I’m guest posting for Micha Boyett’s blog Mama Monk today for her new series: This Sacred Everyday. I met Micha at the Festival of Faith and Writing. I’ll admit that when she introduced herself, I almost said, “Yeah right… I know what you look like from your blog.” However, I’d been looking at an old picture of her.

After clearing that up, I moved on to just feeling insecure around a bunch of people I didn’t know. Micha was amazingly kind and welcoming. When she learned that I hail from Philadelphia, she even talked smack about the Dallas Cowboys. Now that is Christian love in action.

I’m writing all of this to arrive at the point where I asked about her blog, and she mentioned the concept behind Mama Monk: After she had kids, she struggled to find the peace and quiet she used to have for prayer. Mama Monk is about rediscovering spiritual practices in the midst of having kids. It’s a great idea, and the blog itself is even better. I’m honored to be sharing a guest post there today.

Here’s a little sample of my guest post:

Manure tea is heavy and awkward to pour. The smell is revolting. How can week old rabbit manure that’s been “brewing” in a bucket of warm water not assault your senses? I pour the manure tea on our tomatoes. Tragically, it splashes.

I look at the fertilizer powders in the gardening center with longing eyes. What joy it must be to use a scoop to spread a pleasant, clean white powder on one’s plants and call it a day.

Instead, I’m scraping up another load of rabbit manure from their cage and filling up the bucket for next week’s batch of natural fertilizer.

On other days I’ve hauled in bags of dirt and compost, turned over the soil, dug holes, yanked weeds, and fought off pests and disease. I deal with sweat, sore shoulders, torn jeans, and cracked fingers.

Gardening can be physically demanding, expensive, frustrating, and wonderful. I’m not just attached to the thought of the sweet carrots I yank up or the delicious greens that pop up in orderly rows. I’m into the rhythm and sanctuary of my garden as a sacred space.

Visit Mama Monk to read the rest of today’s post.

Back when I studied at seminary in order to go into ministry, I was continually perplexed by what exactly a pastor had to do in order to “minister” to someone.

I could say that accountants crunch numbers. Plumbers fix leaks. Designers sketch prototypes. Pastors? They “minister.” I couldn’t put my finger on that one exactly.

Over the years I volunteered in the church in so many different capacities, and I have struggled to define whether I was “ministering” or just doing stuff in a church. Is this a matter of semantics? Is this a matter of the heart? I didn’t know.

I’ve had glimpses of ministry over the years, and I hope that I’m closer to figuring it out these days. Perhaps an example from the other day at my church will help.

Our pastor preached a sermon about Pentecost. He explained the significance of the Jewish festival that coincided with the arrival of the Holy Spirit. And then he did something that was incredibly wise. He stopped teaching, and helped us all invite the Holy Spirit to come.

As we waited, he encouraged those who felt that God was doing something in them to raise their hands and then asked the rest of us to pray over them.

God spoke some clear messages both to me and through me that Sunday. One prayer was a particularly powerful confirmation for the person I prayed over about the things God had been teaching him.

Ministry is that moment when God connects with his people, whether or not a fellow Christian is involved in that process.

You could say that my pastor preached a message that amounted to ministry.

You could say that praying over someone was ministry.

However, the power behind the preaching and the prayers we offered had nothing to do with our pastor or us. It wasn’t like we were able to help anyone heal from past wounds or leave sinful ways behind with our own wisdom. We don’t have any hope or power that we bring to the table. Ministry isn’t just hard on our own. It’s impossible.

I can’t walk into church, spot someone, and know what to pray for him/her. However, I can respond to God’s leading and pray for that person when prompted.

That gentle nudge, that moment of insight, that wisdom that guides us to turn over an entire church service to the Holy Spirit: that is the work of God ministering among his people. On my own I brought nothing to church that day. With God’s power in my life, I was able to minister to other people.

That total lack of control over real ministry is part of what makes it to tough sometimes. I can’t necessarily plan how ministry is going to happen or the ways that God is going to show up. Maybe he’ll heal the friend I pray over. Maybe he won’t. I’m just an obedient conduit for God to use. I’m not in control.

