:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

When author Nicole Unice signed up for the women in ministry series, it just so happened that she could pick a date that coincided with the release of her first book: She’s Got Issues. That’s not to be confused with the sequel I hope she’ll write some day: She’s Got Tissues—hope for people with allergies. Whether or not she has tissues, Nicole has a story to tell, and I’m honored that she’s sharing it with us today:

In 2000, I was sure God called me to ministry. I was so sure about it, I traded a full scholarship at a local graduate school for a five-hour commute to seminary. With blank notebook and eager mind, I set off for what I imagined to be an amazing life in the church. I had never met a woman in ministry, but I was undeterred.

And then I took my first class. And I was a 23 year old female surrounded by men, professional forty-year old men. Pastors. I loved every word of the teaching but then a few of those men, the pastors, would speak up. They would quote bible verses to each other and talk about theology and they would sound like Pharisees. I would want to raise my hand and say, “excuse me, pastors, there is a professor here who actually has things to teach.” But instead I stayed quiet, and stared around that classroom and stretched my five-hour-commute legs and thought, God must be wondering how I heard him so wrong.

So I did what good Christian females do, and switched into the counseling program. There I was safe. I was with almost all women and a few quiet men, and the kindest and bravest professors who were both pastors and counselors, who taught me what it meant to be present in pain, to be a healing voice and touch, and to stop trying to cure when all I’m given is care.

And then I did what married women do. I got pregnant. I went underground and forgot about the call of 2000. I kept learning, but this time about childbirth and ear infections and how to parent with my husband and how to root deeply into community. And for a few hours each week, I traded my yoga pants for khaki pants and unlocked my counseling office door and received people. And it was ministry. And it was good.

I volunteered in women’s ministry and began to teach and a fire was kindled in my soul. Care was important, but counseling was never what I thought I would do in seminary. And then, nine long years after the call, I sat at a women’s leadership conference and listened to a woman preach with fire and with femininity and it was like nothing I had heard in any church and I began to cry. And I asked/shouted/cried to God:

Why didn’t you make me a man if you wanted me to pastor?

Why didn’t I stay in the pastoral program if you wanted me to teach?

Why won’t you bring me a woman mentor if you want me to make it in ministry?

And slowly, out of prayers of honesty and pain, what seemed wrong, God began to make right. I began to teach and to lead, to slowly integrate all I had learned in counseling with all I had experienced in ministry. I began to speak out with confidence, using the wisdom of years of listening to people behind my closed office door. And instead of one person listening to me “preach” with passion about how God loved her and listened to her, I taught groups.

Although I thought He had forgotten me, He never had. And although I thought my degree was wasted, it never was. And although I thought I was on the slow track, the mommy track, the wrong track, he was only shaping my path, using the twists and turns to smooth out the rough edges of my soul, to embrace myself as a leader and a follower, a challenger and a nurturer, a teacher and a listener.

The slow track pressed me to surrender, and I fought it. Surrendering meant God’s way of ministry, whether that involved a business card and an office or not. Surrendering meant it was not my job to change everyone’s mind about women in leadership. Because the way anyone in ministry changes the world is by looking like Jesus. It’s with gentleness, humility, and kindness. It’s with patience. It’s with a meekness that knows when to be strong and when to be silent.

These are not easy to come by for natural-born leaders, both men and women. But when I look in the rearview mirror of life, I don’t see one mistake. God used every bend in the long road to prepare me to fulfill the call of 2000. It’s 12 years later, and He’s right on time.

About This Week’s Blogger

Nicole Unice is a ministry leader at Hope Church in Richmond, VA. She teaches in a variety of capacities within the church. Her first book, She’s Got Issues (Tyndale) released this month. You can find out more about the book at http://www.ShesGotIssuesBook.com or follow her on Twitter: @nicoleunice.

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.

Contributions Welcome: Contact Ed to pitch your post idea in 2-4 sentences.

