Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast

Dr. Kelley Mathews

Seana Scott

What is your purpose in God’s story? Seana Scott joins Dr. Kelley Mathews to discuss what it means to become “faith-full” not “fear-full” as you discern your purpose and follow Jesus right where you are. Seana spent years confused about what a woman’s purpose really is. Don’t miss this conversation if you are seeking to follow God!

This episode is also available on video.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introductions

Kelley >> Welcome to Beyond Ordinary Women’s Ministry. I am Kelley Mathews, your host. And today I have with you a friend of mine, Seana Scott.

Seana is—I’m going to go back to when we met several years back. But before I do that, let me give you her bio and why we have her with us today. Seana is an author, a speaker, and she is the founder of Well Soul Life, which is a ministry dedicated to journeying with others to know God’s Word, to walk with God, to live with purpose.

She is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, and she writes for a lot of Christian publications. She has a devotional Bible study that is published or will be published in fall of 2026, depending on when you hear this podcast.

And when she’s not in her chair studying and writing, she is enjoying time with her kids and her husband, and we will give you all the information on how to connect with Seana in our show notes.

So welcome Seana. Thanks for being here.

Seana >> Thank you. I am so excited to be here. I have long appreciated the work that you ladies are doing.

Kelley >> Well, you really fit well within this and the work you’ve been doing. When we met, which was 2018. Okay, so however many years ago that was we were at a writing festival and you were part of a class. I think I was probably auditing or I was just along for the ride because I had long graduated. Maybe I was the T.A. I don’t remember exactly.

But you were really getting going in your writing career, and we spent some time getting to know each other and working on one of your articles. And so that was just the beginning of a great friendship. And you have really continued strong in that ministry, and it’s been fun to watch.

So yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you have this overriding message of, well-soul life. So give us some background of what is your ministry, why that title and what are you doing?

Seana >> Absolutely. So really, I think ministry comes from our story, right? The things God calls us to comes from the things he’s brought us through. And in my story, if I had days to tell it, I would. But in my story, there’s been different seasons where I struggled in my sense of wholeness because I really didn’t have sound theology.

I really didn’t understand who God is. And no one ever taught me how to read the Word. So one of my passions is helping the Bible-curious to become Bible-confident. So that’s the know God’s Word part.

And then walk with God. No one ever taught me spiritual practices, and the more I learned spiritual practices, the more I experienced that wholeness that shalom the Bible says we can find in the Lord. And so I am passionate about helping others. If they don’t know spiritual practices to get started, or to take the next step in that intimate relationship with God.

And then purpose. Purpose is really what started all this. Because for about a decade of my life, I bought into the wrong definitions of what purpose is. That it was in your positions and it was in your possessions. And when my position got taken away from me out of obedience to the Lord, and when my possessions were very little, being married to a children’s pastor, for over a decade, I really felt purposeless.

And it wasn’t until I learned the story of God that I was able to see purpose was not in the ways that I thought it was or how the world defines it.

So I’m passionate about meeting people where they’re at to help them know God’s Word, walk with God, and live with purpose. Because I believe if we do this in increasing measure, we truly do experience the shalom of God.

Kelley >> Okay. Good stuff. There’s a whole lot there. You mentioned one of the things I was about to interrupt you, when you finally knew the story of God. What do you mean by the story of God?

Seana >> Like Genesis to Revelation, I never saw I always heard Bible stories. Or you attend a Bible study and you read a passage, but I never saw how it fit together. And I honestly never saw the women in the story of God. And once I saw, like, okay, I’m made in God’s image, like, what does that actually mean? And okay, what does faithfulness look like in the Old Testament, and what does it look like in the New Testament? Where do I fit in all of that?

And once I saw the story, I realized, oh my goodness, I’m still a part of the story of God. My purpose has place in the story of God because the story of God’s not done.

Kelley >> Yeah. Okay. So learning the whole like what we might call the meta narrative, there is one big story in Scripture which I’m all into, that which is more than knowing Bible stories. It’s also knowing where they all fit together. What is God doing kind of this thread that he is pulling through the whole thing. And so you’re saying that as you grew in that knowledge, it helped you see your place in it or the way God viewed you?

Seana >> Yes.

Kelley >> Yeah.

Seana >> And our purpose as Christians, because I was taught, whether it was intentional or not, I was taught that in order—like people kept on saying, “Oh [because I’ve gifts in leadership and teaching and like], oh, you’re going to do great things for God. You’re going to do big things for God.”

But then what if I’m home alone with a toddler midday? Like, where are the big things for God I was supposed to be doing? And that that kind of sowed into my depression, let’s just call it what it is.

And yet, when I looked at the women in the story of God, especially in the New Testament, like they were ordinary women doing ordinary things, following Jesus, and yes, they were brave and but mostly they were faithful.

And so I started asking myself the question, like, how can I be faith filled like Mary? How can I be pour out my life? How can I, you know, open my home? You know, like all these? Yeah, all these examples. They literally helped change the world and expand the kingdom by doing their part.

And we all have a part. We all have the same purpose. It just looks different depending on our life circumstances and what God’s calling us to.

Kelley >> So finding significance in not in the accolades that we might get. Like this. This is like the ultimate human struggle, right? Like this is you’re just like the rest of us, but you’ve actually figured out, I think, what some of these struggles really are, and you’re not so much beating against the wind of trying to gain, you know, whatever fulfillment out of things that will never fulfill.

So your ministry is trying to help others realize the same thing.

Seana >> And if I can be so, I don’t know, it might sound like an exaggeration, but I really, truly believe that one of Satan’s greatest tactics to the Christian is making us distracted from what God wants us to do in a season, or make us feel like we don’t have purpose in our season. Because if we’re not focused on the work God wants us to do in a certain season, then Satan’s already won.

Kelley >> Okay, so if you had to put it into one sentence, what is a woman’s purpose? How would you refine that?

Seana >> Great question. It’s John 17:4 and I don’t think it’s a woman or man’s purpose. I think it’s a human purpose, a Christian purpose. Jesus is praying to the Father and is his high priestly prayer. And he says, “I glorified you on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.”

This was one of the verses that shook me and shifted me, because I realized that Jesus had a ministry only for, what, three years? And he could have done a lot. He’s God. What he did in comparison to even some of like the big platform Christian speakers or whatever, in our time. He did very little, okay. But he did the work the father gave him to do. So if I would put it in one sentence, it’s our purpose is to do the work the father has given us to do.

Period. That’s it.

Kelley >> And that’s pretty universal because. . .

Seana >> Right.

Kelley >> Or more individual because it speaks to what God has given each person. You have a purpose. I have a different purpose. But they’re all united in the fact that God is the one who has given it to us.

Seana >> Another scripture that speaks to that is one that terrified me when I, not when I first read it, but when it first spoke to me is in Matthew 7. And when Jesus says, “You know, many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, and he’ll say, I don’t know you. But didn’t we prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name? We’re doing all this ministry?” And it says, “he who does the will of my father will enter.”

Kelley >> That verse scares a lot of people and has through the centuries, because it’s a big unknown, right? Like I thought I was doing it all right. But God wants us to know him and to be pursuing him, right?

Seana >> Yes. And just to say like, you know, because I know who knows where this podcast episode will be like, we are saved by grace through faith.

Kelley >> Right.

Seana >> You know, I don’t want anyone to think, oh, am I not saved? The whole point is, are we willing to do the father’s will?

Kelley >> Yeah, because he saves us to do.

Seana >> To do.

Kelley >> To not just be, but also to do, so that we will be little Christs in the world, you know, bringing his kingdom as we go along our day. So, yes.

So back to Genesis. All right. If you’re saying Genesis to Revelation, in Genesis, that’s the famous verse where it says, you know, God created man and woman, male and female, in his image, in the image of God he created them.

So you and I both know this means both men and women are both created in the image of God. Let’s just lay that out there. Can you give us a little more? What does it mean to image God?

Seana >> Yes. Carmen Imes’ work on this really has influenced me. I really appreciate her work because for a long time I didn’t quite understand what this meant. And her one teaching on what image is (an ancient, ancient context) being a three dimensional object that represented a king or a deity. And then thinking about how Jesus, you know, is the King of kings and he is Lord of lords.

And so it just makes it a more tangible understanding. Like to image God. We are three dimensional people representing our King of kings and our Lord of lords. And we do that in a way unlike all other creation, because those other creation was not created in God’s image. It was there, created through God’s creativity for his glory.

But only we are created in God’s image to do that which God has given us to do, to represent him, to care for creation, to extend God’s work in his world. And again, we do that in different ways.

But when one thing that also helped me understand this was the theology of disability.

Kelley >> Tell me more.

Seana >> I thought being a good American, you know, growing up in a big city, that my value was based on my productivity.

But when we can’t be productive, we still image God fully. Every human bears God’s image.

So if my identity is I am created in the image of God, right? And I cannot do anything, I’m no less God’s image. That kind of blew my mind and kind of shattered my identity of productivity.

Kelley >> I think a lot of people are still going to need to hear that because of the culture we live in, in that we tend to be human doers, not human beings. And the culture just feeds that. In fact, I’ve joked after all my schooling, every time I get a degree, I hear the question, “what are you going to do with that degree,” right?

And sometimes the answer is, I’m going to keep doing what I’ve always been doing. I just have a deeper sense of who I am and who God is, and that will feed into whatever it is he wants me to do. Like there’s no clear, professional path that came from this program sort of thing. And they can, obviously, but that’s not always what growing in knowledge and spiritual depth, you know, means.

It doesn’t always mean dollar bills, you know, rarely does it actually mean those.

Seana >> Actually no one goes into ministry for dollar bills.

Kelley >> Exactly. Right. Right. So yes, the human beings and knowing that I think I’ve read Carmen’s work before as well. And just to ideas that we don’t lose the image of God in us when we are disabled or sin-filled or, you know, we have. I think I was taught that it gets defaced but not erased.

I don’t know that I really like that. I think it just is. We are the image of God. And yes, our productivity might be impaired, especially through sin, but it doesn’t mean that we are any less God’s image. So good word, good word. So what is the work the father has given you? You said that your men and women alike, like whatever it is God has given you to do, you’re the image of God and that is your purpose.

So is there no difference between, you know, the purpose of a woman disciple versus a male disciple? Like, what’s your argument there?

Seana >> That is a really great loaded question.

Kelley >> I’m not trying to trick you, right?

Seana >> No, no, no, I know you’re not. You know, it goes back to the complementary type of perspective. I do think God created us, you know, equal in value and different. But when it comes to purpose, I think we have the same purpose and that is to image God and to do the work the father has given us to do.

Kelley >> Right.

Seana >> And for again, for each person and each season, there’s no prescription. Okay.

Kelley >> I think that’s very freeing, because sometimes when you say seasons, I feel like women in particular have so many seasons. If they’re able to be mothers, that is a definite season. You get certain ages, things change, whether that’s physically or relationally or professionally, like we are just one season after another, I feel like. And so not tying our identity to a particular season is wise.

Seana >> Yes, yes. And you know my story. But the listeners might not.

When I became a mom, one of the things that was such a difficult reality in wrestling with purpose was because I had been productive in ministry. My identity was changing the world for Jesus. And then all of a sudden I was changing diapers and washing dishes. And it took a long time for me to see that that had value in the Kingdom perspective.

But the thing that someone said to me that I wish they hadn’t, that sowed a lie into my heart for a long time. They said, “Motherhood is your greatest calling.” And so I thought that all my other gifting and all my other dreams and passions were sinful if I had those.

Kelley >> Oh wow.

Seana >> Because motherhood now should be my greatest calling. So something must be wrong with me as a follower of Jesus, because I wasn’t fully fulfilled in using my gifting in motherhood.

Kelley >> And I’m sure no one told your husband that his greatest calling was fatherhood?

Seana >> Right!

Kelley >> Okay, we’ll move on from that. Okay, so but I hear you, we do tend to get that message in certain circles that that is the highest ideal for women, because in their defense, they’re trying to say being a mom is hard and holy work.

And amen to that, like both of us could testify to it is.

