Holmes County Health Commissioner Dr. D.J. McFadden learned the hard way that when it comes to making life decisions, it’s important to pay attention to your heart.

In the spring of 2005, Dr. D.J. McFadden was working in his burgeoning Millersburg, Ohio, family practice when he suddenly became dizzy and lightheaded. His medical assistant, seeing his pallor, insisted on performing an EKG. She shared the results with one of his partners and passed them on to a cardiologist, who urged the physicians to transport McFadden to the hospital to see the cardiologist. After some testing, he was treated for a stress-associated abnormal heart rhythm.

McFadden doesn’t remember most of this chain of events, but he does remember the days leading up to it.

“I was really stressed out, not eating or sleeping, drinking a lot of caffeine, burning the candle at both ends. I’d spent four years in college, four years in medical school, three years in residency and two years in advanced training, and I was faced with this enormous decision. I was struggling like never before in my life.”

The decision McFadden faced was whether to pursue the position of health commissioner of Holmes County, Ohio, where he and his family had settled, after years of building his own private practice.

“Prior to moving here, the previous health commissioner, Dr. Mullet, had asked if I’d be interested in applying when he retired. I thought it would be in 10 years, … [but] two years later, he was retiring, and I was being asked to consider applying. There was no way, career-wise, that I was ready to leave my private practice.”

Members of his community encouraged McFadden to pursue the opportunity. He had the necessary skills to fill the role, they said, and he had worked hard in his practice, earning the community’s respect. But the most significant prodding for the change stemmed from McFadden’s own reasoning. Throughout his life, his education and his career, he had wanted to be a servant.

“What do we do as Christians with the privilege of skills and knowledge we’ve been given? How do we use that? Do we try to enrich others with it?” McFadden had been raised to believe he should.

D.J. McFadden’s father, Dwight McFadden Jr., had just completed high school as an African American in inner-city Chicago and had lived a difficult life as a child struggling through the foster-care system.

At that time, James Lark, the first black bishop in the Mennonite Church, had a vision for reaching people of African-American origin.

He saw the church pouring its resources into overseas mission and encouraged the church to greater effort in urban ministry in the United States.

As part of an effort to diversify, Goshen (Ind.) College offered inner-city ethnic minorities an education. Dwight McFadden was working in a grocery store when he learned of this opportunity to go to college.

“It was an opportunity he took, and it probably changed his life,” says D.J. McFadden.
Dwight McFadden became the first in his family to earn a college degree, serving as general secretary for the Black Mennonite Churches before earning his master’s degree in business education from the University of Notre Dame and then becoming a pastor. In 1997, he was affirmed as moderator of the Mennonite Church at the Mennonite convention in Orlando, Fla.

McFadden’s mother, Joyce Good, had been part of a large family in a Mennonite home in rural Lancaster, Pa., where she helped manage the family’s roadside produce stand. After high school, she performed voluntary service in Atlanta, where she worked in a pediatric ward in the 1960s during the height of the civil rights movement. There she heard Martin Luther King Jr. preach and was in Atlanta when he was assassinated. One of her life regrets was not attending King’s viewing because she didn’t want to miss work. Living in Atlanta, experiencing what she did at that time, greatly influenced her.

She had grown up in an area where she rarely encountered people of color.

“Meeting different races and being part of a movement that combined faith and seeking justice was a life-changing event for her,” says McFadden.

Good took her experiences to Goshen College, where she studied nursing. It was also where she met, then married Dwight McFadden.

D.J. McFadden, the eldest of three children, grew up in Goshen and New Holland, Pa., with a love of learning and excelled in science. As a young adult entering Goshen College, he felt torn between a career in medicine and full-time ministry.

“I wanted a career that relied on science, something that helped me relate to people because I was an extrovert and really enjoyed people. It’s why I went into premedical studies.”

But McFadden still wasn’t fully convinced which career path to follow.

Throughout his college experience, during international study in Costa Rica and during his post-college voluntary service work in St. Louis as a peaceworker, McFadden questioned whether becoming a physician would really allow him to be the servant he felt he should be. Peace work had always been important to him, and he had been greatly influenced by his mother’s stories about Martin Luther King Jr., McFadden’s hero from a young age.

“When I think of heroes, I think of ordinary people who do extraordinary things, who might not have the gifts and skills they need and are reluctant to take on the tasks at hand but do what they need to, even unto death. King didn’t jump into the limelight; he was pushed. He has been my model for doing the right thing, led by God, continuing on because God was calling.”

Torn between pursuing ministry, development work with Mennonite Central Committee and medicine, McFadden ultimately decided that medicine was the best option for working with others holistically, the best way he knew he could serve the whole person.