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: Harriet Congdon

I’ve been collecting guest posts for Thursdays, and today I’m happy to have Lisa Colón DeLay. She’s a spiritual director with a sharp sense of humor. This week she’s launching a new spirituality project for creators that is a fast and free download and is well worth your time. Without further ado, here’ssssss Lisa:

“There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere.”

- Donald Miller

We’re inclined to think that life is like Jazz: Random, but somehow, making strange and beautiful music. However, so much of life doesn’t jive. The harmony is lacking and the beat is off. We imagine God somewhere up beyond outer space, holding the earth–and all things–in his hands, and letting the jazz of the universe play on. What are we to do with all that jazz?

Discordant. That’s Jazz. If you hear a snippet of Jazz it may seem all jumbled and crazy. Is it music, or an imbroglio of sound stumbling to find its way? Scat is even stranger. Perfected by Ella Fitzgerald, Scat is improvisational sounds sung in syllables to the rhythm, but meaning nothing. The vocalizing comes in sync melodically but it communicates only instrumentally.

100 years ago when this uniquely American genre broke out as a viable offshoot from Ragtime music, most classically trained musicians thought all hell had broken loose. It smacked them as vile and unsophisticated. With insolence Jazz broke all the rules. To add to the madness, improvisation was key to Jazz. It seemed rebellious and uncouth. Every trained musician is supposed to behave and stay with the sheet music. Jazz might be best understood as an adjective. It describes what’s going on.

And then, there’s the Blue notes. Sometimes called a “worried note” it pipes out at a slightly lower pitch than a major scale. Discrepant, it pops apart from the expected texture. Then, mesh some of these notes with a string of shuffle note patterns and you’ve landed on syncopation.

Off beat–An interruption of normal, anticipated. Rhythm. Notes come in unequal durations. Punch. in. Punch. out. and…polyrhythms develop in layers. Long-short-long. Long-short-long. Melodic swing phrasing, cocky and bright. Trombonist J.J. Johnson puts it this way, "Jazz is restless. It won’t stay put and it never will."

Through the sins of oppression and the redemption at the source of inner emancipation the seeds of Jazz were implanted. Borne as a mash up of slave owners’ music and the musical interpretation and rhythms influenced by African percussion, the European 12-tone scale fused with tribal rhythms and made a wholly new creature. From it came Blues, Gospel, and the Spirituals, all sung on Sundays at festivals or at church. Later, came Jazz as freed slaves made a living as musical entertainers in marching bands, dance halls, and vaudeville shows.

Jazz is not a mess. It’s deliberately random. Disarray with parameters. A musician riffs his own interpretation away from, but near to, the written notes. It seems to me, Jazz is closer to Reality than we might realize, but not for the same reasons Donald Miller speculates.

As I’ve been preparing resources to help Creators and Communicators it’s become clear to me that God let’s us ad lib from the sheet music he’s written. It’s not that God has made the universe like Jazz. Instead,we are Jazz. We get to interpret and riff from the sheet music. It’s said that Jazz music finds it’s particularity in its special relationship to time and timing. Aren’t we are the same way? During our time here, and to our unique beat, we get to be Jazz and do the Jazz.

Have you seen life working this way? Where have you riffed from the sheet music God has written?

Lisa Colón DeLay is a long-time blogger with a visual arts and design background and a Master of Arts in Religion, with a Spiritual Formation concentration. She’s found a niche encouraging, inspiring, and amusing Creators and Communicators and is now launching a whole new wave of free resources for kindred spirits.

Some of the most important people in my life have been my pastors. They have provided timely wisdom and guidance that has changed my life. However, some of my deepest wounds have also originated from pastors.

I don’t blame my pastors. Personally, they never would have done a thing to hurt me. In fact, I don’t see my wounds as necessarily originating from my pastors. My wounds came from the church system that we both served.

Pastors and lay people have a common enemy: the church system.

The system is rules, expectations, and anything that defines how the organization of church must function. The system is anything that threatens to set itself over the unity of believers. The system uses the hard bolts and jackhammers of man to join together people who require a lover’s caress.

The system doesn’t care whether you’ve had a rough week. If you’re botching up the hymn on Sunday morning, people will complain to the pastor, and the pastor has to do something. The system demands action.

