:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

If we were picking teams competing for Christian awesomeness, and I was the captain (Who would make me a captain of anything?), I’d choose Addie Zierman. She has served all over the place in the church, and she has a lot of stories to tell. Though I haven’t clocked her yet at the sword drill or asked about her stamina for leading youth group lock ins, she’s a talented, up and coming writer that you’re going to love.

We outnumbered the men on campus by a wide margin, filling the halls of the dormitories with strawberry-scented body spray and laughter. We were tromping through the snow to our classes, becoming leaders in our chosen fields – education, business, psychology, music.

But in the various Biblical studies classrooms, we were a debate, a theological knot to be worked out. What is the role of women in church? Could we lead? Should we not? What did the Bible really say?

The whole thing smelled of dry erase markers. The same dusty verses being used to fight the same old battles. The air was tense and tinny with words like Egalitarian and Complementarian.

To be honest, I didn’t much care one way or another. I’d spent the last four years leading that early-morning Bible study at my high school, lugging the weight of stalled conversation on my tired shoulders. I was ready to let someone else do the talking.

*

Her name is Judy, but we called her by her last name: Hougen. She was a writing professor with a reputation for being brilliant and brutal, her green pen slashing through your best poems. Push!

She wanted more here, less there. She wanted you to hold your breath and sink down deep into a moment; she wanted every grainy bit of it on the paper.

And she was a church elder. Not just an elder. Chair of the elder board at a big, well-known church at the edge of Minneapolis’ western suburbs.

She tells me that she was floored when they asked her to serve as an elder, but to me, it was an obvious choice. Judy speaks about God in ways that are beyond the theological – in beautiful, concrete, images.

She had a way of recognizing the brokenness in her students before we saw it in ourselves, and she collected us like the empty, shored shells that we didn’t know we were. She took us out to coffee. She gave us space to complete the sentence that begins with “I feel…”

In the Bible Department the voices were masculine, bearded, middle-aged. They spoke in great, weighted words and organized their thoughts into outlines, charts. From the men, I learned that faith is linear; from Judy, I learned that it is circular, a labyrinth, ever circling the great mystery of God.

Here it was: not a dusty debate but a song, a harmony, two voices, decidedly different, uniquely beautiful. And of course, we need both. I needed both.

They were smart, this church in the suburbs. They recognized the beauty and truth of the female voice. When they brought her on as chair of the church board, Judy’s first act was to make things less corporate, more intimate, moving their meeting spaces out of the conference room they’d been using and back into the heart of the church building. She was about prayer. She was about protection.

“The Judy Season was much more touchy-feely,” she told me when describing her time as chair. “Focusing on the relational feels more feminine to me; it feels a little bit like the water we swim in.”

In various classrooms, the debate raged on. Judy didn’t say much about it, but she read us William Carlos Williams and showed us the holiness in a red wheel barrow, glazed with rain.

She grew tall like an oak; she spread herself like so many branches over the rest of the church leadership, over all of us. She said, “You are safe here.” She said, “Talk to me.”

About Today’s Blogger

Addie Zierman blogs at How to Speak Evangelical and has been speaking evangelical fluently since she was three years old. In her life, she has been a Bible study leader, prayer group founder, Sunday school teacher, worship band singer, and Awana Spark for Jesus. She still knows all the words to the song “Jesus Freak.”

In December 2010, Addie completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Hamline University, where she focused on the creative nonfiction genre. She is currently represented by the Carol Mann Agency and hopes to find a good home for her coming-of-age memoir How to Talk Evangelical.

Addie lives in Minnesota with her husband and two young sons. If you see her out, please don’t say anything about the streak of spit-up on her shirt. It will only embarrass her.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week bysigning up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book!)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed.Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy or submitting your own story, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Lisa Burgess

Today’s guest post is by author and Dallas Theological Seminary professor Sandra Glahn.

