Dr. Kelley Mathews

Sharifa Stevens

If you, like most of us in this audience, are Protestant, be prepared for a treat as you listen to this conversation about women saints we should know. Dr. Kelley Mathews joins host Sharifa Stevens to discuss a number of women from the early church who were named saints because of their faith and actions.

You’ll come away excited and perhaps surprised as you hear about these godly women who played major roles in church history. They teach us great lessons from their love for the Lord, their tenacity and bold courage.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introductions

Sharifa >> Welcome to Beyond Ordinary Women. I’ll be your host for today, Sharifa Stevens. And today our topic is going to be about women, saints that we all should know about. I’m really excited to dig into this topic, and we’re going to have our expert Dr. Kelley Mathews, explain more to us about these women whom we should know.

And I want to tell you about Kelley. I bet most of you know Dr. Kelley already. But let me tell you a little bit more, just in case. Kelley Mathews, Dr. Kelley Mathews, has ministered to the church through writing and editing for over 25 years. She’s a coauthor of eight books, including 40 Questions About Women in Ministry. And also she’s a freelance writer and editor. A former women’s ministry director and Bible study teacher.

Kelley has been married to John, a school administrator, for almost 29 years. They are parents to four active, mostly grown children. Kelley earned her Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and earned a Doctor of Ministry in New Testament from Houston Theological Seminary just in 2025.

Welcome. Now, I can’t call you Dr. Kelley. Why?

Kelley >> You kind of overdid it there. That’s all.

Sharifa >> That’s my job. It’s my job to overdo it.

Kelley >> Okay. Okay. I’ll take it from you. Not from anybody else, though. No, it’s so new. It’s still very strange to hear it. So that’s all.

Sharifa >> You earned it. So I’m using it.

Kelley >> I had a lot of fun in that program, so if I could still go back to class, I would. You know, I shouldn’t say that too loudly around here.

Sharifa >> Tuition-free class? Yeah.

Kelley >> Yeah. No, it was a great program over in Houston. So and that’s a lot of what we’re going to cover today is what I studied there. So yeah.

Sharifa >> Excellent. Well let’s dive in. We’re discussing women saints who we should know. But before we get into the specific saints, I just wanted to know, is knowing the saints the same as venerating or worshiping them?

Kelley >> No. Absolutely not. This is basically history. And I was a history major for my bachelor’s degree. And so coming full circle with this theological study, I naturally went to the history of the church. So New Testament kind of morphed also into the early church, those first few centuries of what was the church getting up to? And so knowing the people.

I mean I would assume that a lot of Christians would recognize names like Augustine or Aquinas or maybe Saint Francis or Luther. We’re just giving you female equivalents, basically. So, yes, just as there were fathers of the church, there were mothers of the church.

Sharifa >> I dig it. Thank you.

Okay, so let’s get into specifics. We’re talking specifically today about Perpetua and Felicity, Monica, Brigid, Hildegard and Clare. And when I say it like that, it sounds like my girlfriends.

Kelley >> Right?

Sharifa >> These are heroes. These are outsized moms of the faith. So let’s get started with Perpetua and Felicity first.

Kelley >> Yeah, they kind of go together. They very much. Yeah, they’re very different women. But everything that happened, happened to them together. So. Yeah.

Sharifa >> Tell me about them.

Kelley >> Okay. So they we know of them. They are among the earliest that we’re going to talk about. They were martyrs. And of course, during the first few centuries before Christianity became legalized and then really approved, there were pockets of persecution.

And this happened right around the year 200, 203. There was this persecution in North Africa. They were from Carthage or from that area. And they were among a group, yes, on the northern shores. So Christianity had had gone south from Jerusalem and gone north into Europe as well, and also east into India. So but these ladies were in the North African area.

So they were among a group, men and women who were arrested and sentenced to the arena, which, you know, we think of the Colosseum and the Lions. And this is one of those situations in Carthage. So their story, we only know about it because Perpetua left a diary and we still have that diary. So that’s pretty unique.

So she is one of the earliest Christian women whose writings we still have.

Sharifa >> Wow.

Kelley >> And there was an addendum put on by someone else to kind of write out what happened to her. But we have her words as the majority of the document. And part of the story is that she had a young child. We don’t hear much about her husband, if anything, but we do know she had a young child who was still not weaned yet, probably 1 or 2 years old, and her father was adamant that she recant her faith and come home.

It was his honor at stake, those sorts of things. And she’s like, no, I’m a Christian, right? And so she eventually gave her son into her father’s custody to take care of him and raise him. So. But you could read all about it in this biography, you could literally just Google it. And it’s there for anyone to read.

Felicity was a slave woman. She was also pregnant, like heavily pregnant at the time of their arrest. So think about a woman, a young woman, a slave woman without any social power, pregnant in a dungeon, basically in a very rudimentary prison with men and women alike. And while—she was not able to go into the arena with her group of friends because of her pregnancy, because the baby was not legally able to be killed, right?

So they had to wait for her to have the baby.

Sharifa >> Had more legal rights to live. Right? Okay.

Kelley >> So they had to wait for her to give birth and to not be separated from her group. She prayed for an early delivery, and she indeed gave birth early in her eighth month instead of her ninth. And while she was in prison, the guards were taunting her about the pain she was going to endure in the arena.

And I wrote down the quote, so let me look at it. And then taunting her also about this pain of delivery, like watching her go through labor. Right. And she says, “Now I suffer what I suffer. But then,” talking about the arena, “then another will be in me who will suffer for me because I have suffered for him.” Okay, so I get chills reading that.

So we remember them because the church recognized the extraordinary lives and deaths of people like the martyrs were very highly honored in the early church. They gave everything for the faith. And so they were given a feast day. That’s what we think of. And that is to us Protestants that’s a very Catholic thing or an Orthodox (capital O, Orthodox) thing to give a day of the year to a certain person to remember them.

But those dates were their death dates, not their birthdays, because in the early church thinking, you were born again the day you died for Christ, so that was your second birth, that into eternity. So the day of theirs is March 7th. So that was the day that they died. By the way. Felicity was allowed to go with her friends. And they she did. Yes. So they because she delivered early, she was able to go into the arena with, with that group.

Sharifa >> So Perpetua and Felicity. Were they friends with each other?

Kelley >>We don’t know.

Sharifa >>Why are they always associated together?

Kelley >> Felicity’s story is included in Perpetua Journal. So we just we know. And whoever the editor was who added on the end made sure that we know about both of them.

Now, it’s not to say that Felicity was Perpetua’s slave like for a while there. I kept getting that mixed up, but they were just in this group together, who were arrested.

So what happens with the feast days is that that was one of the mechanisms that the church, as the centuries went on, could remember the people from the past and go, “Let us tell you the stories of the heroes of our faith.” And so because usually it was a death date, there was a story behind that death or that martyrdom.

And of course, later you get people like Augustine. And he didn’t necessarily die as a martyr, but he definitely gave his life to God, right? He was a theologian and a pastor and that kind of thing. So there’s many, many people remembered through these sort of feast days.

Sharifa >> What a wonderful way to pass on our history and celebrate people who were so, a lot of us in protestant tradition don’t.

Kelley >> Yeah.

It’s one of those traditions that got tossed out with everything else after the Reformation, to our detriment, I think. Not that we venerate them, it’s that we remember God’s faithfulness in their lives as encouragement for his faithfulness in ours.

Sharifa >>Absolutely right.

Kelley >>So Augustine himself would we have several of his sermons in records where he preached about these two women, because—isn’t that fun?

I know! I realized what a nerd I was a few years ago, sitting in my living room reading sermons from Augustine about Perpetua and Felicity and going, wow, he was a great speaker.

Sharifa >> So that’s good to know because we have, you know, we have City of God.

Kelley >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> We have he’s such an outsized literary, inheritance from Augustine. But I love knowing tidbits like that. It’s just and it humanizes both him and them.

Kelley >> Yes.

Sharifa >> We kind of make them more than human in their ability to choose Jesus and choose Jesus at great cost. But really, they are just like us and so we can learn so much from them. Well, you start talking about Augustine.

Kelley >> Let’s go there.

Sharifa >> Why don’t we segue to Monica?

Kelley >> Yes, Monica was his mother. So all we know about her comes through Augustine. But still, it’s really good. Augustine himself, when you talked about them being, they’re just human. Let’s just put it out there. He was very human. He was very fallen. He was raised in the Christian faith by his mother. He had a kind of a verbally abusive father, not physically. And he was unfaithful to his mother, Monica.

So it’s not like home life was great, but he grew up with his own way and got, for a while was just out there living the life. Right? So he had problems with women. He fathered an illegitimate son.

Then he kind of came back a little bit, but got involved with this, what we would call kind of a heretical sect of Christianity, to where Monica was not happy. She’s like, great, you got rid of all the women. He still had this long term mistress. So he was faithful to her, but not married in the Catholic, you know, Christian faith. So she was still very not happy with him.

But it took years for him to come around theologically. And she was praying the whole time. So her legacy is actually one of prayer, of enduring years long, faithful prayer for her son to come back to the true faith.

And so she was not above—I call her a helicopter mom.

Sharifa >> Okay.

Kelley >> Because she kicked him out of the house, but she still prayed for him, right?

She ran off the mistress. She literally was like, this will not, this is not going to do. She arranged for him to be married respectably. Right? Now, that never came to fruition because he came back to the faith and became a priest and dedicated his life to the church, which was great.

She was like, okay, if I can’t have grandkids, then at least I will have you doing God’s work. So she was good with that.

Sharifa >> Okay.

Kelley >> So later he ends up going to Italy to follow the teachings of Ambrose.

Sharifa >> Okay. So he’s and he’s North African, too. Right?

Kelley >> Yeah. That’s right. I forgot to say that.

Sharifa >> Well, I’m only bringing it up because he went to Italy and so he went to Italy from?

Kelley >> From Hippo which is in North Africa as well.

Sharifa >> Do you know what country that is modern day?

Kelley >> I don’t I don’t think so. Let me look at my notes real quick.

Sharifa >> It’s a on the spot question. So—

Kelley >> Algeria, modern day Algeria.

Sharifa >> Okay. Thank you.

Kelley >> Yes, that’s where she was from, which is very close to Hippo. It’s a little town near Hippo. So, yes.

So she gets on a boat and follows him to Italy. Of course, he didn’t know until he got there and a few weeks or months later, she shows up. And she’s working on Ambrose to work on Augustine.

Sharifa >> What?

Kelley >> Okay, she’s in the background. And so she’s doing everything she can to make sure Augustine lands with the true church, learning the true faith and really doing God’s will.

Sharifa >> Wow.

Kelley >> And he does. You know, he gets baptized. I got to visit when I went to Italy a few years ago. We got to visit the big Duomo, the cathedral in Milan, which is where all of this happened.

And underneath in the crypt area is the remnants of the old church back then. And there’s the baptismal font where Augustine was baptized. And for some people it was, you know, kind of weepy moment to be there. So yeah.

Sharifa >> For all the helicopter moms, it’s like it’s a great place.

Kelley >> Right. Right.

So her and Augustine, she died shortly after all of this happened before they ended up going back to Africa. But again, remember, we’re getting all of this from Augustine. And he loved her and appreciated her consistent, enduring prayers on his behalf.

Sharifa >> So I guess at some point Miss Monica must have let her son know I’m praying for you.

Kelley >> Oh, I’m sure she probably let him know all the time, right? I don’t know, so he actually gives her credit for all the way the church—really, if we’re talking about revering someone, Augustine is way up there, right? For all of the theological guidance that he ended up giving us. And she said he calls her “our mother through whose merit I am all that I am.”

I know, it’s super sweet. Yeah.

Sharifa >> It’s like the ancient version of this athlete getting on the mic my mom, thanks I couldn’t have done it without you.

Of course, yeah, there are more sweeping theological implications.

Kelley >> Yes. No, that’s the same idea. He wrote all of this about her after she was gone. And so as much as she frustrated him, he saw the value that she brought to him eventually. Yeah.

Sharifa >> That is so sweet. It’s completely, completely different from the tone of Felicity and Perpetua.

Kelley >> Right. Right.

Sharifa >> It’s like now for something really different. But she I mean, well, you tell me her significance for us is?

Kelley >> Prayer. Faithful prayer, I think. Not following your kid across the ocean to make sure he obeys. Like, don’t do that. No. But trusting your child to God or whoever it is you’re praying for.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Kelley >> She’s a great model of that.

Sharifa >> Yes. So faithful, faithful prayer, whether it’s your child or not. She is.

And also I would say like you never know what your prayer is going to be in agreement with God’s will. You just you just never know that. We all know Augustine. But Augustine wouldn’t be Augustine

Kelley >> Without Monica.

Sharifa >> And the same is true for so many of us. Like we might not experience the fame or, the renown, but our prayers and our support and instruction are raising a generation, you know, and that’s whether we’re mothers or not. It’s the people who we are around who are entrusted to us.

Kelley >> When I tell my testimony, it’s typically a list of women who built into me from high school onward. Yeah.

Sharifa >> Yes. And we’re so grateful. So.

Okay, we’re going to shift from Monica, the prayer and helicopter mom. You talk about Brigid, and Brigid is from another region. So we have Perpetua and Felicity and Monica and they’re basically North Africa. I’m going to say Algeria and Egypt, I think Egypt.

Kelley >> That’s close enough.

Sharifa >> Okay. And so now we’re moving to Brigid. And when was Brigid alive, and where is she from, and what’s her story?

Kelley >> Right. So remember that Perpetua and Felicity were in 203. That’s when they died. Monica lived in the fourth century. So the three hundreds. And now we’re into the 400s with Brigid of Kildare, which is a town in Ireland. So she is one of the—so the faith has like just think the faith has moved all the way up into the British Isles at this point.

And so Saint Patrick is known as the Saint, the missionary to the Irish. He actually lived a little before her and was an older man when she was born. So there are some stories that perhaps he baptized her as a child. We don’t actually know, but they did cross over their years did cross a little bit.

And so she was—Brigid was an extraordinary person. And the stories we have of her, some of them we know she was historical. We do know that she existed for sure. But what we know about her is somewhat mixed with this legend that the Irish used to have a goddess, Brigid. And so we’re not, you know, we can kind of parse out some of the stories that could be legend versus a historical person, but they—she in Ireland, they’re very mystical even today, their faith, they have no problem with letting those that merge stand. They’re like she’s just a great person to, you know, venerate.

Sharifa >> What are some of these myths like, let’s get into this.

Kelley >> Well, let’s look at the history first. So we know she’s born in the 450s and lived into the like, she was about 75, 80 years old before she died. And so she lived into the 500s. Yes.

So she was born to a chieftain and a slave woman. And the slave woman, the wife did not like this. Think Sarah and Hagar okay. In terms of the wife was not real happy with this slave woman and this baby. So they sold her. But the dad retained rights over the child. So when Brigid was born and grew up, she grew up with mom, who was a Christian. So she learned the Christian faith. But then eventually she went to live with her father, the chieftain.

And by then she was very devout and she was overly generous, shall we say. Dad got real frustrated with her giving all his stuff away to the poor. So she there’s stories of her giving away not just her dinner, but then she turned to the kitchen and basically emptied the kitchen for all the poor who were like, oh, we can go there to get things we need.

So she became known for her generosity to the poor in her charity, to giving everything that she could and just, you know, organizing people to help the needy.

Her dad was not real thrilled. At one point, he tried to go marry her off and took her with him. And when you go into another chieftain’s home, you leave your sword outside, right as a gesture of peace. And he gave it to her to hold. So she couldn’t go in to the negotiations. But she was there. She gave the sword away!

Sharifa >> Nice.

Kelley >> So anyway, so they had a lot of, you know, those stories come, and they make her who she is to the people of Ireland now.

Sharifa >> She never married?

Kelley >> She never did. She basically said, “Forget it, dad, I’m going to be a nun. I’m going to bride of Christ, devote my life to him.”

So that kind of solved those issues. Again, Dad wasn’t super happy because it would have been a nice alliance to build their kingdoms, but she established a monastery in Kildare is a little bit west of Dublin, like an hour by car, which was plenty of distance by foot.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Kelley >> And she wanted to establish a monastery there. And one of these stories that kind of lingers is that the local regional king kind of laughed her off when she asked for land to do that, and he was like, fine. And so she said, “Well, what if I just get the land that my mantle, my cloak can cover?”

And he’s like, “Sure. Okay.” So the story goes that she got people like four people to hold the edges of it and expand out the four directions, and it just kept going.

Sharifa >> Nice.

Kelley >> And then finally he’s like, “Stop. Okay. Fine.” And it was several acres worth.

Sharifa >> That’s awesome.

Kelley >> So all that to say, there is a sizable monastery there for years that she uses her headquarters.

She became an abbess of a double monastery, which is men and women, monks and nuns were there. It became a center of learning, a scriptorium which where manuscripts were copied. Have you ever read the book or heard of the book How the Irish Saved Civilization?

Sharifa >> No.

Kelley >> It’s a fascinating history book, and this is part of it. How the Irish Church did a lot of the copying of manuscripts through the Middle Ages. So hers was one of those places. And, yeah.

Sharifa >> So at this time in history, there were enough Christians in that region of Ireland to establish a double monastery.

Kelley >> I think. I think clergy came from other places as well, knowing that that sort of monastery had been established, that that was a draw for the intellectual side who wanted to do that sort of work. But at the same time, she also was serving the people around them. Her generosity and service to the needy again became legendary. So she had those both sides to her, to her ministry there.

And she’s just very well, just beloved in the country. She’s now one of the three patron saints of the country, along with Patrick and Columba. So. Columba was a missionary Irish guy monk who went to Scotland.

Sharifa >> Oh, okay. Thank you, because I will I wanted to know who the third was.

Kelley >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> So. Okay. And so the testimony of Brigid for us. What would you say? Why do we need to know her?

Kelley >> Brigid is an example of early female leadership in the church.

However your theology lands on that there’s no denying that she was in abbess and that she was—it was her monastery, and that she led both men and women. So that’s one. But also, I think her ministry to the poor. It started from the very beginning, and that was her way of living out her faith.

Sharifa >> Yeah. What a testimony. Yeah, it was not. It was not in words. It was in deeds.

Kelley >> Yes. Very much.

Sharifa >> Oh, okay. Yeah.

So okay. We’re gonna I’m like, who do we talk about next? Because there’s Clare and Hildegard.

Kelley >> Let’s do Hildegard because we’re going to go chronologically that way.

Sharifa >> Okay. Let’s go to Hildegard of Bingen, who even I have heard of.

Kelley >> Oh, okay.

Sharifa >> She is goated. What, like greatest of all time. She is just amazing. I mean, all of these women are. All of them are. But from what I heard about Miss Hildegard.

Kelley >> Right.

Sharifa >> What an incredible mind.

Kelley >> Yes.

Sharifa >> Go ahead. Just tell us about her. Where is she from? Where is she in the chronology?

Kelley >> She was born in 1008. And so her life was in the 1100s, which is the 12th century. So we’ve jumped a solid 600 years or more here.

Sharifa >> Wait. 1008 is the 12th?

Kelley >> Sorry. 1098, 1098.

Sharifa >> Okay. All right, all right. Okay.

Kelley >> She lived like 80 years. So she was in the late 1100s when she died. So the 1100s is the 12th century.

Sharifa >> Right.

Kelley >> There we go. So, Yeah, she was born in what we know is Germany. So all these Germanic provinces in that area. And she also became a monastery abbess. So double monastery in charge.

She had so many abilities. She was what we call a polymath, which she was like an expert in a wide variety of disciplines, whether it was math or science or music or writing or singing—like she was a genius in each one. That kind of level, right, that most of us don’t—we couldn’t even imagine that. Let’s see. Let me think here.

Sharifa >> Yeah. Where to land. She was so gifted . . .

Kelley >> Right. I think she started . . .

Sharifa >> in so many things.

Kelley >> I think the mysticism again in that time period that was considered very authoritative in the church, these mystics, because we do hear a lot about them in the Middle Ages. And that was an acceptable way for the Lord to speak to people. Like the people acknowledged that that was one of the ways God did communicate.

Sharifa >> When you say one of the ways that God, which—which way?

Kelley >> The mysticism, the vision, people receiving visions and then writing them down or speaking them and teaching through that. So it’s not from the written word. It’s from the received spiritual word that was consistent with the written word so they could test it.

So Hildegard started out with that. So she from the youngest, she was given into the church. Okay. She was the youngest of ten children, which back then was not that unusual because child mortality was, you know, a thing. And so not all the children would survive. I don’t know how many of her siblings survived, but her parents gave her to the church when she was eight, kind of as a tithe, like, here’s one of our children to serve the Lord this way.

Sharifa >> Wow.

Kelley >> And honestly, maybe they needed help feeding her, like, you know, who knows if that was just a way to provide for her as well. But so all that to say, she ended up in the church under the leadership of nuns very young. So she grew up in this whole world. And then her abilities started to come out.

Eventually, she ended up writing songs, hymns. Mary, the Mother of God, was one of the major topics of her singing. The Magnificat. She’s got like, if you again, you want to Google, you can find Hildegard’s hymns online. That kind of thing.

Sharifa >> Maybe a list that as a resource, along with . . .

Kelley >> I’ll have to find a good link. Yeah.

Sharifa >> her biography that would be great to this resource.

Kelley >> The Pope, I forget who it was at the time, but he approved her on a preaching tour. Even then in those years, women did not publicly preach. But her ability and her theology were so strong that, and at that point, I think her influence was, too, that he gave her permission to go on a tour of the Germanic area and preach. And so she did.

Sharifa >> Wow. So how did she gain this renown in the Middle Ages? Just in Bingen?

Kelley >> It was a center, you know. So it wasn’t the backwoods. They had theologians there. And, you know, of course, she had an abbey. So yes. To do all that, you have to have approval from the clergy authorities by then. So over time now she— there was a misogynist abbot at the time who didn’t want her to found her abbey, but she had wealthy patrons, a female patron. She had the bishop approving. And so she got her place.

Sharifa >> We love this for her.

Kelley >> Right. Right.

Apparently she was not, you know, she used all excess, all resources at her disposal to do what she felt the Lord was leading her to do. But she was just so genius. She was just so smart. And that God gave her this intellectual capacity to serve, and she used it to serve him. So I think that’s

Sharifa >> What’s the message for us?

Kelley >> I think that’s where I would go with her, is that there’s really no limit to what we can do for God. Whatever God has gifted us to do, do it for the Lord and he will open the doors.

And yeah, I mean, why are we limiting anyone, woman or man, boy or girl, like because of our own preconceived notions?

But if we see potential in someone, build it, you know. Nurture it and encourage them to to step into what God has made them to be.

Sharifa >> She really did use everything that she had to glorify God.

Kelley >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> What a testimony!

Kelley >> Yeah. I mean, there’s books written about her. This is obviously just a real basic overview.

Sharifa >> Absolutely.

Kelley >> Yeah, yeah. She is one of four women that the church eventually named a Doctor of the Church. A Doctor of the Church is someone whose contributions to theology or the life of the church are in written form, have informed the life of the church and have stood the test of time.

Sharifa >> Yeah. She should be taught at every seminary.

Kelley >> I never learned about her at any seminary, and I went to two.

Sharifa >> She should be.

Kelley >> I know.

Sharifa >> She should be.

Kelley >> Right.

Sharifa >> Yeah. I’m so glad I learned about her in my secular college education.

Kelley >> Good for you. That’s awesome.

