Denise: “It’s all about Jesus, wherever he sends us”

Standing in the rain during a walk by Ripon College Cuddesdon, Denise found herself surrounded by bright yellow fields. They immediately reminded her of the terraced yellow fields of China, where she and her husband had spent 19 years living, serving and raising their family.

At the time, she was in her first year of training for ordination, but she was still wondering whether she had really heard God’s call.

“I was still thinking, ‘Am I really going to do this? Is this really what you want, Lord? Do you really mean me?’,” said Denise.

Standing there, she looked across to the brown English fields beyond. “It was like, ‘You mean you want me to be in the brown fields, be here in the rain?’ And God said, ‘Yes’.”

The next day, she found herself back outside looking across the countryside once more, with the yellow fields now way in the distance and the brown fields right in front of her. “The Lord was saying, ‘This is it. I want you to be working in the fields of England. Those fields are mine too. I would like you here now’. It was my yellow fields epiphany. It was tough to accept because I had put so much of my life into language learning and crossing into another culture. But I know it’s not lost because nothing is wasted in God.”

Denise Wang was one of the candidates ordained as a deacon at the Cathedral this weekend. This summer, she begins her ministry in the RiverVale Churches (Quinton with Admington, Welford, Weston, Long Marston and Meon Vale). Her epiphany in the fields near Cuddesdon was a moment that had been decades in the making.

She grew up in a Christian family in Teeside before moving to Hampshire as a teenager, where her father became an independent free church minister. Missionaries regularly stayed with her family, inspiring a desire to share her faith from an early age.

“At five years old, I walked into my parents’ bedroom with a simple request – I want to invite Jesus into my heart.”

Her faith continued to grow, but it was while studying Chemistry at Oxford that it truly became her own. “I really became a Christian as an adult. It became my own faith, not my parents.”

After university, Denise volunteered as a Careforce volunteer pastoral assistant in a small Anglican Church in Hackney, before training as a primary school teacher. At the time, she felt called to mission and saw teaching as a practical way of serving wherever God might take her.

“I knew that, with teaching, I could teach English or literacy. I was also interested in Bible translation and reaching people who had never heard the gospel in their own language. I knew that I could go anywhere in the world with teaching.”

After marrying her husband Stephen, that turned out to be China.

“We went with two backpacks and came back 19 years later with four children and a small container.”

The couple spent nearly two decades in west China, working as Christian professionals in education and charity projects while raising their four children.

“The faith of the Chinese Christians was so down to earth and real and relational. I learned so much from them, and from the international Christian community.”

When the family returned to England in 2017, settling back into British life wasn’t easy, but they found a home at St Andrew’s Churchdown, where members of the congregation welcomed them with extraordinary kindness, even opening up their homes when the family’s house purchase fell through.

“I just found St Andrew’s a very healing place,” Denise says. “I wasn’t asked to do anything. I could just enjoy the presence of God and grow in my own faith.”

Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Denise was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“God really used it to bring me close to him,” she says. “It made me realise my own mortality, that I haven’t got forever, and that I do have an amazing hope that I want to share with people and I want to do it in a free way.”

While she was recovering, the vicar’s wife asked a question Denise had never considered.

“She asked me, ‘have you ever thought about getting ordained?’ I hadn’t really considered it before. I always thought my husband would be the one who would get ordained. But I felt God saying, ‘No, it’s you. I want you to do this’.”

That conversation began a discernment journey that led to hospital chaplaincy volunteering alongside her work as a cover teacher at a local high school, theology and ministry training, and that rainy walk at Cuddesdon, where she finally accepted that God was calling her to serve in England.