Often evangelicals teach that women were content with their lot in life until Betty Friedan came along and started the feminist movement. Yet this version of history is inaccurate. And if we believe Jesus is the Truth, we need to tell the story as it actually happened.

Last May Stephanie Coontz published an article in The New York Times titled “When We Hated Mom” in which she referred to the tendency to misread American history by blaming Betty. And while at one time I might have challenged what Coontz wrote, having spent the past few years reading primary historical sources, including those by godly women, I find I now agree with her.

Because Protestants do not celebrate saints’ days, we miss out on learning about many great women in Christian history.

Take for example the one whose “day” falls on November 17. Hilda, Abbess of Whitby (born AD 614), led a large community of men and women studying for God’s service, five of whom went on to become bishops. She brought the gospel to ordinary people, but kings and scholars also sought her counsel. She was a missionary, teacher and educator, and her abbey became one of the great religious centers of North Eastern England. Hilda is one of many such women in history.

Few writings by and about women have survived from centuries prior to the printing press. Yet some do remain, including The City of Ladies by fourteenth-century author Christine de Pizan (c. 1365–1430). Later came defenses of women from Quakerism’s founder, Margaret Fell Fox (1614–1702); Tory pamphleteer, Mary Astell (1668–1731); abolitionist Hannah Moore (1745–1833); and the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Most of these writers acted out of a religious impulse with the relatively unified objective of elevating women.

In the eighteenth century the first Great Awakening with its revivals in the 1730s brought a rise in lay power. Women’s involvement in missions sometimes included preaching, and on the frontier Christian women experienced increased levels of autonomy.

By the nineteenth century the pro-woman consciousness had a label: “the woman movement.” Today we identify these efforts as first-wave feminism. Red-letter dates marking the start of first-wave feminism are July 19 and 20, 1848. The place was Seneca Falls, New York, and the event was the Seneca Falls Convention. Those organizing and in attendance were mostly male and female Bible-believers. A group organized the meeting to feature Lucretia Mott, an eloquent Quaker who favored full sex and race equalization. Together the group drafted a Declaration of Sentiments addressing the role of women in society along with an accompanying list of resolutions.

In the half-century that followed, many joined the fight for women’s suffrage. During that same period thirty-three foreign mission societies sent one thousand women missionaries. That their work evoked criticism is seen in Lucy Rider Meyer’s 1895 defense. As editor of The Message and Deaconess Advocate, she wrote, “In deaconess ranks to-day may be found physicians, editors, stenographers, teachers, nurses, book-keepers, superintendents of hospitals and orphanages… A bit of history shows that the ‘new woman’ is not an invention of the last decade but that, in the character of Hilda, Abbess of Whitby.”

The “new woman” was not an invention of second-wave feminism either. Betty did not start the “woman movement”; Christians did. Motivated by the belief that men and women were made in God’s image to “rule the earth” together, these pro-woman, pro-justice believers sought to right wrongs for those who had less social power.

Isn’t it time we reclaimed our own story?

Sandra Glahn, ThM, is editor in chief of Kindred Spirit, the magazine of Dallas Seminary, where she serves on the faculty. She is a PhD candidate in the Aesthetic Studies program at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author or coauthor of seventeen books, including the Coffee Cup Bible Study series.  You can find more from her at aspire2.com.

Today’s guest blogger, Cortney Dale, is currently exploring ordination in the Episcopal Church. I’ve been looking forward to sharing her story with you for months because Cortney A) has a great story and B) uses puns on her blog:

I’ve inherited a few anxieties. My mother once advised me in all seriousness to never let a man see me without makeup until our wedding night. It’s a hyperbole of her good-intentioned parenting style that she learned from her mother. Act nice and fit in. And so I did.

It wasn’t quite fertile ground for hearing a call to ministry, let alone ordained, collar-wearing, pulpit preaching, Eucharist-celebrating ministry. Let me mention that I come from a tradition (Episcopal) that began ordaining women a few years before I was born. The itch was there, but the hesitancy came from my end, not my church’s.