Sharifa >> It was. So let’s end with Clare.

Kelley >> Clare of Assisi. And that might clue a lot of our listeners in.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Kelley >> Yes. So yes, we’ve heard of Francis of Assisi. And that’s a small town in Italy. Again, we got to visit. So Francis was doing his ministry, preaching and teaching, and he had his monastery and his rule of life.

And Clare heard him when she was a young teenager. And she was fascinated with his his mission and his message, and she wanted to follow him. Well, her parents were not real keen on that idea, which is a typical theme when it comes to women wanting to follow God’s call. The parents have other ideas.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Kelley >> So she ran away and she went to follow Francis, and they had to kind of come to grips with, “Okay, fine, I guess you can do this.” And so he took her vows. She was like engaged to be married. She said, “No, I don’t want to do it.”

She went to Francis and pleaded her case and he saw the sincerity of her call.

And so she made her Franciscan vows, and he established her with another group as his second like second group. And eventually she founded—and I say eventually it wasn’t that much longer—I think she was 19 or 20, and she was in charge of a small group of. Yeah. So it became the order of the Poor Ladies, which is what we call The Poor Clares even today. So this still exists.

Sharifa >> Even today!

Kelley >> Oh, yes. Yes. So in the Catholic world, if you want to be a nun, there’s any number of orders that you could choose from, and so this is still one of them. And their big defining characteristic is poverty. and it’s kind of extreme poverty.

So she ended up Assisi is built on a big hill and at the bottom of the hill. And let me tell you, it’s a steep walk. Okay?

Sharifa >> Okay.

Kelley >> It was exercise for sure.

Sharifaa >> I feel like you lived that.

Kelley >> I did. Going back up was the hard part, but there’s this little convent at the bottom, San Damiana, Saint Damien’s. And so we got to walk through, like we saw where she slept in the corner, on the floor and that kind of thing. Her. She didn’t. She lived into her 50s, I believe, but she ended up dying because she was on the starvation kind of diet.

And it just it affected her health too much. So she was a little. Yeah. She just starved herself over time. So. Right. So giving the food away, relying on the neighbors to to bring whatever it is that they needed.

Their big ministry was prayer. She also would serve they would serve their local community. She was I mean, her big claim to fame, I guess, within the Catholic world is that she was the first woman to write her own monastic rule. Like this is the rule of life. Benedict had his own, you know, everybody who founded their order figured out this is the way we’re going to live. And so that’s she wrote hers.

Sharifa >> Wow. So what is what do you think is the—why should we know who Clara is? What is her significance?

Which it’s hard to distill because—

Kelley >> It is.

Sharifa >> I think that she from what you said, she exemplifies the passion and devotion to Christ that supersedes traditional obligations.

Kelley >> Yes.

Sharifa >> She exhibits a selflessness. Also she’s a young leader. Just her determination and devotion is also coupled with the ability to lead at a very young age.

Kelley >> Definitely she knew her mind. She knew her faith and what she wanted to do. I don’t know that I would recommend, like running away from mom and dad and say, “I’m just going to live life this way.” Those sorts of things are culturally different from the way we are now, but as parents, we would never want to dismiss the faith of our children just because they’re children.

Sharifa >> Right.

Kelley >> Right. And so it’s worth listening to them and being in conversation with them and helping guide them and pray alongside them. What is God doing in your life here? What is he teaching? Where is he leading you? So I think that’s one thing that we can take from her, but her devotion to what she considered her ministry was all in. Like they did not—I forget the word I’m looking for. She renounced wealth to serve God in poverty. Like that’s drastic.

Sharifa >> Her possessions it sounds like.

Kelley >> Yes. Like they gave everything away and they relied on the community to feed them, to give them anything that they needed.

She actually had influence outside of her convent. People came, you know, even the Pope came at the end, realized what an influence that she was and affirmed her order, her rule, and said, “Okay, fine, it’s official. It can be yours.” Two days before she died, like so. It was a lifelong. So I would say she was determined. She was a steadfast kind of person and would not be swayed from what she believed God was calling her to do.

Sharifa >> Yeah. What a strong what a strong woman.

Kelley >> Yeah, And yet she gave her life to serve others.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Kelley >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> Which is strength.

Kelley >> Yeah. And I think that’s kind of a theme through all of these women. I don’t know that I picked them for that reason, but that’s probably one of the reasons they’re all still known to us today.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Kelley >> Is that they were not about themselves.

Sharifa >> What a testimony, especially in a time where there’s so much “me first” energy in our culture, so much self-focused energy. They really, exemplified the foot-washing servant leadership of our savior. In such a beautiful way. I am so thankful that you have spent time with us going into detail about these women that we absolutely should know about, and it makes me wonder who else?

Kelley >> Oh. So many, so many.

Sharifa >> There are so many. It’s a veritable cloud of witnesses that are. Just their lives are an encouragement and an example to follow us. So thank you so much, Dr., for talking with us about this today.

And for our viewers and listeners. You can find many other podcasts and videos that pertain to church history.

You can do so by going to our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, and then clicking the resources dropdown menu, and then scrolling to studying and teaching the Bible. Thanks again, Dr. Kelley, for your time with us.

Kelley >> Thanks, Sharifa. You’re the best hostess. So this is always fun, I love it.

Sharifa >> It’s really fun for me, too. So thank you and thank all of you for listening and viewing. We’ll catch you next time.

In this fun episode, BOW’s guest, Dr. Nika Spaulding, shares how to create Bible teaching that sticks. In other words, how can you, as a Bible teacher, use tangible teaching tools to help your audience remember the biblical point of your teaching? Using the senses, physical teaching aids and play will enable you to enable others to better grasp and possibly clarify deeper biblical concepts.

This episode is also available on video.

00:20 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle. Welcome to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. Today, our guest is Nika Spaulding.

Nika >> Hey, Kay.

Kay >> Welcome, Nika. It’s always so much fun to have you. And for those of you who know Nika, Nika has been on our podcast many times and so we’re always thrilled when she has time to be with us. She has a masters of Theology from Dallas Seminary. She actually went to Oklahoma University, but we don’t really care about that part.

And she has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Northern Seminary. So she’s Dr. Spaulding. But I will not call her that. I will call you Nika.

Nika >> Thank you.

Kay >> Nika is really sort of our go to person for hard questions and about teaching the Bible. And so today we are talking about teaching the Bible, and we’re going to talk about using teaching aids in teaching the Bible.

So Nika why do teachers need to use teaching aids?

Nika >> Yeah, it’s such a good question. And I don’t know, Kay, if you’ve had like your philosophy of teaching develop on this. I would say for me, this is a more recent addition to how I teach the Bible, and that is—when I was a young teacher, I kind of wanted to teach all these cool, nifty things that maybe people didn’t know on their own.

And now I really, really just want to make the Bible stick. I want when people leave for them to remember what we talked about, for them to be able to meditate on it. And what I have found is, you know, you probably think back to your experience when you were in elementary, junior high, high school, and you think about lessons that really stuck.

There’s a chance that your teacher used some sort of teaching, some sort of illustration, or maybe they brought something in the classroom or something like that. I have discovered just over the years that using teaching aids, whether it’s props or engaging the senses or something like that, really allows us to help the Bible stick and that’s really the goal with the teaching aids.

Kay >> Great. So what are what are some of the things that you do see things in the Bible that are teaching aids?

Nika >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that’s what’s interesting about it is when you think about even let’s say you want to teach wisdom, you go to the Book of Proverbs so often what you see from the Proverbs is they take stuff you already know, stuff from nature, stuff that you’ve experienced in life. And then they say, “Hey, this, this is what that’s like.”

So a perfect example is you might talk about honey is how the Word of God is. It’s so sweet, right? And if you’ve ever tasted honey, especially pre modern food where we have sugar at our fingertips at all times, you kind of think about how like, am I? I’m sure in my pantry right now I can eat sugar, but in the ancient days, having that ability, honey, was a really sweet experience.

So to compare that to the Bible, we see how the Bible also uses teaching as Jesus does. This in his parables all the time. He gives examples from the world that allows the story to sort of stick. And so I’ve seen this play out in the Bible and then thought to myself, Why are we not taking the best of the Bible’s teaching and using that in the way that we communicate with folks?

Kay >> What other senses have you seen God use in the Bible besides taste?

Nika >> Yeah. Yeah, I love. Yeah. So the five senses, when you think about teaching aids, I think we often default to visual things. We think of things you can see. And in order to make things stick, we know this from the science is that engaging all five senses actually helps things stick. If you think about like childhood memories, chances are there’s associated like if you’ve ever walked into a room, you’ve gotten a whiff of, you know, chocolate chip cookies and all of a sudden you’re like, whoa, I just got transported back to my grandma’s living room or what, you know, things like that.

So smell is very powerful. And when you’re making your way through Exodus, which I’ve done recently, we’ve talked about this, like there are the boring parts of the Bible right how do you make your way through the boring parts? In Chapter 30 of Exodus, it talks about this really special aroma that belongs to God. It’s God’s incense. And so when you think about how does God show his people that He’s near them, one of the ways is God asks them to engage their senses.

So if you read that list, of senses that or the things that you can smell in Exodus 30, this would be an example of what I would do is you. Maybe grab a couple of the items on the list and have the women smell it while you’re teaching through the Bible.

We hear all the time of the Christmas story. Hey, the wise men come and they offer these gifts and then they offer frankincense and myrrh and then people say, “Oh, what are frankincense and myrrh?”

Because I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I didn’t know that those were, you know, they were smells, they were sniffs, things that you can sniff. You know you can just go in my neighborhood, there is a plethora of shops because we are in a predominantly Hispanic part of town, which means a larger percentage of Catholic churches. That means there are many churches that sell things that Catholic worshipers will use in their worship services.

You can walk in and ask for a vial of frankincense or a vial of myrrh (and it’s the scent; it’s not the actual stuff), but you can then smell what it would have smelled like on Jesus’s, you know, gift day, I won’t say on his birthday, because we know that the wise man came a little bit after he was born.

But think about that. You’ve heard these stories over and over again. You’re trying to teach the Christmas story in a way that it sticks. You know, it kind of allows people to remember it. What if they got to smell frankincense and myrrh while they’re doing that?

So since it’s like such a key part of it and smell is one of those core senses, of course, obviously, what you can see is helpful.

I think about hearing the other day somebody was teaching me a lesson from Hebrew, and a lot of your women are going to be learning Hebrew. But what he did that was really powerful is he played an actual native Hebrew speaker reading the text. And so for me, hearing these words pronounce from a native speaker. And so one of the ways that perhaps if you’re teaching through the Psalms is you could find them in song form and you could play those so that the people could hear the music of the Psalms, not just read it, not just listening to you.

So those are some examples. And then of course, my favorite, my favorite senses, of course, taste. So and I, you know, I don’t think it’s probably feasible for a lot of ministries to do, let’s say a full Passover meal, right? I mean, that might be a little bit hard to do. You know, if you bring a lamb on the spik you know, you’re roasting a lamb. Kudos to you if you could pull that off in your church.

But for a fresh break, you know, if you’re teaching manna and you had fresh baked bread or you had the, you know, different like the honey that we talked about, a chance for people to actually taste what you’re talking about. These are the kinds of teaching ways that allow the lessons to go from theoretical to physical.

And when we do that, when we physically engage in things, it sticks in our memory. We just we know this from the sciences.

Kay >> And those are good ideas. Those are really good ideas.

I was thinking about this this morning, and I thought about one of the most strange lessons that God taught in using an aid was Ezekiel.

Nika >> Mm.

Kay >> He had Ezekiel lie on his left side for, I believe it was 390 days. Then he and he was bound with cords then he had to turn on this other side for another 40 days.

I don’t even understand how that worked. I mean, I think about it, I’m like, how did that work? How could he have lain there that long? I mean. Could he even walk when he got up? I’m sure people thought it was strange, but God was trying to show the people who had been taken captive into Babylon and were not in Jerusalem when the siege came, what was going to happen, how people were not going to have . . .

Oh, and while he was lying there, he had to these little cakes that were specific, you know, and first he was told just to cook them over human dung. And Ezekiel pled against that. So God said cow dung is okay. But I mean, it was, it was all a picture of how bad things would be for the people who were left in Jerusalem.

Yeah. Because these people were not going through it. And have you ever used any physical . .

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> types of aids like that. I mean, not like that. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Nika >> You know, thank goodness I am not a prophet called by God. You know, as you were talking, I am blanking if it was Jeremiah or which of the prophets it was. But there is another prophet, the major prophets, you know, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, they were asked by God to do some pretty incredible things that are these teaching is what we’re talking about.

And I can remember I’m blanking right now, but one of them was asked to build a replica of Jerusalem and then destroy it.

Kay >> It was Ezekiel.

Nika >> Okay. Yeah. And so in which is a great segue way to what we’re about to talk about. I think about a replica and it actually brings me to recently I’ve been teaching through and I’ve been going through the whole Old Testament, and I knew when I got to Exodus, there’s going to be two like sandwiches essentially.

And in the middle is the golden calf incident where Israel rebels and right here are instructions for the tabernacle, the rebellion, and then the instructions again. But this time they’re actually following the instructions, which then also leads into Leviticus when you learn what they’re doing in the Tabernacle. So I made the decision I wanted to have a physical replica of the Tabernacle as I taught through these lessons, because not just because I want them to really understand, like visually what what they’re building in Exodus. But I also knew without that when we got to Leviticus, it would be very hard to understand the sacrificial system. There’s all these instructions he goes into, which room is in front, which lamppost. So yeah, this is insane. I’m not recommending everybody does this, but I am very committed to the teaching age right now.

So I bought.

Kay >> Oh my gosh, you built this yourself.

Nika >> Well, it was a kit, so this is not an advertisement. I’m not advertising here. There’s actually a much less expensive one I got off of eBay. That’s a foam version of this very thing, but I decided to upgrade because I do love Legos. If you haven’t noticed behind me, this is not Lego branded, but it’s similar to Legos.

And there’s a young man who just started a business where he’s creating replicas of different things in the Bible. So I spent more money than I should have. I’m not advertising it, but if you’re interested in it, go check it out. It’s called Bible Bricks. So I built this tabernacle for that very reason because I have a very hard time.

If somebody were to say, okay, here’s a pencil, and they started describing something, they said, now draw it. I guarantee you, whatever I draw is not going to look anything like what they are envisioning.

I am not gifted. Yeah, I don’t have that gift. I don’t understand it. I say I did this for the people that I was teaching but the reality is, is this was very helpful to me because I’ve read through Exodus, I’ve written a study on Exodus. I’ve done so much analysis. And it wasn’t until I actually built the Tabernacle that I was able to then start imagining the priests doing things.

So when we talk about like these physical things, part of what we’re doing is it’s called creating a schema. And what we mean by that is a schema is when you take something you already understand, you’re familiar with and then you build on top of it, it’s much easier to understand then.

So here’s an example where let’s say you’re trying to describe a pomelo, which is a giant grapefruit. So you can say, oh, a pomelo is a citrus fruit. It’s large, about a softball size, it’s orangish yellowish in color. That’s one way to describe it. Or you can say to somebody, Oh, it’s a grapefruit, but bigger. And immediately, because you already knew what a grapefruit was, you can you can get to understanding a pomelo faster.

So one of the ways that we use things like these, you know, these teaching is they’re goofy, right in and of themselves. They’re a little bit silly. But what it does is then when we get to Leviticus, because they already have a mental understanding of what the Tabernacle looks like, then when we go to explain the sacrifices, they’re not having to try to imagine the Tabernacle.. They already have it there. So that allows them to then learn the sacrifices without their brain the whole time.

Go on, wait. He goes to the front and then he and then where’s the altar? And there’s a basin involved and then they sprinkling blood. Where is he sprinkling blood? So the tabernacle is an example of if you can help the person under stand mentally what we’re talking about, then you can add more knowledge to it.

So perfect example is you get to Leviticus 16, one of the most important passages in the whole Old Testament because it’s the day of Atonement. It’s one day a year where the High Priest gets to go into the Holy of Holies. He sprinkles blood on the altar and in doing so he is able to make atonement for the entire nations sins.

All of these things that I just said are extremely heady, big theological things. You’re going to have to work really hard as a teacher to unpack everything that I just said. What you don’t want to be doing is having people going, What’s the Holy of Holies and where is it at and why is it going in there and what does it look like and where? Horns? There’s horns on the altar? Why is there horns on the altar?

But if you have this teaching aid, it allows them to then say, Oh, I can visually understand what you’re doing here now. You can teach me the theology of the day of the atonement without having to teach me the architecture of the day in the sermon. And that is so helpful to anybody trying to learn the Bible is to be able to give them these visual things.

Kay >> And so and that’s basically what you’re saying is the student is distracted with all these questions they have.

Nika >> Yes.

Kay >> And not really listening to your real point.

Nika >> Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Kay >> Yeah. And I at the I’ve heard a lot of teachers who just kind of go off on something a little bit and I’m thinking, is anybody following this? Yeah, because it’s not the real point. And they’ve drawn them off. And so you’re trying to build something in them where they have those details and it will not distract them from the teacher.

Nika >> Yeah. So think about how detail oriented so much of the Old Testament is. So you go to that, like think of the high priestly garments, okay? There are 12 gemstones on the ephod. It’s linen underneath and then a blue ephod on top, and it’s different color fabric. It’s got what we call pomegranates, which are on the hem, which are bells and pomegranates. He’s got the names of the tribes on his shoulders. He’s got a God-named plate on his head. With the two on and on and on we can go. I could stand on stage and start saying what I’m just saying to you. Or I could throw a picture up. Very simple teaching it. Sometimes you don’t have to overcomplicate it.

You know, if you really want to go nuts, you could build, you know, a life size one and walk out with it. I wouldn’t go that far, but, you know, you put a picture up and then when you put the picture up, you say, “Hey, the whole role of the high priests is to be a mediator between God and humanity. So how does the High Priest in this outfit represent God, and how does the High Priest in this outfit represent humanity?”

And then because they can visually see it, they can see the gemstones which are going to remind them of Eden, they can see the bright colors, which hopefully will remind them of Eden.

You can begin to talk about these things that are actually important, because if they leave there and all they really know is there is certain fabric and yarn and some gemstones, I don’t know that that’s going to stick, you know, and I don’t know how hopeful that is to them understanding what is the role of a priest as the person who represents God to the world and then represents, you know, the people.

Ultimately, hopefully where you’re going to take them is we are now priests and we are supposed to be clothed in in the ways of Jesus.

And so in the same way that the priest was clothed in the way of God, in a way that they understood, we are supposed to be clothed in the way of Jesus, suddenly the person goes, “Oh, okay, I can understand that.”

But if they’re still trying to understand I think the 12 gemstone names, like just that alone, I remember one time, like looking them all up to see what color they were to try and like draw in. And I remember thinking how is this helpful to anyone if I were to explain to them all of these and there was just something I wanted to nerd out on, but it’s not helpful to to drive that point home.

So, Kay, I think you’re exactly right, is that our job as communicators is to remove the confusion. And there’s so much confusion when you’re talking about an ancient text. And so these teaching aids, they ultimately are designed to say, “How can I get the main point across as simply as possible so that the person can encounter the living God, not so they can learn something neat about the Bible, but so that they can see the face of God looking back at them. These teaching aids, they really come in handy.

Kay >> Yeah. And I can see how particularly Old Testament teaching aids could really benefit people because I remember —I don’t know how old I was when I had finally saw what the high priest actually wore. And I was always trying to figure out what this looks like, you know, I just couldn’t quite get it. So you know, it’s really helpful to have some sort of picture or something.

Of course, there’s always—you know, they can always watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. As you know, at the end the Nazi puts on the High Priest’s. . .

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> I don’t know how well it pictures exactly what it says in Exodus, but I think it’s pretty close.

Nika >> And that’s such a good point of what you’re saying is. So if you’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, that’s a schema you already have that you already you kind of know it. So if it is accurate, I’ve not seen it or I haven’t seen it in years,

Kay >> I’m not sure.

Nika >> Yeah, but let’s say you watch it and you’re like, actually, that’s pretty close.

Like, that’s pretty good. You could show a 20 second clip and people who remember the movie will go, “Oh, and then they associate that,”so part of this idea of schema and making things, there’s this book and I’ll make sure, you know, we get this, this called “Made to Stick”, and it’s a fantastic book. These two brothers, Chip and Dan, their last names are Heath.

They both independently started studying what makes ideas sticky, like for lack of a better term, like what makes something where you’re able to walk away and go, Oh, I remember that. And throughout the book, they talk about, you know, there’s really simple things that you can do. Like you can use concrete images. You the schema idea I stole from them, this is totally them where you take something that people already know.

So one of their very simple examples of theirs is like, imagine you had to memorize the letters f, k, j, f, k, j. So I tell you, memorize these letters and then all day long you’re going “f, k, j, f, k, j.”

But if I just said, “Rearrange them and said, JFK,” you’re not going to forget if I ask you in an hour, “What were the three letters? Because you already have an association with a JFK. We know John Fitzgerald Kennedy, we know who that is.

And so they have these like tips and tricks to make things sticky. And they and honestly, they’re genius, but they’re so simple. We kind of know them because we experience them in our own lives. There’s a reason why certain commercials work and then others, you know, you’re not going to remember.

There’s commercials I remember from the nineties Super Bowl that I still remember those commercials, which means that marketing exec did their job, you know? And so for better or for worse, I still remember those frogs doing the Budweiser commercial. Now, I’m not drinking Budweiser but I at least remember the product. They have done their job.

And so that’s part of what my recommendation would be. Sit down with your talk that you want to give and then ask yourself, “what is it that I want them to walk away with? What’s the thing that I hope they chew on the rest of the day and then ask like, is there something I could show them? Is there something they could smell? Or something we could listen to or watch?”

And maybe it’s borrowing from culture like you just mentioned from the movie.Is that the movie where they open up the Ark of the Covenant in their faces melt off? Is that the movie okay?

Kay >> Yeah.

Nika >> I totally— that’s the only scene I really remember, which makes me laugh every time. But yeah, yeah.

Kay >> So Raiders of the Lost Ark, this is the one about the Ark of the Covenant. You know, about a lot of things, but. . .

Nika >> See, so we remember that, right? I remember the laughs. You know, the Ark of the Covenant is really important. And they open it and their faces melt off, which tells you something about the Ark of the Covenant. So I would use that clip. I would absolutely use that clip if I were teaching through the book. And so, yeah, you bring up a great point.

Kay >> Yeah. Well, you know, it seems like all the way through the Bible, there are things that God tells them to use to help remember. Now, remember and of course, you know, communion is is something that we’re supposed to remember and that involves food and tasting and just the picture of something of God being in you that I was thinking about.

One time.I haven’t done many, many things, but one time I was teaching Joshua, and when you go into Joshua, of course, Joshua has led the people to the promised land because Moses just died. And so they’re going to cross the Jordan, and after they cross the Jordan, God told Joshua to have men go into the Jordan.

Now that they cross the Jordan, it was dried up. Just like in Exodus when Moses and the people crossed the Red Sea, it was dried up for Joshua. And the people there enter the land of Canaan. He told one man from each tribe to go in and get a stone and put it on his shoulder and bring it out. It was going to be what the people would remember what God had done, a memorial stone that they were to pay attention to.

So when I got to that, I thought, “Huh.” I went like to Michael’s or some place like that, and I bought a bag of little rocks. I gave every woman a rock, and I told her to think about some time that God had made in her life to remember it with that rock.