My suspicion is that a lot of pastors and volunteers put tremendous pressure on themselves to prepare for church by studying really hard for their sermons or lessons. Other volunteers try to put together the best games or craft projects for the kids. Other times we just put general pressure on ourselves to be the nice, happy, smiling people we expect to find in church.

While we should not settle for shoddy efforts in our sermons or children’s activities, the “success” or power of our ministry is not necessarily up to us.

When I served in a prison in Connecticut, I had to learn about preparing my own heart and resting in God before going to serve at the prison. Adding an extra hour or two of Alpha course prep time rarely made a big difference. The best thing I could do in order to “minister” was to show up while on the same page with God, cultivating an attentive spirit so that I could help the men in any way they needed.

I don’t remember any evenings when anyone received life-changing prayer that I’d somehow planned out or prepared for. If I showed up in tune with God, he could use me in ways that I’d never imagined. That was it.

There were many nights that I’d drive home wondering what had just happened and where my prayers and teachings had come from. Somehow God showed up and worked in and through his people. I knew for a fact that it certainly wasn’t me. After all, ministry is impossible.

I have a shocking secret to share with you: Some days I don’t have a clue what people need to read.

This is alarming. I’m trying to write for a living. Understanding my audience is key to hope to provide for my family in a respectable capacity.

Mind you, it’s not always like this. When I wrote a sympathetic post about the challenges and pressures we place on pastors and their connections with affairs, the Google went nuts with people dropping by to read my post. I knew that pastors having affairs was an important topic, and the interest of readers proved my instincts right.

However, there are just as many times when I think, “People already know about this topic. They don’t need me to write about it.”

Take for instance the “I’m messy” blog post. I generally try to avoid that one. I feel like I’ve heard it in church a lot too.

There are some Sundays where my pastors will say something like, “Our church welcomes messy people.” I think to myself, “We know, we know, we know. We’re journeying, we’re in process, blah, blah, blah.”

And then there are some Sundays where my pastor will say, “Messy people are welcome and we want to pray for you,” and I can barely stop myself from running to a prayer minister because I’m frightfully aware that I am a messy person, and I’ve been letting my mess keep me from God and his people.

Sometimes repetition of the same truth in fresh ways is what we need. That’s humbling and tough to accept. I want to figure out each different part of life, stuff it, and mount it on a wall so I can point to it and say, “Look at what I figured out!”

I want to push forward. I want progress. I want to drive on to the next big, huge, shiny goal.

That doesn’t happen most weeks. If it wasn’t for my garden, I wouldn’t have many other tangible measures of progress most days.

Life is far more cyclical, even if we’re moving forward. We’re like cursive e’s that loop backward after moving forward. Each time we loop back, we need to relearn an old truth, dig deeper into something we’ve heard before, and cling to people who are gracious enough to repeat themselves.

I resist writing posts about my mess because I keep telling myself that I’m just repeating myself. Blogging and sermons have taught me otherwise.

I need repetition. I need reminders that the people around me are struggling, that God’s grace abounds, and that others have found healing and hope.

I need to write about my mess. You need to write about your mess. That’s just the way it is. We’ll always run into these pitfalls from time to time, and we need reminders of healing and acceptance from others. Those are the kinds of messages that never grow old.

Writing and ministry share the common trait of gracious repetition. We never know what we ourselves or others may need as a new day dawns. We keep digging into the same topics and themes because the sun rises on a new day and fresh truth must be found so that we can give it away.

Today’s guest post is by my friend Renee Fisher. I’ve known Renee since 2008 since we’ve been represented by the same agent. It has been a joy to watch Renee’s story unfold as she has clung to God through some really tough times. If you ever need someone to help you stay on track with the Holy Spirit, Renee can do it!

I want to tell you a story about a woman named Cindy. Her hair shines like the sun. She is a whole foot taller than her husband, and she ministers to women in prison every weekend.

I met Cindy at church.

She sang on the worship team and I played the piano. Around that time, our church started a women’s mentoring program and I got to pick Cindy. We had no idea what God was going to do, but it was her influence that got me going in the right direction years before God would answer my prayer of a ministry to call my own.

We’d meet up for lunch once or twice a month. We’d eat some delicious Daphne’s Greek Food and dream together.