Seana >> Yes. Absolutely.

Kelley >> It’s just not our calling in life. It may for be a season.

Seana >> It is for a season. I quit work, I stayed home for more than a decade and I, looking back, would not exchange that season for anything. And yet I have learned that in motherhood, my greatest calling is following Jesus.

Kelley >> Yes.

Seana >> My purpose is following Jesus, whether it’s motherhood or writing or ministering or anything else. And that’s the same for men. We’re getting back to our conversation like, it’s not anything different.

Kelley >> It’s not gendered. Yeah.

Seana >> We’re all it’s not gendered. Yes.

Kelley >> Yeah. And how that works out is individual to each person, not necessarily a gender or sex. It’s individual and then communal. So we’re all part of a community of other believers.

So to move into that space of being a disciple and stepping into the calling to follow God in the way that he has gifted us and put opportunities in front of us and whatever season we may be in.

How can a woman listening to this right now, whether she’s a leader who’s looking for a resources or just a Christian who happens across this, how would she would you encourage her to live out what Scripture teaches about making disciples or being a disciple? What would that look like?

Seana >> Great question. So I really summarize this as influencing those around you to find and follow Jesus. So who are the people the Lord has put around you in a season? It might be the toddler pulling on your leg, right? But it might be the coworker. It might be the neighbor. It might be the friend at church, it might be the barista.

It’s like seeking the Lord about who are the people that you’ve put in my sphere of influence to find and follow Jesus. And then, just like we’ve been talking about with purpose, being obedient to the Lord in that.

So I know, like when I’m praying and I have convictions about one person, I need to then be obedient about stepping forward with that one person.

Another Bible verse that scares the heck out of me when it comes to living with purpose is 1 Samuel 15:22. (I knew I was going to mess up the number so I wrote it down.)

When Saul is coming back and he was supposed to destroy all the Amalekites and everything, and he comes back and he has the animals with him, and Samuel’s like Saul, you didn’t obey. And he’s like, “Yes, I did, yes I did. I’m here. I’m going to sacrifice these to the Lord.”

When I first read this, when it first shook me, it was in the 1995 NASB version, and it says, “To obey is better than sacrifice, to heed than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as divination and insubordination as idolatry and witchcraft.”

Kelley >> Those are tough words.

Seana >> Those are tough words. So? So that is why I am so passionate about helping people see their purpose in their current life season. By learning to listen to the Lord and know His Word. Because this is serious stuff. It’s not self-fulfillment stuff. It’s Kingdom of God stuff. We need to obey the Lord. We need to follow him in our purpose in every season.

Kelley >> The willingness is just as important as knowing what it’s—we’re not called to know our purpose. We’re called to do it. Yeah, yeah. And that’s a daily, you know, moment by moment challenge for all of us.

Seana >> Yeah.

Kelley >> And it looks different every time. And so yeah, there’s no formula. Sorry, guys.

Seana >> No formula.

Kelley >> Hope you weren’t here for that.

Seana >> Maybe it’s seeking Jesus every day. And maybe the formula is discipleship. Its formula is reading his Word, praying, you know, all the regular Christian living life stuff. And as we do this, he unfurls it, you know?

Kelley >> Okay, so let’s wrap this up. I know you’ve got your podcast. How often? Is it a weekly? A monthly?

Seana >> Actually, I am pausing the podcast.

Kelley >> Okay, tell us what’s going on. Are you focusing on something else?

Seana >> Yes. So right now I am focusing on building Substack, Well Soul Life on Substack, where I’m hoping to serve my readers to know God’s Word, walk with God, and live with purpose.

And I have a membership on Substack where I send out daily devotions as we walk through a book of the Bible, which is where I help Bible-curious become Bible-confident and really helping us connect with God through the Word.

And then I’m doing once a month live zooms and once a month mini courses to do those things–help know God’s Word, walk with God, and live with purpose. So that’s what I’m focusing on as far as Well Soul Life. All of my podcast devotions are still there, 180, people can binge them.

Kelley >> Yes. Easy to find. Yeah, yeah.

Seana >> So it’s Well Soul Life. Well Soul Podcasts. But in order to serve my listeners and readers well in this new season, I am being obedient in a different way, and I’m developing Substack.

Kelley >> That’s awesome. Yeah, I love it too. So that’s where I am most of the time.

So we will put all of that information in our show notes so people can find you fairly easily when it comes to your writing and whatever else you’ve put on Substack. Maybe you’ll throw in some video because it can do that now so we’ll see.

But as a final question, what’s the one thing you want every woman listening here to walk away with today? Like just that land the plane.

Seana >> Your purpose is not out there somewhere. Your purpose is right where you are following Jesus. So when you have a day where you wonder if what you do really matters, it does. Because when we follow Jesus, faithfulness reverberates into eternity. We can’t even fathom what we’re going to see on the other side. But we can know it’s purposeful and it has impact.

Kelley >> Good word. Thank you. Well, you’ve heard it here, y’all. I hope you guys will not only listen to this, but share it with those women in your life who you feel need this kind of encouragement to not just push through a season, but to take advantage of one and to seek what God has for them right here, right now.

We will have this video and this podcast at the BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org website in the Godly Living section, and you can find that, plus dozens and dozens of other video resources for you in blog posts or just audio, however you like to gather this content and it’ll all be there for you.

So thank you for being here. And Seana, thank you.

Seana >> Thank you so much for having me. This is fun.

Kelley >> You bet.

Dr. Sandra Glahn

Sharifa Stevens

It may seem redundant to revisit women in the Bible, but as new information has come to light, we now know that some of what we’ve heard (and perhaps even taught ourselves) isn’t accurate. Dr. Sandra Glahn of Dallas Seminary provides five reasons for us to do the work of once again studying the stories and references to these women. Don’t miss this conversation hosted by BOW Ministry Team Member Sharifa Stevens. Let’s revisit women in the Bible!

This episode is available on video as well.

00:33 Introductions

Sharifa >> Hello everyone, and welcome to Beyond Ordinary Women. I am one of your hosts, Sharifa Stephens, and today I have the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Sandra Glahn. Doctor, and I love saying that.

Dr. Glahn >> Because you know me long before I was doctor.

Sharifa >> Yes, you did. Dr. Sandra Glahn is a journalist and also the author, coauthor or editor of more than 20 books, including the book A Woman’s Place is in the Story: Seeing Women in the Biblical Narrative. Dr. Glahn is a seminary professor, and her most recent endeavor is the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity. Welcome, Dr. Glahn

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you. Always great to see you.

Sharifa >> Always great to see you as well. Today we’re going to look at the always relevant topic of women in the Bible. We’re going to be talking about reasons to take a fresh look at women in the Bible. And that’s a hermeneutical question. It’s a literary question. It’s an opportunity to consider sources of interpretation. Right?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> So I mean, fire way. I would like to learn.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. When we’re talking women of the Bible, you know, specifically, this conversation isn’t just the Abigails and the Eves, but it’s—what about those hard verses about head coverings and women’s silence?

And one of the things I’ve noticed as I talk on this subject, that even people that are really committed to women’s flourishing in the church and they’re using their gifts, sometimes they’ll have doubts about why are we relooking at this? Are we changing history or are we pushing back, pushing back against 2000 years of tradition and history? And the answer to that is no. And how do we know that is no. And I got five reasons for us to reconsider.

Sharifa >> Five?

Dr. Glahn >> Five. You know, it’s convenient that it works out that way, you know.

But the first one is actual textual reasons. We have reasons to relook at the text, partly because think back with me of when women really started entering the academy in recent history. We’ve had women Bible translators for a really long time. But women’s eyes on the texts are influencing translation in a good way.

And I’ll start maybe with a different kind of example on that is about ten years ago, some of my African scholar friends contributed to the African Study Bible. Well, why do we need that? Well, because if you’ve lived in some of those places, some of the place names are familiar to you, or in one case, somebody had lived in a culture that really didn’t have much paper. It was really rural and really remote.

And so when they came to the book of Ruth and there’s an exchange of a shoe, it made perfect sense to them. They would point to a stack of rocks and go, well, yeah, that stack of rocks represents that particular deal that we witnessed. They use something other than paper.

And so for non-Westerners who were not in a physical classroom, who were not using paper, they had eyes on the text that were closer to the culture of Ruth and could help us bridge the gap better.

And in a lot of ways, women are doing that now as we have women coming to Bible translation again. There is that long history of it. You know, Jerome had help in the late third, early fourth century with Paula and her daughter. But women who are getting an education were coming back into the academy, probably since the 70s, really in the Academy doing dissertations. So were we looking at some of the texts.

So for example, I’ve seen the text about the bleeding woman translated as a woman with a hemorrhage. Well, those of us menstruating on some kind of regular basis go. If you had hemorrhaging, you would be dead. Like.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> You know how much blood is approximately normal. This is not something that our brothers know, nor should they have to know. Like that’s a woman thing. But there are texts about

Sharifa >> It’s okay if they know. Well.

Dr. Glahn >> Oh. Completely agree. I’m just saying knowledge in terms of volume may not be may not be a normal part of their lives, but completely agree.

Sharifa >> Fair.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. So when it comes to text about ritual purity, we’re asking different questions because we want to make sure when you’re talking about and uncleanness, you’re using that as a metaphor, but it isn’t actually sinful. Right? Right. Well, that’s it’s not that our brothers didn’t know that, but it wasn’t a first level concern for them. For us, it’s us.

So what that means is when women have come to Bible translation, we have added something with eyes on the text. We don’t even have to know what. Right? We don’t have to quantify what women do this or men do that. All we know is women image God, men image God. We need each other. That’s right out of Genesis.

So we are benefiting from different eyes on the text, more diverse eyes on the text. And that’s good across ethnicity. It’s good in terms of gender. It’s good for us. And we’re seeing more of that in the last 50 years. So that’s a reason to relook at some of the texts, because where some of the translators in the past might be quick to say, let the women keep silent.

A woman will come along and say, but the word for woman can be translated wife, right? So why is it not let the wives be silent? Because later in the same passage, let them ask their husbands at home, and a woman with a husband is a wife.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> Right? Well, that makes a big difference. Is it all the women that are supposed to be silent in that context?

Sharifa >> All the time?

Dr. Glahn >> Oh, sure. Oh, a totally different question. And an important question.

Sharifa >> Right! I know.

Dr. Glahn >> But these are the kinds of questions that we are bringing to the text saying, you know, you know, you could translate that a different way. If a woman is saved through childbearing, maybe it’s also a wife who saved through childbearing. And again, that text I think has limited application.

But the point in number one here of there are textual reasons to revisit the text.

When you look at the King James Version and it talks about not allowing a woman to usurp authority is how it’s translated. Later translations have said exercise authority. Why did . . .

Sharifa >> Those are two different things.

Dr. Glahn >> Those are very different.

Sharifa >> Very different things.

Dr. Glahn >> So then that pushes back against our idea that we are sort of evolving in women’s rights, have made the text more friendly to women. That’s actually not true. In a lot of ways as a response to radical feminism, translations kind of pushed back. And the ESV is an example where that that committee said, we only want. . .

Sharifa >> Glad you mentioned that.

Dr. Glahn >> We only want complementarian men looking at the text. Well, they’re missing something. Even if you’re a hardcore complementarian, you should value that you need somebody on the committee that’s going to vet you, that’s going to make you defend your reason for saying that. So that’s number one reason why it’s a good time to revisit. Just looking at the issue of women in the text, who are the women in the text?

There are also historical reasons. When you mentioned my connection with the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity. And when we go particularly to northern Italy, but we’re expanding into Ethiopia, we’re looking at how the visual record of the church tells the story of women, and it’s very different from the written record.

So if you just look at the record of church councils, you’re constantly seeing the women are doing too much. You need to shut them down. Women are doing too much, need to shut them down. Too many deaconesses, you know, they’re too young or whatever.

But if you look at the visual record that complements that, then you see, particularly in the earlier centuries of the church, a beautiful gender parity of men and women serving together. You see women at the altar holding communion elements. You’ll see this all the way up through the sixth century.