And so there just little things like that that you can do also. I mean, they may not remember Joshua, but they will remember what God has done for them in the same way that what Joshua did would remind the people.

Nika >> Yeah, I love that Kay. And truth be told, one of the reasons why I had such a strong aversion to teaching aids when I was younger, except for like a visual slide, like I might have put something up on the slide or something like that, but I was always hesitant because I just didn’t want to come across as dorky like that.

That’s the reality. Like, and it’s I look back now and I realize I am a dork. I’m a huge nerd. My bookshelves tell on me behind me. And but I think there was this sense that especially God in the women’s ministry, I had heard from young people, they just felt like women’s ministry is out of touch. And so I was always afraid that I was going to do something that was a little out of touch or a little lame. But I have found some of the most significant moments in my life were not these like really theologically deep, sort of like, you know, heady things.

They were tangible, touch, taste, smell like your rock example. I can think of times in my life where I have keepsakes that I’ve thought that significant and to me that’s that mattered to me. And so, like, I came up with this thing where I decided years ago I was going out into the mission field and I was tasked with teaching the whole Bible.

I was like, what? Like the whole Bible? Okay, no problem. And I think they gave me like 20 minutes. Can you teach the whole Bible in 20 minutes? And so I was like, You know what? Youth Ministries have been doing this forever. They have figured out cool, fun, you know, goofy ways and so I came up with and I had some help. I stole some from other people.

And then I came up with these 13 words that teach you the Bible, and they have hand motion. So I remember getting all the adults up and thinking, well, you know, we’ll see if they’ll do it. And it starts with like creation. We do creation and everybody’s hands go up. And then I talk about how God created the whole world then we do fall and we eat an apple like fall.

And I talk about that, and then we talk about the Exodus. So we go marching and imagine a room full of adults and they’re all doing this and it gets funnier and funnier. Like I make them circle around for wanderings conquest, which is very funny because when I do this, if I do an all men’s group, they get real loud at conquest.

And when I get to the end, I use return and I do, “Urk, Urk.” And the women are always louder on the return, I don’t know, there’s something to that. But all that to say I’ve done this many times now, not just in a missional context here in the States in my own churches. And I have found it’s goofy, it’s silly, it gets people out of their comfort zone.

But in about 10 minutes, people know the whole story of the Bible in about 13 words. And that’s the kind of stuff that you go, Hey, this is a way for you to think about the whole meta-narrative of the Bible. And so when you’re thinking about individual stories, where are you at in the grand scheme of the story?

<p>And so I’ve just learned one to embrace my own dorkiness. And then to that I’m really asking the wrong questions. If like the question shouldn’t be, is this lame? The question is will this stick? And if it will, then I think it’s worth doing. Even if people are like, she’s kind of dorky, but I understand my Bible a little better. I’m great with that. Put it on the tombstone. I’m great with that little dorky, but now I understand my Bible better go with that young teacher.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah. Because you’re right. I mean, what good is that if they never remember any of this, that they don’t understand it and never remember it? If we can’t go down to a real elementary level of how to make sure something’s clear, then we can lose the whole ballgame, basically, you know? Yeah.

Nika >> Yeah, yeah. And this is where, you know, especially as young teachers are trying to find their voice. I know we’ve talked about this before. Like do’s and don’ts of teaching. You guys on Beyond Ordinary Women. There are so many videos that will help you with teaching. So if you’re new to teaching and this is the first video that you’re listening to, go back and listen to the others because this is sort of like a second level kind of thing.

But part of finding that voice is taking time to sort of back up from the top. You’ve prepared it, you’ve done your homework, you’ve studied the passage. You think you have a good idea of what you want to communicate. This is sort of a time to back up and then say, what are those creative elements that are unique to me?

Because the reality is, is me getting a whole bunch of people up in the room dancing around. I was born to do that. I’ve been a camp counselor my whole life. That is something I can pull off, even though it’s dorky because I’ve got the energy for it. It’s not something I’d recommend to every teacher, but I know every teacher is capable of coming up with these creative, unique ways of making it stick.

And that’s where you as a communicator, can really show your people that you care about them. You spent a lot of time thinking about, I mean, those rocks, you had to go buy them. You had to think about it, that tell someone Kay loves me enough to put this extra effort into what she’s doing. So that’s why I’d say, as a communicator, too, these are great ways to demonstrate you really care about your audience and not about if someone knows you care.

Kay >> Yeah, well, tell us. I know you’ve made some decks of cards.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> Yeah, I have some right here.

Nika >> I love it.

Kay >> These are the Minor Prophets cards.

Nika >> Yeah, look at that.

Kay >> They’re Minor Prophet cards.

Nika >> I love it.

Kay >> And I haven’t tried to play a game with them yet, but I’m going to give these. (I have my own deck, of course), but I’m going to give these to my group. This reading through the Bible when we get to the Minor Prophets. And we’re getting close because we’re in Ezekiel, which is what made me think about that story about that way that Ezekiel was God’s teaching aid.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> But tell us. Tell us about these decks of cards that you created.

Nika >> Yeah. So this is another way that you can make learning stick, and that is to play. There’s all the data in the world that talks about if you’re playing, you’re learning, which is why so many great especially music teachers, you know, coaches I remember some of my favorite times in volleyball were when we got to play games at the end of a grueling practice and you learn a lot while you’re doing that.

So as an aunt, I got to tell you, I have played 5 million hands of cards. I have played so much. So I started thinking the last Aunt Camp I had with my babies, I thought, can I create a deck of cards that yeah, we can play games with it. But we can also learn while we’re playing those games, especially with games where you’re pairing things like “Go Fish” and things like that.

So there are 12 minor prophets and you need 13 cards in a deck. So this was, this just lent itself. Plus I’m partial to the minor prophets. So the deck is designed that like the aces are Hosea, and then you go from there and you go through the order of the minor prophets, and each of the different suits, as you kind of think of them, are different cards.

So one is a poem that I wrote that summarizes a whole book. One is an image that I think captures the essence of the whole book. One is a characteristic of God that you learn from the book. And then the fourth one, I’m totally blanking, but I think it’s a key verse. There’s some, there’s a fourth one.

I’ve been working on my gospel deck. That’s why I’m blanking here.

Kay >> I think there’s some key verses in here.

Nika >> Okay, perfect. Yeah.

Kay >> Yeah.

Nika >> And so the idea was, “Okay, you’re already playing. Can we sort of sneak some knowledge into this?” And because over time you get it, you get familiar with cards. So let’s say you’re playing a game there’s a game we play all the time called Sevens. And Sevens are really important in the game, as you can imagine.

Well, Micah is number seven, so as you’re playing, you’re going to naturally know Micah better than the other cards because you’re going to be looking for the Micahs every time you play this game. And so the thinking on this was how can we create, again something you’re already familiar with, a deck of cards? And then can I create little ways of sneaking Bible knowledge in?

So right now I’m currently working on the Gospels deck. It should be ready in about a month. And one of the things, because there’s only four Gospels, each suit is a gospel. So the clubs are Matthew.

So that means over time you’re going to notice there’s these five women on the Queen of Clubs and you’re going to notice them over and over. Bathsheba, Ruth, Tamar, over and over again and then eventually you going to go, Wait a minute, are those the five women in the genealogy? And then later when you’re thinking, Oh, where’s that genealogy of Jesus with the women? You’re going to go, Oh, it’s a club. Clubs are Matthew and now you’re like, without even having to think about your Bible, because now you’re just thinking about a deck of cards.

You’re already learning these things. And so these are some of the ways that. And this is listen, for those of you listening at home, you’re like, this woman invented a deck of cards. This is what she wants me to do. No, no, I’m not asking you to invent a deck of cards. What I am saying is this is what creativity can produce in your communication, in your ministry, especially if you’re a youth pastor, especially if you’re a children’s pastor.

There are ways, sneaky little ways, to get the Bible into people’s lives in a way that allows them to learn without laboring. Learning is hard. I mean, when you start with not knowing and you have to get to knowing, we all feel that dread, especially when you start a new lesson in trigonometry, when you have to learn something at your job, you know, my one of my friends is contemplating a new job, and she’s like, Maybe I’ll just give it a year and see if it works.

And my counsel to her was, Hey, every new job in the first year is really hard. Because there’s just a gap of what you don’t know. And so these are ways to close that gap. To make it a little less painful is playing having, you know, these like the giant temple for them or tabernacle for them to look at.

These are ways to close that gap between what you don’t know and what you want to know and make it interesting entertaining, fun and joyful because we’re talking about the Bible. And so people have to learn the Bible the same way they have to learn trigonometry. That’s just not what we want to do. We want them to learn the Bible in spaces that are joyful and fun and beautiful and encouraging.

And there are a lot of ways to do that. These are just some examples that Kay and I have given you, but it’s I think there they are unique opportunities, again, not just for people to learn the Bible but to encounter the God of the Bible. And that’s ultimately why we do these things.

Kay >> Yeah. When I wrote a Bible study on the Minor Prophets, I just came up with the little icon picture for each one, which is a lot simpler than all the work that you did with a deck of cards.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> But I tell our audience that because you don’t have to necessarily do a deck of cards. Yeah. If you can come up with some way just to distinguish the messages and the different prophets, it will help.

Nika >> Do you remember what the image was for Hosea? Can you remember off the top of your head what it was?

Kay >> I think he was a heart.

Nika >> Yeah, yeah. So mine is they’re broken wedding rings and again.

Kay >> Oh, yeah. No. I did wedding rings.

Nika >> Okay, so think about that. You and I both studied the same book and we both said, Okay, what’s a quick image that somebody would say, oh, that’s what makes Hosea different then? Because I think Micah uses a heart and it’s a broken heart and he talks about you’re going to need new hearts. And then, of course, Jonah, you know, some stand out, Jonah’s being swallowed by a giant fish.

So there’s some that you kind of think, Okay. But so Hosea is a story about a prophet who God has asked to marry and love and unfaithful woman. And God is saying this is what Israel you are like. And so in this story, immediately you can look at these broken rings and you can tell yourself, oh, that’s Hosea without I mean, it’s almost instantaneous.

You begin to associate these things with Hosea. Joel is number two. Joel has for my deck of cards, a bunch of giant locusts. When you read Joel, you learn there’s this famine because the locusts have come in and then God says, I’m going to restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten. And so suddenly you’re like, “Oh, locusts.”

Joel, got it. So if I need a book about the consequences, of rebellion and yet God’s promise to restore, Joel is a great place to go if you can. So all that to say that’s why I asked about Hosea because I had a feeling we had the same image. I think that speaks to a little bit of effort goes a really long way in helping people learn the Bible

And if you have creative friends, maybe they can help you. You never know. So anyway, we do have other resources for studying and teaching the Bible. If you’ll just go to BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, go to the dropdown menu under resources and go to the section on studying and teaching the Bible. And we have a number of episodes of our podcast, and they’re all on video as well, if you prefer that.

And all of those things will help you. Nika has done some of those. We have some other people who have also participated in helping us help others teach the Bible well. So until next time, Nika, thank you again.

Nika >> Thanks, Kay.

Kay >> And we will see you all out there soon.

Jodie Niznik

Kay Daigle

Frequent guest Jodie Niznik joins Dr. Kay Daigle to explain how using the biblical pattern of lament can help us process and work through what we see and read about world, national or local events. There is much to grieve beyond our personal sorrows, and lament enables us to go to God in a healthy and healing way.

This episode is available on video if you prefer.

00:20 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I am Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to our podcast. In this episode we are going to talk about lament. We’re going to talk about lamenting current events. And our special guest is Jodie Niznik. Welcome, Jodie. Thank you for being here with us again.

Jodie >> It’s great to be with you again, Kay. Thanks for having me.

Kay >> Well, we always love having you. Jodie is an author, a teacher and a speaker, and we have had her discuss many things that you can find on our website by just searching for Jodie Niznik if you go to BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. So she is—I‘ll tell you a little bit about her. She has an undergraduate degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Colorado, and she has a degree in Christian education from Dallas Seminary with an emphasis in Christian Education, the same one that I have with Women’s Ministry emphasis.

So we trust you, Jodie. We are so happy to have you talking with us about lament. Just tell us a little bit about what lament is.

Jodie >> Yeah. I’m glad that we’re talking about lament, especially in our current cultural climate that we’re finding ourselves in. Lament really is first and foremost, prayer. It’s a way to take the things that are really painful, the things that are confusing, the things that we’re grieving to God. And to be really honest with him about wrestling through those things.

And the thing I love about lament is it’s modeled for us in Scripture. A third of the Psalms are lament Psalms. I just heard somebody say, “Maybe God knew that about a third of our days were going to be tough, and we needed to know how to lament.” And I thought, oh, yeah, I think he’s probably right.

So lament is modeled for us in Scripture. It’s a way for us to process things that are confusing and painful with God, but it always leads us back to God. And the purpose is to lead us back to trusting God, even when we don’t understand what’s happening.

Kay >> Absolutely. And, you know, lament is found all over the Bible, not just in the Psalms.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> So, you know, if you wonder about lament, it is very biblical. It’s not just an Old Testament thing. It is all over the Bible.

And don’t you feel like our culture is not very good at knowing how to deal with grief, sorrow, and these current events that we’re talking about now, we don’t know what to do with our emotions.

Jodie >> Yeah. I mean, and I think, I, I don’t think we know what to do with our emotions. And I think unfortunately, the Christian church in particular does not know what to do with our emotions, and we should be the ones that actually know the most what to do with them, because we do know that there is a bigger story happening. And we do know that even though things feel really disconcerting, perhaps in our own life, or because of things that are happening around the world, we know how the story ends.

So I do think that Christians should know how to lament a little bit better. I think it’s something we need to actually incorporate as maybe even a spiritual practice, if you wanted to call it that, into our lives.

And I think one of the things that happens is when we don’t lament, we fall into one of two things happening. We either move to denial, so we show up and we’re like, no, everything’s fine. God’s going to take care of everything. It’s all good. And that is yes, that is in the end what’s going to happen.

But that is not actually processing some of the pain that we’re going through right now. So it can lead us to a place of denial. Or on the flip side of that, I think it can lead us to a place of despair. So if we can’t actually process with God, our faith then can’t hold up under things that are happening.

And I think a lot of times that’s why people are either questioning their faith or perhaps even leaving the church is because they don’t have a good vehicle for understanding how a good God can allow and stand by when some really terrible things are happening.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah, I think that’s very true. In fact, I was thinking that just yesterday, as I was preparing a little bit for this, it just came to my mind that knowing some people who have deconstructed and left a lot of their faith behind, I was just wondering if maybe if they had lamented some of the things that had caused them to make those decisions, if it could have been avoided.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> So I totally agree with you about that.

Jodie >> Yeah. I mean, and I don’t have evidence to back that up that that’s the reason.

Kay >> I don’t either. This is not scientific. It was just a thought.

Jodie >> Yeah, I agree, it’s interesting that we were both kind of thinking that same thought. It’s just well, and I think I’ve heard it from people, you know, “God wouldn’t have let this happen.” Or “this shouldn’t have happened.” And there’s an anger because there’s not a solid theology of who God is and the bigger story of Scripture to understand.

Yeah. God is good. God is sovereign. And still he has allowed there to be sin and free choice. And we know we have an enemy who’s prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. So both of these things are true. And I think we have to figure out and lament helps us hold them both at the same time.

Kay >> It does. And we’re talking to God about it instead of just sitting around and going, “Why is God doing this?” And “Why would a good God do this?” We’re not just talking to each other. We’re actually speaking to God about it.

So what are the areas if you, if you were to want to sit down and lament something that’s happening today, what would that include?

Jodie >> Yeah. Well I think the first thing is there’s a and I think the question that you’re asking first is what can we lament or what should we be lamenting. There’s what we see. Biblical lament is and then we see a process of how almost like a formula. But it’s not a formula because it is not step one, step two, step three.

Kind of like grief, right? You know, like there’s this whole process of grief and people go through it in very different ways. I think lament, the process of lament is the same. But we also see that there’s these categories of biblical lament, and that is the personal pain that we’ve experienced in our own lives. So just I mean, I don’t need to explain that to you.

We all know what personal pain feels like. And it’s just, you know, crushing. And if we can’t take that to God and say, this feels terrible and I don’t understand it. So there’s this personal pain.

There’s also national tragedy. And that’s kind of what we’re even thinking about with these current events. But also national or natural disasters, people being displaced, human trafficking, I mean, things that are just terrible atrocities that are wounding untold numbers of people.

And I think that God invites us to lament those things. And then I think the third category that we largely see is seeking justice. So we see a lot of injustice in our world. We see a lot of evil people getting away with evil and actually, like, that’s the effect of sin. And sometimes that very personally affects our lives.

But sometimes we see it more on the global scale. So yeah, so it’s justice seeking as well. So I think those are the three categories. So it’s personal pain. It’s national tragedy and it’s seeking justice from God.

Kay >> Yeah. So thinking of you know we’re talking about a bigger a bigger sphere of concern than just our own personal concerns here.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> We’re talking about sometimes worldwide concerns as you talk about displacement, I mean, there are more people displaced now in the world, I think, than have ever been displaced.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> It’s a huge issue worldwide. But we’re talking about looking at what’s going on and seeing the hurt that other people have sometimes. It’s not always just our heart. There’s a hurt in the world and there’s a hurt that we feel nationally. I mean, I think that we came close to this in 9/11 that we had a hurt that was so large that the entire nation grieved over it. Now, I’m not saying everybody knew how to lament, but I do think we all felt the grief of the loss of so many people.

Jodie >> And I think even the global pandemic was a global opportunity for us to realize that we were all going through something that nobody really knew how to manage and handle. And I think that did help us lift our eyes and go, okay, this is really hard for me because I’m scared. But I can also recognize that there’s a lot of other people going through really scary things as well.

So I do think it gives us a way to take those things to God, because a lot of times we don’t have agency to impact a war that’s happening or, you know, a larger policy. We have some agency, right, because we live in America and we get to vote? And so that is a small amount of agency that we can use, which is very important.

But a lot of times there’s things that are just so beyond our control, and it can make us feel like, well, again, denial or despair, right? Like I can’t do anything about it, so I’m just going to ignore it or despair where we just get sucked into the tragedy and it immobilizes and crushes us. And this actually gives us a way to do something and to actually process it with God and really leave it at his feet.

And remember, okay, this is what is true. This is who you are. I do not understand this. I don’t understand how you, as a loving God, could allow this much suffering in our world. I don’t understand God and/or but I trust you. That’s the only place I can go. I have to go back to that.

So that’s part of. Yeah, it gives us a way to hold some of that.

Kay >> Yeah. So how does the lament differ from just complaining all the time?

Jodie >> Well, you know, I was thinking about this too. I think it is complaint to God. But there is a complaint that is very self-centered and self-serving. “I deserved better than this, God” You know, and that’s almost, you know, kind of veers into somewhat of almost like a prosperity theology. I did this right, and therefore you should have done this for me.

It’s more of a transaction that we thought we did something to get something from God. So I think that kind of complaints, which is, self-serving, it’s—oh what the other words I wrote down, entitled, you know, you owe me. It’s a very selfish kind of complaint. I don’t think that’s the kind of complaint we’re talking about.

In fact, I think that veers on the edge of sinfulness. And we could go down that road.

But I think the kind of complaint we’re talking about is just saying this is bad. I don’t understand it. And I think it can even maybe sound almost like some, you know, it can feel a little selfish, like, I’m in pain.

I don’t want to be in pain. I want you to make it stop. You know, there can be something that feels like maybe we’re being selfish, but I think it goes back to, again, moving toward trust. And it’s also prayer. It’s also seeking God to begin with.

So the movement of lament, as I see it, are really three movements.

And the first is the protest, which is the complaint piece that we’re talking about. So we’re laying our case. It’s almost like a legal case that we’re laying before God. You are a good God. And yet this not good thing is happening and I’m confused by it. So this is my complaint that I’m making to you.

And so then there’s this petition. There’s this asking piece where we’re saying to God, “This is who you are, and these are the promises that I see in Scripture. This is how I need you to solve this for me. This is what I’m asking.” And usually to make our ask the most biblical, it would be in line with Scripture.

So, you know, “I’m not asking you to pay all my bills because I ran into credit card debt because I was frivolously spending.” Right? It’s more along the lines of, “I’m in pain, and I need you to help me figure out how to live in a place of peace again.” Jesus says that he has come so that we would have. He gave us his peace. So I know that that peace is available to me. That’s a promise I can ask from God. Very biblical promise.

So we complain, we ask, but then we move into a place of trust and praising God. So we’re turning back to God. So there’s three P’s. You could say it’s protest, petition and praise.

But I do think instead of praise, I like the word trust better, because I think sometimes praise might be hard for us. It may just be getting to a place of opening our hands back up to God and saying, “I don’t get it. But here’s what I do know. Here’s what I do remember is true. Here’s the promises I see that you’ve fulfilled in Scripture.” you know?

And so it’s reminding our soul of what is true to lead us back into a place of trusting him.

Kay >> So this isn’t something that we’re used to doing.

So what do you say practically to us about lamenting?

Jodie >> Yeah. I mean, I think practically speaking, I would encourage people to find a psalm of lament to read and model after.

And I’d love to just look at Psalm 13. It’s only six verses, and I think it’s one of the most concise, lament psalms. And people can go back and read it for themselves. But I just want to read the pieces and so that we can see and then encourage you as a way to model your prayers around this.

So Psalm 13 says, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?”

So you can hear this is the question. This is the complaint that is coming before God. “How long Lord?” So I think that, practically speaking, we can model some of these questions.

We can ask God, some of these questions. Oh, and there was one more verse. “And how long will my enemy triumph over me?” That’s a big one. So that is the complaint.

The petition, the ask of God, is in verses three and four. And the psalmist says, “Look on me and answer, Lord my God, give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death. And my enemy will say, I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall.”

So here the psalmist is saying, “God, answer me, bring light back into my eyes. So give me some life. Give me something, something positive.”

And then the final part is returning to trust. And I love this because it says in verse five, “But I trust in your unfailing love.”

And it’s that word right there. But that is this pivot word, but God and we see it all over Scripture. So it’s “I’m holding these really big questions and I’m asking you to do something about it. But I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.”

And so it’s this return to remembering. Even though this particular situation, even though this particular war that does not make any sense to me, all of these people that are displaced, all of these people that are being taken advantage of, maybe through human trafficking. Even though I can’t understand that, I do remember these things are true about you. And so I will return to trust.

So I love Psalm 13 as a model for that. And I was reading in Psalm 77 this morning as well. And I love this because it’s again another practical way you can see all these really bold questions that the psalmists are asking. The questions that I like, I cringe a little bit when I read these because I think, is it okay to say that to God?

There’s like 5 or 6 questions in Psalm 77, verses seven and nine it says,

“Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? What? Has his promise failed for all time?” What? That is an audacious question to ask God. We know the answer to that is no.

“Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger, withheld his compassion?”

These are the questions that this psalmist is asking. And yet he does not just that’s not the end of the story, right? He goes on and he says, “But I will remember the deeds of the Lord. I will remember your miracles. I will consider your works. I will meditate on who you are.”

So he’s asking these questions that are plaguing his heart, knowing that those aren’t the that it’s okay. It’s okay to put those on the table, but that’s not the end of the story.

So I think I just really want to encourage people, be honest with God. There’s nothing that you can say to him that he honestly didn’t already know was in your heart and that you were thinking.