The system doesn’t care if you’ve been the only nursery volunteer for three months. The pastor needs someone to cover it because he’s got five more empty slots to fill. It’s his job to train and equip people for ministry, and he’ll lose his job if he can’t pull it together. He may even ask you to bring a side dish next Sunday for the elder meeting because the system needs more volunteers and you’re one of the few willing to play by the rules.

The system demands that we become fuel for the machine. We all have an idea of what the system should look like, and we make decisions in our churches based on what kind of system we want.

I want a church system that reflects my values, and I’ve fought far too many battles to create the church system of my choosing.

The truth about church is that it’s a living, breathing body joined together with the Spirit of God. We require some organizing and some leadership, but we don’t live to serve what organizes us or to make our systems a success.

Just surviving as a group in a system is unhealthy and self-centered, and survival is what a system demands. If the church organization dies, then what? We fear that every time our budgets run a deficit… What will happen to the “church”?

When I say the church becomes a system, I’m also talking about what you do in order to belong. Play by the rules, and you can be in the community. If you don’t follow the rules, you can’t be in the community.

These rules will vary from church to church, and even some churches can take good things such as inclusiveness to an extreme—as in, if you’re not quite inclusive enough, you’re out. Some systems are enforced from above and other systems are enforced by the loudest members of the congregation. Oftentimes the pressure of the system is applied equally from pew to pastor and from pastor to pew—both making demands and expectations of one another without ever asking why we do this.

The system plays leaders off the congregation. In the system, a congregation needs leaders to provide a compelling vision statement, guide their spiritual lives, and keep the church as an organization vibrant and running. If the church as an organized system fails, it is the pastor’s fault.

The pastor has to maintain a delicate balance of pushing his/her congregation to grow spiritually, while prodding them to buy into the church system. If they don’t believe in the system and follow that by attending, volunteering, or giving, then the pastor is a failure.

There is enormous pressure on both sides. The people want something meaningful to give themselves to and they need real help with their pressing issues in life. Leaders are under enormous pressure to press people to grow, but to not press them too hard.

The system falls apart when pastors push hard to get the congregation to buy into changing the system or their lives. People grow attached to their system and the status quo. It provides the comfort of meeting the same expectations every Sunday:

We show up at 9 am. We sing until 9:24. The offering and announcements run until 9:36, and we pray that there isn’t a special music until the pastor takes the pulpit at 9:37. He will preach until 10:25 because we need a few minutes for an alter call in order to be dismissed at 10:30. Heaven help us if we run until 10:35…

The system hums along until the pastor realizes that the system needs to be changed. This is where all hell breaks loose, literally. The people were told that the system will provide for them and guide them where they need to go. They have invested in a system, an institution, a church, a holy place of God that looks just right to them. Who are these pastors to tell them it needs to look different? At this point, it makes far more sense to fight for the system than to trust the pastors.

The system will give the people what they want. The pastors become caretakers whose livelihoods are held hostage to the congregation.

Other times, the pastors use the authority of the system to hold their congregations hostage. They hold the power of church discipline. They can destroy relationships with one e-mail, even one message on a social network.

The ease of online connectivity can give leaders tremendous power to inflict terrible harm if they sense someone isn’t buying into the system. The same holds true for congregations.

Some churches are on the brink of all our war with congregations and pastors both trying to control the system. When the people/pastor become a “threat” to the “church,” that’s usually just another way of saying the people/pastor want to change the system we like.

As I’ve found churches where I can belong, I try to keep an eye on the system. It’s a caged beast ready to strike our communities at any time. The system will alienate us from our leaders we both fear we’re not measuring up. The system has no grace.

I want to serve God and minister to people rather than serving an organization or becoming enslaved to my expectations. My pastors should have freedom to hear from God and to lead without fear. I want to follow them without clinging to any pictures of what a church “must” look like.

I hope my pastors know that they can fail. They can make financial mistakes. They don’t have to lead perfect families. They can have doubts. They can end a service early or late. They can teach from any part of scripture they feel lead to speak about.