So if we just think back on what we know of, maybe the Orthodox tradition, the Catholic tradition, maybe if you’ve come out of those traditions, all you’ve ever seen is a man holding the elements. You might think it’s always been this way, and you might have even been told it’s always been this way. But the historical record gives us a more complete record that is less edited by those who end up in power.

Now, we have seen some of those records edited, but they’ve done a sloppy job of editing it. And it’s, it’s almost sometimes ha-ha! For example. . .

Sharifa >> We want to know!

Dr. Glahn >> So okay, so if you go to a church in Rome, the church of Praxiteles, ninth century, eighth century mosaics, you’ll see a label in the Greek that labels Theodora Episcopa, which is the Greek word for bishop.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> So then what they’ve done is they’ve taken the name Theodora, and they’ve changed the little tessera, the little squares, to make it just end at Theodora.

Sharifa >> Ooh.

Dr. Glahn >> But here’s the problem. There are two places in that church, and one of them is more obscure at the same time, and they didn’t fix the other one. So we have evidence that it was Theodora. And then the job that they did is really sloppy. You can tell that something changed.

Now, these are official churches. So this had to have been initially sanctioned by the church in this hugely public space. And then it had to be officially changed by the church.

So you see something similar where you have Mary in the Lateran Baptistery. So there’s a mosaic of Jesus’s mother in the Lateran Baptistery, which is really, you know, if you want to say First Baptist Church of Rome, this is the this is the first official Church of Rome, even more so than Saint Peter’s. It’s where the seat of the bishop is.

You have Mary in the mosaics holding her hands in the orans position, which can also be the position of a speaker. What’s interesting is she’s wearing this sash that comes around her neck and then goes straight down, and it had a cross at the bottom, which is the way bishops dressed for centuries.

Well, then you notice that the crossbars are missing. The first time I saw it I said, “What is the letter L mean on somebody’s sash?” Nobody can answer. I’m asking everybody, “What does this mean?” Well, then I found out (and I was not the first person to discover this), but that letter L used to be a cross.

And somebody got in there and changed the little squares. And we know this because in 1899, someone painted a painting of what they were seeing in the art, and that painting had a cross. And so this is a mark of clergy. This is setting a woman aside as a member of the clergy as recently as a late 1800s.

And we know in the early 1900s, the Roman Catholic Church decided that a woman could no longer be depicted as a deacon.

So these are the kinds of things that sometimes it’s like Watergate, sometimes the cover up is really even more interesting than the break in. And we’re seeing some of these alterations, but there’s also enough that’s still standing in the reliquaries, you know, those boxes for storing relics, where you’ll see a woman at the altar or a man and a woman at the altar, you know, one on either side holding up their elements.

When you go to Ravenna, the ninth century mosaics on one side, the Empress Theodora is either side of the altar. She’s up there holding the cup, and her husband’s across the aisle holding the basket. Well, you’re not going to have the official church art representing male and female at the altar, if that goes against Scripture in their mind.

So for historical reasons, but also some of this is we don’t know our history. You know, it’s been interesting to listen just to the SBC conversation about the word pastor, when if you go to the art and you see women holding shepherd staffs, you know, second century, eighth century in Oxford, you know, a major church that was, oh, by the way, planted by a woman centuries and centuries ago.

You see women holding crosier, which is the religious fancy word, right, for a shepherd staff. Well, the word shepherd in Latin is pastor. There’s shepherding and to make shepherd an office is— that’s the new thing.

And if we go back and look at history and we know our history better, then it makes us look at passages like the elder passage and not read pastor into elder in that passage where their qualifications for elders.

But there are never qualifications for pastors because it’s a spiritual gift. And you and I don’t have to have qualifications to have the gift of encouragement, or the gift of giving or the gift of evangelism. Our qualification is being in Christ. That’s it. But other qualifications in the church, they are vetted. The office of widow is vetted because she has to have been married. She has to wash the feet of saints. She has to—oh! and did I mention the office of widow? So this is a clergy office.

Sharifa >> I was like—wait a second! That’s an office?

Dr. Glahn >> I have a sixth century ordination prayer, which is in the written record of an ordination to the office of widow.

And then we go, okay, we Protestants, we don’t look at nuns. And where did you come from? When did you start? They go way, way back, way, way, way back. And they used to be called widows. And if you think about it, the word widowed early on doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily lost a husband.

It means a without a man woman. So it usually means you’ve lost a husband. But it can mean that you were never married, which is still a qualification for a nun today, right? You were either married and widowed or you’ve never married. And you’re typically older. And so the earlier church seems to have seen the end of 1 Timothy 5 and the qualifications for widow as an office.

Sharifa >> No way!

Dr. Glahn >> So you’re like, oh, wait, so the church has elders and widows, deacons, female deacons, because they don’t have a female word for it. It’s like they don’t have the word teacher.

Sharifa >> And teachess!

Dr. Glahn >> Teacher and teachess! Plumber and plumbess. No, no, it’s like it’s a plumber. And a female plumber is typically how you would say it. And I think that’s what’s happening in 1 Timothy is you’ve got deacons and then the women.

Sharifa >> What history is this available like in the visual museum?

Dr. Glahn >> It is available, but let me just say this. We’ll get it on the BOW page to go with this podcast. I published an academic article on the office of widow. So it’s got the receipts in it. So we will give that away for free.

It was in the Trinity Evangelical Journal. So that’s a really important thing to reconsider. And in front of some of the fun news about that is, again, thinking about how long women have been in the academy in recent history.

Well, one of us are doing dissertations on these things that were not that interesting to our brothers. They again, it’s not no shade on them. It’s just they’re not that interested in girl things for the most part. And we’re interested in the office of widow.

Now, that said, there’s some awesome scholars, Michael Byrd, Scott McKnight that are that are doing important work. But in general, these topics have been neglected and they are no longer being neglected as women are very interested in them and want to do deeper dives in them.

And which leads me to another adjacent thing about education, and that is the internet.

Sharifa >> Okay.

Dr. Glahn >> So the internet means that when I started my work looking at who’s Artemis of the Ephesians in at the time of the earliest Christians, one of my male scholars colleagues said to me, now, of course you’re familiar with the Anatolian Digest. I’m like, never heard of it.

Sharifa >> Isn’t everyone?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> I think it had like 150 subscriptions, but because of the internet, all these obscure journals which maybe a scholar from Egypt or a scholar from Ephesus or a scholar from name your country would publish something, but it wasn’t well known.

And suddenly, with our ability in libraries to get PDFs of some of these works, we’re finding that in some ways it’s like a cheat sheet to your quiz where you took a quiz, and then you find out afterwards how you did on the answers, because somebody else who lives near or closer or knows the language as a first language.

Some things you can eliminate on what your hypotheses were, and some things you can confirm with better evidence. An d it really exponentially sped up our ability to take some of the good scholarship that had been done in isolation and have access to it.

It used to be, you know, when my brother did his dissertation, he would have to wait weeks and weeks for a French scholar to write back after translation. But I can, you know, go to Google Translate, craft a message. And when I get up in the morning, there’s a message waiting, which meant I could sit in my jammies, sit in my chair and go on the library and, you know, download a PDF of the Journal of Anatolian Studies. And that would tell me things. So the internet has made.

And then you add AI. AI’s got its weaknesses, but one of the things that it has done well is taking the ability to tell me about sources I didn’t know about who’s writing on Artemis, of the Ephesians. Who’s writing in Turkey on that question? You know, who is writing in Turkey, where Ephesus is, but that’s been translated into English.

Instead of me having to go to Turkey and dig through library files, it’s finding it for me. And so I can spend less time trying to find sources and work smarter. Now I’ll probably end up going to Turkey, but while I’m in Turkey, then I know who the scholars are, who’s already done work, and I’m not sort of inventing the wheel.

So the internet has done awesome stuff for women’s studies in particular in exploring the scholarship and just scholarship in general with ramifications for us. Yeah, yeah, that’s another big a big development.

Another one that’s sort of adjacent to history that we’ve been talking about is a real new in the last 40 years, emphasis on social history. So in the past when we looked at history, the main women that we knew about were Cleopatra, maybe Helen, the mom of there were people who were connected politically to men of power.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> They might have some power in their own right, but it was usually adjacent power. And in the past, you know, maybe 200 years, our history that we have learned has been very focused on white men, men of privilege, men of power. It’s focused on troop movements. It’s focused on wars and conquests.

And the renewed interest in social history means we’re looking at how do women give birth? What did they eat? What was their diet? Were there female gladiators? Yes there were. We know this because we’re uncovering bones and the pelvic bones tell, you know, or the DNA tells us these are women. Well, did they fight differently? You know, are their wounds, you know, different?

How long did it take to walk for Paul from or how long did it take for Paul to get from Ephesus to Rome when he wanted to be there by Pentecost?

All those factors that have been of interest, especially to biblical scholars, we have one of the best historical social history documents dating to the time of the earliest Christians that exists at all. Because you have Paul saying things like, I left my scrolls, you know, bring my scrolls.

Sharifa >> On.

Dr. Glahn >> Bro, as try to get here before winter because I’m kind of cold. You know that that is not political history. You have Rhoda answering the door and you know, or going to the door and hearing Peter and going back and saying, “Peter’s here.” And they say, “It can’t be Peter. Even though we’re praying for Peter to be released. It’s got to be his angel.”

Sharifa >> Angel? Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> Well, just that which seems really bizarre to us. Flags for us. Well, maybe their belief in angels was maybe they thought people had personal angels. What in the background studies relate to that. How old was your typical slave girl? What in the world is a Christian doing with a slave? Like all of those questions.

Sharifa >> Of those questions, social.

Dr. Glahn >> History questions, but are different questions than we were than historians were asking, you know, a hundred years ago. Right. The first book on women. Really, Sarah? Sarah Pomeroy was, you know, early 70s. And we know so much more since then.

So social history, if you think about Ephesus alone, when people have asked me, well, why are you depending so much on inscriptions when it comes, Artemis, I go, “You know what? I do depend on scriptures. But, you know, I started in the book of Acts because there is a big long section on magic which has an Artemis connection. And then there’s a big long section on the brouhaha that happens in the temple. It’s right out of Acts 19.” Acts 19 tells us what the religious climate is in Ephesus, so we can build on that.

But that’s how we know to look for Artemis, because Artemis was the last thing that ran Paul out of town. Maybe that would be the first thing on his mind when he’s writing to Timothy, telling him how to fight.

So social history, what was the background? How you know, how what did they eat? What was the average life expectancy? So these are the kinds of things that tell us that the number one cause of death for women was childbirth. And for the most part.

Sharifa >> And that matters.

Dr. Glahn >> It totally matters.

Sharifa >> When you’re reading about being safe through childbirth, for example.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, it shows us that Paul is thinking pastorally there, not powerfully. But also the number one cause for men in most parts of the Empire is going to be war, which also affects childbearing because the emperors are giving incentives to women who have three to five children, because you have to have a lot of children to replace just to keep the same number of people in your empire because of their power and how they’re going to war and young lives are being lost.

And that comes back to the women and childbirth, because they’re the ones who have to give an army.

Sharifa >> And then the widows also.

Dr. Glahn >> Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Good point. Really good point that. Yeah.

And could even affect how we look maybe at the woman at the well and you know, typically assume that she’s shacked up with five men and don’t factor in-oh, she’s probably been multiply widowed. Yeah. And she might be missing some teeth and maybe over 50. You know, she’s not the Jesus Christ Superstar.

Mary Magdalene, you know.

Falling in love with Jesus. Yeah. No, probably. Probably not. Yeah. And while I mentioned Mary Magdalene, these are the kinds of things we know. We know that there are women of means. We know better how they got those means. Some women did have access to money that they could manage. Very often it related to being widowed

And they are benefactors. You see Phoebe as a benefactor. I know a woman who’s just finished a dissertation on what it means to be a benefactor, and one of the theories is it’s also connected to being not just giving money, but being an emissary.

We know that the office of deacon has a connection with maybe ambassador emissary kind of interacting on someone else’s behalf, not just serving, not just cooking. You know, these are holy tasks, but there’s also an element of representing somebody in that.