Which is all to say that this bright young girl grew up with some loathsome self-doubt. What would the people of my small conservative hometown think? Was I loud enough, tall enough, assertive enough to be taken seriously? Who was I to think I had something to offer people?

God bless the day I decided that being authentic was more important than being liked.

God bless the day I prioritized God’s call over any of the “roles” thrown at me from various corners of culture.

Funny enough, for all the confidence I thought a priest needed, the altar is the most humbling place to be in church. I stood there every Sunday for the past six months for a discernment internship, pointing the book (helping the priest keep track of the service- think human bookmark), and looking out at a sea of faces that had gotten dressed pretty on their day off to come here and meet Jesus.

Here. To meet Jesus. What I have to offer is irrelevant because all people need was offered two thousand years ago.

In the real trenches of day-to-day ministry, an ounce of grace is worth a pound of gumption. I’ve almost come to treasure my inherited anxieties as a little reminder that I’ll always be dependent on God’s perfectly timed gifts of grace. Almost.

My life, for one, would be a lot easier if God never called women into ministry. Alas, here I sit- drawn to church, drawn to the altar, drawn to serve and still with a uterus. Yet I’m beginning to suspect, after meeting incredible women who’ve faithfully answered a call, after reading their blogs and hearing them preach and listening to their stories, God doesn’t call us to ministry despite the fact we’re women, but because of it.

About Today’s Blogger

Cortney Dale is in the discernment process for ordination in the Episcopal Church. In her spare time she’s an undisciplined blogger at cortneydale.wordpress.com. She lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky. [Read the rest of her bio complete with one-liners and puns HERE.]

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book!)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy or submitting your own story, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Addie Zierman

Though most readers know her as Tamara Out Loud, Tamara Lunardo has made her noise by writing powerful, hilarious, and deeply honest blog posts that often leave her readers laughing out loud. We’re fortunate to have her guest post today:

I’ve heard it from both sides, each passionate, each convinced, each sure of God’s design.  I’ve heard them trace threads of their own theologies throughout the scriptures, winding them tightly around what they hold true. I’ve heard them tear up Paul’s letters over whether to permit a woman to speak, preach, teach, minister, or lead. I have heard them and heard them and heard them, and I am tired of hearing it.

I am tired of the arguments, the anger, the divisions, the hurt; I am tired of it all. And so I think the most subversive thing I can do amid the fight is to do what I am passionate about, what I am convinced of, what I am sure is God’s design: I can write. I can write because God gifted me to, and when He gives you a gift, you do not debate the merits of using it. You say a humbled thank-you, and then you use it.

And when I write, a funny thing happens: Neither complementarian nor egalitarian need argue. God permits a woman to speak.

When I write stories of Jesus’ meeting me at the well or of His barging in on my Damascus road, God permits a woman to preach. When I write stories of seeing grace light dark places or of learning love in unexpected form, God permits a woman to teach. When I write stories of painful struggle or of raucous laughter, God permits a woman to minister. When I write stories of baring raw honesty or of poking at man-made taboo, God permits a woman to lead.

When I write, God permits a woman to speak, and I am only a whisper in a beautiful, growing chorus.

When God permits a woman to lead, people can share stories long pressing their hearts because they first saw me share mine. When God permits a woman to minister, hurting hearts who would not venture inside a church building can find community in my written spaces. When God permits a woman to teach, a worship leader can pray new hope with thoughts I have put to paper. When God permits a woman to preach, a pastor can reach his congregation with a sermon infused with my imagery.

And for now this is enough; I don’t need to hear the arguments. God permits a woman to speak, and I do.

About Today’s Blogger

Tamara works out her thoughts on life and faith at TamaraOutLoud.com, occasionally with adult language, frequently with attempted humor, and hopefully with God’s blessing. Editor of What a Woman is Worth through Civitas Press, she holds a BA in English and her five children, when they let her; she almost never holds her tongue.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book!)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Cortney Dale

We are lucky to have the multi-talented Alise Wright as our guest blogger for today’s post:

I don’t know if music can technically be a part of your DNA from a scientific standpoint, but I’m pretty certain that music was etched into my soul from the start. From my earliest days, music has played an integral role in bringing me joy.