So McFadden and his then-girlfriend, Susan Lehman, who later became his wife, settled in North Carolina during graduate school, where McFadden was accepted at Duke University as a medical student. It was there he began asking questions that his professors recognized as pertaining to public health.

“Duke requires research from their medical students during their third year, and they allowed me to get my master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina, which they took as my research year.”

That meant that when McFadden graduated from Duke, he had earned both a degree as a medical doctor and a master’s degree in public health.

McFadden and Lehman moved to Holmes County after Lehman had been offered a position teaching physics after her first interview at the College of Wooster. Wooster was Lehman’s first choice due to its focus on teaching, its strong research program and the caliber of students there. McFadden, who was demonstrating obstetrical procedures to lay midwives in Ecuador at the time, encouraged her to accept it.

“She said we could talk about it when I returned from Ecuador, but I told her just to tell them she would take the job. She was concerned about me, but I told her to take the position, and I would find something.”

Upon returning to the states, McFadden researched Holmes County and found a perfect fit with an established medical practice in Millersburg, Ohio, that happened to be looking for someone, especially someone with special obstetrical skills. After an in-person interview, McFadden joined the practice, the couple found a house they loved, which they purchased on faith, became active members of Millersburg Mennonite church, and McFadden’s practice quickly grew.

But new policies in the county restricted family physicians from performing the higher-level obstetrics that McFadden loved and had largely built his practice around.
It was a blow to McFadden’s plans.

“We had a significant period of soul-searching,” he says. “We had felt like doors were opening and we walked through, but now the back door was closing, and the side door was closing. I felt trapped. It was not a comfortable position.”

That’s when then health commissioner, Dr. Maurice Mullet, announced his retirement. For McFadden, taking the position would mean a significant pay decrease, longer on-call hours and leaving the practice he’d built and grown to love. It took much active prayer and seeking counsel from others to help him make a decision.

“Part of why I struggled so much was that I was running away,” McFadden says. “I didn’t want to go into uncharted territory. I felt like Moses. I didn’t have the skills for this position. There were others who spoke better than me. There were others that had more leadership abilities than me. I have mixed ancestry, come from a middle-class family and had to work hard for everything I’ve gotten. I don’t have the best pedigree. I’m not the most influential person.”

But ultimately, it was because McFadden felt called, he said, in a world where most people don’t have a clue what they’re supposed to be doing, that caused him to realize this was the direction he needed to take.

“I felt pursued, like Jonah,” he says. “It was humbling that I was being pursued. God pursues us. God cares to pursue us. I was being pursued—all of us are pursued—by a God who cares.”

McFadden also felt strongly that when Christians are asked to serve, that’s just what they should do.

“And that is what ultimately swayed me,” he says. “I was being asked to serve the community. I wasn’t being asked to be part of a business model. I wasn’t being asked to be a doctor. I was being asked to serve. I couldn’t resist that urge, that call that had been following me for so long. I think, ‘Here am I, send me,’ really stuck from a faith perspective.”

As soon as McFadden made the decision to apply for the position of health commissioner, he experienced a peace and calm like he hadn’t felt in a long time.

“I know that without my understanding of God and the belief that I’ve been called, I would not be able to do this,” he says. “But, empowered by the God I know, I’m able to attack this thing.”

It’s been six years since that dizzying day in his office and, to some degree, McFadden still questions his calling. His real longing, what he’d love to do as a career, is to become a stay-at-home dad to his two young sons.

“The easy thing for me would be to quit my job and stay home with the boys. I wrestle with being a good dad. I love what I’m doing, but the most important job I have is to raise my children to be responsible adults, to give them the skills, support and love they need to be fully functioning human beings and to teach them to love and serve God.”

But McFadden won’t be stepping down soon. He says there is still a lot of work to be done, and, along with his excellent staff, he will continue doing it.

“I went into medicine not to be a doctor; I went into medicine to be a healer,” he says. “I believe you can have disease and be whole and that you can be free from disease and be really broken and sick. My goal is to help people be whole and healed in whatever their state.”

McFadden keeps in his office an image of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, accompanied by a verse from Philippians that reads, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus who, being in very nature God, made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.”

“It’s a reminder that I’m a servant. I serve the people of Holmes County, Ohio,” he says.
And even in spite of the challenges, that’s the kind of work that does D.J. McFadden’s heart good.

Denice Rovira Hazlett is a freelance writer and photographer in Charm, Ohio, and a member of Millersburg (Ohio) Mennonite.

Photos above by Denice Rovira Hazlett.