All that’s so interesting. And we still have probably half a million inscriptions from the time of the earliest Christians we haven’t even entered into our databases.

Sharifa >> My goodness.

Dr. Glahn >> So it’s a great time to be a historian trying to do some digging.

The last thing, the last of the five reasons. So just to review them, textual reasons, historical reasons, the internet, social history. The last one is going to be inscriptions. And as I just mentioned. So you have so many inscriptions. And the thing that’s great about inscription.

Sharifa >> What is an inscription?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. So epigraphic work is the technical academic work. Epi is Greek for upon, grapha is writing. So things that are written upon the Romans loved to engrave things in stone, write things in stone. And that’s great for us, because the period in history with the most inscriptions is the very period that we most want to study when it comes to the New Testament. That’s awesome for us.

And but it isn’t necessarily just stone. It could. It could be an ad chiseled on a wall somewhere in Pompeii. We have some of those, things that are written on its. It could be a written grocery list that’s found in an ancient garbage dump. It’s, yeah, a flat for rent, and we found these in Pompeii that were sort of frozen in time because of the eruption of Vesuvius. And so that’s another really important development is the eruption of Vesuvius. Frozen time in 79 AD, the time of the earliest Christians, a whole community. It stinks to be them.

We’re sorry for the loss of life, but it’s awesome for historians. And it’s not just Pompeii, it’s Herculaneum. Herculaneum. It’s a it’s all these little villages all the way around. And both Herculaneum and Pompeii, which are at the base of the mountain, were frozen in time, if you will, in different ways. One had a different kind of lava flow, and the other was just buried in ash. So it preserved different kinds of things in different ways.

And so one of the things that we learned from bodies that were sort of casts made by the flow of lava, we used to think it was a woman cradling her child. We now know that the two were not genetically related. So it looks like a woman just gathered a child up into her arms.

I know! And the little child has a very expensive bracelet on her arm, and it looks like probably what’s happened is Mom or Dad put, you know, the worldly goods that they had and sent the child out to, to be saved. And someone tried to save this child and didn’t. I mean, it’s tragic, but it’s also giving us a whole lot of data about the world of the earliest Christians.

So lots of data coming through

Sharifa >> inscriptions, right?

Dr. Glahn >> Sorry. So one of the beauties of inscriptions, (thank you for getting me back on task) is that when you have a manuscript, somebody can change lettering, they can erase lettering, they can alter things. And so, for example, the scripture that says “let the women keep silent in the church, let them ask their husbands.”

We were not positive where that goes in the text because it was written in the side. So here’s the question. Was a written in the side because it was a scribal edition really early, who couldn’t stand the idea of women having spiritual gifts, or was it left out by accident? And a scribe came along later and wasn’t exactly sure.

Does it go here, or does it go here? We’re going to add it back, but we’re not sure where to insert in the text, which is why we find it inserted in different places in the text. That’s the kind of thing that can happen with a scribe.

That’s much harder for that to happen with an inscription. You know, we’ve seen with the mosaic you can do some altering, but we can tell you altered it. We can see. But inscriptions like so there’s, there is an emperor or two that we’re so bad and so hated that their memories were dammed. And you can see where we don’t find them anywhere, because they went back and everywhere their names were, and they were chiseled out. So that in and of itself tells you measure of how unpopular this person was.

Sharifa >> Social history meets inscription.

Dr. Glahn >> There you go. Yes. To your point, all of this. It’s not clean boxes, right? Right. The internet is then telling us these inscriptions, the work of our friend Dan Wallace, who’s going back and doing not just photography of every manuscript they can find everywhere in the world, so that we can compare them and find different text traditions and trace them back, which is great work.

But also he is doing an imaging that will take a scroll, like from, let’s say it was, it survived the eruption of Vesuvius, but it’s just basically ash. But it’s still in enough, like, you know, very fragile, but you could never unroll it to find out what it says. Well, now they can use infrared.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> imaging and read all the layers and then lay it out on AI. And we can read things that we thought were lost to history.

One of the areas where this kind of information is really helping us is in looking at what it meant to be adopted. So in our culture today, I’m an adoptive parent. Most of us, when we think of adoption, we think of bringing a little baby home, making it our own, making it a member of the family.

In the world of the earliest Christians, if we notice, Paul, when he mentions adoption, usually mentions being an heir, h-e-i-r. And in his world, Julius Caesar didn’t have an heir. So he made who we know as Caesar Augustus his heir. And he became his heir posthumously. After the emperor’s dead, somebody has to inherit the world and so he names an heir.

And this is a much bigger part of adoption in the ancient world that you can’t, you know, in their minds, you can’t, for the most part, have a girl inheriting stuff so you would find a male to leave things to. And again, that’s not a hard and fast rule. We do have women inheriting, but adoption is much more connected to being an heir.

So then when you start looking at Paul, talking about being joint heirs, when you look at Peter talking to husbands, saying, you know, your wife is going to inherit along beside you. These things are elevating women in a world that women we’ve tended to say women couldn’t inherit. And we do know that they could, but it still wasn’t that common.

And we’re just learning more about how people built families, how they left their inheritance to people. One of the interesting things the inscription shows, inscriptions in Ephesus show is how many times people would make Artemis their heir. And so they would leave it all to the goddess. And so you contrast that—that’s an inscription that’s very prominent in Ephesus that says that.

Well, you look at the wording in Ephesians 1 where it said, “God makes us his heir.” We don’t make God. Right? Instead of us leaving our inheritance to God, our little pittance, God is going, oh no, no, no! The meek inherit the earth. My people get the planet. Their inheritance. They’re going to sit next to Jesus.

What? Are you kidding me?

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> There’s so much power and provision in adoption and being an heir. Power and provision.

Yeah. And a complete reversal.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. All this is sort of what the history, the inscriptions, the internet are giving us. So it’s a really important time to relook at some of what we’ve had hunches about women that maybe, maybe we weren’t getting the whole story on some things.

Sharifa >> Yeah. And that’s a very generous way to say that.

But it just all of these five reasons are also when I hear that, I hear a better context, a more nuanced and more informed reading. More—and I always credit you with how consistent you have been since I’ve known you about how we are better together. Just when you reference Genesis, it’s you are always referencing it so that we remember where we came from and also where we’re going together.

Dr. Glahn >> Absolutely.

Sharifa >> I want to make it plain you, you, you don’t want—“Well now it should be women on top.” What you want is what God designed.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah we need each other And we don’t have to stereotype to say how we need each other. We can just acknowledge everybody brings something important. I don’t have to analyze it. Our goal is the fruit of the spirit not becoming more feminine or more masculine. Those are byproducts.

Sharifa >> Yeah, exactly. And yes, so we are both made in God’s image. That’s what it comes down to. Right? So how can only one gender reflect.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> Yeah. So you have always and I appreciate this. You’ve always been consistent about the togetherness nature of men and women. And so that’s why it’s so important I feel like it’s important for women but it’s important for men to know . . .

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> their siblings, fellow siblings in Christ to know and to have a more nuanced and more contextual view. Yeah. Of what? Of women in the Bible, and not just for knowledge sake, but because it makes us better worshipers of the God who made us. And it also makes us better lovers of people, more informed, more nuanced, more compassionate, more curious, lovers of our fellow siblings.

So this work is just so important. It’s not just important for the academic endeavor, which is sacred and worthwhile.

Dr. Glahn >> But the goal of academia is for it to go down and serve the church. The church is the bride, not the academy. Yeah, we serve. We serve the bride.

Sharifa >> We use this. We are empowered by this.

I just I appreciate so much. I mean, the legacy that you bring to this work and how much love is in this work, as well as academic excellence and curiosity. I can’t say curiosity enough because I feel like it’s an element that is sometimes missing in how we teach, in how we take information and give it to the next generation. And also sometimes at least in my very limited and anecdotal experience, people need permission to be curious, to ask questions.

Dr. Glahn >> You can have a high view of Scripture and revisit things that you were always taught. And it doesn’t mean you’re throwing your former pastor under the bus. The pastor had limited access to some of this historical information.

Sharifa >> Exactly. And when you know better, you do better.

Dr. Glahn >> So yeah. Oh, put that on a t-shirt. You know.

Sharifa >> I mean, I didn’t come up with that. But I just really appreciate you sharing these five reasons. I would just put the sixth reason as this is how we serve the church, you know, this is how we love one another.

Dr. Glahn >> So let me add something to that. One of the things that we’ve seen as we are looking at more and more at Paul’s use of constant use of sibling language for how we relate to each other in the church is finding more and more that the brother-sister relationship in many places, in ways, trumped the husband wife relationship.

Now, that is not what I’m suggesting that we do. I’m just simply saying that in Paul’s world a brother sister relationship was really, really important. And so for him to choose the family as a metaphor and talk about how we’re supposed to relate to each other as brother and sister, and then talking about loving one another deeply from the heart, suggest that he’s assuming that you can love one another deeply without sexualizing your relationship and how much the world needs brother-sister modeling, championing each other. Absolutely. We need each other.

Sharifa >> Okay, well, I feel like. Well, first of all, I, you know, maybe that’s that’ll be another episode, because I want to know more about this sibling relationship that you’re finding in antiquity. But I want to say thank you. Thank you for spending time with us. I personally, individually love learning from you. So I appreciate you so. And I know that our listening and viewing audience will also gain so much from this episode.

And I want to let them know that you can find many other podcasts and videos featuring Dr. Sandra Glahn on BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, and you can find this episode and others by logging into our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, clicking Resources and scrolling down to Church Issues. So I want to make that plain to our audience.

Thank you so much for spending time with us today. And thank you again to Dr. Glahn for your knowledge.

Dr. Glahn >> Thanks to you, Sharifa. You’re outstanding interviewer. It’s always a pleasure.

Sharifa >> Thank you.

Ann McKinley

Kelly Arabie

Dementia is a difficult illness, and so we need to think about what the church and dementia looks like. Jesus called us to love the least of these, just as he did. Today millions of people with dementia need our love in tangible ways. Ann McKinley provides understanding, encouragement and practical ideas in this conversation with Kelly Arabie of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries.

If you missed it, our first conversation with Ann, “Learning about Dementia” is available on the BOW Podcast or on video.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introductions

Kelly >> Welcome everyone to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. My name is Kelly Arabie and today we are back with Ann McKinley talking about dementia and the church. If you missed our first podcast, it was such a great conversation on learning about dementia, and I encourage you to go find that on our website.

But today we’re specifically talking about dementia and faith communities. Ann McKinley works with Juliette Fowler Communities in East Dallas, leading their citywide initiative, Dementia Friendly Dallas, which is committed to empowering those affected by dementia.

Ann, what does it mean to be a dementia friendly faith community?

Ann >> Great question. Most people think about grants or worship services or programs or, you know, special signage and all those things are very important when we want to engage people in our churches who are living with dementia. And those things matter. But they’re not the total picture.

To me, a dementia friendly faith community is one where people living with dementia and of course, those that are caring for them, their care partners, they know that they are seen, they’re valued and they’re loved.

A dementia-friendly faith community doesn’t define a person by their diagnoses. They are still defined by who they are—and that is that their beloved child of God. That doesn’t change.

So when we are working to create a dementia-friendly faith community, we’re trying to create a culture of belonging. It means that people don’t have to wonder if they’re going to be welcomed or accepted, or that when their loved one repeats a question or is disruptive during a service that their condition worsens, they know that they don’t have to apologize or stay home. They’re not going to worry about how other people might respond.

Dementia-friendly faith communities also recognize that that person still has gifts to share and offer, and they will actually teach us more about our own faith and our own presence and our own love. So our goal is not to care for people with dementia.

Our role is to be in community with them.

Kelly >> Love that. I love that. So how does dementia challenge our understanding of faith and personhood?

Ann >> One of our five key messages of dementia friend, is that a person is more than their dementia. And that’s important for us to rethink our assumptions about people and our assumptions about what a person with dementia is, does, and what they’re able to do. We often equate faith with what we know, what we remember. So when you’re thinking about a person who may not remember the words or how to pray out loud or some of those things, or to be able to articulate the passages that we’re reading or the liturgy in the church, you know, that could look like a disruption.