I loved that Cindy wasn’t afraid of my story.

Up until that time, I was always known as the sick girl. For those of you who don’t know my story, I lost about nine years of my life to eczema. I lost the skin off my face, hands, and feet. Healing was something I craved–no, longed for the most.

Cindy never took pity on me, and always saw me for the woman I always thought I was and wanted so badly to be.

One Sunday after church, I was packing up my keyboard and Cindy said she needed to talk to me. She asked me the most amazing and difficult question I’ve ever been asked, seriously!

“Renee, the Holy Spirit wants to know, if you were [physically] well, what would you do?”

She told me her reasons afterwards. Cindy knew I would do my homework and seek the Lord to figure out what He wanted to say to me.

Her question liberated me.

I don’t remember exactly what I said to her, but I remember writing my answers down on a 4×6 card. I told her that I wanted to be married and in ministry with my husband.

It’s crazy to look back and remember.

God answered Cindy’s question and my prayers. Many years later, God has done wonders not only in my health but also in my writing. He has given me a ministry that far exceeds my wildest desires and someone to share it with.

This past week I was rearranging my office and found the card. I thought I’d lost it and it makes me giddy to think I found it again. Most of all, I am thankful for women like Cindy who believed in me. She saw past my fears and challenged me to believe.

“Then the LORD said to me, ‘Write my answer plainly on tablets, so that a runner can carry the correct message to others. This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed” (Habakkuk 2:2-3, NLT).

About Today’s Blogger

Renee Johnson Fisher AKA Devotional Diva® is a spirited writer to twenty-somethings. She graduated from Biola University and worked with nationally known Christian speakers and writers at Outreach Events. She is the author of Faithbook of Jesus and Not Another Dating Book. She and her husband Marc live in Escondido, CA with their pit bull named Rock Star who walks with a limp.

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: Amy Young

Christian writers need Christian community.

That was a really hard sentence for me to write because I essentially spent seven years outside of the church. While wrestling with the ways the church had failed me and the ways I could possibly once again belong to a community, I began blogging. A few years after launching my blog, I also released a theology book.

All in all, I blogged for about three or four years while not attending a church full time.

About three years ago I finally found a Christian community where I could belong. I still blogged during that time and I wrote another book.

The writing I produced during those two periods could not have been more different.

While I could chalk up some of the differences to my own maturity, my growth as a writer, and other trends around me, it’s really tough to write for the benefit of Christians if you aren’t connected to a few of them in a real community of faith. Here are a few of the challenges I faced:

I Criticized without Accountability

When I didn’t have a community around me, I was free to write anything I wanted. That lack of accountability led to some unhelpful rants and some critical statements that I now regret. Of particular shame is the one story I shared in a study guide where I said the church wrecks Easter. What I meant to write was that pushy conversion sermons laden with theological jargon may do more harm than good, but I lacked the wisdom or desire to write that more responsibly.

If I had thought of a real pastor that I knew reading that sentence, rewriting it would have been a no-brainer. As it stands, I just wrote a sentence that exposed me as a mouthy jerk.

I Wrote about Hot Topics Rather Than Real Concerns

Paul wrote that everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. If that’s true about anything, it’s true about Christian blogging. I used to jump onto controversial topics because I thought the world needed a cool, calm, interesting guy like me to weigh in.

I can only think of one instance where weighing in on a hot controversy actually did anyone any good. Every other time I jumped on a controversy back then just brought a boost to my traffic.

I wasn’t thinking about the real issues people in my church were facing. I was just trying to think of ways to be popular.

I Lost Sight of the Average Christian’s Concerns

It hurt like heck to remove my chapter on Nietzsche when I was editing Coffeehouse Theology. Looking back, I can’t believe I still kept two whole chapters explaining the impact of modernism and postmodernism on today’s culture and church. What was I thinking?

I can tell you one thing, I wasn’t thinking all that much about what the average Christian needed to know about shaping theology in everyday life. While Coffeehouse Theology still provides a very accessible guide to shaping your beliefs in the rest of its chapters, I tell most readers today to skip the modernism and postmodernism chapters.