I hope everyone in my congregation knows that God’s Spirit knits us together. We don’t have to prove ourselves to one another. We are free to serve one another and let an unstaffed program die because no one feels called to it. Church doesn’t have to look like anything we’ve ever known before if God’s Spirit is leading us to change how we gather for worship or how we serve our community.

We are free to love God and to serve one another, and freedom is the one thing that a system hates. I love my pastors, but I hate the system.

Over all of my years immersed and banished from the church, I have boiled down everything that is important about Christian community to one, 4-letter word: LIFE.

Seek community where there is life. Where God is present and free to move. Where people are encouraged to pursue God’s calling for their lives. Where a community moves as one toward God’s throne of grace.

If you don’t feel the freedom of God’s life in a church, it will be hard to belong. It is God’s life that animates us and joins us together. We can find belonging through other means and activities, but it will never create the bonds God intended to create for his family.

I don’t’ want to offer a template or blueprint, but I do have one rule I follow: Look for the life of God around you.

Where is God free to convict you, to change lives, and to lead you? Cling to community where you can find that. Any community without the life of God is just a club, both an organization centered on common interests and a weapon that will, sooner or later, leave you broken.

Does gathering in community bring you closer to God and his life? Does community leave you more bound and trapped? That is my test.

God is doing stuff in us. We need to link up with the people who are also experiencing God in similar ways. Otherwise, we’ll only fight and struggle with each other. This is not to say we should avoid diversity. That can be good. However, if God is cultivating reverence and silence in you, then liturgy will be a healthy place to find community and to grow, rather than fighting through a more charismatic style that may leave you feeling confused and uncertain.

At this point in my journey, I feel like I’ve had teaching up to my ears. I feel so much more life in a church that emphasizes worship and prayer—as in actively praying for one another at the end of the service. There have been far more Sundays where I’ve longed to receive or offer prayer than to learn something.

I find God’s life in a community that reminds me I can’t learn my way into spiritual health or minister to others solely by imparting information. I suspect that the things that bring life to me today may shift or change a little over time, and that we all experience the life of God a little differently. Perhaps some of us need a little more instruction and knowledge to keep us grounded.

When I can sense the conviction of the Holy Spirit about sin in my life and seek out a friend who is waiting in the wings with the other prayer ministers, I know I’ve found a place where I can belong…

As my friend lays his hands on me and blesses me with confirmation of God’s forgiveness and healing, I can sense the unity of God’s Spirit, knitting us into one people, slowly becoming the image of Jesus in a broken world.

As our church in Connecticut sorted out its future, one of the church’s new leaders started to share her vision that children needed to become a higher priority in our community. As a church in a college town, it was easy to overlook the 5-6 kids who showed up each week. However, she was absolutely right. Part of our calling as a community was to support the spiritual growth of our children.

If we could not bond together for the sake of our children, were we any different from the dull disciples who tried to send the children away from Jesus?

The hard part here is that children’s ministry can become one of the many black holes that consume volunteers.

Churches abuse volunteers horribly.

Churches die without volunteer ministers.

If we want our communities to thrive, we need to participate in them, but then sometimes volunteering and serving takes on a life of its own where volunteers are expended as fuel for the sake of making the organization and programs thrive. On the one hand we need to invest in our kids, but on the other, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to create a “successful” children’s ministry that grinds up volunteers in the process.

This once again raises the question of whether we’re trying to help people thrive or whether we’re trying to help the organization thrive and survive.

Are we volunteering to serve one another or our community because it is good for others and ourselves, or are we volunteering because someone (sometimes it’s just us, sometimes it’s our leaders, sometimes it’s both) to help our organization become successful and well known?

When I visited one church, I happened to mention that I played guitar, and a couple immediately said, “Oh, you should play on our worship team. We need a male voice up there.”

Did you catch that? They were looking at a struggling program, and they needed fresh fuel to help it run better.