And I think there is something I mean, therapy tells us this and science tells us, behavioral science tells us that when we speak out loud, sometimes things lose their hold on us. And so there is an essence of being open and honest with God as a way to start processing some of this pain. So I think practically you speak it out loud and practice.

I think the other practical thing I would say is don’t wait for a massive implosion in your own life. Start with the things that are just the little things that feel painful and wrestle with God over those things and lament those. And that’s okay. He cares about those little details in our lives, just like he cares about the massive things that we see all over the world.

And that’s hard for our finite brains to hold that that matters to him as well as this matters to him. So I think part of it is just starting to practice lament. So grab Psalm 13 and just model your prayer after it.

Kay >> Yeah.

That’s good. And I do think that, you know, we’re afraid is this really okay to do with God? But I remember when I was in seminary that my professor who taught the Psalms to us said, some of these laments are screams. They are screaming out to God in their pain.

And you know, I don’t think I’ve ever screamed out to God, but sometimes that’s what your heart feels like is screaming out to God. And it’s okay.

It’s okay to do that.

Jodie >> And I think it’s also okay to remember we don’t have to move to the trust piece in the same breath. A lot of times we may get stuck in the screaming out to phase when something really confusing is happening. I think, you know, a lot of times we see this like Psalm 13, it’s all neat and tidy in six verses, you know, it’s a very quick process, but I think sometimes we could get stuck in that, you know, beginning complaint process for a season even before we can move back to trust.

And I think, just give yourself a little grace. Remember, you’re complaining to God, so you’re at least taking it to him. And that is a beautiful thing. Instead of just, you know, stuffing it inside and kind of imploding on it.

Kay >> Right.

So let’s pivot a little bit. What do we know? How do we know what to lament? I mean there’s so you have listed many, many things going on in our world right now. It’s overwhelming. All the things.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> It really is. And that’s one reason we need to lament, but we how do we pick from all of these things?

Some that we can really, really focus on and pray about?

Jodie >> Yeah. I’m so glad you asked that because I do think, again, we can get overwhelmed to a place of being immobilized and throwing up our hands and saying, “I can’t pray about all this, so I’m going to pray about none of it.”

And I would say a couple of things. One is what pulls at your heart. We all have things that God has placed on our heart that really matter to us.

And that may be the fact that, you know, the war in Iran is going on. And there was a school of girls that died. And it may be that that just leveled you. And I would encourage you then to just lament for those families and those children, siblings who didn’t get their sister back that night or, you know, I you know, however that worked, if it was a boarding school, you know, I mean, just I think it’s okay then to just say “I will lament that and I will hold that and let that be the thing that I’m going to lament.”

Or you might be really leveled by the fact that, you know, they found another sweatshop that was employing, you know, ten-year-olds to make goods that we consume here in the United States. And that may just level you then lament that, you know.

So I think part of lamenting is realizing that when one part hurts, whether that’s a part all the way over in Iran or another part hurts, and that’s just down the road for me, or even in my own body, physically, I can be a part of holding that together, but I’m still not responsible for the whole of it.

God is the one who’s holding all of that together. So I would say just choose something.

The other thing I have done personally in my own life is I’ve really done an audit on how I’m consuming the news, because the news can really derail and consume. We are consuming things almost faster than real time. Like, I mean, I know that’s not possible, but maybe it is actually because we’re anticipating and we think this is going to happen.

And so we’re reading a headline about something that hasn’t even happened yet but might happen. So we’re, you know, and our souls are not made to handle all of that.

So I personally have said, I can’t read all that anymore. I don’t want to stick my head in the sand. I don’t want to be uninformed. But I can’t be over informed either because that’s not helpful for my soul.

So I’ve actually found a news source that I love called The Pour Over. And just like, you know, you’d pour over a coffee or something and it’s just it’s a— they kind of highlight just a few stories, but they do it from a neutral perspective. And then they offer you a scripture and a way to pray. And that’s been really helpful for me because I feel like I haven’t totally lost touch with the world, but I’m not in the nitty gritty of every nuance of everything that’s happening.

And they’re just reminding me, whether you think this or this, our God is still good. And I’m like, yeah, that’s what my soul needs right now. So that’s what how I’m choosing.

Kay >> I think that’s really wise because it is just overwhelming and the truth is, you know, there’s so many different versions of what’s going on out there. You know, it’s almost impossible to know what’s really happening.

Jodie >> That’s right.

Kay >> It’s just very difficult right now.

Can you give us an example of what God has put on your heart to lament?

Jodie >> Yeah. I mean, I will say, I mean, there’s a couple things that come to mind. One is a very personal example of a young woman that I’m walking alongside who is being really wounded by a leader in a church, and it angers me to be honest, and it confuses me because I don’t understand why God continues to allow those things to happen in his church.

And so that is something that I have very personally been lamenting on behalf of this young woman because, well, I’m carrying some of that pain with her. So that’s occupied quite a bit of my personal prayer time.

On a more global level. I have been lamenting, like I said, the school, the girls. That’s something that I just—it breaks my heart and it’s things like that and they keep happening. So that is something that I have been taking to the Lord with “I don’t understand I don’t understand why this is okay.” His response is it’s not okay. It was never okay. And yet that’s why Jesus came. That’s why I sent him because this world is broken, the systems and structures are broken.

And while there are glimmers of goodness because we are God’s people and we can bring his kingdom, that is our calling as his people—it is still a very broken world. That’s the system you live in. So that’s a little bit of what’s on my heart right now.

Kay >> Yeah. I haven’t zeroed in so much on like the school of girls, but just generally the war and all the people being displaced, all the people who have died, all the people who have been injured, the soldiers, the families of the soldiers. I mean, it’s just so many. I feel like there’s just so many people impacted by a war like this, like for any war, really.

And so that’s really what’s been on my heart lately. That’s what I’ve been lamenting, is just the various aspects of what war is doing. And if we don’t lament it, I think that our hearts can become hard against people where we don’t even care about them anymore.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> Because it’s too hard to care about them. If we don’t take it to the Lord, if we don’t lament it, I think our hearts can get hard and we just begin to be more selfish and not want to deal with other people. We just write them off that they don’t matter as much to God as we do somehow.

Jodie >> Yeah, I think we can even get to a place of so being detached from humanity that we believe they deserved it in some way.

Kay >> Yeah.

Jodie >> That’s terrible because we have all been created in the image of God. Now, whether we accept Jesus as our, you know, part of the triune God that we worship, or not, that doesn’t change the fact that God still created, his fingerprints are still on us, and he still deeply loves each and every human soul that is on this planet.

So yeah, I think lamenting does keep us tender to that truth.

Kay >> I think it really does. And I feel like there’s a lot of noise out there as to how everybody brought this on themselves, and that’s just not the case. You know, there certainly are leaders who bear more of the consequences and should bear more the responsibility for what’s happening. But we have to remember, most people are just like us.

They’re as overwhelmed by this stuff, if not wanting more so, because they are losing their homes, they’re losing everything they have. Things like that.

Jodie >> Yeah. And I think generally, I think it’s good to remember that while there are evil characters that are causing a lot of this, most people want the exact same things we want. We want to live peaceful lives. We want to be productive citizens in our community. We want to, you know, have loving relationships with the people around us.

Most people want that. And so I think it is good to remember even people that feel so different than us because of a cultural context or religious context aren’t maybe as different as we could paint them to be.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you so much, Jodie. I think this has been really helpful, and I pray and hope that many of you out there will sit down today or soon and really take some time to ask God, you know, to lay some things on your heart if you don’t already have something on your heart, and just tell him what’s what you really feel about it, and be honest.

And you know God, God is there. And at the same time, remember all the things you love about God and all the ways that he has loved you.

Jodie >> That’s right.

Kay >> So. I know that in studying lament, you can just sort of study it, but I want this to be a reality for people. And I think that we need to learn to do this. And whether you have an issue right now going on or whether you’ve thought about the world situation or the country’s situation or whatever, there’s something that should tug at your heart to call you to begin lamenting.

And if you don’t feel like you have a personal need right now, you will someday have a need to have a personal one as well.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> I have just finished actually writing a study on lament that I would just suggest if you need some guidance, if you need some guidance in doing this for yourself, that that might be something that you would want.

Just go to our website BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org and go to Bible Studies. And I don’t want it to be a study of lament, but a study to show us, to lament. So we learn to lament, not just study lament.

Jodie >>I love that Kay, I’m so glad that you did that, because we do need tools to help us just practice.

Kay >> We do.

Jodie >> Yeah. So that’s amazing.

Kay >> Yeah. And we also have some more lament recordings that Nika Spaulding did a few years ago. And you can find those as well, if you go again to the Godly Living page, go up to the resources at the top menu, pull down to the Godly Living page. You can find those as well. So all of these resources are there to help you, and you can always contact us if you have any questions.

So thank you Jodie. And hopefully next time we can talk about something that might not seem quite so sad.

Jodie >> Yes. Only happy topics.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah. That’s what we’ll do.

Jodie >> But that’s not real life.

Kay >> It isn’t real life. And we have to deal with these other things too.

Jodie >> Yeah.

Kay >> Thank you for joining us and we’ll hope to see you and our audience back again next time.

Jodie >> All right.

Dr. Jackie Roese

In this final episode of BOW’s three-part series on relationships between men and women as the church, guest Dr. Jackie Roese describes living out that calling as God’s dream team. Instead of seeing danger involving women, what if we saw one another as brothers and sisters in Christ?

You won’t want to miss this final episode that provides a glimpse of what a thriving partnership between the sexes would look like, God’s dream team, and how that would affect the purpose of the church.

Kay Daigle

If you missed them, go back and to the previous episodes in the RelationSHIFT series: 1. It’s More Than Being Biblical and 2. It’s More Than a Sex Narrative. All episodes are available on video only with others that deal with the issues of men and women.

00:21 Introduction to the series & Jackie

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I’d like to welcome you to the third video in our series on It’s Time for a RelationshipSHIFT. And we’re talking about men and women working together as Christians. And I’m with Dr. Jackie Roese, who has a book, RelationSHIFT, as well as some other books. You can read about Jackie, and her material will be on our website as well. You can link to her ministry, The Marcella Project, as well as her material, because probably by now, if you’ve watched the first two, you want to hear more from Jackie. So we’re about to do that.

Now we’re going to talk about God’s dream team. We’ve talked about some of the problems with men and women in the church and some of the teaching that’s behind some of that, some of the misconceptions that’s behind that. And now we want to talk about what it would really look like. And I know as a woman who has volunteered in churches as well as been on staff, that sometimes you’re quite aware that you have no voice in anything and you’d really like to change that.

So how can we as women, affect some change in the church?

Jackie >> Great. And that is the big million dollar question, isn’t it? I would say first and foremost, we need brothers and sisters bringing change to the church, not just women. And we’ll get to that.

First and foremost, I think women need to get informed about God’s bigger vision, about what did God intend for men and women to serve together collectively in the home, in the church, community, workplace.

And I think probably one of the best descriptions out there right now is Carolyn Custis James’ description of male and female called The Blessed Alliance. And I’m going to summarize it really quick. But basically, she says in Genesis 1 and 2, God formed the foundation of creation based on two load bearing walls. The first being humanity’s relationship with God. And the second load bearing wall in which the world was supposed to operate was male and female relationships. Not just in marriage, which we tend to read only the Genesis passage in a marriage paradigm, but it’s actually also talking about community brother, sister. And there’s lots that I’ve written on that and so if that sounds different.

But these two load-bearing walls is what the world was supposed to operate on. And together these two are given a mandate. They are to rule, subdue and fill the earth, which fill the earth does include procreation. But really beyond that, what it means is to create civilization. God throws raw material at them and says, have at it.

Create societies, create cultures. And so that is the job of male and female and they do it together. So we need to see first and foremost that that is God’s desire. We have done a great job of helping humanity reconnect with God. We have not done a very good job of putting together the second load bearing wall, which is what does it look like for men and women to serve together?

I served on a pastoral staff for almost a decade, and during that time had to deal with a lot of these things. And my husband and I, my husband was also on that staff as the executive pastor. And so he and I have traveled around the United States and talked to church leadership about how do you help hear the voice of women, how do we start serving together?

When I share my insight, it’s one first and foremost women need to familiarize themselves with the biblical text because they will be asked. You will have to say what you think about certain things. So you’ve got to do some work. You can’t be lazy, right?

So you’ve got to familiarize yourself. You don’t need to be a seminary student to understand, just to understand a little bit of what’s going on. And you’ve got to deal with the Bible. Because your church pastor is going to be bringing the Bible to you. So you’ve got to know what you’re talking about.

When you approach the male leadership of your church, attitude really matters. So I tell younger women in particular who’ve been told they can do anything they want in the workforce, and then they get in the church and they’re like, “Hear me roar,” you know?

Well, first of all, we don’t do that. Not because we’re trying to manipulate or placate, but because Jesus doesn’t do that. Right? I tell women that they need to think about 1 Chronicles 12:32, which says, “And the children of Issachar who had understanding of their times to know what Israel ought to do.” And so I try to tell women, “Understand your time. Understand the time frame of history in which you find yourself as a woman in the conservative evangelical church.”

Movements change likes big, huge shifts like what we’re looking for from men and women to like move away from danger narrative to brother-sister takes hundreds of years. And you may not want to hear that, but that’s the truth. Understanding where you sit in the middle of that movement, like maybe we’ve still got 100 years to go, you’re not going to be as flustered.

And then once you understand where you are in the time, then you will know what you need to do for that time period. 400 years is the average it takes for a movement to move through. We saw this Protestant Reformation. We saw it during the suffrage movement, civil rights movement. It’s going to take time.

So I think for women, it’s also learning to take on an attitude of Christ and to be wise about her time frame. I would say that it’s important for her to support and get educated by progressive organizations that have these kinds of conversations that expand her thinking about gender constructs, about what’s happening in power, what’s going on in danger.

She has to be aware of those things to even be able to articulate them to her staff. Right?

So when I did the research on brother and sister and realized I started bringing it up to the men on the staff. “Hey, I want to tell you today, this is like an example I do. I want to tell you that I really like your shirt, Jason. But when I do, I don’t want you to think I want to have sex with you. I’m just telling you, as my brother in Christ, that’s a good looking shirt on you.” It sounds funny, but slow but surely we started identifying to each other, “I’m your sister. And this thing that I’m doing right now is my being a sister for you, you know?”

And before you knew it, we started operating more and more like brothers and sisters. So we were able to talk about those things, like, you’ve got to know about them.

I think it’s really important that you find the male in your congregation that is really for women. And allow him to also be your voice. And they are there.

And there are a lot of men who love women and know that women have much to bring to the table. Make them your advocate, don’t use them. We don’t use people. That’s not what I’m talking about. But there are men there that God has lifted up. And so find them and build a relationship with them.

Now, what my husband would say to the men on staff is he would say, “You can’t catch trout in a bass pond.”

So in other words, men, whenever they tend to want to find a new hire, well we’ve lost the youth minister. They start asking their male circle of leadership. Right? Who do you know that’s a good pastor, and that’s how they get the references. But none of those men ever hang out with women leaders, so her name never gets thrown in the pond, so to speak.

So men need to work hard at actually building relationships with women leaders or knowing who the women leaders are so that they can bring them into the circle.

The other thing that my husband would say is men need to understand that women at this time in history in America have particular cultural constraints that impact how they can serve on a church. So it’s helpful for men to understand that if you have a meeting, you might want to have the meeting before children get out of school. Right? If you want to have a meeting, it might be helpful to not have it at a cigar shop or to talk about hunting all the time and fishing that you make these meetings accessible to a woman’s particular cultural constraints.

Because we know right now most women take care of the home, even if they’re working full time out of the home.

He would say, “Be prepared for pushback.” And I would say that for both men and women.

As a man, we want to have our men learn to ask the question, “How do I share power? How can I be less so she can be more?” Men have to be even stronger advocates for women than they would have to be for another man, because there’s so much there. And my husband would tell men that they need to deal with their bias in themselves and in the church staff toward women and that you have to get informed with that.

One of the things we did at Irving Bible Church to help shift and bring women into the fold, and my husband and I just led a church through that in New York, was we actually just invited influencers from both women and men in the church to come and have a conversation, just talk.

Nobody was like trying to get anybody anywhere. Just let’s talk about our experiences. When my husband orchestrated that for our church, we had all the elders there. We had a bunch of women leaders from around the Dallas Metroplex. And one by one, the women shared their experiences and some of the men cried. They had no idea.

And they were just totally upset that this is what was happening to the women. They loved women. And here they were doing they didn’t know. They couldn’t see. Right? And let me tell you, that started shifting things.

Same thing with this church we were in New York. We had women leaders. We had the elders. And this is what women can do. And, well, let’s just share your experiences. And I watched those men become warriors for those women because they had no idea. And they didn’t want that to be their experience. So we got to have some mutual conversations together just over dinner. You know, not trying to be defensive to one another, but just, hey, are you willing to hear and are you willing to say it?

And our brothers rise up. They do. They love us.

Kay >> Right. And I’ve had some wonderful support. My husband has always been my greatest cheerleader and my greatest support.

Jackie >> Absolutely.

Kay >> Because women cannot, well they can’t reach out in any area without the support of their husbands. But I’ve also worked with some wonderful men who were the kind of warriors and the kind of voices that you’re talking about. And I’m very grateful. I’m very grateful for them.

So thank you so much, Jackie. This is just been very helpful. And if you have any questions for Jackie or for me, just contact us through Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Go to our website, BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org and contact me. And I’ll ask Jackie if we need to talk to Jackie.

Or you can also find her at The Marcella Project online, and she will be happy to do that as well.

Dr. Jackie Roese

Kay Daigle

In this second episode of this series, Dr. Jackie Roese explains the problem with the church’s sex narrative. Don’t miss this important conversation as she talks with Dr. Kay Daigle about how making men’s and women’s relationships in the church all about sex is a mistake and why it matters. Many of us have been taught the church’s sex narrative and may need to consider its effects.

This episode can be accessed on video along with the first episode, It’s Time for a RelationSHIFT: It’s more than being biblical.

If you missed it, you can find the 1st BOW Podcast episode on seeking a RelationSHIFT between men and women in the church: It’s More than Being Biblical.

00:21 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I’d like to welcome you to the second in our series on It’s Time for a RelationSHIFT dealing with men and women working together in the church. My guest is Dr. Jackie Roese. Jackie is the Founder and President of The Marcella Project. And you can read more about her and her ministry online on our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. And I hope you will take advantage of that so that you can even contact Jackie if you need to.

Jackie, in our first video, we talked about the fact that the situation between men and women and the way that we work together in the church is more than just the biblical and theological beliefs that we have. In this video, we’re going to talk about the fact that there’s more involved than just a sex narrative.

And I wanted to tell you that not too long ago, a friend highly praised a sermon that she had just heard, so I went online to hear the sermon. It was about men and women together. And I think in light of all of the various things, the sermon focused on how to avoid any kind of sexual contact with anyone of the other sex.

But I was pretty horrified because really if you followed what it said, pretty much you wouldn’t talk to many men. And he seemed to suggest he told a story about a pastor who was having a book signing and whose son said, why are you so rude to the women? He said, “Oh, they’ll whisper their hotel room number in your ear. They’ll give you their key.” It seemed to be perfectly fine, according to the sermon, to just be rude to women to avoid them tempting you sexually.

So with that background of my horror, really, at thinking about how does somebody even do this in this age with work and things like that, I don’t even think it’s a practical solution. But even if it were, there’s something wrong with treating people poorly just because you think they’re a threat. So I want to hear what you had to say.

Jackie >> Yeah. So, wow, there’s a lot there. First, I would say not only is it wrong because it’s not biblical.

Kay >> Oh, yeah.

Jackie >> So, and this person that you were listening to, they’re still teaching this danger romance narrative as the only narrative we see in Scripture. And it’s actually not the largest narrative we see. It’s not the emphasis of the New Testament.

And so I want to talk a little about that. Before I do, let me just say with the #MeToo #ChurchToo movement, there has been a lot of sexual exploitation. And I am very aware and want to be very sensitive to the fact that when there is sexual failure in the church or in the home, it’s devastating.

And I want to be sensitive to that because people have experienced that. It has blown up their church when their pastor has been inappropriate with a woman or left with an affair. And that does happen—rarely, but it does happen. And it’s painful.

But if we move over to that being the major way in which we deal with one another, we’re actually being unbiblical.

And so what do I mean by that? Well, let me just say, we have the danger narrative/danger romance narrative is the only narrative we talk about in the church about what men and women can be together.

I remember meeting with a pastor one time, and he and I were talking and he said, “I can’t get in the car and drive away with you. It’s the Billy Graham rule. Because basically men think about sex all the time.”

And I googled it. And I told him, You know that’s not actually technically true? Men don’t think about sex every 60 seconds. That’s actually not true.”

And then I said to him, “And furthermore, if a woman came to you and said, “I just had this urge to buy a blouse every 60 seconds. Or if she said, “I just can’t stop thinking about eating ice cream every 60 seconds.”

I would say, “That’s an addiction,” you know? Like this isn’t how God made you. That’s an addiction.

And so when we say things like men can’t help themselves, I wonder what exactly what Paul did mean then when he said, “You are a new creation.” What did he mean when he said, “He has given us the Spirit of Christ.” I mean God Himself is redesigning us into this new creation. Now God is pretty powerful, right? And he says that we can have the mind of Christ.

So when we say these things about our brothers—you know that they can’t help themselves, that men just always think sexually and then therefore it’s a women’s responsibility to be pure and stay away from them.

And all of this conversation, I’m like, really? Because that doesn’t sound like an image bearer to me. That feels like we’ve so lowered the bar. What it sounds like is we are saying men are pigs. My husband is not a pig, and I have two sons and they are not pigs.

So I’m not willing to dehumanize my brothers by that kind of story that we tend to teach in the church out of fear of moral failure.

I’ll give you a quick example of how this played out in my life and why I’ve had to dig deeper into the Scriptures and go, what is going on here?

Well, at the end of that semester, that residency, we had to form a cohort of about five of us. Of course, you know, it was like, who’s going to get the loser girl? And this group got me, and they were great. And for a whole year we talked online together.

We get back to residency the second year. They didn’t even, the school didn’t know what to do with me. They put me in this huge inn all by myself. Not another soul. I felt so safe! And the guys were across the driveway in a house together. Again, all kinds of offline learning that I don’t get to be a part of.

So I had heard that where we were going to have class was quite dangerous, and I was really nervous. And I’m not a very good driver and I don’t have a real good sense of direction. So that morning I woke up and I was a little nervous and I went to breakfast and I’m standing up, standing in the doorway and everybody’s eating. And I see one of my cohort’s guys way in the corner, and I yell probably because I’m nervous, right? I say, “Hey, Bill, can you give me a ride today?”

And like, it was like a movie. Everybody just stopped mid-air, like, oh, my God, did she just ask to get in the car with him? And I was like, okay, what am I listening to? Danger Romance, right? I said, That’s it. Enough, enough of this story. And I wanted to at that point insert the more biblical story, which is we’re brothers and sisters.

And so I literally yelled across the room, “Bill, I don’t want to have sex with you. Just as your sister in Christ, I just don’t want to be raped. That’s all I’m asking for.” And everybody kind of got nervous and giggled, and Bill gave me a ride.

And lo and behold, we functioned as brothers and sisters. That statement, putting it out there, changed the whole paradigm of the rest of my doctoral program with those men. We got to do offline learning together. It was fabulous.