If I had written that book while attending a small group or Sunday School class, I would have been clued in to the interests of the average reader when it came to discussing philosophy and theology. Instead, I simply made the philosophy ideas from my seminary text books more accessible and called it a day without ever asking whether my readers needed two whole chapters of philosophy before discussing the ways culture impacts our theology.

My Caveat for Christian Writers

I write all of this with my own story in mind. For a season of my life I was not in a healthy place to attend church. I just didn’t fit. I wasn’t trying to be disobedient. I was just trying to honestly process all that had happened in my life. God eventually restored me, but I needed time to heal and the right community where I could belong.

I understand that there may be some Christian writers who can’t belong to a Christian community right now for whatever reason. I have no desire to bring judgment or condemnation. However, I do want to be honest with you. Writing for fellow Christians outside of physical community is tough.

I’m not saying that Christians who don’t’ belong to a community are unable to share anything of value. I’m just saying that belonging to community will help save us from some pretty serious pitfalls.

I hesitated to write this post because I know there are plenty of Christian writers who are honestly struggling to find community. I can certainly relate. However, I encourage my friends to keep two things in mind:

• Think of your time outside of community as a season and pray with hope that God will send you community some day.
• Stay patient, but beware setting your standards for a church too high. You may be able to find perfect community among an imperfect church system.
• Write with specific readers in mind and consider how you can help them follow Jesus better, rather than just getting more readers and comments.

Writing is a lonely enough pursuit. Anyone hoping to serve the church needs to know the church intimately in all of her diversity, complexity, and potential.

When I meet someone who has been damaged by Christians, I feel terrible for them for one simple reason: those damaged by Christians need the healing found among God and God’s people. It’s the paradox of community. Community can wound and heal us.

People in the church are both the sources of our problems and the conduit for solutions.

I’ll be the first to admit that I like to joke about the fundamentalism of my youth. Part of my tendency to tear fundamentalism down has a lot to do with a child who mocks the fictional monster he used to fear under his bed. I used to live in terror of an angry God, of falling into theological error, and of a bloody apocalypse. I stressed over Bible translations, music, dancing, relationships, and every other little minutiae that fundamentalism tried to control.

It felt good to break free of its control. It felt even better to mock it. If I could mock fundamentalism, then it could no longer control me.

As much as the conservative church gave me nightmares, insecurity, and fear, it also gave me salvation, women who prayed for me, men who welcomed me into their families, and friends who accept me as I am. For all of the times that the church worked me to the bone or force-fed some ridiculous bit of theology, it also provided times of rest and a table in the presence of God.

It’s maddening really. The church can be both disease and doctor. Oftentimes different people will be involved as either disease or doctor, but the point remains that Christian community is rarely ever all good or all bad. Those who have experienced more bad than good may have simply been in an unhealthy community.

Even in churches where I ran into the most problems, I also found refuge among some of amazing, nurturing people. Somehow God can take broken situations and even broken people and still use them to bring restoration that we can’t imagine to be possible.

When I tried to return to the church three years ago, I remember those conservative women who committed to praying for me. There were people like them scattered throughout churches, even the churches that sometimes infuriated or frustrated me. I held out hope that even in the midst of frustration, salt in old wounds, or even failure that God’s people could bring the healing and restoration I needed.

If the church has ever failed or wounded you, there are pastors, elders, deacons, and lay people who understand what you’re going through. They’ve either experienced the same things or have witnessed a friend go through something similar.

Healing will often come from different people than the sources of our wounds, but make no mistake: God uses his church to heal us. We’ll find healing and hope in the church. It’s there.

Sometimes you need to wait a bit.

Sometimes you need to search for it.

Healing is present among God’s people because Jesus is among them. They carry the same spirit and authority. That’s the hope really. There is hope because no matter how hard some people try to wreck the love and power of God, he always wins.

I returned to our cozy little neighborhood this afternoon with the relief and gratitude of someone who had just escaped a zombie apocalypse. I didn’t exactly escape a brush with death, but I did face the one thing that Americans hate almost as much missing American Idol: the inconvenience of the suburbs.