They didn’t ask me about where I was at with God. If they had, they would have found out that I’d been burned out terribly from music ministry. I’d grown weary of the complaining and the endless requests to meet someone else’s expectations and standards—the endless pushing and tugging for each person to get his/her own way.

I wanted no part of the music ministry at that point in my life. Truth be told, I was also clinging to my own way of doing church, pushing and tugging for dominance. There was one way to describe my volunteer relationship with the church back then: toxic for both of us.

The church and I were like a married couple desperately clinging to get our own ways because we feared that the other didn’t have our best interests in mind. The problem was that I’d been married to church organization, not the people.

As my friends began to dream about what our church could mean for the children among us, God showed me what he’d been hinting at all along: Christian community is not about the church serving me or me serving the organization. It’s about serving the people in our community.

I’d put up walls around myself in the church because I feared the organization would latch onto me and suck me dry like a relentless oil platform drilling down into my life until all of the fuel had been extracted.

My friend who asked us to rethink our approach to children’s ministry wasn’t concerned about making our church organization great. She simply saw a few kids who needed more attention from the adults, and she asked us to make sacrifices to ensure they’ll receive the support they need to follow Jesus.

When we sacrifice ourselves to an organization, we may get a mug, watch, or picnic. When we sacrifice ourselves on behalf of one another, we have a chance to see the life of God taking root and springing up among others. Serving one another brings more life, and that life can’t help but spread.

While attending our new, struggling church in Connecticut, we regularly faced the possibility of the church disbanding or at least going broke. Part of me hated the thought of finally finding a church and losing it.

I’d waited seven long years for this church. Would God really take it away from me now?

The more I thought and prayed about this, the more I realized that I didn’t care about this church. To put my thoughts more precisely, I was 100% loyal to the gathering of people, but I could live without the organization: the name, the logo, the meeting space, and the pens—I could manage never again seeing the 10,000 pens that a previous staff member had ordered.

On one hand, I was ready to give everything I had to this church. On the other hand, I was ready to start listing all of its assets on Craig’s List.

It was probably the best thing for me.

As I wrestled with my past disappointments with church and the hope our new community represented, the threat of losing it helped me keep a better perspective. I needed to belong to a community of people joined by God, not to a nonprofit organization.

When the people serve the organization and not God, one another, and the world, we create a barrier that may prevent us from belonging to God’s community. We become employees, of a sort, for an organization. This tension only becomes greater the larger a church becomes and the more assets it owns.

This taps into some of my issues I’m still working through with church.

On the one hand, I have no problem with investing in processes that help the community function better. For a season I helped update the church website and started an e-mail newsletter.

On the other hand, I have long resisted membership classes and any form of membership.

Perhaps my idealism lingers, but I still can’t stomach the thought of sitting in a class that explains the basic theology and practices I need in order to be a part of a community. What are the creeds for? I still imagine that the things discussed in these classes should be part of every Sunday and embodied at small group meetings and service projects.

If I need to be “taught” that my church values serving others, then what are we actually doing each week? Are we serving others?

The thought of formalized, hoop-jumping, class attending church membership still strikes me as a waste of time. I’m all for making a formal declaration that I’m committed to worshipping and serving with a group of people, but why do we need membership’s boundaries between insiders and outsiders?

The moment we create members and non-members, we’ve just created a potentially large barrier to belonging to a community. I know that the church has historically had a rigorous membership process, and I’m all for discipling and teaching new Christians, but I bristle against formalizing it and labeling people.

I’ve always tried to walk this line where I want to be fiercely committed to a community of believers where I belong while never adding anything that could put up a barrier between myself and anyone in my community.

Perhaps I’m an extremist here. I certainly don’t condemn anyone who believes in church membership or who has taken a membership class. I don’t want to make this a moral matter.

I just really, really don’t want to attend a ten week class that somehow magically makes me belong in a community. A class can’t do that.

The more I reflect on belonging to Christian community, the more I notice obstacles that we have created on our own. It’s hard enough to belong in a church. Why make it harder?

I know some churches that won’t allow people to serve in ministries without becoming a member, and that’s where I really bristle. Such a policy tells me that buying into the organization itself is more important than the ties that God has created among us through the work of his Son and the indwelling Spirit.