But Christianity reminds us that it’s our relationship with God and that God is not dependent on our cognition. He’s not dependent on our ability to remember him because he always remembers us.

Kelly >> That is so true. And it is about relationship. Our relationships change, but they don’t go away when someone is impaired cognitively or finds themselves with a disease they didn’t expect.

So I love that you framed it in that way that we haven’t changed in our relationship with God.

What are the growth edges, perhaps for those churches?

I mean, this is just a deep. There’s a steep learning curve for most churches. Many of them are finding that they have opportunities for people in their congregation who are now struggling with dementia. But there’s a steep learning curve. I haven’t heard of very many churches with ministry to those who have dementia. What do you think?

What do you think the growth edges for churches are?

Ann >> Well, I think that we sometimes, you know, minimize what that person’s contributions can be. We think that their value is based on their contributions. I mean, our society values us for, you know, unfortunately, you know, I am Mike’s wife. I am Katie and Patrick and Michael’s mother. I, you know, do this and I do that. But really, the truth matters. I’m just a child of God. And so our narrative about who people are and what they bring to the table needs to be completely challenged. And especially when you’re looking at dementia.

I’ve actually been asked whether someone with dementia still has faith. And I really think the better question is, as a church, we need to remember that God still has the ability to reach them. God’s presence is not limited by a person’s memory.

We often think about what programing, what is that programing that we have to do? And again, this isn’t, you know, just about a programing thing. This doesn’t have to be a massive change in a ministry for a church.

It’s about culture. It’s about how we perceive each other, how we value people, how we make ourselves available. A person with dementia cannot change, but we who have healthier brains can, and we can change our expectations. God’s grace is not dependent on our cognitive abilities.

Kelly >> It’s not about productivity and efficiency.

Ann >> It’s not. It’s not.

Kelly >> Which is a shift in our culture. It is a shift that needs to happen.

Ann >> And who better to do it than? I mean, really, the church has the framework for it. We are the ideal framework for a dementia friendly community. We already exhibit love and compassion. It’s not like we have to teach that. It’s just an awareness of the needs of others. And really, what a person with dementia is living with and living through and how we can best support them.

Kelly >> I think the relational journey with God for people—there is a transition that I have seen in a lot of people that is a relational transition away from transactional interaction with God, if you will, to a relational interaction. You know, that is a shift that many people have made or need to make— that I am completely loved by God for who I am, not for what I do for him. Not for my working out of my religion, if you will, or working out of my salvation.

And there’s theology behind that. But just the relational capacity that we have is not diminished by disease or by something like dementia or Alzheimer’s. Our relational capacity changes. But as you said, God is not changed.

Ann >> God does not change.

Kelly >> He’s still reaching out to us in relationship. And so, you know, how can an entire congregation that is a relational, a culture shift that needs to happen, and it’s not the responsibility alone of a pastoral staff to be a part of this kind of initiative or to have this kind of culture shift. How can an entire congregation consider being dementia friendly?

What does it look like to shift my mindset?

Ann >> Well, I’m glad you said that it’s not up to our staff because, you know, I think this is 100% a lay lead and ground roots initiative.

A faith community starts with education. You know, one of the reasons we have such a stigma and a fear of dementia is that we don’t know enough about it, and we have a one-hour education session that we do for congregations that outlines—what is dementia, what are the signs and symptoms of dementia? How do we engage and interact with dementia? How are different parts of the brain working together?

And because and I’ll tell you, because God doesn’t just say, open my Word and just read it. He’s not saying, I just want you to be a student. He wants us to act out our faith. And so in the same way that, you know, we want people to learn our material about dementia, we also want people to act on it.

And we make a challenge in every session that, you know, what are you going to do to put this, this learning into action? And so that’s where I think congregations can start. I know at my church I’ve done three sessions for different groups. We, we go into we are touching ministerial staff, pastoral care staff, but also Sunday school classes, just any type of a group.

I would love to do a children’s youth group. We’ve not done that yet, and I look forward to the day that we can do a youth presentation. But our goal is to change behavior, and behavior is an individual thing. And when you get a whole group of people doing the same thing and they’ve heard the same message and they’re all acting in the same direction, you change culture. So our friends with dementia can feel safe and welcomed. And they know we engage with people with dementia all the time.

And I’ve had people with dementia sit in my sessions, and they’d come up to me and afterward and said, “It makes me feel so good to know that other people know what you just taught them, that they understand what I’m experiencing. And it makes me feel good to know that people care enough to be here to hear this information and to pledge to put their learning to action.”

So everyone should be a dementia friend. And I think that’s where it starts. And then as a church, as a community of faith, the church can take that education further. It can become an outreach to the greater community.

They can decide that, you know, we want to do a very specific program. I’ve heard of dementia choirs in faith communities. There are dementia worship services that are designed specifically for people with dementia. They’re shorter. They lean into the things that people are very familiar with. So the familiar songs, the familiar verses.

I apologize to my pastors when I bring this up, but there’s usually not a sermon that’s not the focus of this. It’s the ability to come together and truly worship and praise through music and to be with others. People who are no longer verbal will start singing songs of praise. And it’s a beautiful thing to experience and it really that stays with them for a while. It’s interesting that that will stay with them in their verbal connection, will stay with them past, you know, for a while, past the service, because we’ve tapped something in the brain that comes to life.

Kelly >> I think in our churches we’ve looked at love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength. And we’ve really focused on that. Second, love the Lord your God with all your mind. And what happens, you know, when that looks differently? But all of those capacities need to be tapped, and music hits that place in the brain. You know, there’s—and I’m sure you can explain it better than my understanding, but we’ve seen it happen over and over.

I know my grandmother just turned 95 and has dementia. Music is—and she’s told me this my whole life—“Music is my thing, honey. Music is.” And so for her birthday, we had someone come and play hymns, and she got up and danced, and I danced with her.

Ann >> I love that.

Kelly >> I know. It was beautiful. And so she can sing and she can dance, and she loves to do that. And so that was very special.

Ann >> Well, in our personal experiences, my dad loved music too, and it was the only thing—he had a form of dementia that he would often have outbursts and aggressive behavior. And as a result, we had to find ways. And we tried to find non-pharmacological ways that we could intercede. And music was the way.

So we had an iPod created with his favorite music. We had music videos. And boy, the minute he would start to get revved up about something, we’d plop those earphones on him and turn on his music, and his entire demeanor would change. And so that that was a key thing for us to do for dad. So music in the church is soothing, peaceful, and brings us near to God.

Kelly >> Yeah. So. And what gives you hope for the future of dementia-friendly faith communities?

Ann >> Well, it gives me hope is that we’re beginning to see a shift in the conversation. More churches are recognizing the impact on families and care partners.

When we first started this work, I would have pastors say, well, I can really only think of two people in my church that have dementia and they’re now, you know, peeling back to layers and realizing that there are many, many more people impacted.

They are recognizing that it’s not a special ministry just for a few people that in fact, they can impact the greater community as well. It’s part of what it means to love our neighbor.

So a dementia friend is just caring for people across every stage of life.

I’m also encouraged because becoming dementia-friendly doesn’t really require a huge budget of a church. It doesn’t require a complete overhaul. It just really starts with the willingness to learn, a willingness to notice, and to want to build those relationships and to maintain relationships with people that we’ve always cared about.

Sometimes it’s as simple as greeting somebody by name. Sometimes it’s just sitting with someone and making a point to watch for someone and to sit with someone that you know is experiencing dementia.

Being that care partner is really helpful. I read a book years ago, long before I was in the dementia field even, long before my parents were diagnosed. And it was written by Duke University Medical Center, and it was about Alzheimer’s and the congregation. And there was a story in there about a man who said, my wife and I are classified by our church as shut-ins.

We’re not shut in, were shut out, and I’ve never forgotten that shut out. That’s just that was just really a powerful image to me.

And he went on to say that one person in the Sunday school class noticed that they hadn’t been there and picked up the phone and called. And he explained what was going on. And the man genuinely said, what can we do to help?

And the Sunday school class got training, dementia training. They created a calendar and a schedule where they took time and they routinely had people coming to spend time with his wife. Other people were doing things to help them, whether it was the mow the lawn, or take him to lunch or give him time to go to his own doctor’s appointment, you know.

And he said we could afford to buy any care in town, but I couldn’t buy what our Sunday school class provided to us.

And that’s the gap, right? It’s that true care. It’s that true “I’m going to walk this path with you, and we’re going to be there.” And it’s that continuous focus and that effort to get trained to know, to get the tools. So there was no fear to interact and engage.

Kelly >> Yeah.

Ann >> Looking ahead, my hope is that every person with dementia and every care partner knows that they have a faith community where they belong, and that that church is the place to go.

And I’m not sure that that’s existing right now. I think a lot of people stop attending because of the diagnoses, and our care partners need to know that they don’t journey this alone. They’re not alone.

Ultimately, I hope we stop saying that dementia separates people from church. And instead, I hope that we start recognizing that people living with dementia can continue to teach us. And they teach us what faith is really about. It’s about love. It’s about respect. It’s about grace and presence and the truth that our identity rests not in what we can remember but in the God that loves us and the God that never forgets us.

Kelly >> Wow, what a great word. Thank you.

Ann >> Thank you.

Kelly >> That’s beautiful.

Anything else that you want to say to our audience about loving people with dementia or the church and dementia?

Ann >> Yeah, I think dementia-friendly is not defined by the program or the ministry. It’s just defined by a promise, and the promise is that no one walks it alone. And we have opportunities that exist that we can help a church explore what and provide that education so that individuals can explore what they can do individually, and that possibly a church can determine what they want to do as a community.

What a wonderful leadership opportunity for a church in any city or town to put their stake in the ground and say, “We are dementia friendly, we are welcoming.”

And, you know, we hear a lot these days about, being inclusive. I think it’s really more about about belonging. Belonging is a little different.

So I hope I have the opportunity to shepherd churches in this learning opportunity, in this exploration. It’s an exploration of your resources and what you want to do. And it’s 100% up to a faith community to decide what they want to embark on, because that’s based on your resources, your finances, your manpower, your facilities. So that’s from a programmatic standpoint.

The most important part is the education you can provide that will benefit those living with dementia and their care partners and the entire family.

You know, one thing I want to say, behind every one person that has the diagnosis, you’ve got an entire family, an entire family that is experiencing and needs the support of their friends and their faith community.

Kelly >> So how should someone reach out and find you? Your website is?

Ann >> We have a website, it’s DFDallas.org.

Kelly >> Okay.

Ann >> And if you are not in the Dallas area, you can still feel free to reach out to me, and I can help connect you in another city, state, town. You can go to DFAmerica.org and see the other communities and states that are actively involved in this initiative. This is a truly a global initiative, and this is our little effort to change our part of the world just one friend and one church at a time.

Kelly >> Thank you, Ann, for being with us. I really appreciate your time and your heart and your willingness to share with our audience.

This is part of a series on Caring Well. You can find Ann’s other video, “Learning About Dementia”, on our website, BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. If you click the drop down menu of Resources, you’ll see Caring Well, and we have several other videos and resources that would be helpful for you. Feel free to check those out.

Thank you again. We’ll see you next time.

Ann >> Thank you.

Ann McKinley

Kelly Arabie

Learning about dementia helps us understand and love well those who have it.

Ann McKinley joins BOW Team Member Kelly Arabie to aid us in being the friends, family and neighbors those affected by this diease need in order to show them the love of God.

For families, learning about dementia is crucial. For friends, it helps us treat others as we want to be treated if we eveh have to deal with dementia ourselves.

This episode is also available on video.

00:21 Meeting Ann and her heart for dementia education

Kelly >> Welcome everyone to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. I’m Kelly Arabie and today we are talking with Ann McKinley on Learning About Dementia. Ann works with the Juliet Fowler Communities in East Dallas, leading their citywide initiative, Dementia Friendly Dallas, committed to empowering those affected by dementia. Ann, welcome. So glad to have you here.