So we have this narrative. I had to ask the question, “What do we do with this narrative? Is it biblical?” Well, lo and behold, it’s not. The largest metaphor in the New Testament talking about men and women in the church is sibling-hood. It is not sex. It’s siblings. One hundred twenty-four times the word siblings are used when referencing the church male and female together in the church compared to the metaphor of the church, which is used 45 times.

The reason Paul—Paul by the way, uses the metaphor in 1 Corinthians 60 times, men and women siblings, 60 times—and the reason he chose that is because he was playing upon siblings in antiquity. And in antiquity, brothers and sisters had the strongest bond of any relationship, more so than marriage, so he’s playing on this because I know that in this community they only honored blood kin, right

Furthermore, Matthew 22 says we’re not married in the new heavens and new earth, and we’re still gendered. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be female, pretty sure I’m going to be short and still have curly hair, you know. And the relationship that lasts in the new heavens, new earth, that’s going from here to there is not marriage. It’s brother and sister. And so I keep asking if that’s the relationship that we will live in in eternity, shouldn’t we figure out how to live that way now as we move there? So I just want to end with this example. I had a woman, a man come to me one time and we were talking about— can men and women be friends because we got to deal with this sex issue. And he shared with me that he started a church plant. And when they started the church plant, they had women on the leadership team with them.

It was all hands on deck. You can’t be picky when there’s too much work to do, all hands on deck. And so they start serving together. Well, when the church started to get structured and established, they decided the elders had to be all male, and so the women were removed from the leadership table. He says, now what happens, Jackie, is we have these meetings together, us men, and we come up with a solution. And then we go home and we tell our wives what we’ve come up with, and they will ask questions that we didn’t ask.

So we have to have another meeting to discuss the questions that we didn’t think to ask. And then he said this profound statement. He said, “We were better when women were at the table.”

Kay >> Great story.

Jackie >> Yeah.

Kay >> Great story. Absolutely. And I certainly ran into some of that being on staff that in situations where women weren’t asked that there would later on be some repercussions from that were not anticipated because only men were talking about it. So thank you.

Jackie >> I tell people there’s always women elders, whether you’ve elected them or not, because those male elders go home and they talk to their wives and then they have input. So we actually are getting female input we just haven’t voted them to be elders. But there’s always women at the elder table.

Kay >> Right, right. Well, thank you. We have one more video in this series, and it is going to be about God’s dream team. So if you want to hear what it would really look like for us to shift these relationships between men and women, in the church, I hope you’ll join us for video three.

And you can find all of these videos on our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org.

Dr. Jackie Roese

Dr. Kay Daigle

Dr. Jackie Roese joined Kay Daigle some time ago on video (before we started creating podcasts) to discuss Jackie’s call for a shift in working relationships between men and women in the church. If you are in any type of leadership–whether paid or unpaid–in a church, you should hear this conversation.

Jackie points out some of the walls that women often bump against when they attempt to get things done through men on church staffs. Thus we need a shift in working relationships between men and women in the church.

You can now access the videos of the other two conversations. The podcast episodes will drop on 6/3/26 and 6/17/26:

00:20 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I’d like to welcome you to our video series, It’s Time for a RelationSHIFT. And our guest is Dr. Jackie Roese. I have known Jackie since we were in D.T.S. together.

And I have been so looking forward to this conversation because this first video is going to be a conversation about It’s More Than Being Biblical. And when we talk about a shift in relationships, we’re talking about men and women in the church. With all that’s been going on in the last couple of years with #metoo and #churchtoo, and all of those things, there’s been a lot of conversation about men and women. And much of what I’ve heard, Jackie, is actually saying that it all has to do with our biblical view of women in the church.

And yet you’re saying it’s more than the theology of women in the church, that there’s more at stake here. So I’m very excited to hear what you have to say.

Jackie >> Great. Well, thank you for having me here. I’m glad to be here.

Yes. First, let me say it does have to do with the Bible. I’ve been with women who said, “Oh, we don’t need to work with 1 Timothy 2. We don’t need to figure out, you know, 1 Corinthians 11 or 14. We can just those are ancient texts. They don’t apply to us in the modern world.”

And so they just don’t even want to deal with them. And I’m like, no, no time out. We have got to go and dig and do hard work in the text. We’ve got to understand those biblical passages. So it is about the Bible, but it is actually about more than the Bible.

So what do I mean by that? We have men and women scholars who have in the conservative evangelical world who have studied these particular texts that seem to prohibit women from being fully inclusive in all different leadership roles in the church. And those men and women have landed on very different interpretations—same conservative evangelical faith, tradition, you know, orthodox theologians, and they disagree.

Kay >> They’re not, it’s not a liberal/conservative thing.

Jackie >> No, it is not someone way over here or someone way over here. I’m talking about people in your own circle. Theologians and scholars in your own circle disagree on the interpretation of those passages that seem to restrict women. So we have that, and we need to deal with that. That’s first and foremost.

But I’ve been a pastor for about 20 years and being a female pastor who happens to be gifted in preaching, I had to learn that it has to do with more than just what your stances on those particular passages.

Kay >> So we don’t want to scare off women from listening to us who might be more conservative than you and their perspective of those passages.

Jackie >> Absolutely.

Kay >> Because we’re not really talking about those passages. We’re talking about the things that are beyond those passages that affect men and women’s relationship in the church.

Jackie >> That’s exactly right. And those were the things I wasn’t aware of. See, I had been to seminary and I had been in the discussion about what does 1 Timothy think, say? And this is what this scholar says and this is what this scholar says. And I had all that. But what I didn’t know was when I actually went to work in a church as the Teaching Pastor to Women.

So I was serving women. I was bumping into walls all over the place that I couldn’t get my hands on of what am I experiencing and why. And it had nothing to do with 1 Timothy 2. And it had nothing to do with 1 Corinthians 14. And so I was like, well, there’s something here that’s beyond just where someone lands with the text.

Kay >> Right.

Jackie >> But I do want to say we need to do our work with the text.

Kay >> I totally agree.

Jackie >> Yeah, I’m not about blowing it off. Right? And so, yes, this is for women, regardless of where they stand on what women can and can’t do in the church. Regardless if you are a Women’s Minister or a women’s leader in any capacity in a conservative evangelical church, you’re going to hit up against walls that you can’t quite identify.

And they are there not because of Scripture. It’s helpful to know what they are and what you are up against and what is actually thus says the Lord and what is cultural and how do we tear down the cultural things that can allow us to serve better together as men and women.

Kay >> And that happens even to volunteers, women who come in and volunteer in the church or are like, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Jackie >> Right. This is for any woman who is serving in ministry in any capacity, whether they get paid or not. Because you and I both know many, many women are serving like crazy in the churches and they aren’t getting paid. So we don’t want to just talk to people who are paid on staff.

Kay >> And that was most of my life. You know, I’ve spent most of my life volunteering in the church.

Jackie >> And you still encountered the very things I’d like to talk about.

Kay >> Absolutely.

Jackie >> Yes. So. So yes. So this is for any woman. And so one of the things that surprised me that was at play that I didn’t know was the issue of power. And I remember meeting with Dr. Scot McKnight and saying to him you know, I’m brand new on staff as this Teaching Pastor, which my role was just to teach women the Bible and to teach other women how to teach the Bible and just pastor women in our church.

It was an awesome position. I loved it. I went to him and I said, “What exactly am I experiencing here? Because there’s this really heightened tension around the issue of men and women. And I don’t understand what’s happening. You know, I wasn’t raised in the church, so I didn’t have a lot of background to all of this.”

And he said to me, “Oh, Jackie, it’s about power.”

And I remember in my young face looking at Dr. McKnight and thinking, “No, it’s not. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I didn’t say it because I knew he was way smarter than me. But years later, I kind of started to understand, “Oh, there is something about power at play here.”

So one of the things that was at play is that we tend to, as Christians, operate under an ethic of scarcity rather than multiplication.

And we see this in Matthew 20 with James and John, right? They want the left in the right-hand seat. And Jesus says to them, “My kingdom is not of this world. This is not going to look like they thought the people in power are going to be removed and I’m going to be in power.”

That’s what they thought.

And so we have this ethic of scarcity even within the church, which is if you go forward and you’re really successful then that means I have to go to the back of the line. Jesus, on the other hand, modeled an ethic of multiplication. He had no problem handing over his power. He didn’t become powerless or have to go to the back of the line to do so.

He hands you your power and you multiply and multiply and multiply.

And so I think power is at play, but the other thing that’s at play also and probably the biggest thing is that we have gender constructs at play. So we have an idea of what a godly woman looks like, right? She stays home, she’s married, she has children, she creates a hospitable house. She is sweet and charming and compassionate.

And then we have male constructs. And what we tell men is they’re to be independent and self-reliant and don’t lose, win, be successful. And if all else, do not be beaten by a girl. Right?

And then you have women who show up in the church, and they don’t fit that ideal. They might be assertive. And for a man, what that does is it creates a sense of insecurity and it can even threaten his masculinity. So an example of that that happened to me was I was in this Bible study, we had about a thousand women coming with people from all over the country asking us how we were doing, what we were doing.

And the men in our church asked if they could come to our Bible study. And I said, “No, you have the wrong hormones and all of that.”

And so they started going to the men’s minister and challenging him about the fact that our ministry was bigger and better than his, and he felt emasculated.

So our success made him less and that is not what we want here. We do not want to be in competition with each other. We want to be in collaboration. Ministry is not competition. It is collaboration.

And so I had to meet with him and say, hey, “I’m with you, brother. You do not need to fear me. I am your ally.”

So I think these are some of the things that are at play that actually you bump into these gender constructs, power situations, and you don’t even know that’s what you’re experiencing.

But if you do, it helps you go, Oh, this is what’s happening. This has nothing to do with 1 Timothy 2.

Kay >> Right. Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Jackie. That really helps us get a little bit behind the curtain. Because we don’t necessarily know what’s going on back there when we run into walls, when we run into disinterest, when we run into being ignored in some ways and our voice is not heard. And so I think that’s very helpful. In our next video, we’re going to talk about the fact that there’s more than just a sex narrative going on as well.

And so I hope you’ll join us. The third video will be about God’s dream team. So if you want to hear how the church should work, as men and women work together, you need to keep going with the other videos.

And if you want to read more about Jackie, her bio is on our website. And all the videos will be there on the resource page under general leadership as well. So thank you, Jackie, so much.

Jackie >> Thanks.

Elizabeth Woodson

Kay Daigle

As Christians in a world that doesn’t follow Christ, it’s essential not to let the culture around us form us. God desires his children to become more and more like Jesus. Too often, however, we fail to be aware of the voices around us that are forming us instead. Elizabeth Woodson shares from her latest book, calling us to resist the culture’s formation rather than the Spirit’s.

Elizabeth not only helps us recognize common ways we are being formed by culture, she also provides the antidote. She suggests specific spiritual practices to implement. Don’t miss this important conversation.

This episode is available on video if you prefer.

00:21 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to our podcast today. I’m very excited to welcome Elizabeth Woodson, who has been with us before.

Welcome, Elizabeth. We’re so glad that you’re here.

Elizabeth >> Thanks for having me, Kay. It’s great to be here.

Kay >> Oh, you’re welcome. Elizabeth is a Bible teacher, an author and a speaker. She has a degree from Dallas Seminary in Christian Education. And she has a new book out, and we’re going to be talking about it today. The name of the book is Habits of Resistance. And the subtitle is Seven Ways You’re Being Formed by Culture and Gospel Practices to Help You Push Back. So right there, hopefully the title will just pull people in, Elizabeth, because I think it’s a great title and it helps us understand what’s in the book.

So it’s Habits of Resistance. What are you suggesting that we need to resist?

Elizabeth >> That is definitely an interesting title. We wanted to be able to draw people in with something that would make them ask that question. And so what we are wanting people to resist, or what I hope for people to resist, is being formed by the culture.

And so it’s the idea that our discipleship is not neutral, right? So being disciples isn’t just being disciples of Jesus. We are disciples of whoever we follow. And unfortunately, I think we’re in a space where maybe some of us have drifted from the path of Jesus more than we like to admit. And the fruit of our lives reflect that we’re being formed by the culture. And so the encouragement through the book is to be aware of that, but also to practice these spiritual disciplines that help us resist that formation current that the culture is trying to keep us in.

Kay >> Well, I certainly see the need for that. What did you see in us in the church that motivated you to write this particular book?

Elizabeth >> Yeah. I saw things pop up in the place where a good portion of us like to hang out, which is social media, the gathering spaces that we have online. And so it’s probably no surprise to the people who are listening that sometimes the comments sections on social media can be a bit of a dumpster fire even between Christians as we are disagreeing about things that we have difference of opinion. But in doing so, we dishonor one another as image bearers.

And also is maybe just the subtle habits of what we’re purchasing! And so I think there are aspects of overconsumption that we’re just being pushed things and maybe our houses are full of too many things. Mine too, Kay, the Amazon boxes are showing up at my door, but the question is what is motivating us to push that buy button? And are we stewards of what God has given us?

And so there’s a couple other things I could list, but it’s really the fruit of how we’re showing up. And so we know spiritual fruit. We see it outlined in Galatians 5— that peace, love, joy, patience, self-control, gentleness, kindness, all of these things. And is that the witness we’re having online or is it something else?

But it’s not just what I saw in other people, Kay, it’s what I saw myself. And so there was a season of my life just experienced really a really person I loved a lot went to be with the Lord. And so that grief led me into a season of busyness and achievement. I’m trying to deal with my pain through just having a busier schedule and not leaning into the comfort that comes from God.

And so it’s even in my personal conversations of God making me aware that— are you dealing with your life in a way that aligns with how I tell you to deal with your life? Or are you doing something else? And all of that is we are doing what the culture puts before us and not necessarily what we see in Scripture.

Kay >> And it happens to all of us doesn’t it from time to time. We just sort of fall away from some of the things that we know are right and we begin being influenced by what’s around us and what we’re listening to and what we’re reading. What we’re consuming. It’s so easy to do. It’s easy to get angry online because everybody else is angry.

Elizabeth >> Yeah.

Kay >> So I think this is a very needed book. I’m thrilled that you wrote it. Each chapter of your book describes something we seek that is better in Christ than what the culture gives us. And we can’t go through all of those chapters in this short podcast. So I would certainly encourage you out there to read the book because there will be many more chapters than those we talk about. But I did want to talk about a couple of them.

And I thought we might really start with the fact that right now many people I talk to are struggling to find peace. They’re telling me that they’re upset all the time, that they’re fearful. And I feel that, too, because our world really appears to be out of control right now. And we sense that, and we don’t know what to do about it. And so it makes us angry or it makes us anxious, fearful of the future. We just don’t know what to do about it.

And your first chapter is about a better peace that Christ gives us. So you describe our efforts to seek peace through control. Would you explain what that looks like?

Elizabeth >> Yeah, I think a lot of us are really resourceful. And so our feelings of that life is a little scattered. We feel the lack of peace within our person? We see a lot of things going around us that we feel like we don’t have the agency to control or to fix. But we still want to try to get rid of the feeling of a lack of peace, to find peace.

And so one of the ways, I think in the West that we believe to be really effective which I don’t think is as effective, is information. And so the more information I have, the more security I have. And so whether that is information through AI it is ChatGPT it is Gemini or Claude or that is just consuming a lot of information on social media. Studies show that our ability to be empathetic has decreased because we just see so many things that there’s a limitation to how much we can consume as humans.

And I think that we are reaching and exceeding that. But we felt like as long as I have the information, maybe I can create a plan, or maybe this information gives me a prediction of what might come in the future.

And because I have that knowledge, then I feel secure and safe. And that’s where we try to get peace from. But the thing is, sometimes the information we get isn’t true. It isn’t the full picture. It can change. There are limitations to that. What the Scriptures point us towards is where we place our hope is—not the information but wisdom.

And there’s only one for whom the Christian wisdom comes from, and that is Jesus. But it’s just so tempting because we have all of this access around us and we’re being told the more you have, the better it will be. You have the ability to control your situation, trust in yourself, and we are just limited. There’s only so much we can do. And eventually we kind of hit the wall in our capacity to try to hold all the plates to keep them spinning and the plates start to fall.

And what that points us back to is, oh, I need to be connected and abide in the one who has in some sense an unlimited wingspan that he can capture and control all things. And it is by being connected to him that I’m able to make it not just what I can grab or reach for on my own.

Kay >> And that’s just so true. I mean, I feel like the more I consume of social media or something like that, it really doesn’t help me control anything and it doesn’t give me peace, that’s for sure. It just makes me more anxious, actually.

You go into the idea here of something that’s going on in our culture manifesting. And I’d never really heard of this until I read your book, and I really appreciated it.

Would you talk about that? What does that mean? What does the word manifest mean? And then what is that looking like in our culture?

Elizabeth >> Yeah, manifest is kind of a word that I believe has been popularized in the recent past few years, maybe past 20 years or so. But to me it’s a reinvention of the power of positive thinking. And so which would be familiar to many of your listeners. And so for me that is I can control what’s happening in my life just by putting in some people’s language, good energy out into the universe, right?

So I’m going to create a plan. I’m going to think positively. I’m going to surround myself with things that will help me get to said plan. And when it happens then what I will say is, Oh, I’ve manifested this.

And the reality is there’s nothing wrong, Kay, with creating a plan. There’s nothing wrong with being intentional about speaking the things that are true and right and beautiful about the world and about life.

I would not be surprised if someone who has a more positive disposition tends to have more successful things happen than someone who has a negative disposition. But the thing is, we are not fully in control of what happens. And so when people say that they manifested things, what I share in the book is they say,” I manifested this successful business”, but what they leave out is the advantages that they might have had because of their network or because of the wealth that they brought in before they quit their nine to five.

It gives you this belief that all you need to do is work hard, that good things come to those who work hard. And with the Christian knows is that’s just not the full truth, that the things that come to us are by grace and by God’s blessing. And so it doesn’t mean we don’t plan. It doesn’t mean we don’t speak what’s true to ourselves.

But what it does mean is anything that comes our way is ultimately not because we just worked hard. It’s because of the grace of God. And so I think that manifesting gives people a false sense of control when in reality it’s still not enough to find the peace that they’re hoping for.

Kay >> I certainly agree with that, and I’m happy to know about this manifesting thing. I guess maybe I had just never heard that terminology to the positive thinking, or if I just think about it enough, I will succeed. If I think well enough of myself, you know, I can do this, that kind of thing.

How does God’s way counter that and provide a better peace for people?

Elizabeth >> Yeah, I think part of it is you do have these New Age spiritual things that people are turning to. And so again, it’s the resourcefulness it could be manifesting. It’s also crystals that I have seen people use. And sometimes it feels to a younger generation because this tangible thing gives me power.

I think I want to be compassionate in the book of what gap people are trying to fill by. And so people long to have connection with something greater than themselves, to be able to find this desire again, whether it’s manifesting or some other new a spiritual reality. The universe, in the words of one of my friends, does not have ears. It cannot hear you, but we know one who does. And the Scriptures point to that Jesus cares, and he is the one that helps us.

And so I think about Jesus in the boat with the disciples. And there is a storm that is raging all around them and he is asleep, and they are losing their minds. They wake him up and he calms the winds and the waves. And they are quickly reminded that the reason he is living in peace is because he is in full control of all things, even the things that we don’t think about.

So the Scriptures keep bringing us back. I think of Jesus’ words in John 15 “to abide.” That unless we abide in him (He is the vine; we are the branches), we can’t do anything. And so, the one who does have the ability to change my situation. To do the miracle. To what I like to say open doors that don’t have handles on the outside. Right? It’s the opportunity or connection that you couldn’t even have dreamed of and the Lord just brings your way. That’s because he controls all things. So come back to him, right?

Whatever we do that he is a starting place. He is who we root ourselves in. And it is from his wisdom and guidance that we are able to move forward. It’s not just hard work, it’s the grace of God. Doesn’t mean we don’t work hard, but that our hope is ultimately in what he can gain for us and not what we can do for ourselves.

Kay >> Right. Well, in each chapter at the end of each chapter, you suggest a spiritual habit that will help us form resistance to those ways of the world that are tugging at us constantly. What is the habit of resistance that brings peace?

Elizabeth >> The habit of resistance that brings peace is prayer. And what’s interesting is the habits that I present in the book aren’t anything new. They’re things that Christians have been doing for centuries. I think it’s because they knew the formative power of them. And prayer reminds us of many things, but one—that we’re limited and God is limitless. I think about the words that Jesus speaks in Matthew 6, in the Lord’s Prayer, of “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”

It’s He whom we start with, he is the one that gives us our daily bread. He is the one that protects us from temptation. He is the one that helps us forgive one another so that we might receive his forgiveness but it is prayer and that the Holy Spirit shows up and something dynamic happens. And so it’s staying tethered to God through that consistent conversation.

That reminds us of the bigness of our God and what we have access to through him.

Kay >> Yeah, I love that. Well, the next one of your topics that I wanted to talk about, I feel like Christians are commonly falling into this problem of their search for identity. And they are really often out there finding their identity in just the wrong things you know. So what are some common identities that you feel like we cling to even as believers?

Elizabeth >> Yeah. I think when it comes to identity, where we find our value and worth, sense of significance from, it’s not that can just be what we produce. And so it is whether it’s the business, it is being an influencer online and maybe it’s not what you produce, it’s what your children produce or what your husband produces. It’s our job, it’s our careers, it’s our education.

And so we are just big achievers and we find a lot of value and significance in what we’re able to achieve. And the way you can know is if you find your value in something is thinking about what would happen if it was taken away. If you no longer had that job, if your kids were no longer in the picture perfect and making every mark that made you say, oh, my kids are at the top of the class or they’re the top athlete, how would things go, then?

And we start to see how I would feel like I don’t have as much to contribute or as valuable to this community. Or maybe I feel like I’m not treated as well. But I think productivity and achievement is a big one.

I think for us as Christians, it’s also in our appearance. I think this is one for women that women constantly struggle with, have struggled with for a generation. And so the way we look and the temptations around whether it is body image is weight and size. It is conversations about plastic surgery all of that. What the images we see placed before us of people again on social media, who our culture would consider beautiful.

And so how we may or may not measure up against that. We feel this pressure to whether it is the face creams, it is the hair treatments, it’s the clothes we buy. Again, some of the stuff is really subtle. But what we see as, oh, those people look really happy and I want to be happy too. And so I’m going to do what they do.

And we find ourselves maybe in a space of trying to achieve something through our appearance that maybe is not lining up with what we claim to believe as Christians. So kind of appearance and achievement are two I think that pop up at the top of the list, but there’s definitely other ones that are included in there too.

Kay >> Right? Where should our identity be found.

Elizabeth >> Our identity is found in the fact that we are made in the image of God. And so I still marvel at this, Kay, that God in his creation of humans, created us in such a way that we represent him, that people get to understand what he is like simply by interacting with us. Now, we know our ability to do this is made more difficult by sin. Jesus shows us how to image Christ perfectly, but that we have inherent dignity and worth simply because we are made in the image of God.

And it is something we did not give ourselves. And so therefore it’s not something that we can take away the things with the places we find value in our world. Are things we have to earn. And so when we stop earning them that, we start to see things taken away our place, again our sense of significance of self-worth.

But the Lord never does that to us. And so I think there’s a lot of beauty in how we’ve been created and how that should give us confidence, regardless of whether we’re meeting the mark of whatever affinity group that we want to belong to.

Kay >> Yeah.

