BIXBY -- More than four years ago, First United Methodist Church of Bixby got a new minister. At the time, many in the congregation did not know what to expect. After all, they'd never had a female senior pastor.
Denominational leaders' appointment of the Rev. Jessica Farish Moffatt
Marked a first for the church.
"Any time you have a change like that, it requires a little bit of an adjustment," said Kathleen Phillips, chairwoman of the church's administrative council.
"We were all very receptive, and Jessica is such a dynamic person that any preconceived ... thoughts that we might have had vanished after the first week."
Moffatt had preconceived ideas a quarter- century ago when her older sister revealed plans to attend seminary and become a United Methodist pastor.
"That is so weird," Moffatt recalled telling her sister. "Can a girl do that?"
At the time, Moffatt had never heard a woman preach.
All these years later, her sister, Karen Farish Miller, is a Methodist district superintendent in Asheville, N.C.
That first reaction helps Moffatt understand when someone asks, "Now, you do what again?"
A full-time minister for 16 years, Moffatt has learned to balance what she calls the four M's -- marriage, ministry, motherhood and me.
"I wondered before I was married how a spouse of mine would feel having a wife who was considered a spiritual authority in her professional life," Moffatt said. "But that has not been any kind of any issue for us."
Her husband, Blake, is president of First United Bank in Sapulpa. Daughter Hannah, 11, is a sixth-grader at Bixby Elementary School.
"My husband cooks and helps care for our house and our daughter," Moffatt said. "We really share all those responsibilities. There are no divisions of labor because of gender in our house."
She jokes that their relationship works because each supports something the other loves.
"I support a whole lot of golf, and he supports a whole lot of church."
That Moffatt and her sister both entered the ministry shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
Both their grandfathers were Methodist preachers.
For a long time, though, Moffatt's future seemed tied to the performing arts, not the pastorate.
At age 4, she first sang on stage. As a teen-ager at Tulsa Edison High School, she played the lead in school plays. As a young adult, she excelled as an opera singer -- and even contemplated a professional career.
But she decided the opera life would require her to focus too much on herself -- and not enough on God and her fellow Christians.
As a senior public relations major at the University of Tulsa, she prayed that God would show her how to use her degree.
"I was saying to the Lord, 'You know, I could work for a university or a political candidate or a corporation' ... when I got this sense of, 'You should do that which means the most to you.'
"I just said aloud in my room, 'Well, that would be Jesus Christ.' There was just this huge gasp in the room."
She enrolled at the Cander School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta and graduated in 1984. She began full-time ministry at First United Methodist Church in Tulsa in spring 1985 and worked in a variety of roles there until her 1997 transfer to Bixby.
For Angela Ward, 15, a member of the Bixby church, Moffatt is a role model. Ward, a Bixby High School sophomore, plans to pursue the ministry herself.
"She's very sincere and down to earth," Ward said of Moffatt.
"When she found out that I wanted to get into ministry, she was very supportive and would pull me aside a lot and help me along.
"She'd tell me a lot of times that she was there with me, that she wanted to be my partner through my becoming a minister."