Ann >> Thank you so much, Kelly.

Kelly >> Tell us, how did you find yourself in this arena for ministry?

Ann >> Well, as you said, I work for Juliet Fowler. I’ve been in the senior living community for over 20 years. And so of course I have professional experiences with helping families. But it was through my own personal experiences that I found the Dementia Friendly Initiative.

I’m a daughter of dementia. Both of my parents had dementia and that did not preclude me. My professional experiences did not preclude me from being that daughter who was googling at night and looking for answers and responses.

We in our family really thought we had all our ducks in a row. My husband’s an attorney. I have a sister who’s a doctor, another sister who’s a nurse married to a doctor. So and I’m in the senior living business.

We thought we were prepared and had it all already. But dementia doesn’t follow your plan. And so I found Dementia Friendly America and recognized that that was something that could be helpful to our community. It made me realize that there were gaps in understanding and gaps in services that existed. And I felt like at some point in time, that was something that I wanted Juliet Fowler to get behind.

And so within a short time they did. And here we are.

Kelly >> So let’s talk a little bit, say more about the gaps in understanding. Could you help us understand a little bit what is dementia?

Ann >> Yes. Well dementia is a term. It’s an umbrella term that describes—not the diseases. It’s not the disease itself, but it’s an array of symptoms. The symptoms of cognitive function. So it’s not just memory loss. People think immediately of memory loss. But it’s not just memory loss. It can also be vision. It’s communication. It’s mobility. It’s depth perception.

It’s a lot of different things that are all managed by the brain. And so when a dementia impacts your brain, all of those functions are impacted as well eventually.

Kelly >> So say more maybe about the symptoms of dementia. Those are some broad.

Ann >> They are broad and there’s actually many medical conditions that can cause dementia. And so the first thing a person really should do is we have to be very honest and upfront with our own physician. When we start recognizing a difference in our own self, we need to have those conversations because there are reversible medical conditions that can create and can mimic dementia. So first you got to know what you’re dealing with.

Alzheimer’s is the most prevalent of the dementias. It’s actually they estimate 60 to 80% of your dementia falls in under the Alzheimer’s bracket. But some of the other dementias are frontotemporal, vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s can have a dementia aspect.

I’m going to speak to the signs and symptoms specifically of Alzheimer’s, because 60 to 80% of our diagnoses are attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.

I also want to point out that not everyone that receives the diagnoses is going to experience the same symptoms, and they don’t go in any specific order. So some of those symptoms might be memory loss, specifically recently learned information. So your short term memory loss, the inability to plan and execute or solve a problem. So our executive function can be inhibited.

Vision changes and not the type of vision changes that are cataracts or, you know, normal macular degeneration, not that type of thing. I’m talking about the inability to see depth perception, to distinguish colors, confusion about time and place, communication, having a problem remembering words, being able to string words together to create sentences, understanding what is being asked, and then the ability to respond.

So those are just some of the most common signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s and of course, change in personality and behaviors. That’s something that some people experience as well.

Kelly >> So you’ve talked about various symptoms of dementia and the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. How can you know what you’re dealing with or what is a family in your experience? What does a family do when they see symptoms and they’re not really sure where to go?

Ann >> Well, I think the first thing you do is you talk to your primary care physician. A primary care physician needs to rule out anything that is medical beyond a diagnosis of a long term dementia, because medication mismanagement, depression can mimic dementia. There’s a lot of different things that can mimic dementia.

So your primary care physician is going to rule that out. They’re going to run the tests or do whatever is necessary to rule out something that’s treatable, something that’s reversible. Then they will refer you to a neuropsychologist who will do an entire array of tests. And the tests are first off, we don’t have, in my opinion, we don’t have enough neuropsychologists. And so it can take time to get in to see a neuropsychologist to do the testing and to get that very specific diagnosis.

And then your physician, the Alzheimer’s Association, Dementia Friendly Dallas, there’s a lot of resources. We are very fortunate that we live in a city that truly is rich with resources. And so the resources are there. Dementia Friendly Dallas is trying to do is bring an awareness to our community.

It’s not about when are you going to be impacted or when will dementia stand in front of you. It already is. It’s all around us. It’s in our businesses, it’s in the grocery stores, it’s in our neighborhoods. It’s walking down the street, you know, it’s in the pews of our church. So we as community members are called to to be friends, to be dementia friends. And that’s what the Dementia Friendly Dallas movement is about. We our goal is for our city to be a place where people can live, age and thrive.

And we don’t usually equate dementia and thriving. You don’t. We don’t think about that. A person who has a dementia diagnoses can live with dementia up to 20 years. I mean, there are people are known to have it for 20 years. And that’s a big chunk of our life. So that’s why it’s really important that we with healthier brains can recognize and have the tools and know how to adapt for that person who can adapt.

Their brain won’t let them adapt. They don’t have the ability to change what they do and what they say and how they’re acting and what’s happening to them.

And it’s kind of like when you go bowling and they put those bumpers, you know, to help get the ball down. The, you know, so you don’t gutter your ball.

We’re the bumpers. We’re the bumpers for people with dementia.

Kelly >> How does someone thrive with dementia?

Ann >> Great question. We participated in a panel several years ago of spouses with all the spouses that were care partners were working, and all the spouses with dementia were younger. And we asked them, what do you need the most?

And they said, “We need things to do. We need our friends. We need opportunities to have purpose. We need opportunities to volunteer. Our lives are not over, and we still want to live productive, thriving lives.”

We believe there’s such a stigma associated with this disease, that’s what isolates people. People become isolated due to the lack of knowledge on the parts of the rest of this community. And also because there’s such a stigma, people hide themselves. They’re not as open to share with their friends.

I’ve seen this happen in multiple ways, and I think the person that thrives is the person that lets their community, lets their tribe know. “I’ve had this diagnosis. This is what I’m experiencing.” And you’re really walking it with that person. And the more open a family can be and a more open the person that’s received the diagnosis, the more open they are with their community, I think the better they’re going to thrive.

But purposeful interactions. It really saddens me when I hear that friends no longer invite them to parties because I don’t know how the person with dementia is going to act. Or they’re no longer invited to play golf because they can’t fully they can’t count all their strokes, whatever, you know.

Being the friend that recognizes and anticipates and recognizes that this is a disease.

You know, it’s let me put it another way. This is like an invisible disease. You can’t look at a person with dementia and know they have dementia. You can look at a person with cancer and notice that they’ve lost their hair. You can look at a person that has got a brace or, you know.

There’s so many other things that you can see and this one you can’t see. It’s so gradual and it happens over a long period of time that people just withdraw from associating because I don’t know what to do and say. So it’s just easier to not be there.

We’re challenging people to be there, to be there. This is a culture change.

Kelly >> To be present.

Ann >> To be present, to maintain the community. And that’s how a person thrives.

I know for my in my own circumstances, my dad was a volunteer. He was an active volunteer. And so we had to find ways for him to volunteer. And because we understood that a person with dementia can maintain procedural memory, we thought of ways that we could tap procedural memory.

So he had been a volunteer at the VA hospital for years and years, and he would clean and repair wheelchairs. So when he was in the senior community, the rehab department would bring my dad down and let him—and please know that they could have cleaned those wheelchairs in ten minutes had been done—but they took the time to bring him down and let him work with them to clean the wheelchairs and test the wheelchairs.

And that took twice, if not, you know, triple the time for them to do that. But that was very important to him. It fed his soul. It fed who he was.

Kelly >> Efficiency and time are not God’s highest priorities.

Ann >> They are not. They are not.

Kelly >> Yeah.

Ann >> And then we realized that that was beyond his scope. So then we started stuffing bags for the homeless shelter because Dad could sort and he could very methodically get the toothpaste, the toothbrush, the soap, you know, whatever. Put it in the Ziploc bag, seal the Ziploc bag, you know, and he would sit there for hours because he had purpose. We put purpose in his day.

So remembering that a person with dementia can’t just sit there and look at a TV and watch movies.

Kelly >> Right.

Ann >> Right. That interaction, that social interaction, and in fact, the social interaction helps preserve the brain.

Kelly >> Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

Ann >> God made us to be in community.

Kelly >> Yes he did.

Ann >> He made us to be in community.

Kelly >>And that doesn’t end. That doesn’t end when disease impacts us.

Ann >> That’s right.

Kelly >> There are many challenges that a family faces when they’re impacted by a loved one who has dementia. And there are many challenges that the individual faces themselves. You know, so much loss. What have you seen in either your experience or the experiences of those you’ve worked with? Particular challenges that we should just be aware of?

Ann >> Well, your care partners need an outlet. They need support. They need friends that really check in on them, that don’t just say, Well, let me know what I can do to help,” but are very specific with their needs. I read a book years ago about dementia in the church, and a man described said that he and his wife were classified as a shut-in.

“And in fact,” he said, “we’re not shut in, were shut out.”

And he spoke about the actions that their specific Sunday School class took to help and to support, all because one person noticed their absence. So being aware of the people that are no longer sitting next to us in the pews, being aware that someone is not there, being very persistent and active with the needs, and recognizing and calling people that we know haven’t been in church for a while.

Keeping people safe and welcome is our ultimate responsibility, and these small acts of hospitality make an enormous difference.

Kelly >> Yeah, I’d love to have a conversation about what the church can do to support dementia. It sounds like there are a lot of opportunities and perhaps we can come back and have a conversation about that a little bit later.

Ann >> That would be wonderful.

Kelly >> What else would you like our audience to know about dementia and people who you know they love who are impacted by this? There’s just there is a deep lack of awareness, as you’ve no doubt encountered in people just not understanding what the diseases are. And I mean, I’m just learning from you that there’s more to it than just Alzheimer’s.

Ann >> Dementia Friendly Dallas does a one hour session. It’s called Become a Dementia Friend. And in this dementia friends’ session, we talk about the ten signs and symptoms. We talk about how two parts of the brain interact and engage the amygdala as managing our emotions. And our hippocampus manages the facts and figures of our life. And how those interact and engage. How when the hippocampus gets hit with dementia, it becomes very confusing to a person with dementia because they’re holding on to feelings and they don’t have anything to relate it to.

And then we spend a good bit of time with communication. We want people to take what we teach. It’s just one hour but we jam pack that with some very useful tools so that people can be in the community. When we’re giving people the ten signs and symptoms that speak for a couple of different reasons, we want people to be able to recognize that the person that they’re speaking with may have dementia.

We’re not trying to diagnose a person. It’s just to have an awareness. This person may have dementia. I may need to use a tool that I that I have in my tool belt. We also want people to increase their empathy and to have an understanding that this is a disease and this is what this person is experiencing.

And when we have that knowledge, we approach people differently. We change our expectations. It’s important that we change our expectations of the people that we are interacting with when we recognize that they have dementia.

And so through this one hour course, we are creating dementia friends, and we really believe that we are going to change this world one friend at a time.

Kelly >> I love that, I love that. That’s beautiful. Is there anything else that you would like to share about Dementia Friendly and your goal? How to register for your education?

Ann >> Yes, we have a website. It’s DFDallas.org and so you can learn more about what our Dementia Friend initiative is. We have a dementia friendly business initiative. So and we have a dementia friendly faith community initiative. And we have another initiative that is called Dementia Friendly Engage. And Dementia Friendly Engage came about really after the pandemic because prior to the pandemic, there were many opportunities for engagement for people with dementia.

And throughout the pandemic, like everything else, they shut down and they didn’t come back. So we felt it was really important for us to shine a light on those opportunities. And we have toolkits available for people to create memory cafes. We have mentors that can help start a respite program. So personally, I believe if you are breathing, you should be a dementia friend.

So that’s all I do is right. Everyone should have this knowledge. If it’s not in front of you right now, it will be. And children are amazing with people with dementia, so we shouldn’t shy away from exposing our children and giving our children the opportunity to nurture and to shine. The intergenerational component is so important.

And then if you are any type of business or organization that’s engaging the public, you should be dementia friendly. There are things even senior communities have recognized things that they can do to modify, whether it’s their environment or, you know, a practice that they’re using and really have people in the room that say, wait a minute, is this dementia friendly?