While my wife worked on her final papers for grad school, I took over shopping duties and ran about thirty seven errands in the suburban strip. I had to leave my comfortable little bubble in town, venturing to the edge of civilization where engine exhaust makes baby bunnies nested outside condos weep.

It didn’t take long to get angry at people.

There was the lady who didn’t look until after she almost backed her car into me. Some guy in a sporty SUV wouldn’t let me merge onto the highway and then tailed me before roaring around me close enough that I could have lit a cigarette for his passenger.

There was traffic jammed in the parking lots. Lines in every story. People who jumped in front of me in line. People who went back to for one more thing when they should have been paying!

The chicken in the cooler started to warm up. My car started to overheat. The freckle-faced kid at Rita’s told me they didn’t have root beer water ice. The world was out to get me. Inconvenience!!!

When I travel out to the suburbs for these rare shopping trips, it’s like I’ve gone to a different nation where I don’t fit in because my car is over 10 years old and has rust. The hustle and hurry grabs me and I dutifully go along with it, as if I don’t have a choice. As people become obstacles in my way or take risks that put me in danger, I begin to seethe at them. We’re SO different…

Shifting gears from suburban shopper to urban gardener when I returned home, I set to work with clumps of dirt, compost, garden borders, and a few blackberry bushes. When I had a chance to feel like myself, I began to ask, “What just happened to me?”

We could say a lot of things about the suburban shopping experience and what we each bring to it, but today I saw that I’d been looking for reasons to separate myself from people. It’s like I craved conflict. I wanted to be in the right, and in order to tap into that, I had to direct my aggression at the people who crossed me in any way.

By dividing myself from others, I was trying to build myself up or to give myself fulfillment in some twisted way.

Conflict can be a good thing that drives a story forward. However, the right kind of conflict brings liberation and fulfillment—as in that moment at church today when our prayer ministers prayed for those going through tough times. Conflict can be misused to tear people down and it leaves neither us nor anyone else better off. All we get is a conflict buzz from fighting someone a little bit.

The Gospel restores and heals relationships. It accepts that lady in the parking lot who was careless for a moment but who may be the most caring person in her family. That guy in the SUV who almost hit me may live in fear of stopping or of facing who he truly is. So he drives a sporty SUV as fast as legally possible and never stops to ask why he’s taking sleeping pills to fall asleep each night.

The Gospel welcomes these people and many more into our Christian communities—even into my own where I secretly hope aggressive and negligent drivers aren’t allowed. There’s no place for these frivolous divisions in God’s Kingdom.

Even more so, the Gospel welcomes big government liberals and small government conservatives. The Gospel reaches people who like country, alternative rock, and maybe even jazz (does anyone “like” jazz for real?). The Gospel belongs to the hip, the straight-laced, the disheveled.

If it works right, the Gospel should ruin our neat little divisions we create, trashing every us vs. them narrative. Even my suburban angst narrative needs to go.

Rather than permitting me to perpetuate my little farce where I’m the hero who overcomes conflict to get what I want, the Gospel turns God into the hero who wants everyone and who is even willing to overcome conflict with a grumpy urban gardener to reach the people he loves.

I’m taking a day off from the Belonging series to share a contribution to Prodigal Magazine’s Living a Good Story series. We’ll pick up tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming.

While taking a walk two years ago, I began to think in tweets.

That’s when I knew I had a problem.

Twitter has been great for sharing my writing , meeting colleagues, and sharing what I enjoy, but I began to live my life according to what was tweetable. And if I wasn’t consciously trying to do something tweetable, my first response to a funny scene, clever idea, or even bad pun was, “I wish I could tweet that right now.”

Twitter has elevated the mundane to the loftiest of heights. It kills our imaginations, our thinking, and our hope of becoming people who can deeply concentrate on one topic for a sustained period of time in order to understand it. For all of the times that I’ve found great ideas and links on Twitter, there are four times when I’ve read something trite or useless that merely distracted.

Think about the madness of this for a moment:

Someone stopped creating, thinking, drinking, eating, or doing something just to type something like, “Mmmm, nachos are gud!” or “Waiting in line again!” or “Awesome movie last night.”

It would seem to me that the first step in living a good story is to stop telling everyone about the mundane details of life and to focus on real life.