I could be wrong. I don’t know. I just know that the churches where “buying in” to the church’s way of doing things became a big obstacle. It wasn’t enough to profess the same creeds. I needed to profess the same vision statement and values.

That doesn’t strike me as a way to belong. That’s a way to become an employee. When an organization’s goals and values overshadow the work of God among us, belonging will be tough, if not impossible for many of us.

Jesus came to break down barriers, and therefore I’m always suspicious of any barrier we create before people can truly “belong” to our Christian communities.

Facing rejection as a church visitor is tough enough. However, if you don’t see the value of attending church in the first place, it’s nearly impossible to face something as unpleasant and alienating as being the lonely visitor standing with a cold cup of coffee in the lobby while everyone else cheerfully chats with one another.

When I stopped going to church, I didn’t see how I could ever make church work for me again. However, as I prayed about it, God sent a little nagging thought into the back of my mind: “Never say, never.”

I didn’t, but it was hard to believe.

My time isolated from Christian community was tough. As I struggled to find a new Christian community and faced the possibility of rejection or getting tangled in an unhealthy church, those seven years in the wilderness away from church reminded me what was at stake.

It’s really, really hard to be a Christian without the support of a community. For a few years we hosted a few Christian friends at our home for a morning prayer meeting before work, and that was a lifeline for me.

We only had about 30-45 minutes, but it was just enough to provide me a safe place to share my struggles and to find the support I needed so desperately.

Belonging to a Christian community is not about just stamping your time card each week and relieving your Christian guilt. In fact, the obligation of attending church is an empty mirage of Christianity. Attending church weekly is not a way of avoiding sin in and of itself.

Belonging to the life-giving Christian community, which can be found in church, is how we are sustained and kept healthy. We need to be with people who are facing the same challenges in life or who have worked through the same stuff as us.

We need to know we’re not the only crazy ones. We need to receive prayer from people who face the same doubts, fears, and temptations. Belonging to community is not always the same thing as “attending” a church.

We need to know that someone we care about will be crushed if we give in to our sinful desires. We need to know that someone will pray for our restoration after we have failed.

Failure in the Christian life is a very real possibility. Christians struggle with broken marriages, porn addictions, body image lies, eating disorders, and greed. These are big, ugly sins that have taken root in our lives, and our only hope of healing and wholeness comes through God and his community that embodies the ministry of Jesus.

If the church continues the work of Jesus among us, then we need to be connected to a community of believers who can bring his healing work among us.

When I am joined to a community of believers, I can find people who support me and pray for me. I have prayed healing prayers for others.

Isn’t it amazing that we all come together with our flaws and problems, but God chooses to use us to heal and bless one another. When we gather together in Christian community, we have an opportunity to be touched by the very hands of Jesus.

We don’t belong to a community when we all wear the same shirts or park outside the same building. We belong when we become the presence of Jesus to one another, joined together mystically by his Spirit as one body and bearing one another’s burdens.

Years ago, we used to attend a rural church. Naturally, the hunters ended up together.

When we moved to an urban setting, all of the cyclists shifted their chairs toward one another.

Sometimes these groups form naturally. Other times they arise because they’ve been imposed on us.

We’re frequently broken down into marketing segments by businesses for the sake of selling us products, and it’s not uncommon for churches to do the same. We naturally lean toward affinity groups and congregate around common points such as age, hobbies, beliefs, or even which service time we prefer.

Churches follow demographics, trends, traditions, prejudices, and just about any other way people define themselves. Sometimes these trends emerge naturally, while other times churches work hard to make these distinctions extremely stark.

With all of these ways to slice and dice people into groups, should we be surprised when it’s hard to find a church where we feel completely comfortable—where we feel like we fit in perfectly?

Whether we welcome affinity groups or we try to fight them through building generationally integrated small groups, there are real challenges to community and belonging.