Because if it’s dementia friendly, if it’s good for a person with dementia, it’s good for everyone.

Kelly >> Yes.

Ann >> So DFDallas.org is how you learn more about dementia friendly. You can. We’ve got a calendar online where you can see our upcoming education. We do virtual sessions. We have in-person sessions that are routinely scheduled, and then you can schedule one for your specific group or business or faith community.

Kelly >> Okay. Okay. So how would somebody connect with you if they’re not in the Dallas-Fort Worth area?

Ann >> Well, they can always reach out to me, and I can help direct them. But there’s another website, DFAmerica.org, and that’s Dementia Friendly America. There is an entire list of communities throughout the country. Almost every single state in our country has some presence of dementia friend and dementia friendly initiatives, and so they can reach out and find a person in their state that can help them.

And if it is not there, be the person that starts it. Be the leader that wants to pull this together for your community.

Kelly >> Yeah.

Ann >> At Juliet Fowler we have a care philosophy that’s called I’m Still Here. And it’s just a reminder for all of us that the person that we love and the person that we know is really still there. And while they may forget our name and they may forget some very specific details, that love that they have in their heart is still there.

That person, if that person was a musician, they’re still a musician. They still love music. And so when we can remember that that person is still there, we need to continue to tap in and treat them with the dignity and the respect that we’ve always treated them with.

Kelly >> Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thank you, Ann, for being with us. This has been so helpful, and I look forward to having you back and talking again about ways that we can minister to families with dementia or those with dementia, how the church can do a good job about coming alongside and loving well.

Thank you for being here.

Ann >> Thank you so much.

Kelly >> And we’d love to direct our audience to BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. You can find more resources on caring well. Go to the Resources tab on our dropdown menu and select Caring Well. You can find other podcasts and videos that are able to support you in caring well for others.

Thank you for joining us.

Rebecca Carrell

Many evangelical churches have failed to give their congregants permission to grieve for their friends and loved ones who have passed away. They seem unaware of how that has hurt the spiritual and mental health of many of them.

In this episode Rebecca Carrell suggests various ways that the church and even the larger American culture have done this. In her conversation with Dr. Kay Daigle, she uses scriptures to explain the biblical pattern which provides permission to grieve for all of us who don’t know how to grieve well.

Kay Daigle

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introductions

Kay >> Hi I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to this episode of our podcast. We are delighted today to welcome Rebecca Carrell back. Rebecca, we’re so glad that you’re here with us.

Rebecca >> Thank you for having me. It’s always such a pleasure to join you.

Kay >> Oh, we love it when you come. And I’m very excited about this topic that we’re going to talk about. But let me tell everybody just a little bit about you. And they can find the rest on our website if they want more information. She does have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Education from Dallas Seminary, just like I do, and she is working there presently on her doctorate in education.

And she is also mentoring and teaching at the seminary in Media Arts and Worship Department, as well as educational ministries and leadership department as well. You’ve got to be a busy person.

Rebecca >> They like to keep me busy. Yeah. I’m really looking forward to post-doctoral life.

Kay >> Yeah. And when will that be? When do you expect that to happen?

Rebecca >> Oh, not anytime soon. I think about two years. I’m really hoping for two years.

Kay >> Yeah, well, that sounds reasonable.

Rebecca >> Yeah, yeah.

Kay >> Well, today our topic is about grief. We are going to talk about “You have permission to grieve.” And when Rebecca suggested this is a topic, I was very excited because I believe that the way we deal with grief in today’s church is not healthy for the most part, and it’s widespread in our society. But it shouldn’t happen in the church, is the way I feel about it.

So, Rebecca, describe how we in today’s Western culture deal with grief.

Rebecca >> Well, Kay, about 10 or 12 years ago, probably maybe even 12 or 13 years ago, I attended a funeral. A friend of mine lost her brother and he had been in his early 40s, left behind two young children, a wife. And it was a tragedy, the way death is always a tragedy. But the circumstances surrounding his death were particularly heartbreaking.

It was a drug overdose. He had struggled throughout his life and OD’d on drugs. I was at the funeral, snuck in just a little bit late, came straight from work, and as I sat down, the pastor crossed the stage, took to the podium and thundered in this loud voice that just filled up the room. He said, “We are not grieving. We are celebrating. Today we are celebrating because we know where he is.”

And I knew what he was trying to do, and I knew that he was trying to encourage us, that because someone is in Christ, we don’t grieve as though we have no hope but to take away the one place left in society where it’s okay to actually come together as a community and express sorrow and lament is so destructive.

And it highlights a pattern that I’ve seen. Oh, probably, probably started when I was a teenager, maybe in the early 80s, and it might predate that. But this, this move away from funerals to celebration of life, instead of taking advantage of an opportunity to really share the gospel and hammer into the room what Christ did for us, it has come more about making people laugh and telling stories.

And I think that in our eagerness to grieve as those who have hope, we have forgotten that grief and hope can co-exist. And we have entered into this kind of attitude of triumphalism and what the medical sciences would tell us and the psychological sciences would tell us, is that to not grieve actually is very, very destructive, not just for the soul, for the spirit, but also for the body.

Kay >> Yeah. Well, you know, when my father died. I was 33 at the time.

Rebecca >> I’m sorry.

Kay >> Yeah.

Anyway, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to grieve. I mean, I had that sense from, you know, the verse that says we don’t grieve like the others do, that you were just talking about. We have hope and those things. But I had the sense that everybody was saying, “He’s in heaven, he’s happier. You just have to let go of the grief and celebrate the fact that he is there and he’s well now.”

And so I kind of stuffed it for a long time. And it was it was not healthy at all.

Rebecca >> No it’s not. And not only is it not healthy, but it’s not biblical. And that’s where I think the church has gotten a little bit out of alignment in the sense of victory in Christ, which is true, which really cannot be overemphasized. But in this leap toward the victory piece, we forget that we still have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death.

We forget that the Bible, if it is anything, it is a witness of people crying out with raw, real emotions to God and God meeting them where they are, allowing space for grief and lament. And we find that the healing comes through the process and not by avoiding it. So I think your story is so common.

And the more I have this conversation with people, the more I hear the same story is this feeling that it’s almost like it’s a diminished witness if we express our grief.

Kay >> That’s a thought I hadn’t thought of, but I totally agree with that. It does diminish our witness.

And it really made it hard for me to talk about my dad. So I certainly couldn’t really talk to other people about it because I felt like I just might start crying.

Rebecca >> Right. And that’s another thing for some weird reason. And I just need someone to explain this to me. We have gotten or embraced this idea that somehow tears are bad.

And when you think of like I did this as a young parent, my kids would come crying to me with something and instead of sitting down and entering into the sadness with them. And if I could go back and do it again, and I did course correct when they were, you know, later in elementary school, in middle school. But if I could go back and course correct, I would actually affirm their tears because I believe that God has given us tears as a way to process through our emotions.

And we can talk about this in a few minutes if you want. There are actually big differences between grief tears and tears of laughter, tears of joy, onion tears, to where grief tears, or psychosomatic tears are chock full of adrenaline and stress hormones. And they’re thicker too. So when grief tears trickle down our face, they take longer. We are wired so that when we see tears, we tend to be moved with compassion. And so not only are we drawing people to us, to comfort us when we can openly express our grief, but we’re also purging our body of the toxins that can harm us through our tears. But for some reason, when we cry in front of people, we say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be crying. I’m so sorry, I’m crying.”

And we try to stop. Instead of making space for each other to weep and to weep as loudly and for as long as we need to. And I think the biblical example is just that.

Kay >> That’s interesting, that it’s even a physical way that God has made us so that we can grieve.

Rebecca >> It’s beautiful, if you think about it. I mean, it’s just it’s the kindness of God that the healing comes through the grieving and the weeping.

Kay >> That’s really interesting. I had no idea there was some scientific basis for a different types of tears.

So what would you say that the Bible teaches us to do then?

Rebecca >> I think we have examples all throughout the scriptures. But when I when I teach this in lesson form, I tell the people in attendance that we can take three things from the Scripture, and the first is that we have permission to grieves. God gives us permission to grieve.

The second is he gives us prescribed words in the lament Psalms.

The third is that he gives us a pattern in the Psalms of lament. So to if we were to talk about permission, I would point you to John 11. And I think this is one of those examples in the Scripture that best illustrates the humanity of Jesus in such a tender and compassionate way. But if you’re not, I know you’re familiar, Kay.

If you’re not familiar with the story of Jesus and Lazarus, Jesus and his disciples are about two days away from a town called Bethany. Bethany is where some dear friends of Jesus live- Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus. Well, Lazarus becomes ill and the sisters are alarmed. So they send word to Jesus and they have the messenger tell them that the one he loves is ill.

Well, Jesus stays where he is for two more days and then makes the journey back to Bethany. Well, by the time he gets there, not only is Lazarus dead, but Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. And that number four is significant because the Jews in the first century believed that the spirit sort of hovered around its body for a couple of days after death, and may or may not decide to reanimate the body.

And so once you passed that third day and entered into that fourth day, they believed that the spirit had gone on to its final resting place, and that the body was as dead as dead could be.

Well, the sisters hear that Jesus has come to the edge of the town, and Mary is collapsed on the floor weeping. But Martha races out to meet Jesus, and she says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

And then Jesus enters into a dialog with her, and they actually end up having this really beautiful theological conversation where they talk about the redemption and eternal life. And this is really interesting to me because Jesus, who knows all of us perfectly, knows the kind of linear thinker and verbal processor that Martha is.

She seems to be just maybe a little bit more cerebral than her sister. And so in her grief, what Martha needs is words. And so Jesus gives her words, and then Martha goes back to the house. If I’m remembering this correctly and sends Mary, she tells her sister, “The teacher has sent for you, or the teacher is calling for you.”

And Mary gets up, races to Jesus and when she gets there, starts to talk to him, but just collapses in tears. Mary is our feeler. She’s our emoter and Mary doesn’t need words. Mary needs Jesus to meet her in the emotion. And that’s exactly what Jesus does.

The text says that Jesus wept. We tend to stop there, and we laugh and we say, “If we’re going to memorize one Bible verse John 11:35, it’s the shortest one.”

It’s two words, Jesus wept. But if we stop there and we don’t read on to verse 36, we really miss something poignant. The text then says that the Jews who were around him and all the people surrounding him said, “See how he loved him.”

And so that tells us something else, though we read verse 35 and go immediately to verse 36. When this played out in real time, Jesus wept loudly, demonstrably, and with enough passion that the people around him felt compelled to comment and John felt compelled to record it.

So we can assume that Jesus didn’t just wipe away a tear, but that he actually entered into Mary’s very real sorrow and empathized with her. And so we have this picture of not only Jesus, the healer and the miracle worker who’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but we have a picture of Jesus with a very high EQ, a very high emotional intelligence, who knows exactly how to meet people, where they are in their grief, and who condescends to enter into that grief.

And it’s because he loved Lazarus. He loved Martha, he loved Mary, and he grieved death. He grieved death even though he was about to reverse it, he still grieved death. And so for us to gloss over something that Jesus wept over and that Jesus came to defeat is to diminish it.

And even in modern society, Kay, we say things like, “Sometimes death is better. Death is a friend.” You know, sometimes death is, you know, a release.

Well, theologically, that’s very antithetical to the gospel. We’re never to make friends with the enemy that Jesus died to defeat. And so I think that the church is doing all of us a disservice. And not all churches do this, and not all pastors do this. But as a society, by and large, to sequester the grievous and to not create a space for people to come together and really lament as a community and weep and grieve is to it’s not to short circuit the process. It’s actually to delay healing. And I think that we miss a real opportunity to grow in Christ likeness and to grow in empathy when we try and short circuit grief, short circuit grief.

Kay >> Yeah, I love that. I love, I love that story. I’ve always been so glad that Jesus wept and grieved Lazarus for everybody to understand that he felt their sorrow. I loved that too. And you know what you were just talking about so often? You know, I hear reports of somebody who is grieving. They’ve lost someone. Christians just say the wrong thing far too often because they’re trying to make the person feel better, and it doesn’t help.