I hate to write this, but I had a “Twitter stream of conscious” tendency in my brain. I want to be clever. I want more people to follow me. So I began to serve Twitter with my life, hoping I could think of something clever to tweet.

More than all of those things, I want to become a better writer who is capable of writing four or five pages in his journal every day. I want to write punchy and perceptive blog posts. I want to tap into the most pressing issues of my generation and write books that help people.

Twitter is not the ticket to do any of those things.

In fact, Twitter will not help us with anything that requires deep thought, discipline, or perception.

Make no mistake, Twitter is great for quickly spreading a good idea. I use it every day. It’s the Big Bird of networking tools.

However, Twitter is a lousy living tool. In fact, Twitter can become a distracting obstacle to deep thought, art, or relationships.

I have a little mantra that I use to fight off my urge to tweet bad puns or the random things people say in the café around me. Here it is:

“Are you creating something?”

Twitter is the bullhorn you use on the corner to proclaim the creation or existence of something. A bullhorn won’t write in a journal or swipe a bit of paint on a canvas.

I guard my walks because they provide the solitude I need in order to write. My mind is free and clear from the clutter of a feed. I can return to my computer with those ideas and write something because I’ve lived something and thought it through.

If it’s good enough, I may even tweet about it.

Today’s guest post is by Jaimie Bowman:

This Mother’s Day I was asked to preach at my church, and the night before I realized that I was quite nervous. My mind rushed back to the first time I ever preached on a Sunday morning, which was when I was 22 years old.

The service was set to begin but we could not find the pastor anywhere.  The worship team was missing two members, a husband and wife, and it was glaringly obvious that they were somewhere with the pastor and that something was wrong.

After about 15 minutes, they rushed to the stage, faces beet red.  Something in my gut told me that it was about me, but I pushed those insecurities aside and preached for my life.  The fire that had been shut up in my bones for the past few years came out, and I felt empowered like never before.  I found out later there had been a heated confrontation about me preaching that morning.  Immediately after worship was finished, the husband and wife left the service and soon after decided to leave the church.

That wasn’t the first time my "womanhood" caused an issue.  When I was 15 years old, I announced to my parents that I felt called to the ministry. My dad, being a pastor of a conservative church that did not support women in ministry, did not feel the need to change his position on account of his daughter.  When I was 21, I was almost afraid to tell them I was becoming a Licensed Minister, but I did and we have never really spoken about it since.

Over the years, these kinds of obstacles did not seem to fade.  It seemed like wherever I went, minding my own business, other people felt like it was their business too.  People tried to "set me straight," discipline me, and put me back into the cocoon that I had just emerged from. I didn’t understand why they were so mad, taking up so much of their time trying to fix me.

The hardest part of the situations that I faced was that I was just trying to obey God.   Whenever I preached, I sensed the anointing of God like never before. The words came easy, like honey from my mouth, and my own gender just….never occurred to me.  I was too busy preparing for messages to notice what everyone else saw as the elephant in the room.  I wasn’t trying to usurp anyone’s authority, or demand my rights, or kick down any doors – I was just trying to be obedient.

Thankfully I had many wonderful people pour life into me during my early ministry years since I went to a Christian university that fully supported women in ministry.  Yet, outside of that safety net, I found the church to be a dangerous place.  I became one of those women who asked God, “Why did you make me a woman?” and pleaded with Him to take this calling away from me if it wasn’t from Him. 

Yet the burden only became stronger.

What surprised me the most was that the majority of the objections came from the women, not the men. It was the men who had spoken life into me, who had urged me to use my gifts, who had prayed for God to open the doors for me. The women often were the ones who seemed most upset and more intent on setting me straight.

I have learned that women can either be each other’s biggest supporters or biggest enemies.  Today it is my aim to help other women feel supported and encouraged in their calling.  I recently started the South Bay Network for Women in Ministry, inviting women from our area to come together for a time of fellowship and prayer.  Nine women joined together at my church, and there was such an excitement in the air.  Most of us had never met before, but we became fast friends. 

