My grandmother, Thea Jones, who has died aged 93, was a teacher, lecturer and management trainer who gave up her career in her early 60s to become ordained as a minister in the United Reformed Church.

Thea (short for Dorothea) was the daughter of David Higham, a senior accountant at the Phoenix Building Society, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Barnes). She was born and brought up in Woodford Green, Essex, until, when the second world war started, the family moved to Brighton. Thea attended Abbotsford school, Broadstairs, and then Malvern school for girls.

She got a degree in history from the University of London as an external student in Sussex, graduating in 1944, and then took a certificate in social science and administration from the London School of Economics. She began her career as a youth worker in Manchester, before becoming a lecturer in public administration and social policy at Brighton Technical College (later Brighton Polytechnic and Brighton University).

Noel Jones, whom she married in 1948, worked in teaching, youth work and as a national NUT officer, and as a couple they shared values and encouraged each other.

In the 70s Thea moved to East Sussex social services department as a training officer, focusing on management development. But in 1985 she decided to take early retirement to answer what she felt was her vocation – to train as a minister in the church.

She went to Queen’s College, Birmingham, to study comparative theology and was ordained in 1990 as a non-stipendiary URC minister. She then went to Banbury, Oxfordshire, to work with Roman Catholic and Anglican priests launching a new church, St Francis’, on a new estate; the work included developing social service programmes.

She served there until 1995, followed by a short period at Brackley URC, Northamptonshire. She continued working with churches and the community in the Banbury area, taking funerals for people not connected with a church. She lived in Middleton Cheney and led and then supported the Anglican/Methodist covenant and the Women’s World Day of Prayer.

Thea managed to be both perpetually angry at bureaucracy and global injustice and also full of joy. In her final years, she railed against the insistence of the “heritage industry” on roofing churches in lead. Her local church, where she often led services, had experienced several wholesale roof thefts, and she felt a less stealable material would free the church to focus resources on serving a needy world.

She was ferociously independent, driving until she was 92 and living alone outside Banbury until a month before her death.

Noel died in 2007. Thea is survived by her children, David and Bridget, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.