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Joyce Burks Warren
Joyce Burks Warren was born in a small town in Arkansas. Shortly after graduating from Mary Holmes Junior College in Mississippi, she migrated to the Washington, DC, area, where sh...view moreJoyce Burks Warren was born in a small town in Arkansas. Shortly after graduating from Mary Holmes Junior College in Mississippi, she migrated to the Washington, DC, area, where she joined Faith Temple #2 Original Freewill Baptist (OFWB) Church, under the leadership of the honorable Bishop L. N. Forbes. She received Christ in a revival and joined church before her twenty-first birthday. It was at this point that God set into motion the many events that would shape her life as well as this ministry. She was raised in a Christian home and always remembered talking and praying to God at an early age, even before she understood the power of prayer.
Once after behaving mischievously, she was running from her grandmother to avoid a spanking. She stopped right in the middle of fleeing, looked up to the sky, and prayed to God that He would not let her get a spanking. It was at that same moment that her grandmother caught her and spanked her. She then—with lips poked out—said to God, “I thought I told You not to let me get a whipping!” Later she realized perhaps her grandmother, who was rather shapely in size, might have been praying for God to let Joyce stop running so she could catch her. She thought, of course, Grandmother’s prayers would be heard first, since Joyce was the one behaving mischievously.
God would often give Joyce dreams and visions that she initially did not always understand. What was unusual was sometimes the dreams would be animated or in cartoon fashion. After being in church for about a year, she was asked to assist the tiny tots teacher in Sunday school. When the teacher was no longer able to teach, she recommended that Joyce take over her class.
Joyce resisted because she felt she needed to be taught more about the Lord herself. However, this ended up being a blessing because it made her study God’s word to be prepared. She had to take what God taught her and teach it on a child’s level. Later, she would be asked to become the mother of the Sunshine Band children’s choir and finally the president. She kept this position for over thirty years. She served as vice president of the OFWB Sunshine Band Convention for over twenty years and as editor of the OFWB Children’s Page Newsletter.
Currently, she is an ordained minister, children’s church pastor, tiny tots teacher and assistant to the director of Christian education, and Bible class instructor in her local church. She is a retired civilian worker for the Department of Defense, where she worked as an information technology specialist for nearly forty-one years. She is married and has one daughter and three angels in heaven.
Once, while Joyce was attending a youth convention, the facilitator asked her to take the children outside and keep them quiet while the adults had a workshop. He explained that while he had planned for the adults, he made no plans for the children. She was not only hurt but offended by this request. She would later understand why her burden was so deep. It lit a fire and created a necessity to not only teach children about God but to teach church leaders the importance of children. God revealed to her that a church without children or a church that does not invest in their children is a dying church.
She had no idea that all roads would come together to reach out to God’s littlest ones. She has always loved to write and is the author of many unpublished short stories, plays, poems, and children sermons. Her secret desire has always been to publish and share her materials with others.
One evening, after her third miscarriage, she was crying, praying, and communing in her heart to God, and she turned on the television and began to listen to Bishop T.D. Jakes, who was announcing his pending conference. It was at this moment that she heard God speak to her softly. He said, “What about the children?” It was at this point that What about the Children Ministry was birthed in her. Now under the unction and anointing of the Holy Spirit, she feels the time has come to share this ministry with the world.!view less