Our Staff | Bloc Ministries

Judy Shelton

Program Director Redeemed Homes

I felt the call to missions as a young adult – 3 decades ago. However, at that time the call of my own addiction and alcoholism, depression, anxiety, trauma, and grief from my past was so much louder that I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hear anything else. Those chains would bind me during my 20’s and 30’s, until I slowly began realizing my worth not only as a person but more importantly as a child of God. I began the road of recovery and sobriety on January 3, 2012 and haven’t looked back since.

As I began to heal and work on my own recovery and more importantly my spiritual walk with God, I felt an intense yearning to go back to school. Just the mere thought scared me, but I had committed to follow Jesus wherever He led me. I began working on my bachelor’s degree in Psychology w/a Counseling Concentration at CCU in January 2015 and graduated in May 2018. In August of 2018 I began working on my master’s in counseling at CCU – I had and continue to feel the strong calling from God to give back to those who are hurting, much the same way that others had given to me.

I was familiar with BLOC from my undergrad days CCU and during grad school I would become an “intern” at Redeemed Home leading Dialectical Behavioral Therapy groups as part of my required internship hours in January 2019. I was so close to finishing my master’s degree, when CCU announced they would be shutting their doors at the end of Fall semester 2019. I felt discouraged and at that time wanted to completely walk away from whatever it was that God was calling me too. However, my stubbornness and inability to call it quits led me to NKU to spend another year chasing after my degree. During this time, I became I became part time staff at Redeemed and with the onslaught of COVID and the loss of staff/volunteers I fully embraced life at Redeemed and was all in – that call to ministry from 3 decades ago -- for better or for worse was coming to fruition. I graduated from NKU with my MS in Mental Health Counseling and became a licensed counselor in the state of Ohio in April 2021.

In September 2021 I took on the role of Program Director at Redeemed and once again find that I am learning new things, facing new situations, learning to lean more and more into what God has called me too. Having lived over half my life in addiction and being a survivor of severe childhood abuse (physical, mental, emotional, and sexual), it doesn’t take long for connections between myself and the women we serve to be created. While no two people’s stories are the same – there are commonalities that tend to draw people together and I do not take that for granted with the women we serve at Redeemed.

My life can be summed up by Isaiah 43:19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. My hope is that our ladies at Redeemed (past, present and future) can take this verse and allow God to use whatever time they have with us to create streams in their wastelands and make something beautiful out of their wilderness.

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