Even Paul tells us to weep with those who weep. And I think that’s the problem. We’re trying to fix it. We don’t want to see and hear other people who are hurting.

Rebecca >> Yeah, I totally agree. And it’s because we’re uncomfortable with grief. You know, it. It makes us feel uncomfortable. So we try to slap a Bible verse on it or we try to distract them. I have found though, (and the Lord has blessed me with numerous occasions to grieve and grieve deeply), and what I’ve found is that when someone tries to make me feel better, I may be distracted for a little while, but I ultimately feel worse and unseen and unvalidated.

When my husband and I were going through a really, really heavy season that lasted over a year, a girlfriend of mine took me to her house in Colorado, and we just spent time in nature. We were there for a week and she said, “Your job this week is to cry, and I’m not going to try and make you cry, but I’m going to hold space for you to cry. I’m going to sit here while you cry, and I’m not going to try and stop you from crying. And you’re going to promise to never apologize for crying.”

And every morning I would get up and do my Bible study and she would come and sit down. And it was like just her compassionate presence would trigger the tears. And I would cry for about 30 minutes, sometimes 45 and maybe by the end of the trip—not quite that long—but I found that once I had worked through that emotion that I actually legitimately felt better all day long, I felt like my loss mattered. I felt like someone else was giving weight to the heaviness of the loss and validating it.

And I felt. I just felt so seen. And I just imagined that that was part of the magic of what Jesus did with Mary and Martha. Is he just saw them and he just held space for them to dump all of their emotions on him, to yell at him a little bit. I mean, I don’t think we should try and sterilize Martha saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

She’s saying, “Where were you? You could have stopped this and you didn’t.” And that’s something we all have to wrestle with when we go through a loss of any kind. “Where were you, Lord? You could have stopped this.” And you didn’t.

And so I think one of the changes that needs to happen in order for the church to get better at helping people grieve, is for us to understand that there’s actually this beautiful healing process within the grief itself.

The grief isn’t bad. The grief is the path to feeling better, not trying to make someone laugh, not trying to distract them, not drinking alcohol or binging on Netflix. It’s processing those emotions. But even more than processing the emotions, stealing, feeling seen within them. Because the other thing, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this, Kay.

The other thing I hear from grievers over and over and over again is the same thing that my husband and I felt when we were in our long season of grief. And that is where has everybody gone? You know, I mean, it’s people who used to call and we just used to do life with on a daily basis just disappeared.

And the only thing worse than a good, hard season of grief is going through it alone.

Kay >> Oh, yeah. I’m so sorry that happened. That is. Yeah, but I think it’s back to the idea that because our society just is not comfortable with pain and grief, they just don’t know what to do. So they avoid people who are going through that kind of pain.

Rebecca >> And that’s what it is.

Kay >> Yeah. It really, really, really makes that hard on the person who’s already going through grief when they don’t have anybody who is commiserating with them.

Rebecca >> Yeah, yeah. And it’s so symptomatic of our culture. I mean, if you think about the air we breathe. I mean, we really do live in a world that says, “If you want it, you can have it. Your highest ideal is to be happy.” And anything that threatens that is something that should be cut away.

The biblical authors would actually tell us there is great value in our suffering and in our trials. James said, “Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you face many trials of many kinds.”

I mean, so we have kind of—and this is something I need to tease out a little bit more my own mind before I really feel prepared to talk about it. But I think that one of the issues we see today, certainly in society, but also in the church and I think more in evangelical spaces, is this emaciated theology of suffering where suffering somehow, instead of being viewed as sanctifying, is viewed as getting in the way and something we need deliverance from right away.

And we need a miracle and we need a breakthrough, and we need to be through the trials as fast as we possibly can, because that’s what Christian triumphalism tells us. But the biblical authors would imply that without suffering, there’s no sanctifying.

Kay >> Yeah, and suffering is really when we grow the most in the way.

Rebecca >> I wish it weren’t true, but it’s true.

Kay >> Yes, yes, it really is. It really is. So what is the scriptural pattern for going through a time of grief?

Rebecca >> So the lament Psalms are a fascinating study, and one of the reasons we’re not terribly familiar with them is because we don’t like them.

We, like the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. We don’t like create in me a clean heart. Oh, God, renew a right spirit within me.

Kay >> Or we make it for somebody else. Create in them a clean heart. Oh, God. You know.

Rebecca >> Right? Right. Exactly. Yeah, but we really do naturally tend to gravitate toward the scriptures that make us feel better about us. And I’m as guilty as the next person. You know, I don’t think I’ve memorized a whole lot of the lament psalms. I have memorized Romans 8, which is more than conquerors, so guilty as charged. But one of the reasons that we are not as familiar with them as we should be is because we’re not spending time in them, and when we spend time in them, we’re not thinking deeply about them and putting ourselves in in the story that that it’s telling or applying it to our own lives.

But the majority of the Psalms and I don’t have an exact percentage. It’s higher than 60%, lower than 70%. But the majority of the songs in the Psalter are community laments, which tells us two things. Israel did not shy away from letting the Lord know that they were unhappy with things. They did not hold back when they were upset. They didn’t hold back when they were angry.

And it also tells us that they came together and lamented as a community.

And so I think that is a cue for us. Instead of having celebrations of life—and I get I get it, I do, and I’ve had my fair share of celebrations of life. But I think we should at least retain the funeral language and understand that we don’t have to have a party. We actually can come together and weep. We can come together and recognize the brokenness of the world.

I think we honor the Lord when we do that, when we recognize and acknowledge and affirm that things are not as they should be, I think we honor the person who has passed when we publicly grieve their loss, and then we move into hope.

We grieve as those who have hope. But that doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. It just means that we grieve while we hang on to hope. And that is something that can be done at the same time. And then when we when we don’t have the words, the beautiful things about the lament Psalms is that the Lord saw fit to preserve in the Psalter words penned for us when we can’t find our own.

And so when I am so weighed down that I just don’t know how to pray, I can go to Psalm 13 and I can say, “How long oh Lord,” you know “How long. Oh Lord, when will you see me? When will you hear me?” And then when we pray through these Psalms, and I think it’s a good idea to even practice writing our own.

But what tends to happen is that about halfway or two thirds of the way through, there’s this shift, and it’s as though, in crying out to the Lord and dumping all of our hurts and cares and concerns on him, the Spirit shifts our gaze. We start to remember who he is and what he’s done, and what he has promised to do and what he is still actively doing, and that is saving people and making all things right and speaking order into chaos. So that’s where the hope is. But I do feel like you have to pass through the grief to get to the hope.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah. Amen. Just yesterday. And we’re recording this for the audience in March of 2026, I read an article about a study that had been done about best practices for grieving, basically. And some yes. Some people had studied this, you know, and they’d done it with all the scientific stuff where they’ve got two groups, two and two different things and compared them.

And all of these people were grieving something, and they had a group who was going through a Bible study and reading more cheerful verses, encouraging verses in the Bible. They had another group who was—who were learning how to lament. And they were using the psalms of lament, and that they said that that group processed things the grief better than even the people who had the encouraging verses. Because the encouraging verses would help them for a little while, but then they kind of just go back into it and they, they didn’t know what else to do except just read more verses. You know what I’m saying, but lament really gave them something to do, something to take away. And it really made a difference. And I was just really interested when I read that yesterday, and I couldn’t believe I saw it yesterday when we were, we were going to have this. But you know, it’s kind of back to your there’s something physical about it, I think.

Rebecca >> Yeah. You know, that just doesn’t surprise me because I know the truth of the gospel and I know my eschatology, and I know Jesus is coming back, and I know we will have resurrected bodies and unexpired knees, and we’ll be able to do all the things and we’ll be rejoicing forever. And that does not help me when I am in the pit of grief.

What helps me is knowing that the Lord knows that things are broken, that he has done everything there is to do to make things right. And what helps me is someone sitting with me in my brokenness, letting me process through it and then helping me out the other side. And there’s something inauthentic about slapping a Bible verse on something on a gaping wound, even if it’s true—and it is true. But ill-timed truth is not helpful.

And Jesus said John 16:33, “In this world you will have trouble.” You know, “I have told you these things to that you will have peace.” And then the very next thing he says, “In this world you will have trouble.”

How is that supposed to give me peace? I don’t know, but somehow it does.

Knowing that the Lord has acknowledged that this life is going to be hard, but that this life isn’t all there is, has a way of validating the difficult circumstances we go through. And I think that’s just what we want more than anything else when we’re in those spaces is for someone to say, “Yeah, you know what? This really rots. This is just awful, and I’m not going to try and fix it. I’m just going to sit with you in it.” And ironically, that’s what seems to fix it faster.”

Kay >> So what do you do when the person that is dying tells everybody not to grieve for him? Because I.

Rebecca >> Don’t you dare take away my right to grieve.

Kay >> Yeah, I have seen this happen that they said, “I don’t want you to grieve. I don’t want anybody unhappy at the funeral.” Of course, they don’t want their loved ones to be sad. That’s the thing–they’re trying to prevent them and protect them from those feelings, those emotions that they’re going to have to go through.

But what would you say to somebody who maybe had someone pass away who told them that? If you see that they’re struggling, what would you tell them?

Rebecca >> If I was talking to someone who was really struggling because let’s say their spouse had told them they didn’t want them to grieve, I would say, you know, “I recognize how much you want to honor what you feel like are their dying wishes. And that’s just not how this process works. And they don’t get to tell you how to feel, and they wouldn’t if they were still here.”

And to someone who was dying and, you know, let’s say had a terminal cancer prognosis and they said that to me, I would just really lovingly tell them, “I see what you’re trying to do, and I love you for it. And it’s just not helpful because your life has immense value, so much value that Christ died for you.

“And if you try to diminish that, for those of us who are left behind and love and love you, you will actually hinder our healing and not help it. And so instead of trying to make us feel a forced happiness when you’re gone. How about you just love us well, while you’re here and let’s just live life to the fullest while we have you. And then we will. We will mourn for you the way we need to when you’re with the Lord.”

Kay >> I think that’s really great. A lot of wisdom in that. Thanks, Rebecca.

Well, do you want to give us a closing thought as we close the podcast here?

Rebecca >> Yeah. You know, I would say that we live in a world that’s so addicted to happiness that this is just sort of the air we breathe. And it takes a little while to shift your mindset to one that actually embraces grief and looks at trials and hardships and suffering not as something to be delivered from as quickly as possible, but actually something that is ultimately going to make us more Christlike.

And I’ve found, as I have been doing this work on grief and walking with a precious friend who’s had just a terrible grief journey in losing her daughter, I found a deeper and richer relationship with the Lord. But I’ve also found that my joy feels more authentic. I think, in embracing the difficulties in life and the grief that I’ve walked through, I also have a keener appreciation for the good times and a stronger longing for the Lord.

And I think that that is something that the biblical authors would tell us is something to be desired, that we should long for the Lord’s presence. And I am less accepting of injustices when it’s something I think I might be able to help.

And so I think embracing a posture of open hands and open hearts toward not just your own grief, but toward others are grieving, too, is actually going to make you more of a holistically healthy human, and in the long run, more like Christ.

And I think that’s where our deepest joy is to be found.

Kay >> Okay, I love that. That’s very well put.

Well, thank you for joining us. And thank you, Rebecca, for being our guest.

If you are joining us and thinking about this topic, you can also go to our website, BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. We have a couple of other podcasts on lament that Nika Spaulding did just two parts. One is “Understanding Lament” and the other is “Practicing Lament.” And she did that for us a couple of years ago. And so if you want more in depth about laments themselves, I think those podcasts would help you. And you can find those in the Godly Living section. If you go up to our main menu and go down to look at Resources under the Godly Living section, you will find those two.

And I am actually writing a study Learning to Lament. And so that should be out by the time this podcast drops. So if you would like a study to kind of go through yourself or with a group that will be out by the time you hear this.

So thank you again, Rebecca. We look forward to seeing you soon.

Rebecca >> Thank you for having me, Kay. And thank you, friend, for listening.

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.