Likewise, the church has always been a part of my life. Some of my first memories are in the church. I can’t think of a season when the church hasn’t been a key character in my existence.

It makes sense that the two would find their way together.

It started from an early age, singing and playing the piano with my family music group. We were like the von Trapp family singers, only with cassette tapes of Amy Grant and Sandi Patti. And there were only five of us. And none of us were running away from Nazis. But otherwise, just the same.

Later music and faith came together in our church’s choir. Then again in college at the Newman Center. I’ve played the organ for a small mainline church and a keyboard stack in a large mega church.

Music and faith are inextricably linked for me.

But music as a ministry? That idea was a bit more elusive.

The overwhelming majority of my church experience has taken place in congregations where women were not permitted to be leaders.

No one ever said that women couldn’t serve, they just couldn’t lead. Women could teach Sunday School or work in the nursery or beautify the church building or be a part of music. However, the distinction between serving and leading always seemed to make these things the lesser ministries, and because I’ve never been one who liked to be pushed to the sidelines, I simply didn’t think about playing music as a ministry. It was just something that I did as an act of worship.

Then music was taken away from me for a season. I was told that I could attend church, but not have anything to do with music.

I thought that I could put it away. I could still worship from my seat on Sunday morning. I could still sing along to my MP3 player. I could still play the piano in my home.

But though this was all true, there was something missing.

The ministry aspect of music.

No matter how much I wanted a more prestigious seeming ministry, music was the ministry to which God called me. Playing was a way for me to enter into worship, but it was also a way for me to help others do the same. By doing this, I was participating in ministry.

And when I was ministering to others, God ministered to me.

If the creator of the universe can minister to me without a fancy title, I don’t need a title to minister either.

About Today’s Blogger

Alise Wright is married to her best friend and is mom to four incredible kids. She loves knitting, writing, playing keyboards in her cover band, and eating soup. She also loves making new friends and you can connect with her at her blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book if you sign up in January)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Tamara Lunardo (of Tamara Out Loud)

We’re welcoming Jamie Wright as this week’s guest blogger in the Women in Ministry Series. You probably know about her incredible blog Jamie the Very Worst Missionary. 

I’m just gonna come out and say this: I never, ever, in a million years, wanted to be a “woman in ministry”. Never. And I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would actually be one.

I grew up far from any church influence, so the very narrow example I had seen of women in ministry came mostly from television, where they were often portrayed in the form of nosy, judgmental, gossip-loving Bible-thumpers. As a teen, when I finally crossed paths with some real live women in ministry, I found them to be…well…nosy, judgmental, gossip-loving, Bible-thumpers. (“You know who’s going to burn in Hell? You, honey.” That’s how a youth pastor’s wife so gingerly shared the Gospel of Jesus with my 15 year-old self.)

Many years later, when my husband and I began the process of moving our family into full-time ministry, I wasn’t exactly aching for a chance to join the ranks of Pastor’s wives and Missionaries – at least not the ones I’d been exposed to, with their Bible tracts and sensible shoes, and their strong, loud opinions about who is going to burn in Hell.

The truth is, the women who ministered to my own wanting soul weren’t “women in ministry” at all. They were good neighbors and generous friends. They were soccer-Moms who took my babies off my hands for a few hours at a time, when I most needed help. They were steaming coffee dates where no subject was off limits, where laughter flowed freely and tears of anguish were met with tears of empathy. They were gentle spirits who whispered the Love of a Savior into my life, slowly and sweetly, because they understood that, through friendship, Grace abounds. It just does.

Those women didn’t work in churches. They had government jobs, they were part-time consultants, some were homemakers, one was a personal trainer, another ran a daycare. They taught me that there’s a really big difference between “women in ministry” and “women who minister”. And they showed me that a woman’s ability to deeply impact the world around her, her value in ministry, isn’t limited by her job title (or her husband’s).