So what habit of resistance should we follow in order to counter these false identities?

Elizabeth >> Yeah, for this one, I think it was an interesting one for me to be able to include, but it is the church it is being a part of the community of God. And the language that we use to talk about Christians in the New Testament is family.

And so what would it be like? And I think especially for our kids, as they think about belonging and you think about bullying, you think about identity issues among our children.

What would it be like if they showed up to youth group and they showed up and had friends who cared for them? They had leaders who were their big sister and big brothers in Christ? And regardless of whatever is happening in the world around them, when they came to this space, they in some sense are coming home.

And so I think that is magnified for us as adults that when we walk through that door, that we agree to that, that we are welcome, that we find a place of “Man, these are my people and they know me and when life is going well, they’re going to love me.”

And when I’m a little struggling, they’re going to love me too, because they are mirroring the love that we receive from Christ. And so I think there’s a powerful opportunity for us when it comes to the church of the belonging we can offer people that contrast to the conditional belonging that’s offered by the world.

Kay >> And that doesn’t work if you’re just watching television.

Elizabeth >> Yes.

Kay >> Or you have it on your computer streaming your church services. It requires actually being present with people, doesn’t it?

Elizabeth >> It does. Present, showing up, serving, making that step to join the small group and to press through when it gets a little difficult, messy or awkward, right? Because we’re imperfect humans trying to live out what we see in Scripture together. But it is that the screen limits what we’re able to do as embodied humans, and that we would show up together and see the beauty that comes from just being in the same place with one another.

Kay >> Yeah. Yeah, it really does. Well, the third topic I’d like for you to talk about is the idea of a better justice in Christ. What is the culture teaching us about justice? What ideas are we falling for?

Elizabeth >> Yeah, I think the big one is cancel culture. And so we just get rid of people. And if people do not meet our expectations. I will say from the front, some there are many times that relationships get really complicated in ways that are painful and messy.

And what I believe is a culture is not encouraging us to lean in. It’s not encouraging us to forgive. It’s not encouraging us to have a conversation. It is encouraging you to block someone and move on with your life. And that’s just not the way of the gospel.

We have received grace from the Lord that we do not deserve that he has forgiven us of things that have eternal consequence and so that should motivate us to lean in to the space of forgiveness and reconciliation for our relationships here on Earth.

And so in the book, I wanted to lean into sometimes we can look at the big things that are happening in our world, and those tend to be other people’s problems because other people have the agency to fix them. But we have the agency to fix our relationship with our neighbor. For some of us, it is our literal neighbor that we are not getting along with, but it is our relationships in the church, relationships in our family, our friends.

And instead of cutting people off, protecting our peace, marking them as toxic and moving away or ghost or quiet-quitting our relationships, we just start quietly showing up less that we’ll be courageous enough to lean in again in the way that Jesus has modeled in Matthew 18. And have those difficult conversations and movements forward towards forgiveness and reconciliation.

Kay >> Those are hard things to do. But if we want to be like Jesus, everything you just described is exactly what he was.

Elizabeth >> Yeah.

Kay >> What he is, you know.

So what habit of resistance helps us to counter those messages about, you know, shutting people off and tearing up relationships and all those kinds of things.

Elizabeth >> Yeah. The habit, I think is really powerful is the habit of confession. And so both to God and to trusted community that we confess the moments in which we sin, the moments in which we need grace and receive the forgiveness of the people around us if it is a sin that we have done against them and received the forgiveness of God.

And so I think what that does is that remind us we need grace. That reminds us afresh that we are broken people and we need people to extend to us grace. Paul Tripp, in several of his books I found, has this really powerful quote about people who understand how much they need grace are people who dish it out a lot to others, and it just is an acquaintance of it.

And so as kind of this evangelical Baptist space I live in, sometimes confession is something that is connected to the traditions of our high church brothers and sisters. But I think it’s something that we need to recapture because we need to be reminded of how much we receive from God and therefore what we are supposed to dish out to other people.

And again, it does not mean there are not consequences. It does not mean boundaries are not wise. But what it does mean is that maybe we have a little bit more spiritual energy of sorts to lean into those hard places because we remember how much God is leaning for us too.

Kay >> Yes. And I totally agree this and I just— many churches have emphasized that you’re already forgiven and have gotten away from suggesting that you really need to look inside and actually repent and confess these things before the Lord. So, you know, I think this takes a little work because we’re out of the habit of doing that.

The church that I’m in now, we do have corporate prayer from the front. And there’s always some confession in there. And I just appreciate that a whole lot. I think it really makes a difference because you’re hearing it at least once a week. You’re hearing that you need to confess before the Lord.

Elizabeth >> Yeah.

Kay >> Lean on his grace.

Well, there’s so many other good chapters here, Elizabeth. So I just encourage all of you out there to buy her book. And where can they buy your book? You said something about Amazon earlier.

Elizabeth >> It’s available on Amazon. It’s also available on Lifeway.com. And so those are the two main places I encourage people to go.

Kay >> Well, thank you so much for being part of our conversation today.

And for those of you out there, we do have other resources to help us live in a godly way on BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. And I just encourage you to go to our website. Go to the pulldown menu at the top under Resources and go down to Godly Living. You can watch or listen to via podcast a number of resources that we have that will help you in some of these areas. We talk about prayer a lot in there. Just other ways to live the way that God wants us to live.

So thank you, Elizabeth. I think you have hit on something that we need right now in our culture. And I appreciate your spending the time to write the book and to talk to us about it.

Elizabeth >> Definitely. So enjoyed our conversation.

Kay >> Okay. And for all of you out there, we’ll hope to see you again soon.

Laura Barringer

Sadly, we’ve recognized over the past decade or so that healthy churches for women are not as prevalent as we’d like to believe. Too often such churches have abused, dismissed and devalued women who have much to give them. In this episode, Laura Barringer, co-author of The Church of Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing, joins Dr. Kelley Mathews to discuss what healthy churches for women looks like and how to spot them.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introduction of Laura Barringer and A Church called TOV, the book she wrote with her father, Dr. Scot McNight.

Kelley >> Welcome to Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I am Kelley Mathews and I am here today with Laura Barringer. She is the coauthor with her father, Scott McKnight, of several books. But today we’re going to talk about tov, A Church Called Tov. I’m going to give it a little bit of publicity right here. So welcome, Laura. Thank you for taking your time with us today.

Laura >> Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be with you. I’m grateful to be here and to meet you and hear a little bit more, too, about your ministry for women.

Kelley >> Oh, yes. This is you’ll hear more about it as we go along. But we do a lot of these interviews, really, and just provide resources for support. I would say primarily women leaders in the church. But obviously when they’re online, anybody can access them.

So we will hopefully add this resource for looking at churches and what they can do and why they can do—make take real, tangible steps towards being safe and healthy churches, particularly for women. And so both of your books, the other one is called Pivot, but where and that’s a newer one, but we’re going to stick with the older one.

And it was very foundational, I think, to the conversation over the last, what, seven, eight years, maybe? I forgot exactly when it came out.

Laura >> 2020. The fall of 2020.

Kelley >> Only five. Oh, wow. OK.

Laura >> Yeah.

Kelley >> Yeah. Well, that’s you know, Covid does a lot to make time disappear, I think.

Laura >> It makes everything it makes everything fuzzy.

Kelley >> Oh, goodness. Well, why did you partner with your father? I mean, we if anyone doesn’t know Dr. McKnight is a New Testament scholar and writer and professor. And why did you guys partner up to write this book?

Laura >> I wanted him to write the book. So that was the original plan. The book started as a personal story for us. In 2018, in March of 2018, a story broke up here. I live just outside of Chicago. The Chicago Tribune is the major newspaper here in the city. And it was a story about our former church, Willow Creek, our former pastor, Bill Hybels. It was a story about accusations, sexual accusations made against him by a number of women, most of whom somebody in our family knew.

And it was a very disorienting, I speak of it now, but at the time it was very disorienting. It was disorienting because the church was saying the women were lying and the women were saying the church was lying. And I naively had not been you know, just I naively thought at the time, well, churches would tell the truth, of course.

And it really sent my head spinning. It sent our heads spinning. And my dad wrote a series of blog posts specifically about Willow that kind of we call kind of white Christian viral at the time. He just called them to truth telling, to resisting the false narratives, to repentance, to restoration with those they had wounded.

We didn’t want to write just like an exposé. There’s a little bit of that in A Church Called Tov. But we really wanted to write a redemptive story that would draw people to the goodness of who God is and his vision for his people and his church. And so somehow along the way, I got looped into helping him.

Kelley >> That tracks with what I know.

Laura >> That was not the plan at first. The plan, I was like, you write it. I am not a writer. You know, I have other things. I have a full time job of my own. But that’s how it all started. It was really the story of Willow Creek, which I quickly learned is far beyond the city. The topic we wrote about is extends far beyond the city of Chicago, beyond Illinois, beyond the United States. It’s a global call to action.

Kelley >> Yes. Yes. And I you know, I read through the book and you kind of open with story of how that situation kick-started this whole process. But what y’all put together is more of a vision for what the church is supposed to be. Now, you titled it A Church Called Tov. Tell us what that word means, you’ve already kind of hinted at it.

Laura >> Initially, the title was turned down by the publisher. They said, “Oh, we don’t use Hebrew words in our titles.” And my dad, who has written, who is a prolific writer, was like, “Oh, no, well, that’s the title. So, OK, you like me, it’ll catch on.” And it did. He was right.

Tov is the Hebrew word for goodness.

And I have learned through my father and through the Bible Project, which I watch constantly and listen to constantly, that it is we should think of tov, goodness, as one of the major moral categories of our Bible. That it really should shape our entire lives as followers of Christ, because God himself is, his being is tov.

Everything he made everything he will make is tov. In fact, if you open your book to the first page of Genesis, you’ll find tov there seven times. God saw all that he had made, and it was very tov. This little dog sleeping behind me, tov. And then I’ve learned that that little word tov follows more than 700 times in the Old and New Testament. Jesus is our tov shepherd. I can keep going on and on. You get the idea that it is one of the Bible’s major moral categories, and it is how tov should shape our entire lives—at home, at work, everywhere we go as followers of Christ.

Kelley >> When I was in college, I was just really getting started in the Bible Church. And so I remember being in you know, Sunday School class, and a visiting teacher came. She had just experienced her house burning down. And so we were kind of all talking about that. And her lesson this I mean, I don’t remember a whole lot of all those lessons, right?

But this one thing sticks with me of how she held up her hands like a frame and said everything has to come through the goodness of God. So the goodness of God frames everything that happens to us. So same idea, I think, of knowing and trusting of who God is. And then we can look at life knowing he’s not out to get me. He’s not evil. He’s not trying to hurt me, all those things, because he is good.

And I think as what you guys put through this book is that the church, we are his agent, right? We are his representatives in the world, and we are to reflect his goodness, but we don’t always.

So what I want to kind of walk through here is, of course, no church is perfect, but some churches are actually harmful or have an ethos, you know, this culture of toxicity.

Can you give me some clues? Like if I walked into a new church, which I have done over the last year when I moved to go church hunting because we moved away from our former home area, what kind of clues ought a woman look for or anybody as far as is this a good church, a safe church?

Laura >> That’s a really good question. And I like that because it goes to the heart of tov culture.

Speaking on the topic of women today, when we write about a goodness, a tov or a goodness-shaped church, one that empowers women, we are talking about something deeper than just including them. Right? It’s not just about including women. It’s about it’s about forming a culture that reflects God’s goodness. One that restores dignity and nurtures gifts and will resist a system of harm or like a hierarchy of some sort.

So what we’re looking for, like red flags, if you will, are the opposite of that. And I think a lot of people, a lot of men and women are asking that question right now, like what are the signs of toxicity in church culture? And I could go on for a long time. I’ll mention just a few.

I think one big red flag is when you think about leadership and you think about power dynamics. How are decisions made? Are decisions flowing down from like one powerful man, one powerful person? Or do they come through like a shared discernment, shared process of a leadership team that includes women? Like are female voices represented in the church?

Or a red flag for me would be that women are absent. They’re absent from decision-making tables, they’re absent from teaching platforms, they’re absent from elder boards. I don’t like when women are, like tokenized, like they’re present, but they’re valued like for the image of them being there not necessarily for their influence.

Something that I appreciate so deeply about the church that my husband and I attend now is that women who have gifts, women who have gifts of teaching, theology, scholarship, leadership— those gifts are like encouraged, they’re nurtured, they’re recognized.

It’s not just like, oh, this is the token thing. And we’ll say that we have a woman doing this. But no, like it’s very deeply valued.

Those are just to name a few. I could keep going.

Kelley>> Just a few. Oh, I’m sure that’s so. Yeah. Because you think of authority and it’s important to know where God derives from and what’s the process within a church. Because, you know, from the leadership, it flows downhill so to speak.

Let’s talk about some of the elements that you guys write about of tov culture. Now you have seven and we’re just going to camp out, I think, on maybe one or two because we could, again, all give so much fodder for thought. But there’s plenty of illustration.

Compassion and empathy. I think you list them out separately. We’re going to just kind of combine them because empathy is sort of the feeling and compassion is the way it’s worked out. What do you think of the recent trend that, you know, minimizes or kind of even tries to reject the idea of empathy?

Laura >> I know I’ve been watching I’ve been watching the trend. I first of all, for those who are fighting the use of empathy or the word empathy, I’m catching a lot of what’s behind it. And it feels like anxiety. It feels like fear.

I can get into that more, but I think it’s important to define like, how are you defining empathy? Are you identifying it as like blurring the line between right and wrong?

Like, exactly how are you? Are you defining it as overly sentimental? Like, I think when those who are resisting the word, I would really like to know what is it to you?

Kelley >> So and that feels like, yeah, like nobody really wants to come right out with the definition. They just use the word to feed their own agenda. That’s my impression.

Laura >> Because I think if you really look at what empathy is, how could you advocate for resisting it? Look at Jesus, look at the gospel. He embodies that empathy. So I think that’s that’s my first comment. Last question and I don’t have the answer, but I really would like to know how empathy is defined by some that are resisting it.

Like I said, I feel like I’m catching a lot of fear behind the comments, behind the tone. I think there’s the fear of like moral boundaries slipping or it’s become like it’s being used as like a progressive agenda, sort of manipulative, like empathy is a woke narrative.

That, you know, they say, oh, yeah, Christians should act compassionately but not necessarily feel empathetic.

And so it’s become so politicized. And I take issue with that, to be honest. I take issue with it because here’s why. Because look at Jesus. Look at Scripture. The Gospels are full of stories of Jesus not only caring about people, but stopping and thinking of —when he was on the road to Jerusalem and he was coming out of Jericho and there’s the blind and deaf man yelling, “Son of David, have mercy on us, have mercy on us.” And the crowd is telling him, telling those men, “be quiet like hush.” Like the message I imagine they would have received, “You are not important enough to distract this man from his mission.” You know?

And what does he do? He stops, ask, turns, asks for these men to be brought to him and says, “What? What do you want?”

And they say, “We want to see.” And he heals them. And I think that’s like empathy embodied is like—not just the healing. Of course, that’s like so beautifully compassionate, but it’s the stopping them and seeing them and so.

Kelley >> Being seen.

Laura >> Yeah. And when I see this debate in the news, I’m thinking, I think we’ve really lost like what empathy is, right? Our motivations are from ministry, from care, from sacrifice. And I just I’d take issue with it being a politicized term.

It helps that Jesus being our tov Shepherd, it helps us see the experiences of those who are marginalized, those who are suffering, those who have been ignored. And I think rejecting empathy, resisting empathy is dangerous because it could really to blindspots like it can make us less merciful. Where is our Christian witness if we don’t have empathy?

Kelley >> Preach to the choir. That’s exactly right. So I was thinking, you know, the Gospels come right out and say Jesus felt compassion, right? Like it’s right in black and white—or red, whatever letters you like.

So if that is the heart of Jesus, which I totally agree as a church leadership, if you’re talking to someone who’s on staff, whether they’re pastor, associate women director, like men and women, but they’re in leadership, are there any steps that you would recommend that they take to better ensure you were talking about somebody needing to be seen and heard, valued like the blind men?

But the women often feel invisible or unheard or just ignored. They’re taken for granted because they aren’t men and they’re not in leadership. And so we’re talking complementarian churches, but also it can that can happen in any church, whatever label they give themselves. And again, I’m not trying to paint every church this way, but we know that it does happen.

What would you tell leadership to do to help them start to turn the ship, so to speak, so that they can begin to have better healthier practices when it comes to valuing and seeing women.

Laura >> That’s a really good question, a thoroughly important question. The first thing that comes to mind for me is listening. Think of listening as like an offering of discipleship. Let women in your congregation share how they have been included or excluded. Encourage pastors to listen, to practice empathy, not just defensiveness.

Sit with those—sit with people who are uncomfortable without trying to rush to defend your system or theology, be quick to listen and really think about your teaching theories. Think about the words that come from the pulpit. Are women can women help shape the applications of a sermon? How does this text sound from a woman’s perspective?

Like, I think if we avoid men is the leader/women is the helper. Instead of using that as our framework, like let’s flip the script. I shouldn’t even say flip it because I believe this is what Jesus taught. But like if we are co-laborers in Christ, what does that look like? What does that sound like in a church?

But women have to feel safe to be honest and I think that start with being good listeners without being defensive and practicing empathy and being willing to hear where women have felt unsafe and excluded.

Kelley >> Mm hmm. That’s great. Where have they felt unsafe and excluded? Knowing and hearing the specifics, and that might change from church to church. I know part of what inspired your book was the lies about infidelity and spiritual abuse from a pastoral leader, which honestly, it was in the middle of the MeToo and ChurchToo movement, right?

Well, it may have been at the beginning, but I don’t exactly remember the timeline. But, you know, in the late 20-teens became the trend where women were finally speaking out en masse about the fact that they had experienced some kind of sexual trauma or abuse or discrimination, and they were using the hashtag MeToo. Well, it jumped into the church because women thought, “You know what, this happened to me because a pastor did this to me or some kind of spiritual leader did.”

And so we started to see some movement towards reform and education and maybe even apology with varying levels of success. I would probably venture to say it has not really succeeded and, you know, really changing a lot, but at least the awareness is greater.

So as a church leader, when it comes to pastoral, being a safe pastor—maybe that’s not the right term, I don’t know. But what would you say about making church safe for women in that specific realm? Because that’s kind of a physical safety, but also a spiritual sense of well-being that I can trust these leaders not to take advantage of me. And as leaders, let’s just talk to the leader here.

What can we do as leaders if we are on staff of the church as many of our viewers are to begin or further becoming a healthy leader in that respect? Does that make sense?

Laura >> Yes, when so the first thing that comes to mind is women are watching what they what we watch, right when harm happens and I’m not going to say if it happens, but when it happens, you know what? How does the church how does the leadership respond?

I come from a trauma-informed background, so if I’m a little biased, that’s why. But the other part is, is the protection of the wounded, what is prioritized or is it the protection of the reputation of the church or the leader. My dad always says, like when an event happens, when trauma or when something comes to light, when a scandal arises you can always tell who the church is and who the leaders are by their response.

And there were a lot of really terrible ones, Willow Creek being one of them. There are some tov examples, and I did write about one of them in the book but we can the hope is that we can learn from the example of those that that we did not do well, that did not do well.

We hear a lot, “Well, that wasn’t our intention. We didn’t intend to do that.”

And intention doesn’t matter. Right? Goodwill isn’t enough. What we need is a goodness culture that will build a system and that representation, like women, has a channel for feedback where they can speak candidly and they feel safe doing that about policies or like or, “Hey, this sermon really didn’t settle well with me.”

And they don’t fear, like, blowback or a reprimand for speaking up. I talked about listening. I go back to that again. Like think of it like you’re just like discipleship to listen and know the experiences of women in your congregation. Offer care and counseling to be led, or at least or co-led by women.

Kelley >> I think it’s critical. Yeah.

Laura >> You know, like, like let them let our let our partnership in the church be mutual, male and female. We are designed to co-rule, to co-exist, to co-create. So I think reframing the question from like—can women lead as a woman allowed to do this? Like, let’s just take that off the table and replace it with how? How can we lead together?

I feel like a tov church would understand that. That God’s spirit is not just poured out on men. It’s poured out on women, too.

And like I said, I mentioned the church where we go to right now. And it doesn’t it really doesn’t. It was such a relief to walk into this church and see women preaching, women leading alongside men. And it’s just not even a thing. Like it just is what it is because we are made in the image of God together. And I believe you have it. You know, the pastor will say, like, “I really believe you have a teaching gift. I want to help develop that in you.”

Whether it’s a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter. It was such a relief that I thought I feel like this is the body. This is the body where all of us are allowed to use and develop the gifts that God has given us.

Kelley >> That’s sounds divine, actually. And pun sort of intended. Yeah. Kingdom working the way it’s supposed to work is a wonderful experience.

Actually, I was going to kind of walk you through some of the elements of a tov church, but you kind of blew right through them. You just name them all, like, you know, knowing the names of stories and stories of women nurturing them as agents of God’s work in the world, and then intentionally promoting their contributions in the life of the church.

So those are just a few characteristics of a church that promotes goodness, that reflects God’s goodness in the lives of women—which also benefits men. So this isn’t just to make the ladies feel better. This is to actually reflect the purpose of God in his local church body.

Is there anything you want to throw in there that I haven’t asked? I know we could go on to a whole different topic, but this is probably long enough and focused enough.

Laura >> Yeah.

Kelley >> You have so much in this book, so. Yeah. Any final thoughts?

Laura >> No, I just want to reiterate again, I feel like it’s so much more than just including women. It’s not just about including them, including them on a committee, including them to sit at the table. It’s about seeing them as an equal partner, as seeing them as they have gifts, too.

As you know, women have been preaching and pastoring since A.D. 1. You know, like leadership is collaborative and women are welcomed and they are seen as having equal value as men. That gifts and callings are not defined or assigned by gender, but they are assigned and defined by the spirit who gracefully gives them.

So I guess that’s what I feel is most important on my heart today is it’s so much more than just including. It’s about seeing and developing and giving women the freedom to use the gifts that God has given them.

Kelley >> Yes. Yeah, that’s a wholehearted amen there. It’s almost when a church utilizes both men and women that they become a whole body. They aren’t just, you know, they haven’t cut their arm off because they refuse to use it. That sort of imagery. And so when women are sidelined because of theological differences, that’s what ends up happening.

And I would also say, I don’t know who amongst our viewers hails from a complementarian background versus an egalitarian theology. But even in a complementarian world, there are ways to affirm and empower women to use the gifts that God has given them, like you were just saying. And there is always room for improvement in how women are not just included, but considered essential to the life of the church.

So I highly recommend A Church Called Tov. There’s so much more in here but I just feel like we as an American church are in a bit of a crisis at the moment. Some of it stems from—well, there’s a lot of things it stems from, I think, but the treatment of women is part of the it’s become, I don’t know, not a consequence, but the fallout maybe, of core theology. So I want to just thank you for writing the book, for letting your dad talk you into it.

And obviously you all did well enough together, you wrote a second one together. So,

Laura >> Yeah.

Kelley >> I need to pick up Pivot. I believe I have it on e-book waiting for me. Now that my school is over, I have much more time to read things I want to read. Yeah, I look forward to that.

So thank you for your time. Yes, looking forward to reading that and appreciate your time with us today.