When I tried to find Christian community again, I had no idea where to start. How could I find a place to belong? When I used to think about belonging in a community, I could only see:

• Our backgrounds are too diverse.
• Our experiences are too many.
• Our outlooks are too limited.
• Our wounds are too deep.
• Our commitments are too powerful.
• Our fears are too great.
• Our boundaries too many.

Three years after returning to church, I have a bit more perspective on that Sunday morning where we gave organized church another shot. It was so hard, so very hard to park our car, and walk into a building filled with the grins that every church visitor gets—grins that are rarely ever followed by an introduction or meaningful conversation.

I’d seen these grins at other churches we had visited during our seven year sojourn outside of a church. The lack of action that followed those grins told me: “We’re glad to see you, but please stay the hell away from our personal space.”

That’s what most church visitors see. That’s what I’ve seen too often as a church visitor. I’m sure I’ve given out those meaningless grins and handshakes to visitors more times than I can count. Once someone actually walked over and talked to us that first Sunday, I was finally able to face all of my baggage, that long list of bullet points that prevented me from belonging.

If you can survive the first visit, you face the daunting task of finding your place among hundreds or more people with a variety of interests. Where do you even begin?

This is an area where book publishing has helped me deal with rejection, failed conversations, and attempts at relationships that become dead ends. Sometimes you just can’t connect with people without facing the possibility of a limp handshake or a phony smile. My only hope over the years has been reaching out and remaining proactive.

I would have never found a place to belong without starting conversations, asking people about who else attends the church, and telling people what I care about. When a couple at our new church reached out to us, I was able to return the next Sunday and the Sunday after that, facing the possibility of rejection with renewed determination to overcome it and belong. However, I only had the courage to become proactive after someone reached to me and told me that I was welcome and valued.

I soon found people who read a lot, who garden, and value creativity. I had to seek these people out after services. I set up meetings at a café. I attended a small group. I volunteered for a ministry that connected with the passions God has given me.

The hard part about finding a community where you can meaningfully belong is that you need to begin with a flimsy handshake that means basically nothing. However, a handshake can be treated as a dead end or you can grab on to that person and learn about each other.

For years I made the mistake of assuming that all Christians viewed visitors as a threat to their neat and tidy social groups. That has been true in some cases, but as I’ve belonged to several churches, I’ve witnessed people who have really struggled to figure out ways to welcome visitors.

Those handshakes really can mean something. They aren’t necessarily a way of shooing me away after doing the bare minimum. Oftentimes, a handshake is a lifeline, welcoming me into a community. Everything changed when I took hold of that lifeline and held on for dear life.

When I first imagined what this series could be, I hoped that I would be able to share stories like the one we have today from Rev. Meg Jenista. This is the kind of story that every Christian needs to read.

In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote, “There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.” Friedan’s revolutionary research was the underpinning of the 1960s and 70s feminist movement, the aims of which have, in many ways, supplanted the so-called feminine mystique as the operational norm of gender stereotypes and feminine self-understanding in broader culture.

Reading Friedan’s work 40 years later within the context of church culture, I heard my own life experience explained to me. There is still an operational feminine mystique guiding our churches today, a one-size-fits-all mentality of Christian womanhood. I submit into evidence the "Women’s Interest" section of your local Family Christian bookstore. . .and the defense rests.

There is a dominant story in our Christian churches about what it means to be a woman. In reality, there are a lucky few women who naturally fit into this story. Other women subconsciously adopt this narrative, pretending it is their own, amputating the parts of themselves that don’t quite fit between the covers of the storybook.

Most women I know are partial-resisters of the story, timidly struggling against but ultimately bowing to the societal hand-slap that comes along with trying to tell the pieces of your truth that don’t comfortably fit the plotline of the dominant narrative. There are some women out there who just flat out resist the story. I would like to meet these women.

As an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church, you might suppose I am one of those no-holds-barred resisters. I remember a more conservative time in my life when I assumed that women preachers were all New-Age goddess-worshippers who cut up Scripture to their own liking. But that caricature of women ministers assumes we are “in your face” simply because we exist. Instead I offer the story of my timid struggle to own my identity, as a child of God first and a Minister of Word and Sacrament second.