That means that Missionary or not, I am a woman who is called to minister. Pastor’s wife or not, you are a woman called to minister. Sunday school teacher or not, your wife/sister/daughter/friend is called to minister.

Our neighbors and co-workers are counting on us to use our God-given gifts and abilities to bring Hope to this broken world. Our families and our friends are depending on us, with our uniquely feminine voices, to speak into their lives with wisdom and authority. And the God who created us, in all our girly glory, has released us to feed the hungry, care for the sick, love the unlovely, and guide the lost.

He has invited each and every one of us into ministry. Even the chick who never, ever, in a million years, wanted to be a “woman in ministry”.

About Today’s Blogger

Jamie writes from her home in Costa Rica, where she lives with her husband and three sons. She is best known for candid conversations about life and faith on her blog, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary.

If You Appreciate Jamie, Read This

I (Ed, the owner of this blog) couldn’t invite Jamie to contribute to this series without thinking of some concrete ways to support her and her husband Steve in their ministry. Jamie had no idea I was going to do this, but I’ve been plotting  a special ask of this series’ readers. Here it is:

1. Steve and Jamie are trying to figure out their next step in ministry. Will you commit to praying with them?
2. Whether they stay in Costa Rica or move someplace else, Jamie and Steve are going to need some serious bucks. They have poured themselves out in ministry to others, and I would like you to prayerfully consider donating toward their ministry. In particular, can you give at least $10? They have some major expenses coming up that we can help them meet so that they can focus on their ministry and family. Go here to donate: Donate at PayPal Now.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book if you sign up in January)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Alise Wright

We’re welcoming Sarah  Styles Bessey of www.emergingmummy.com today for the first guest post in the Women in Ministry Series:

There is my mother, of course. Can any woman’s story start without her mama, her first woman she watches? So I watched her, I took her freedom and confidence, her love for that well-thumbed Bible, into my bones. I can tell you how she grew up without really knowing much about this God stuff so when she somehow decided to take us to church, she came to Sunday school with me, passing out crayons, just so that she could listen and learn about her beloved Jesus, captivated. How she found herself in mothering us and found God there, too. In my later years, I watched her step out with my dad, gathering university girls, new parents, young couples, and friends around them, how she easily remembered their details, taught during home groups, cried and laughed, placing her hands on their backs to pray life into them, she feels like they are her family, I know.

Then there are the women in my churches. Because of the nature of our post-Christian society, we don’t do the mega-church thing too often here. So our communities tend to be a bit smaller, a bit more intentional, most of us are there because we want to be, cultural Christianity long since abandoned by all of our peers and parents. And in every Sunday service I attended as a kid and a teenager, there were women. They prophesied easily. They lead ministries. They preached. Taught. Read Scripture. Sang. Ministered. We sent them out as missionaries, single, married, far away from us, their smiling pictures tacked up to a corkboard in the foyer, a string of yarn connecting their pictures to push pins of their locations on the map.

Our pastor was usually a plural form.

I can tell you about Janet, whose husband was on staff with my own husband at our church. I was 22 when we moved there and, let me be perfectly clear, I was a know-it-all with a chip on my shoulder. This was no two-for-one deal, I huffed, I have a career, too, you know, and I am no pastor. It was Janet and the other gracious staff wives like Natalie, Bonnie, Sylvia, Jessamy, that revealed to me that I was a bit of an idiot, desperate for Jesus still. These women helped me to understand my own callings, my own vocation, to stop thinking so defensively, to learn generosity of grace. These women showed me the truth of life lived in ministry, they pastored me in the best ways possible, over time, gently praying, dismantling my brick walls by laughing, serving the least of these with joy, showing me a better way to live, forgiving easily. They taught me how to live a seamless life, all of my work an offering.

