the area's prison facilities, including three federal prisons, a couple of state facilities, as well as people traveling to see loved ones in prisons a long way from home.
___An estimated 9,000 prisoners live in the various facilities, which range from hospice care for terminally ill men and women federal prisoners to minimum security federal camps to state jails.
___The Fort Worth Hospitality House is one of six such facilities in Texas that minister to offender families, explained Jim Young, who directs restorative justice ministries for Texas Baptists.
___Key, both the founder and namesake of the Hospitality House, started a ministry to offender families soon after she graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1984. The Hospitality House was started three years ago.
___"Last year, more than 500 families used the Hospitality House," said Key, who now is a Mission Service Corps volunteer and a field consultant for BGCT restorative justice ministries. "Many of them were elderly parents coming to see children and grandchildren in the prisons. Many of the offenders were ill or perhaps dying."
___Family members often come to pick up babies born in the medical facilities of the two federal prisons in Fort Worth, she added.
___"We needed a caring person who could live in the Hospitality House and be available" to individuals facing all these challenges, Key said. "We wanted someone who really cares and can understand what they are going through. That really helps a lot."
___In Mann, they found a caring, loving, experienced manager who says her life experiences have been preparing her to do the work.
___Her life has not been easy, nor has the path she has trod been smooth and free of stones and mudholes. She gives her testimony of the way life used to be, but says she "would rather tell of the Savior I met one night while driving down a Los Angeles freeway."
___Mann was born in Lubbock but grew up on a farm near Petersburg, about 35 miles northwest.
___"When I was about 7, I realized my daddy was different from the dads of my friends," she said. "He was a good farmer, but he let the bottle rule his life. He was an alcoholic."
___When she was 9, her grandmother told her a story about a little girl--also about 9--who went forward in church, was baptized and her daddy quit drinking.
___"I knew that was something I had to do," Mann said. "I wanted my Daddy to quit drinking, so I walked the aisle and was baptized on Father's Day. But he didn't quit drinking."
___Her disappointment led to anger against God, and then to rebellion. When she was 15, she ran away from home with a man who was five years older.
___"I ran away from home to get away from an abusive alcoholic and married another alcoholic, who was not only abusive, but also a criminal," she explained.
___Her husband often was on the run from the law, and life was a hand-to-mouth experience. "When he ran from the law, I ran too. I was afraid to leave; I was afraid to stay."
___She had her first child when she was 16 and then had two more by the time she was 19. She had given birth to five children before she reached 25.
___The last child died when he was five weeks old of crib death syndrome, an event that made the already rebellious girl even madder at God.
___Eventually, her husband abandoned her, taking the children and moving to Denver. She followed and was forced to live on the streets while she was looking for her children. She also had serious surgery and no place to go, so she slept in a park, ill and abandoned.
___Finally, she got the children back and returned to Southern California.
___"I started going to church, primarily because I wanted my children exposed to God, but I partied on Friday and Saturday nights before going to church on Sunday," she admitted. Though she never drank, smoked or cursed before, she started doing it all.
___She often drove to relax. One Saturday night, she was on a Los Angeles freeway "when it just seemed that God spoke to me and told me I could not keep on living like I was living," she recalled. "He gave me the choice to die--which I knew was both physical and spiritual--or to accept his Son, Jesus, as my Savior and to live for him.
___"I chose Jesus, and I have never regretted it."
___Not long after that experience, she and her children moved back to the Texas Panhandle, where she operated a day care center.
___"God kept putting hurting people in my life for me to share with. It really scared me at first. I told God he was going to have to help me cry for them so I could minister to them. It was very plain that he told me he was not asking me to cry for others but to show them the way to him," she said.
___Mann moved to Dallas 12 years ago and started work for the BGCT. In those years, she has lived in a variety of places, with a variety of people, in a variety of situations.
___Through her church, she has led Experiencing God classes and weekend retreats, ministered in prisons, shared through crisis pregnancy centers. But much of her ministry has been in jails and prisons.
___"I think God has put me with a variety of people so I could learn to minister and witness to them," she said upon reflection.
___Now she plans to draw on those experiences, and her own life experiences as well, to help and inspire those in need.
___Jesus is "my bridge over troubled waters," she said. "It amazes me that God uses my life, but I want to be all I can be for him, because he is my all in all."
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