I want to point our viewers and listeners to some of the other resources on the BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org site. We have produced videos that talk about caring for women which has been a major topic today of how churches can care for women.

If you go to our Resources page, you will see the Caring Well page, and it has videos such as Recognizing Rape Culture, Caring for Women Who Struggle with Porn, and Sexual Abuse in the Church, which was an interview that I did with Mary DeMuth who is well versed in church hurt sorts of topics.

So those are just a few of the resources that we have to help leaders just learn something new to help minister with good, solid advice and insight from other people who are doing good work with them. So I encourage you to turn to that and let us know your thoughts. And we hope that it blesses you.

Dr. Sandra Glahn

What does ancient Christian art created in a culture of orality reveal about women in the early church?

Dr. Sandra Glahn of Dallas Seminary joins Sharifa Stevens of Beyond Ordinary Women in this conversation about the visual record of women in the early church. In a time when many people were illiterate, the church used visual images to teach the people and honor those who were heroes of the faith. By studying the art of the Byzantine Era, we are able to learn more about the church of that day. The Visual Museum of Women in Christianity has created a place for us to see many of these images today and provide free access to downloadable pictures of these pieces of art.

You will find this conversation both educational and a delight as you hear the amazing stories of prominent women in the early church.

Sharifa Stevens

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introductions

Sharifa >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. I am your host for today, Sharifa Stevens, and I would like to introduce you to someone whom I admire.

Dr. Sandra Glahn is a journalist and also the author, coauthor or editor of more than 20 books. She serves as Professor of Media Arts and Worship at Dallas Theological Seminary. You can discover more about Dr. Glahn on our website, BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org.

Dr. Glahn’s most recent endeavor is the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity which we’re going to learn more about today. Welcome, Dr. Glahn.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you so much. What a pleasure to see you.

Sharifa >> Well, it’s a pleasure to see you always.

I wanted to just jump in to questions about the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity because I’m a newbie to this subject, and I’m sure there would be plenty of people in the audience who are intrigued and want to know more. So let’s get started.

Dr. Glahn >> Let’s do it.

Sharifa >> How would you describe the museum to someone encountering it for the first time?

Dr. Glahn >> It’s a place to get free high quality photos of women and the history of the church, particularly the early church and Byzantine eras. Maybe in 4.0 we’ll be looking at every century of the church, but really it’s focused much more on women in the early church.

And it’s a resource with free downloads where you don’t have to ask permission. You don’t have to say where you got it. Everything is a work for hire with photographers so that women are much more easy, much more easily accessed if you want to include visuals with a presentation. What we found, well, there’s probably more than you need it just for a short explanation, but

Sharifa >> no.

Dr. Glahn >> we found that when we were looking to add women to PowerPoints and talks and people were looking for them for sermons, they’re hidden behind paywalls. The art was paywalled or it was clipart.

So it was one extreme or the other, the really high quality stuff. You know, it was illegal. If it was if it was even there. And so this is an effort to make it super accessible.

Sharifa >> When you say early church, just for those of us who might not have a clear timeline of the Byzantine era, what are the years that we’re talking about?

Dr. Glahn >> So early church, of course, begins with actually with the women of the Gospels. Well, right after Pentecost, but we’re including some women in the Bible as well. For example, there’s a whole section of Jesus’ mother. But really, then we’re probably looking through maybe the first through seventh, eighth, ninth centuries before you get into full on medieval, which, you know, there are actually set years, you know, but roughly the first 500 years of the church and then maybe a little beyond.

Sharifa >> Okay. Thank you.

So what are some examples of women who have been overlooked in church history, but whom you found in the visual record? And why do you think women’s contributions to Christian history have been so consistently overlooked or under-visualized?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. Well, first of all, I’m in the Protestant tradition. This this site is, of course, for anyone. But one thing that we notice in church history, especially in the Protestant tradition, is that because Protestants don’t believe in sainthood, they believe the by the New Testament does teach that every believer in Christ is a saint. So we Protestants, you know, took that hyper- literally and got rid of all mention of saints, except the ones of the good parties.

You know, we kept Saint Nicholas. We kept we kept, say, Valentine, we kept Saint Patrick. We could name their feast days but it’s true in general.

Sharifa >> St. Patrick

Dr. Glahn >> Exactly. But the church in the past had a feast day is the day that you graduate to heaven. So it’s not your birthday. It’s the day that you die. And many times, like Martin Luther in, you know, the 1500s he’s born in the late 1400s he’s named Martin because his baptism day, which is going to be in infancy, is the feast of Martin of Tours.

So you’re often named for the saint whose day you’re born on. And so people would know immediately, oh, you’re born in April. You’re born in September. By your name.

But what that meant was when we quit talking about the Saints, we lost the biographies. And so instead of learning, oh, today is the feast of Saint Thekla. Today is the feast day of Saint Putensiana or Praxedes or Priscilla or Agnes.

We lost them completely. And but the visual record has them. And what I mean by the visual record is anything in frescoes, in the mosaics, in the statues.

Actually, something else that we are tracing is even church names. The name Thekla, the church in Milan today the big, beautiful Duomo Cathedral in Milan is built on top of the Church of Thekla, which for more than a thousand years bore the name of a woman.

You have the same thing in Florence, which is built on top of the foundations of the church for Saint Reparata. And this is a name, right, that I’d never heard of but this is a name that is known to everyone in Florence. And for again, more than a thousand years, the church bears her name. So just if you look at the architecture of the early church, you’re going to find multiple women’s names.

If you go to Venice 1.0, before they move to the current island, because the island they were on, which is Torcello was sinking. So they had to go to an island they thought was not sinking. The Church of Santa Fosca is still there, still operating from the six or seven hundreds. And again, Fosca is not a name that most Protestants at least know. And she’s an early martyr.

Sharifa >> Okay. So it sounds like Protestants in our zeal for sola scriptura kind of left behind some of our, not kind of, we left behind some of our history

Dr. Glahn >> Exactly right.

Sharifa >> in that pursuit. So your visual record is also kind of a reclamation of

Dr. Glahn >> It is completely a reclamation of lost history.

If you look at some of the Catholic liturgy, these Agnus, all of these names are said every week in the high Holy Communion. So there are at least names that are known in the Catholic tradition because—and the Orthodox with a capital O, in these traditions, because there’s an acknowledgment of saints, they know whose feast day it is today.

And you have nuns as well. So even though there are not women in the priesthood. There are not women officiating at communion. You still have a pretty hefty visual, both living and dead tradition of women in the church.

We have no parallel to nuns in the Protestant church. And then we got rid of the names of the Saints. And so we really, we very often hear and I still hear it all the time. We hear a narrative that it really started with Betty Friedan and the second wave feminists. And up until then, there really weren’t women leading in the church.

Because our men who were trained in seminary in the 1930s, forties, fifties, they didn’t get the names of the saints or the women. And so they’ve never heard of them and are exposed to them. So we can feel in the public memory like it’s a new thing when you start mentioning women, particularly in the Protestant church.

Sharifa >> Mm. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think these names are important? Why are we going back for them?

Dr. Glahn >> Oh, for lots of reasons.Let me just give an example of a retreat. I did a couple of weeks ago where I was talking about some of these women telling the story of the martyrs, telling the story of Agnes and Agatha and Apollonia. These names we just don’t know and they’re amazing stories of faith. And a young woman who was 17 came to me and said, that is the first time I have ever heard of women spoken of in the faith in any context other than aspiring to be a wife and mother.

That is a high holy calling, but I thought it was the only calling. And yet you have women who are benefactors. You have women who are bone collectors. So a bone collector in the early church is someone who is going and collecting the body parts of the martyrs and giving them a decent burial—in the same way that our militaries, you know, want to go get the dead and give them a burial to honor them.

You don’t just want them decaying. I mean, it’s dishonorable it’s devastating to the families. And part of this is because the Christian faith is rooted in physicality. Unlike some other faiths that really prioritize the spirit over the body we see both. Our God is incarnate in the flesh.

But even in Genesis one, in the first line, the scripture, God created heaven and the earth. Like it’s holy, it’s holy ground. And we tilled the ground. So. So you think then the earth is holy? It’s you know, it’s going to be redeemed, it’s fallen, but it’s beautiful. You have our Savior who comes in the flesh. He is he dies in the flesh. He’s buried in the flesh. He’s risen in the flesh. He’s coming again in the flesh.

We have the millennial kingdom on earth, in the flesh.And so this is a core value to the early church. And so they’re saying, “We know that God can collect the body parts. If you die at sea, it doesn’t mean you won’t be resurrected. But also we promise to honor you. If you give your life to Jesus and are killed for it, we’ll sacrifice or risk our lives to go in and give you a decent burial.”

So you have one. I can think of two sisters Praxedes and Prudentiana, their names, churches named for them in Rome. They’re still operating today. And we see the beautiful mosaics in the ninth century of their work, in the second or third century. And they’re bone collectors. So they’re risking their lives whenever there are Christians are tortured and killed to go collect them.

And these sisters were not martyred. But when somebody is not martyred but punished or tortured, we call them a confessor. So they’re confessors in that they risk their lives for their brothers and sisters.

I had one little old lady who was like in her eighties and super little tiny woman bony hands come up to me after a talk on this issue. She said, “I would have been a bone collector.”

Sharifa >> We love her.

Dr. Glahn >> We do. We absolutely love her. And but this is the kind of thing I’m talking about where wifehood and motherhood is included and it’s a high and holy calling. But there are also bone collectors and benefactors. And, you know, you see a hint of that in Phoebe. In Romans 16:1, Paul is thanking her she’s carried the book, what we now know as the book of Romans to the church in Rome, and he calls her a benefactor.

You look at the women in Luke 8:1-2 who are bankrolling Jesus and the guys. So we trace some of that. You have Empress Theodora who is married to Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. We see them in ninth century mosaics in Ravenna. And she is low-born. And she gets to know a young man who’s not yet emperor, and they have no clue he’s going to be an emperor.

She’s probably a woman of the night because she’s in poverty. But he discovers this woman talks turkey to me like she’ll tell it to me straight. She has nothing to lose. So then when he raises in power and she is raised in respectability, shall we say, he really loves her because he’s surrounded by yes men and people who tell him whatever he wants to hear.

But she tells him the truth. And so he has the laws changed so he can marry her. They profess Christianity, and she is the first person in history to fight human trafficking from a government perspective.

I know we have wonderful stories, wonderful stories of what women have done beyond motherhood. Or after motherhood or when they could with a mother, with motherhood. Or many of them chose to remain virgins and this was not a purity culture decision. This was an empire decision where they’re like, since the emperor is requiring a certain number of babies because he has to staff his army and the number one cause of death for men is the army. These women are saying, my Savior’s kingdom is not of this world. I’m not giving you a son to go kill people.

I’m going to remain celibate. So if you go to Ravenna again, this is Ravenna probably has the best mosaics in the world for early Christianity. You walk into one church, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, which is the New Sant’Apollinare, which is I find funny because you name something new in the sixth century. All these years later, we’re still calling it new. Maybe we shouldn’t do that. But anyway, I digress.

You walk in and you look up and flanking you on the walls are life size 22 women. 20 of them are virgins. Two of them are married, proceeding to the throne of Christ. Mary is holding baby Jesus on the throne, but he’s got a cross in his halo, which tells us he’s God. On the left. On the right, you see 27 male martyrs proceeding to the throne of Christ, holding the seven seals.

So imagine you walk into a worship space and you are flanked by this huge cloud of witnesses, men matching women in the lineup. The only difference is in front of the three women is the three wise men, because all the women are from the East and all the men are from the West.

So you have male/female, east/west represented in these beautiful mosaics. And one of the things that we see in the early mosaics is this parity of men and women. You don’t see this predominant male everything. So imagine this. You’re at the altar you look up and you see a mosaic of Melchizedek and Abel. And the reason they’re chosen is because they’re the two that have received or given perfect offerings of the earliest reference like so far.

So there’s a biblical literary literacy in some of these choices that just stories we would not necessarily put together and then you look up on the right and here’s Empress Theodora, who I mention, this woman who’s fighting for justice for very poor people. And she’s holding the cup in her hand. She is flanked by her spiritual advisors. And we know this because as we’re learning visual literacy, we’re learning that if a woman or man, if someone is holding what’s called a maniple, which we would probably look at as a long sash or a handkerchief over your hand, then that’s what you can handle holy objects with.

So Mary is sometimes has a maniple as she’s holding baby Jesus. And again, because we didn’t grow up with this tradition. We don’t know what we’re looking at. We just think she’s got a cloth in her hand.

But for the Princess Empress, Theodora, to be flanked by these women that have maniples, that means they’re her spiritual advisors, not just her quote, ladies in waiting.

And so she’s on one side.

Over on the other side is Justinian. He’s carrying the basket with bread in it. And this is really interesting because, you know, then later in the church, you hear that women cannot serve communion, that this is something that people who are ordained do and in many traditions women don’t even touch the cup or the plate, that the bread and wine are carried in.

Even if you think about Virgin Mary has the body and blood of our Lord and her womb for nine months, like, if anything, dignifies humanity, uh, human womanhood, if it’s not being created in the womb, the image of God, it’s that the baby Jesus, God, is being carried in his mother’s womb.

So that’s the sort of thing we’re seeing in the visual record. It’s male and female rather than predominantly male, which is very interesting when you consider the creation record that it’s not good for a man to be alone. And it’s not just in marriage.

And so these early church images where you see brothers and sisters, you see male and female saints, it’s really encouraging.

There’s one church, the church of Praxede in Rome. You walk in and you see this arch that has the 12 apostles and then Jesus, these are in mosaics, and then the inner arch inside that has eight women. And then Peter and Paul— Peter, Paul and Mary in the middle. And for the longest time, we’re like, Who could these women be? Because of course, you know, the 12 guys are going to be?

And an archeologist recently Carina Prestes, who’s a Brazilian archeologist, today released a book called Excavating Women. And she identified them as the eight named women in the Gospels, which makes perfect sense that the earlier church would have known them as much as they knew the 12 apostles. But again, because we’ve sort of lost the women, particularly in the record of saints, we can’t name Joanna and you know, we can’t we can’t just rattle off who those were.

You know, we know Mary Magdalene. We can maybe slowly put it together, but we know wife of Chuza but the earlier church that maybe couldn’t read, they also had a lot of this memorized.

Sharifa >> Yeah, it does strike me how literacy has changed what we remember and how we remember it, which is so fascinating. But what we have in the visual record is another form of a cloud of witnesses to tell the story of what we’ve been missing. Also to inform us of what their theopraxis was, what they valued.

Dr. Glahn >> Yes.

Sharifa >> And how they valued it. And it bears a striking contrast sometimes. That’s what you are outlining.

Dr. Glahn >> That’s the goal. Yeah.

What have we lost and what can we recover?

Sharifa >> What can we recover?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> And what is worth recovering? And there’s so much that’s so much worth recovering, even in the Protestant tradition.

Dr. Glahn >> Absolutely.

Sharifa >> Okay, I’m gonna ask you a, I guess behind the scenes question, which is what kinds of sources and you’ve mentioned some of them, but what kind of sources do you draw from when creating or curating visual representation of historical art.

Dr. Glahn >> So the best, in my opinion, is the mosaics because they’re made of stone and glass that don’t fade. And so these mosaics that were put up in the eighth, ninth century, they could have been installed last week. The other thing that’s really funny about mosaics is there has been some effort to erase some of the really overt women in leadership.

For example, in the Church of Praxedes that I mentioned there is an inscription over a woman that calls her and labels her as Theodora Episcopa, and episcopa is the Greek word for bishop. So you can see that Theodora has been they’ve taken the little tesserae or the little squares, and they’ve replaced them with just plain ones so that it is Theodo. Theodo. But they did it A) they did a really sloppy job. But the other thing is in the same church, there’s that full inscription with Theodora from the same era. So we know they missed that one. So sometimes.

Sharifa >> So they were sloppy!

Dr. Glahn >> They were sloppy. But like the, you know, the cover up is

Sharifa >> Revisionist.

Dr. Glahn >> Revisionist is more interesting than the original.

So anyway, mosaics are really fun in the visual record. There’s another place where Mary, Jesus’s mother, is dressed as a deacon or a bishop, depending on the era. And she had a cross on her stall and it was turned into an “L”.

And again, that little tesserae on either side of the cross bars were just removed sloppily again. And so we have some close ups of that work.

So you have the visual record, the you have the attempt to alter the mosaics. You have frescoes. Again, I mentioned some of the architecture. You have early statues there.One of the pieces of the visual record that I talked about in an earlier BOW podcast was the Megiddo Mosaic and you have a woman there who is dedicating an altar. It’s written out in it’s a mosaic, but it’s spelled out in the mosaic. And her name is, well, doesn’t matter.

And what matters is she dedicates an altar to Jesus, God, and this is in the year 230, and that is now the earliest visual record we have of the church calling Jesus God. We knew a lot from the written record.

Sharifa >> Wow!

Dr. Glahn >> I know.

And particularly fun on the anniversary of Nicaea, to see that Constantine might have had influence 100, 80, 90, years later. But the church didn’t start calling Jesus God with Constantine. The visual record is there for us. So the mosaics are my favorite. But again, some the mosaics are in combination with the architecture, as in the case of the Megiddo or Megiddo Mosaic. Akeptous is her name. And her name does matter. But my point is it’s not the most important point I’m trying to make.

The other thing that is included in the visual record sometimes is coins. We haven’t really explored a lot of that yet. But again, in 4.0, we have lots of plans for expanding because that helps us with dating. But even in the Megiddo mosaic that I mentioned, we can date some of the issues because of the way things are. It would be like using a Courier font versus a Times Roman. Like we can approximately date when that started.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> And so anyway, it helps us with dating, but of course for me it’s much more interesting when it’s helping us to see that men and women are partnering together in the early church.

The other thing that’s on the site is that Dr. Lynn Cohick, who is one of the co-founders with me of the Visual Museum, for a while, she had her masters and doctoral students doing research on each of the people featured. So that when you click on Theodora, you get her story and then you get what we think might have been embellished. But you know, that’s not really the main point. Yes, some of these stories got embellished, but that doesn’t mean we throw them out.

I think the embellishment is a little bit like what today we would call fan fiction.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> And just because there’s fan fiction doesn’t mean the original wasn’t legit or like we have to just throw out the whole thing.

Sharifa >> What geographical regions are you looking at?

Dr. Glahn >> So good question. Since you have so much of the early church in Rome and the letter to the Romans, we have started in Italy, but we have now expanded to Spain. And I just applied for $14,000 grant to go to Ethiopia. So I mean, some of it depends on funding, but we want to go to India.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> We want to go, you know, to the ends of the earth.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> So yeah.

Sharifa >> I mean that’s what the early church did.

Dr. Glahn >> It is. Yeah.

Sharifa >> It’s like walking in the same.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

I just had a zoom with my Ethiopia scout last week and she’s got the places plotted for us to go photograph as soon as we can raise up the money.

Sharifa >> Well, okay, audience. Some of you might be looking for charitable donation possibilities. And so I’ll just put that right there.

Okay, how does visual storytelling change the way people understand theology, Scripture and churches?

Dr. Glahn >> Hoo-woo. I think the first thing that I love about my job is when I get to take students to Italy to some of these places. There’s a lot of weeping. And this is the line I hear, “I can’t unsee this. Like there is no amount of book reading or preaching or, you know, hearing that I can be told that this wasn’t happening. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And I can’t unsee it.”

I think another thing that’s been really important is that it emphasizes representation. And that has been meaningful for men and women alike. The other thing that we’ll see, like one of my favorite stories that’s represented in two different places in Ravenna is a story of two women who were imprisoned for their faith and martyred as a result.

And Felicitas and Perpetua are thrown in prison together. One is lower class. She’s in the slave class and one is in the noble class. They love each other as sisters. And the woman who is literate writes down her story. We still have it today. You can read the story of being thrown in the prison for your faith and the decisions they had to make about—I think it was Felicitas who was pregnant and Rome had a rule that they would not kill someone imprisoned until the baby was born.

And so she was praying that her child would come early. So that she would not be left alone and then martyred alone. And the child did come early and they were rejoicing that she then got to be martyred with her Christian siblings.

Sharifa >> Oh.

Dr. Glahn >> I know. And then in, you know, a Christian woman offered to raise the child for her.

But what these people are giving up, and we have first person accounts. And there’s another quote, role of women that we don’t hear much, and that is Junia who’s mentioned in Romans 16. We’re so busy fighting over whether she was an apostle, we miss that she was in prison. Paul mentioned she’s in prison. And then you have this account of these two women that are imprisoned and you have in the literary record reference to Christian women who are thrown in prison and the conditions that they endured and the risk. I know.

And so there’s a hush—that you say, okay, this puts my life in perspective. It doesn’t mean my suffering is invalid, but it also it brings reverence and respect. I stand on the shoulders of a great cloud of witnesses. I’m not inventing anything new.

Another thing that we see is women in translation. When you get a little later in the fourth century, Paula, and her daughter, who’s very long name, starts with an E, I still have to learn all these names. She’s helping Jerome with his translation work. And Jerome says of her, you know, she could she was so good at Hebrew that people living in Palestine couldn’t tell that she wasn’t born there. And we do not often hear about women in the great translation tradition.

The other thing that we start seeing is now we know who some of these women are. Then who some of the men like Ambrose, who is the bishop of Milan in the early church, they are taking these women saints days and spending their Sunday sermon telling these women’s stories. So the thing that’s encouraging about that is these stories are not just for women. The stories of the men and women are for men and women.

And so that’s the other thing is to see how meaningful that has been for men and women.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Selah.

How do you select which women to feature next, given the vast. Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So one thing people will say to us is I’m traveling to Croatia. What can I photograph for you? And we’ll say, well, that’s just it there’s not a catalog anywhere of what’s anywhere. And often the things that you find are in the little tiny chapels nobody’s ever heard of.

Or if there’s been a book done on, let’s say, the art of Praxedes or the art of the Church of Pudenziana, there’s not a book that says, Okay, all the women in the Roman churches. Right?

And we’re at the embryo stage of starting to use reverse imaging on AI to even identify some of these people we’re looking at. And so this very serendipitous in terms of grants we asked for Spain, we got Spain, and now we’re asking for Ethiopia, hoping to get it.

So we want to think globally, but also we’re hoping that a time will come when people who’ve traveled can upload their photos on a place like they do on Unsplash so that we are not just having to raise funds to send a photographer somewhere, but that as people go and they stumble on a teeny tiny church of Thekla at the top of a mountain, which has happened, then we add it.

So to answer your question, how do we select? Well, we select from what we end up with, what we have the researchers to verify. It’s a little bit serendipitous right now, and also it’s largely volunteer driven. So it’s, you know, what we have the power to want to say manpower, but, you know, it’s the power, the people power.

Sharifa >> Yeah. The people power.

So people who are listening or watching this who are going on their vacations to Italy or France or India or Ethiopia.

Yeah, they can if they wanted to submit photos. But what is the website?

Dr. Glahn >> We’re not ready for them to submit photos. What we could use is a list of what you saw and where you saw it.

Sharifa >> Okay.

Dr. Glahn >> So that when when we send— when we get a team to go, we know that it’s there and that eliminates a whole level of having to do scouting.

Sharifa >> Right. Okay, so send them to you.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, send them through, there’s a contact sheet on or contact form on the VisualMuseum.Gallery site and let us know what you found where you found it.

Sharifa >> Oh, can you say that again? The URL again, please.

