My Ordination Story: KyungMi Banks

The Question That Changed Everything

Before KyungMi Banks was born, a single question changed the course of her life.

Her mother had already lost three children. Frightened that KyungMi might follow them, and not yet Christian, her parents considered an abortion, and her mother went to a neighbour to borrow the money.

Instead of handing it over, the neighbour asked her something that would change everything. “What if there is a God, and what if God will provide everything your baby needs?”

Her mother decided to try. KyungMi was born and survived the six months everyone feared she wouldn’t. She traces it all back to what John Wesley called prevenient grace, the grace that goes before us, even though she then knew nothing of Wesley or the Bible. God, she believes, was already holding her life.

A Coal Mining Village

KyungMi grew up watching the transformation faith brings, including in her own parents' lives. The first church in her South Korean coal-mining village in the Northeast, which her family helped to build, changed people before her eyes.

Men known for drinking, gambling and violence, the men children crossed the road to avoid, would walk through the church doors and come out softer, happier, more joyful.

God became so real for her as she witnessed these things. She wanted to follow Jesus, and was baptised when she was 12. She still remembers praying to keep that cold yet fresh drop of water on her forehead to cleanse her heart.

But by her early twenties, she had drifted, chasing promotion, money, and recognition as a qualified secondary school teacher, journalist and book editor in Christian publishing, where words were her gift. The Church had slipped down her priorities.

The Voice at Four in the Morning

Then, at four o'clock in the morning on the first day of the new millennium, she heard a voice. Gentle, but insistent. It told her to wake up and read Isaiah chapter 45. She had no idea what was in it, and tried to keep sleeping, but the voice wouldn't let her. So she found it in the index and read. The passage repetitively says, "I'm the Lord. There is no other God apart from me." It wasn’t just echoing, but thundering at her heart.

She had refused God’s calling once before, when she encountered God through Moses’ story, and told God she wasn't the right person and that God should send somebody else, for she couldn’t identify with Moses’ slow, ineloquent speech.

This time she listened with relief and trust. The question that had followed her since childhood finally had an answer waiting. Why had God saved her life, and what was it for?

Indirectly, For a While

KyungMi came to Britain in 2001 for missionary training with Youth With a Mission, and explored the possibility of serving as an overseas missionary. She knocked on different potential doors, travelling to several countries. Interestingly, whenever she tried, she felt God kept bringing her back to the UK. In one Bible college, Edinburgh, she met her husband John, and although she had never planned to marry in the UK, they agreed God was calling them together, with the Church as their shared mission field.

For years, she served God “indirectly” as she puts it, supporting John's ministry and looking after family, while one question never left her. “Lord, when will you let me work with you directly?”

The answer came through Cliff College and then a Methodist church in Bakewell. Watching all kinds of people, men and women of every background, step up to preach and lead worship, she began to wonder whether God might call her into the pulpit too.

She didn't have to wonder long. People asked her to preach before she had even suggested it, and John reminded her she was already a preacher in her evangelist’s heart.

She enrolled as a local preacher, and from that point on, she says, God was speeding her up. The people she met in Harpenden and Tower Hamlets whilst working as the circuit pastoral worker, affirmed and reaffirmed her calling with encouragement and support.

Standing Between Two Worlds

Training at Queen's in Birmingham taught KyungMi that ministry was never only her own calling. It belonged to her family too, with her teenage sons, Daniel and Isaac, watching how their parents lived out their faith at home.

And it taught her about the position. She did not need to stand at the front leading the crowd. She could stand in the middle, or even at the back, to be led. "It's not me," she says. "It is God and His grace."

Now a probationer in the Black Water Valley circuit, she finds herself among many cultures and backgrounds. People see her first as a foreign East Asian woman, and they bring her their questions. Why are you here? Can I believe what you believe? Is the God you follow the same God I knew back home?

She has learned to stand between two worlds, walking alongside people who feel they have lost a “spiritual father”, and pointing them towards “the Father in heaven”.

Her advice to anyone wondering whether God might be calling them is simple. The first calling is not about ordination at all. It is about your relationship with God and a clear confession of Jesus as the Lord (for life!), and that is a question only you and God can answer.

And then trust, and obey. "Once you hear, you know that you need to stand and wait. The rest becomes history, between you and God."

KyungMi Banks will be ordained at Shrewsbury Abbey on 28 June 2026 at 4pm.

The service will be live-streamed here.