I can tell you about Pastor Helen here in Surrey, of her more than 30 years of, yes, “official” ministry. I can tell you about her daughter, Angela, my age, ferociously preaching in her knee-high leather boots on a steel stage. I can tell you about Idelette who turned her passion for stories and women into a life-giving movement worldwide. I can tell you about Nancy who started a small home for girls in the grips of life-controlling issues and decades later, hundreds of women are set free and transformed. I can tell you about Musu, Juliet, Nicola, Rachelle, Megan all working at the women’s residential home where I work, too, here in Canada in the daily trench work of saving lives. I can tell you about Tracy who leads worship with passionate abandon, jumping and preaching and calling out to God every Sunday in that elementary school gym where we gather together.

I can also write a line for the good men around us. The ones who support their wives as they are supported, the ones who serve as they are served. The men who listen when a woman speaks and can easily receive wisdom from her. Men who are not threatened by a woman who leads, who affirm friendship and respect and mutuality in their marriages, their work, their parenting. Good men, true men, strong to the core and holy.

Oh, can I tell you stories about women in ministry. And the reason I can tell you stories is because women have been in ministry, in all ways, in my world without question for a long time now. We left behind a lot of those gender-debates that wear a soul out and just got on with the business of loving God and loving people.

There is life here in the wide open spaces. When you stop waiting for permission from anyone but God, you’d be surprised how many of us there are here, waiting for you.

About Today’s Blogger

Sarah is a writer and non-profit marketing director. At her personal blog, Emerging Mummy she grapples with spirituality, theology, mothering, politics and almost everything else you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company. She lives in British Columbia, Canada with her husband and three tinies.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Jamie Wright (Jamie the Very Worst Missionary)

Some people are talented at making money. I, on the other hand, have the unique talent of choosing highly specialized professions that don’t make any money.

When I started attending seminary, the typical conversation with my family was something like, “How will you avoid becoming a beggar on the street?” OK, it wasn’t quite like that, but way too many conversations had those overtones.

Thankfully, I had plenty of pastors to look up to over the years. They seemed like reasonably well-adjusted individuals with normal lives. It wasn’t until I started working in a church and saw pastoral ministry up close that I realized it wasn’t for me.

I kept my misgivings to myself and my wife, not wanting the “beggar on the street” conversation to further evolve. As I searched for a new path forward, I realized that the obvious answer was writing full time. This did very little to assuage the concerns of my family.

When I started to pursue writing as a serious profession, I didn’t know any writers personally. How does one go about making a living as a writer? I could handle the part where I pounded out 5,000 words in a day, but the part where a paycheck ended up in my bank account eluded me. I had never seen the life of a writer up close and personal, and I had no idea how to go about pursuing my calling.

Enter writing blogs, books, and magazines. For years I inhaled Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and a bunch of writing blogs and books. These stories of professional writers became my lifeline. When people wondered how I could ever make it as a writer, I received support and encouragement from the stories of writers who kept up the struggle and dreamed up creative ways to make a living.

Without those stories, I would have given up on my calling a long time ago. If I didn’t know that there were other crazy people like me who loved to write and didn’t mind the spare pay checks, I would have been forced to settle for a soul-crushing job that didn’t tie into my passions.

Without stories, it’s hard to know if we’re on the right path. We need to know that other people have faced similar circumstances and have kept up the fight. We need to know that it’s worth the struggle.

As I’ve thought about the importance of the Women in Ministry Series that will be launched this Friday, the value of stories have been at the forefront of my mind. Women who feel called to ministry need to read stories about those who have blazed the path ahead of them. Women who have been told “no” all of their lives need to read stories that tell them “yes.”

Perhaps the most difficult part of this process has been contacting some very talented storytellers about contributing, only for them to reply that they don’t have any stories to share about women ministering in their lives. It never occurred to me that there are women who simply haven’t seen a God-empowered female ministering as either a pastor or a lay minister in the church.