Dr. Glahn >> So www.VisualMuseum.gallery and that’s what confuses like people will do .com but it’s a lot of art spaces are on .gallery if you can remember that that will help.

Sharifa >> Okay, VisualMuseum.gallery. Okay, final question, what upcoming exhibits partnerships or expansions are you most excited about?

Dr. Glahn >> Well, we are getting ready to work with the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. And there they have an icon exhibit coming up. And so we’re working in partnership with them to talk about the Visual Museum and how to read an icon and you know, some of those women and iconography.

For example, you have Saint Apollonia who is martyred by having her teeth pulled out.

Sharifa >> Oh my goodness!

Dr. Glahn >> If you Google her name, you will find some dental practices named after her. And also I’ve started noticing women, a woman holding a huge pair of pinchers in the visual record is Apollonia. So we’re just even

Sharifa >> Are you serious?

Dr. Glahn >> I know. So we’re just starting to even recognize what’s there, what we have.

So each time I go back to spaces where I’ve already been, I’m seeing women that I didn’t see before or I couldn’t identify before. I didn’t even know I’d looked at them until I see that, oh, there’s a woman with a little lamb. That’s Agnes, you know, Agnes is Latin for lamb. And just as we start figuring out what they’re holding or how they’re represented, we’re finding more and more women were there all the time.

We just didn’t know who they were.

Sharifa >> Wow. Okay.

Well, my mind is blown and my curiosity is piqued and I hope that you get all the funding you need.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you.

Sharifa >> We need this visual record. We need to go back and reclaim. There’s a Ghanaian concept of Sankofa. It’s like going back and getting what was lost.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa>> And this project is so much about going back and reclaiming part of our inheritance

Dr. Glahn >> Exactly.

Sharifa >> as Christians. Not as Christian women,

Dr. Glahn >> Right. Yeah. Just as Christians, right.

Sharifa >> Yes. Because both men and women can be inspired by the knowledge of these women’s histories and what they endured and the shoulders that we indeed do stand on. So thank you for your work.

Dr. Glahn >> You’re welcome. We would just love listeners to use the site. The downloads are free. You just click on the free download and start including them in your handouts and your homeschools and your presentations. That would thrill us to just seeing people use them.

Sharifa >> And your sermons.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> All of it. Just all of it. Yes.

So that’s our talk for today. And you can find many other podcasts and videos pertaining to the role of women in the church by logging on to our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, clicking Resources and then scrolling to Church Issues.

Again, Dr. Glahn, it’s always, always a pleasure and a revelation to talk to you.

Thank you for sharing with us about the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you, Sharifa. Always good to talk to you.

Jamie Grant

Heather Parker

In this second episode with counselors Jamie Grant and Heather Parker, they talk about the gift of anger, how it is a gift to us as we learn to notice what’s going on within our hearts when it arises. In this conversation they explain where anger comes from, inward and outward anger and the possibility that anger is masking other losses.

Connect to Episode 1: Does My Anger Matter to God? if you missed it.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:22 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to our podcast and video episode.

We have today guests who have returned. Two weeks ago in our podcast we welcomed Jamie Grant and Heather Parker, who are both licensed professional counselors. We have been talking about anger. We’ve been talking about all sorts of things, and we’re extending that today to a second session because there was so much information that they gave us that we want to dig a little bit deeper into anger, particularly as Christians.

So, Heather, tell us a little bit summarize a little bit of what we’ve already heard and talked about before we go into a new area of anger.

Heather >> Sure. So in the last one, we talked about the perception. Well, first we talked about anger—how do we see that in the image of God and really highlighting that God is slow to anger. There’s a real there’s a lot of restraint and it’s not long lasting. That is the truth of how we see anger in God.

That’s not always how we’re taught. Sometimes we’re taught that he is a rageful God but Scripture tells us otherwise. So we kind of hit a little highlight on that.

We spoke of the perception of anger in the church—that oftentimes anger can be viewed as sin or it’s bad. And if it’s sinful and it’s bad, then we’re bad.

Yeah. Jamie, you can jump in at any time too. Yeah.

We talked a little bit about just the perception of it really highlighting the difference between God-given anger that shows us something’s not okay. It exposes what we’re passionate about and shows us something’s not okay. It’s not sitting well with me and can eventually inform how we want to approach that. And really highlight the difference between that and a rage or acting out or the quick-tempered what we often see in families and society. And even often in our churches.

We talked about, yeah, just how anger—sometimes people in leadership will want to make sure that people stay away from their anger. And that comes out in an element of control and that can look a lot of different ways.

But overall, the messaging around anger as being bad or negative starts really young and is often widespread, especially in Christian circles.

Yeah, anything I leave out, Jamie?

Jamie >> I think that was a great recap. I think what made it a nice kind of segue into what we talk about today is you know, if there’s, as you were saying, like these beliefs around anger as being bad or if I’m taught anger is bad and therefore I internalize this message that I’m bad because I’m experiencing this emotion of anger.

There’s also some other messages that we get as children because we’re you know, this isn’t going to be a parent finger-pointing episode or session. But we are—we’re sinful people raised by sinful parents in a sinful world. So we’re going to get messages around our emotions based on how we’re brought up. If there’s this thing that I’ve split off from me yet, it’s part of being human, it’s going to go somewhere.

And so looking maybe in this episode, a little bit of what happens when this quote unquote bad entity, you know, we’re experiencing has either nowhere to go or has no place like what happens.

Kay >> Great. So we know that where is it going to go? I mean, where does our anger go? We’re used to the outward anger for sure. That’s what we see so much in our society right now is just outward anger. People who are actually enraged, as you’ve talked about.

So you want to talk about that? You want to talk about inward anger? Where do you want to start?

Jamie >> I’d love to start like at the beginning just before we look at where it goes, like because I think this example will show us from a sort of like a neuro-biological perspective of what happens.

And so if you look at an infant when an infant is born, they don’t have a lot of ways to communicate except by crying and that’s their means of communicating to their caregiver, hey, something’s off like my diapers wet or I’m hungry or I’m cold, I’m tired, overstimulated, whatever it is, I cry. And that’s really necessary and God-given because it’s the infant’s way of protesting. Something is wrong. And so when I can do that as an infant, the design is like caregiver attends to my need. And so it’s a very important and of course, survival component of life of being human.

Well, there have been studies and books written about what happens when a child’s cries or protests are not met. And, you know, initially they’re going to—if you’ve ever been around an infant that you’re not attending to—their cry is going to get louder or their protest is going to get louder. Eventually, it’s going to turn into sort of this rage full, like meet my need. And there is, again, a very specific purpose because as an infant, our survival depends on a caregiver meeting our needs.

When that escalated protest is still not met, what an infant does, what our brains do (this is not conscious, this is wired in) is we will begin to prune away the protest or the cry for our needs to be met.

And what ends up happening is a baby will eventually stop crying so they can have needs. They can be in soiled diapers.They can be an awful conditions and like not cry about it. That’s not because they’re a good baby. That’s because their brain is literally trying to keep them alive.

And if you’ve you know, again, if you’ve seen an infant wailing and throwing a fit, you can see how much energy it takes. Like you’re their faces red. They’re sweaty eventually, like they probably crash out from exhaustion. It’s actually the body the brain body’s way of preserving my life energy. It’s this survival mechanism of going, what my needs aren’t met.

So I’m going to I’m going to prune away this response. And that’s really important to understanding later as we get older where anger goes. You want to add anything to that, Heather?

Heather >> No, I think that’s the fundamental part of understanding why we have such complicated relationships with anger as adults. Because we’re not even aware this is happening as infants. And yet it is. And then we become very acquainted with the just the complexity of our relationships to anger as adults. But understanding everything you just shared is like and really important to knowing why and where that comes from.

Kay >> So are we ready to move on to outward anger versus inward anger?

Jamie >> Sure, we can. I let me add on here and then, Heather, I’d love for you to for you to jump in you know, so probably I’m going to guess, you know, the majority of your listeners didn’t maybe experience the far the extreme form of neglect. So, you know, that they were left in, you know, extreme conditions and their brains were not probably pruning off their anger or protest at this very, very young age. But I think there’s also like that sort of underlies the neuro-biological process that often we relate to later in life.

So growing up, when there’s different ways that I receive messages about my anger and again, I’m reminded of Heather’s story of her daughter receiving this message. So obviously these children that told her, you know, she’s angry is she’s not a Christian.

They have received the message about their anger, maybe overtly. But there’s so many covert ways or unspoken ways we learn about what to do with our emotions growing up. And, you know, as children, we have two needs. We have to have connection to our caregiver. Again, that’s we’re dependent on that for life. And then we have this need to be who we are and sort of this authenticity.

So there’s authenticity and attachment.

And so growing up, if I learn that when I have when I’m angry, let’s say if I come, then I’m really angry at my friends or something. And I’m maybe told by my parent, “Oh, there are people that have it worse.” Or a lot of people that I talk with relate to this message of “You’re crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Maybe relate to being really upset as a kid and being told to, you know, go to your room until you can come out calmly. And these are just a few examples of ways that we learn that our own anger jeopardizes our attachment relationship with our caregiver because now I’m cut off emotionally from this person that I’m dependent on.

So what I do is I go internally and this is again, this is not conscious, but my brain is going, oh, attachment is threatened. Let me put this anger away. But it doesn’t it actually doesn’t go away because again, it’s like part of being human.

So I like to liken it to going into a pressure cooker. And that’s I think kind of where we can see it.

Heather >> Yeah, I think this is also where it gets into so much of what Jamie’s referencing the need for connection. You know, so much of that depends on your environmental expectations and demands. And so, you know, in some families, it going outward is a part of that. Like that’s how the family does things. The louder you get, the bigger you get, the more space you take up, then you’re more likely to get your needs met that way.

Some families, the louder you get, the bigger you get, the more space you take up, you won’t get your needs met. Learning to absorb the anger and hold it inward becomes the mechanism of survival or the strategy to get through that.

And so it’s just it’s such a there’s so many layers to how that takes place. That’s why I’m looking at the organic part of how it starts, like Jamie was referencing as a baby and then realizing how our environment also begins to play a part on how that’s expressed—out or in.

I think that part of it has to do with, you know, you’ve got all these layers of you got your family of origin, and then you’ve got your educational environment, and then you have your little community and then you have your spiritual community and then you have you.

And so it’s like all these filters are playing a part in what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. And this is where I think it informs where people end up moving towards acting out or acting in depends on what’s going to keep them the safest and have them in a position to have the most attachment or connection that heavily informs which way they go.

I’m also reminded of like the sermon that you referenced Kay, by Tim Keller. He describes this as three different ways. He’s talking about the gift of anger and the God-given gift of anger like we were talking about earlier. But he says that, you know, there’s no anger, blow anger and slow anger.

And no anger is kind of like what I’m thinking. about as we’re talking about this, this acting in. It’s where I absorb it all. I pretend like it doesn’t exist, I shame myself for feeling the anger that’s there and it all goes inward. That often manifests in depression. If you think about the organic word of depression, it means to push down. Oftentimes depression is actually anger that is just being acted in and pushed down.

And so there’s that way of holding it in. Then you’ve got the blow anger, which is the quick-tempered method of I’m going to put it out on everybody else because it feels so intense. I’m not going to hold it myself.

Either way, whether it’s acted in or acted out. It’s a way that we’re trying to control or disconnect from our own protest from this place of this is not okay with me.

And that it’s truly only in the gift of slow; being attuned to what is happening in me. exploring the reality of what’s coming up and being able to tolerate it, that we can really access the gift of it. Yeah. That’s kind of where my mind goes to how that shows up tangibly.

Kay >> Want to add anything to that, Jamie?

Jamie >> No, it’s I’m curious what your next question might be.

Kay >> Well. I’m just, you know, my mind is going around as I’m listening to the two of you of people who are dealing with their anger inwardly and dealing with it outwardly. And so as we think of you, you know, you’ve mentioned several times that people always label anger as sin, which would not be correct because it’s a God-given emotion. It’s part of being the image of God.

But would you see either one of these inward or outward as worse or is it just— I mean, I think of the person doing outwardly sometimes hurts other people because of that.

Does that make it a worse way to handle it? Are they both just the way that our body handles it?

Jamie >> Yeah, I don’t know that there’s a worse. I think this is kind of what was coming to my mind earlier. I think we tend to think that outward, like any kind of expression of anger, outward is bad. And this, again, goes to some of the messaging that we’ve internalized either in our families of origin or our faith circles.

That expression of anger is bad. And so in even going back to growing up in an environment where an expression of anger may have jeopardized connection to my caregivers. If again, we’re using the premise that anger is a God-given emotion, it has gifts of informing us and giving us information about our greater environment and how we fit into that, if I’m internalizing that, that that’s a bad and that I’m bad. And that is actually also a very neuro-biological, I’ll say, like this is part of the neurobiology of attachment.

So what a child can’t stand is, first of all, they can’t simultaneously like love and hate a caregiver or a parent. Those are two very conflicting emotions that they can’t. They don’t have awareness to hold those together. So if I’m feeling angry as a child at my parent and that’s jeopardizing my connection with them, what’s going to happen is, no, I’m not I don’t have the awareness or the words for this. But it’s not like, “Oh, my parents doing something that’s actually not good or healthy or for me or bad.” What gets internalized is “I’m bad,” because that is necessary in order to maintain this love or this connection with my caregiver.

So what we call shame, this “I am bad,” is actually like so many times these internalized messages of kind of hate and contempt for the self, what I am feeling, who I am. We actually become very, very violent with ourselves. And it can be to the point of self annihilation, whether through words or actual, like, you know, attempting to take myself out of this world and like annihilate myself.

So I don’t think we can call outward, you know, displayed rage worse than inward, because the reality is God loves all people. So if I’m doing this to myself. And I don’t want anybody here with depression— like I’m not calling this a sin by any means. In fact, that’s one of my soapbox areas.

We’re looking at human responses— two ways that we’ve been taught to relate to ourselves. Where I get heated and sort of angry is these messages were given to us. We didn’t get the choice. We didn’t have consent and telling ourselves we were bad. This is a means of survival.

So it really breaks my heart when we get to adulthood and people are still internalizing these messages from childhood or from growing up in environments that told them parts of themselves were not okay.

Kay >> You want to add anything to that, Heather?

Heather >> No, I think that’s very well said.

Yeah, it’s heartbreaking, truthfully, because the acting inward on ourselves, I think use the words like self annihilation—and that’s just as devastating as people who are acting out on to others, annihilating others. It’s different sides of the same coin. You know, they’re both really harmful and impactful.

Something that is really interesting to me is that a lot of times people will associate, they’re acting out rage with anger, and there may be traces of the true God-given protest that something’s not right.

But oftentimes when it’s a rage and it’s being acted out in a pattern like that, what’s really underneath it is grief. And that can feel really terrifying. For some people, the rage is more is trying to control the grief, stay down. And so I know that’s probably another podcast for another day, but it’s an important piece of the acting out is there may be elements and traces of a protest but often what’s underneath the acting out is a grief that hasn’t been honored.

Jamie >> Yeah, that reminds me of a book that I actually I have listed as a resource. It’s no longer in print that you can still get it on Kindle. I will occasionally find like an old copy of it at Half Price Books or something, but it’s called Faces of Rage. And the subtitle is, I think I’ve given away all my books so because I loved it so much, I think it’s The Eight Losses that Lead to or that Underlie Anger essentially. And David Damico is the author. He’s a Christian author, and he looks at anger from a Christian perspective and really highlights the losses that underlie anger. And that loss can be is simple, if you will, as, you know, losing connection to a caregiver.

If I’m having emotions. And he gives lots of examples. You know, there’s an example in the book. It’s been years since I read it of maybe like an elementary-ish age child whose parent dies. And in an attempt to I’m going to say soothe the child. It’s a lot more complex than that. The grandma comes in and she’s like, you know, well, it’s going to be okay. We just got to get up and kind of move on with our lives.

And it’s like there’s so much loss there that’s going invalidated, if you will, which is one of the things that I mean, that can certainly lead to, you know, rage inward or outward later on in life, because how confusing. Like, what do I do with all of this inside of me?

Heather >> Yeah.

Kay >> Yeah. Grief is grief is really, really hard. And I know that my dad died when I was 33, and I picked up the message that, “Well, he’s in heaven. We don’t really need to grieve. We’re just going to celebrate.” And it took me years, years to grieve him because of that, because I would just push it now, push it inside and not deal with it.

I don’t think I became angry, but it was I mean, the grief was there, and I think that’s common in the church. That’s a common way to deal with death. And I don’t think it’s healthy.

So you you’ve mentioned I don’t know if you mentioned it in this episode or the last one, but you mentioned that anger can be a gift.

And I really like the idea of us concluding on this particular topic because I love that thought that anger can be a gift to you if you take the gift. So Heather, do you want to explain how that’s true?

Heather >> Yeah, let me start by saying this because I feel like this is this piece of this. And I feel like Jamie and I align on this, based on our conversations, there are a lot of models that hold anger as a secondary. Like it’s really hiding something else. It’s not quite so significant. It’s really a symbol of something else that’s going on.

That’s not really where we approach this. We really approach the gift of anger and the gift of grief as that’s what holds our aliveness. Like, when you think of being human and being alive, having the gift of life, anger moves us towards what matters.

Grief honors what has also mattered or what wasn’t there and should have been there. And so when we kind of hold this place, that grief and anger is it’s part of what being alive as a human is about. And so the gift of anger, if we can really slow down and become curious about what is it? I love the reflection Jamie did, just taking a moment to pause and think, what is coming up in me?

Like what about this is not okay with me? What about this is feels wrong? And giving it some space and becoming curious about it can provide clarity on, oh, this is what matters is, this is what my passion is about. This is what this is how I can in my love for, you know, whatever this is, I can make create movement. There’s agency in that.

And so for me, the gift of anger is that it creates the movement towards life. Really living a full life. And we’re not talking about the acting out anger or the turning inward and acting in anger. But if we really give it space, there’s just so much clarity in it— and movement. And so that’s when I think of the gift.

And I think of when Jesus flipped tables. You know, there was it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t flippant. It was he had had enough if he had seen enough and he had had enough and he said no more. That’s pretty powerful. And if we’re able to step into those places with a calm confidence to say no more, like that’s a gift. So that’s how I hold it.

Jamie >> Yeah, I love that. I’m so appreciating you’re highlighting the gift of life, like aliveness that it gives us. And I’m thinking of it on that smaller— is probably not the right word—but a more like individualized skill. Like, here’s an example for my own life that comes up is like recently I feel like I’ve seen more doctors than I would care to see in a short amount of time. If you’ve had interaction at all with our medical system, you know how frustrating it is.

I was having a really hard time getting any one doctor to sort of take ownership of some of the things that I was experiencing. And I was really, really finding myself angry about this and felt very uncared for and to the point where I at one point in my mind went like, I might as well just give up.

Like, I guess I’ll just suffer through whatever it is I’m suffering through. And I thought, wow, hold up. I mean, I’ve done enough of my own internal work to be really present to what was kind of happening in the moment. I’m like, wow. I’m like throwing myself under the bus just because somebody else won’t take it in, won’t care for me in the way that I want them to care for me.

When I can slow down and listen to, like, what is the message of my anger there? The message is I want to be cared for that message or that way of going about being cared for as an adult is not by expecting like somebody else to take care of me.

It’s like, oh, I get to take care of me now. My voice matters. My needs matter, me being taken care of matters, but it has to matter to me. I can’t expect anybody else to, you know, for my, you know, medical or whatever issues to matter to a doctor more than they matter to me. And so in that, it gave me this gift of going, “I matter and I get to care for me.” It’s okay if a doctor thinks that I’m sure they don’t even think about like me, but my thoughts are like, “Oh, gosh, they’re going to think I’m annoying or I’m going to, you know, they’re going to think I’m a hypochondriac or whatever.” And I have all these messages going.

Okay, if they do, like, what does that really matter?

Quite honestly, they’re probably not thinking that, but it gives me this gift of my own aliveness. Like, Oh, I get to matter to me. And so many times I think we’re adults walking around with expectations that other people are going to meet the needs that we had growing up, that we split off because our protest wasn’t answered or whatever was happening in the environment at large.

But we get this gift of when we listen to anger getting to show up for ourselves in ways that, you know, we may never have before. And in that it’s really honoring who I am and who God’s made me to be. It’s like I’m sure you’ve heard the old— I think it’s given as a joke sometimes—there’s a person stranded on a roof and they end up dying in the floodwaters rise and they die and they go to heaven like “God why didn’t you rescue me? And God’s like, well, I sent a boat and you didn’t, you know, you were like, no, I’m waiting for God to rescue me. And I sent a, you know, a helicopter and you’re like, “No, I’m waiting for God to rescue me. Like, what did you think the boat and the helicopter were?”

And the way I look at it is like, God’s given us anger as the people in the helicopter to go, Oh, there’s something going on here, and you get to matter to you because you matter to me.

Kay >> That’s great. Heather, if you want to add anything.

Heather >> I don’t know that I need to add anything to that.

That’s a great way to summarize it, for sure.

Kay >> Yeah, well, just give a final word to our audience before we close. Heather, what would you say to the women and men out there that are listening or watching this about anger.

Heather >> I would say be curious. Be open to the possibility that it’s not what you’ve been told and to the possibility that it’s more than what you’ve been told. Get to know what it feels like, and when it’s authentic and the ways that you shut it down. Get to know the ways that you might act it out.

So I would say just be curious about it, and try to hold the framework that it is okay. It is. We are made in his image and he expresses and experiences anger, the Trinity expresses and experiences anger. And so just get to know that in yourself. That would be that can be the hardest part.

Kay >> Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Jamie?

Jamie >> Yes, that’s for sure. Getting to know it in yourself, particularly as leaders in a church setting, in this in the case of this audience. Because if it’s not something you’re familiar with, we run the risk of hurting people more by giving messages of, you know, just make a different choice. Just put your anger away from you or don’t be you know. Don’t be depressed or pray more about it.

I mean, those things are all fine and good. But I think it’s a very partial—like it’s like a tiny piece of a much bigger story of human beings. And if we don’t get to know our own humanity as leaders, how are we going to lead the humans who are in our flock? How are we going to shepherd them well?

Often ways we respond are not choices. They are survival strategies. And they require time and care and being with rather than trying to make somebody into what we think they’re supposed to be, which is I’m not going to well. That would be a whole other podcast, but yeah, so just making space for the humans that we care for.

Kay >> You know, I know for me it’s really been through the Scriptures that I’ve recognized that it’s a positive to show your anger. The Psalms are so full of, particularly David, speaking his anger to God about what’s happening in his life. And that’s, that’s a real pattern for us to recognize the anger and to speak to God about the anger, as you said. And realize that he invites us to share our anger with him.

And he can help us work through it. He can help us see how it’s a gift and do all the things that you have been encouraging us to do in this podcast. So thank you so much for the time that you’ve given us, for the wisdom that you’re giving us, for the insight that you’ve given us into anger. And once again, you can contact them. Heather is at WaterstoneCounseling.org and Jamie, tell us again because I don’t have it written down.

Jamie >> It’s MetanoiaDallas.com.

Kay >> And you can also consider the book by Chip Dodd, The Voice of a Heart: A Call to Full Living. Tim Keller’s sermon The Healing of Anger and the Faces of Rage by David Damico are suggestions of other resources that you can go to.

And as I’ve said, our Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast has many other topics we have connections on our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org to all sorts of resources to help assist Christians.

So we’ll look forward to seeing you next time.