I heard story after story of women passionate about serving their God, yet their greatest obstacle seemed to be the church itself – the church they so desperately wanted to serve.  Some of these women were broken, feeling discouraged, overlooked, and underpaid. However, there was a silent hope in the room – a hope that, as we all come together, we can be the support one another’s needs, even when we cannot find it in our own churches.  

As women in ministry find one another, there is renewed hope.  We have a hope that as we are faithful to use our gifts and not give up, that God will be pleased.  We are not here to fight. We are not here to take over anyone’s positions. We are simply here to serve God with our gifts. 

Instead of pouring my energy into proving people wrong, I just want to pour my energy into encouraging other women in ministry, to let them know that they are not alone.

And that Mother’s Day sermon that I was so worried about?  One older gentleman came up to me and said, "Well, I have to tell you, I didn’t think it would be that good coming from a woman, but I was wrong."  I smiled.

Today’s Guest Blogger

Jaimie Bowman is a minister to whomever needs ministering to.  Married to her husband-pastor for 13 years, together they have two cute boys, ages 5 and 7.  As a speaker and writer, Jaimie longs to connect with and encourage other leaders.  Although she lives in Southern California, she does not have a tan and does not go to the beach for fun.  You can often find her drinking coffee and writing about leadership at www.jaimiebowman.com, or about motherhood at her personal blog The Wonder Years.  Jaimie is a Licensed Minister and holds a Master’s Degree in Church Leadership.

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: Tammy Nischan

I used to hide my theology books and guitar upstairs. I didn’t want people I met to know I’d been to seminary or lead worship.

Writing that now sounds a bit strange. It made so much sense at the time. I’d connected serving in the church with being over-worked and exploited. For years belonging in church had been associated with “getting involved.” Sometimes “getting involved” became a higher priority for some than simply learning my name.

“Did you say your name is Fred? Hey Fred, you should join our men’s group. They’re going to set up a huge church event next Saturday. You should serve with them!”

I know many have had conversations like this. If these people had learned I had a seminary degree, they would have handcuffed me to the pulpit.

“You can preach and lead worship and we don’t have to pay you???”

I’d grown so weary of those types of conversations where desperate volunteers just tried to plug another body into a struggling church ministry. There were so many things that needed to be discussed, but I wasn’t the guy to bring it all up. When I started to return to church, I just wanted to be left alone for a season. I wanted to maintain a happy anonymity while I sorted out my place.

Since those days of hiding books and musical instruments, I’ve stopped defining myself and my place in the church by what I do in my community. I belong based on my relationships, and I serve because those relationships define my place in my church communities.

I used to feel a lot of pressure to get involved in church. If I didn’t serve, I was just a lazy drain on the church. I didn’t want to be a “consumer Christian.”

My pastor often speaks of seasons in life. We go through seasons in our communities, in our families, and in our personal lives. I passed through a season of healing and reorienting to church community. During that season, it would have been foolish for me to serve. I didn’t need to just get involved. I needed to be healed and to learn how to thrive in the church again without becoming a critical voice.

Now that I have that perspective, I feel better able to get involved and to manage my church involvement. I don’t need to serve just like everyone else. We may be in different seasons.

In two months we’ll have a baby. That’s going to change a lot of stuff for a season. My wife being in graduate school has already changed how we think of our time for this season. My helter skelter writing life imposes limits on us for a season as well.

I want to always give something to my community, but sometimes the push to get involved in a bunch of stuff just wears us out. The guilt can be crushing. And that’s the hard part about belonging to a community. We’re sometimes trapped in between two overcorrections.

We’re either consumer Christians or we base our sense of community on how much we serve.

Sometimes we need to stop all of the work just to get the basics right. If a church can’t accept us as a family, then there’s something terribly wrong. If our church doesn’t treat us like a family, they’ll fail us at one time or in one way or another. That’s not a pleasant thing to write, but it’s true.

If your family is only based on whether you pitch in and help, you’re going to have a lot of hurt former family members. Think of teenagers who just want to slump and play video games or text or whatever teenagers do these days. They may check out from family activities for a season, but they are still members of the family.

When you can belong to a church family without conditions or strings, then you can serve with that family free from guilt or obligation. You will be free to serve others with a joy that can weather the bleakest of storms. Joyfully serving others happens when you know you belong.