That left me wondering how many women are struggling with a nudge from God that they simply can’t process. Are there women who sense a call into ministry, but they can’t sort it out because they’ve never seen it modeled for them?

As I think and pray over all that this series of stories about women in ministry can be, I hope that it will become a lifeline to women who need models. I hope that readers can share links with those who need encouragement and a few examples of what it’s like for God to work through women in the church.

And then, when a well-meaning relative asks a young woman, who is planning to go into ministry, how she will eat or find a place to live, she can smile and know that she has a treasure trove of stories assuring her that God will show her a path forward.

When certain people read that I’m putting together a series of guest posts about women in ministry, they may be tempted to think and say that I’m out to destroy the Bible, nay Christianity itself. They may assert that I’m misconstruing clear passages from the Bible based on loose speculation and undermining the very faith I claim to support.

If women are allowed to teach and serve as equals in ministry, what will become of Christianity and the church? I’ve conducted a very thorough risk assessment of my series that kicks off next week, and such detractors are certainly right. There are tons of risks. Here are just a few that I’ve thought of:

Under the cold-hearted leadership of female leaders and ministers, men will be rounded up and locked in the nursery. Children will puke on their shiny shoes. Pastors will lose their expense accounts. Secretaries will stop answering the phone.

THE COFFEE WILL NOT BE MADE!!!

Yes, it is a terrible thing when sinners fall into the hands of an “angry woman.”

Sermons will start to include illustrations based on raising kids and cooking dinner instead of sports and war movies. Women will start to speak their minds to the male authority figures in their lives, thereby causing strain on men who are forced to utilize neglected parts of their brains. Men will have to start vacuuming better, moving the chairs out instead of just going around them. Dinners will not be cooked. Children will stop eating their vegetables.

Dangerous heresies will sweep through the church by “easily deceived” women—just like Eve. In fact, women will start forcing their husbands to eat apples all of the time. The line for the men’s restroom will become oppressive. The parking lot with become a scrap heap of twisted vehicles piled upon one another. The back rows will buckle and break under the weight of disinterested, dispirited men who feel like the church is way too feminized.

Without a man to wear a suit up front, men will no longer know how to dress on Sunday morning. First they’ll forget their ties, and then they’ll soon denigrate to stained t-shirts, slippers, and dirty Carhartts. They’ll stop reading their Bibles because they’ll become convinced that only a woman can interpret it for them. They’ll stop signing up to lead anything in the church. Even the hunting group will be organized through the cabal of the lady’s knitting group. Camouflage will be replaced by knit teddy bear sweaters. Venison dinners will be replaced by crusty, inedible scones and fruity teas.

Yes, letting women teach, speak in church, hold authority, or call themselves “ministers” in any sense of the word could destroy Christianity as we know it. And even if my little series of stories about women in ministry won’t do any of the things I mentioned above, I do hope it destroys part of Christianity as we know it—the part where women think they are somehow designed by God to be inferior to men.

This will be a destructive series. However, we’re not destroying something for the fun of it. This is a matter of obligation, a dirty job that someone has to do: undoing the wrongs of the past and restoring women to their proper place in the church through empowering stories.

I’m not interested in forcing anyone to join me in this. I know there are some men and women who are comfortable with male-dominated systems. That’s fine for them. I’m not forcing them to change anything. I’m far more interested in speaking to the women and men who think there is something wrong with that—who sense in their times of prayer and readings of scripture that God created men and women to be equal partners in salvation, ministry, and the home.

And really, what’s the worst thing that could happen? A woman may discover her calling into ministry?

Figuring out my ministry and calling in life has been a struggle that sometimes left me discouraged and frustrated. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been if there were a bunch of people saying, “God can’t use you in the ways you feel led. You can only serve in a few select areas.”

My reply would be, “So you’re saying that God made me a second-class citizen in his Kingdom?”

What I imagine for myself is what many women face in the real world of Christianity. I used to think that women could not teach men, hold authority over men, or even do all that much on Sunday morning. Then something shocking happened.