In my first preaching class at seminary, I prayed that I would suck. I did. I prayed that God would relent, that it would be manifestly obvious that this was NOT God’s gifting. Then I would be free to return to my regularly scheduled life – a life that did not include rocking the boat. I didn’t have a radical agenda. I wasn’t looking to prove anything. That’s not quite true. I was looking to prove that I didn’t have a radical agenda.

Even as I prayed, though, I kind of knew that this was going to be one of those unsatisfactorily answered prayers. And, frankly, I was mad at God. Again. I was mad because God made me in such a way that God’s people didn’t know what to do with me. 
So I preached. I preached well, as it turns out, and I loved it.

Even after resigning myself to this difficult gifting, I was also deeply ashamed of it. Once, preaching in front of my mentor, she stopped me and asked, “Why are you standing there with one leg wrapped around the other? You look like you’re nervous or that you’re trying not to take up too much room. What’s that about?” Without pre-meditation, I blurted out: “It’s okay if I preach but if I’m too good or confident, it’ll make the boys feel bad.” Tears in my eyes, hand over my mouth, we both stood there. “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

Since then, seminary education, various internships and four years of ordained ministry have confirmed that I was made for this, that God is calling me to this. But I still find it difficult to feel the entirety of God’s delight because I know that this calling comes with the mixed reviews of God’s church. When the assumptions about my character come at me, as they do yet on occasion, I remember my own shame-filled truth: “Don’t be too good. Don’t be too confident. Don’t make the boys feel bad.” I remember that resisting the church’s dominant narrative is still a hand-slappable offense. I remember how it felt to secretly suspect God made me wrong.

Being the person God has called me to be is so much more complicated than the tidy little story God’s people have offered me. Some days I would give anything to be one of those lucky few women who naturally fit into the story of the Christian feminine mystique.

Then I remember that complicated is real. And real is better easy. Thanks be to God.

About Today’s Guest Blogger

The Reverend Meg Jenista is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  She was ordained at Third Christian Reformed Church in 2008, where she continues to serve as the Minister of Community Life and Witness.  She eagerly awaits the day when Tina Fey decides to write a sit-com based on the lives of young clergywomen. You can listen to her sermons here. She tweets as @RevGirlKazoo.

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.

Contributions Welcome: Contact Ed to pitch your post idea in 2-4 sentences.

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: Kathy Escobar

While working on the Taking Root series, I noticed that I was far more pleased with the quality of my posts if I gave my ideas more time to develop. As I started my new series on Belonging in the Church, I wanted to find a way to still give those posts time to take shape so the writing could be sharp, economical, and to the point.

The solution I’ve played with and finally settled on is to take Thursdays off. I’ll either share guest posts or some highlights from blogs I’ve been reading. This gives me a little more breathing room and enables me to recommend my favorite blogs. That’s something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now, and I’m glad that I can finally make it happen.

Check out Ray Hollenbach’s post: Jesus, Friend of Pharisees

Ray writes, “The same man who welcomed Matthew the tax collector was also friends with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.”

Lore Ferguson has a beautiful post about the tension between worship and fear: Kissing Fear

Lore writes, “Worship. Fear. Be in awe. Draw near…”

Sarah Bessey has an eerily similar story to my own about heartbreak and restoration in the church. The difference is that she writes about it with way more passion and poetry than literal ole’ me. This post will make your day: In Which God Has Restored Church to Me

Sarah Writes: “Six years ago, Brian left full-time vocational ministry and, you who have walked this road with us, you know, it’s been a journey. We were so burnt out, so exhausted, so broken hearted and part of me, a big part of me, never wanted to darken the door of a church again. ”

Kristin Tennant wants you to Learn How to Be Bored Again, and I think she’s right on.

Kristin writes, “I’ve been thinking about time not as currency, but rather as space. ”

I hope you enjoy these posts. I’ll be sharing the Women in Ministry Series guest post tomorrow, and then Monday I’ll pick up where we left off with my Belonging in Church series. Thanks for stopping by!