While attending Taylor University, a woman spoke about doing something I’d been taught women should never do: teach men.

During missions week, Marilyn Laszlo spoke about her missions work in Papua New Guinea. She ministered among an entire tribe as the only missionary. So far as I could tell, she was free to “teach” men during our meetings at Taylor. Even more eye-opening, she was the only missionary teaching the men in her village.

Some speak of God making special exceptions, calling in the JV female team when the males aren’t around—A League of Their Own for the church. The shakiness of this argument began to wear on me during missions week. Why would God make an exception if it was an absolute standard in scripture? Why were churches OK with women going to teach men in the jungle but not in the sanctuary on Sunday morning between 9 and 12 am? Should a solitary female missionary turn over authority to the men in her village when they reach a certain point of spiritual maturity?

Better yet, if women aren’t supposed to teach or hold authority over men, where do we draw the line for websites, books, and conferences? What if a female speaker at a conference begins to convict a man in attendance? Is that not a form of authority?

I dedicated myself to studying this issue. I learned about the context of the Old and New Testaments. I learned about women such as Deborah and Huldah—women God chose to lead and to teach. I learned about the Greek culture of the New Testament, the female oracles, and the rowdy female prophets that would have populated cities such as Ephesus and Corinth. I began to realize that we’re forced to either choose God’s standards for female leaders or Paul’s standards—making one or the other culturally situated.

For me, the issue of women in ministry is settled. I have no doubt that women were not only created fully in God’s image, but that women can serve in the same positions as men. Some Christians disagree with me on that one. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in having this debate on my blog. There are plenty of other places on the internet to duke this out. I want to contribute something different to the issue of women in ministry: stories.

Stories That Open Eyes

When I learned about the incredible ways God used Marilyn Laszlo, I began to question my beliefs about women. God was performing miracles through this woman. Could I have been wrong? After years of studying scripture, I changed my position.

Stories about God’s work today can stretch us, force us to dig deeper into scripture, and to pursue different courses for our lives. Rather than debate theology, I want to create a place where women can tell their own stories of pursuing God’s call into ministry. I want every woman who has been told, “God can’t use you…” to read stories about women who have been affirmed by God.

Starting on January 13th, I’m launching a new series of guest posts that will go up every Friday called the Women in Ministry Series. I’ve asked some of the most talented women I know to share their stories of being called into ministry or of a woman who ministered to them. We’re going to create a new conversation about what God is doing in and through women, rather than getting lost in the debate about what women can and cannot do.

A Series That Builds Up Women

I think we’ve all seen threads of comments on blogs where an otherwise encouraging discussion is sidetracked by a peripheral debate. While I encourage readers of all perspective to check out this series, I want to make it clear that our discussions in the comments will not include debates about whether or not women can teach, lead, or speak in church—that women can teach or lead will be assumed. The goal here is to encourage women who have been told “no” for far too long, and therefore I want to create a safe and encouraging environment.

There are plenty of other bloggers out there who are eager to host debates on this topic or to advance a perspective counter to my own. It’s not like I’m suppressing anyone. Our goal is to simply create a different kind of conversation at this blog, and in order to do that on the internet, we need some rules.

For those who dislike these parameters, I have two words of encouragement. For starters, this is a great opportunity to practice  the Christian virtue of patience. Secondly, if you feel like your voice has been silenced, then you are in a perfect position to empathize with the thousands upon thousands of women who have felt the same way for hundreds of years.

How We’ll Begin the Series

The Women in Ministry Series begins on January 13th with a guest post by Sarah Styles Bessey of Emergingmummy.com. She’ll be followed by Jamie Wright of Jamietheveryworstmissionary.com. After them, I’ll share a preview for the next writer each week.

If you are a woman with a  story to tell, visit the project’s home page for submission guidelines. Stay tuned for the first post on January 13th. You can subscribe via the RSS feed or through the e-mail notification form at the top.

I pray that many will be encouraged by this new series. Thanks for reading!