FireFall Vol. 1: A Prayer for Connection
Introducing a resource hub for women in ministry and church leadership
Today, I pray for my sisters who proclaim Jesus Christ in pulpits and hospital rooms, seminary classrooms, outdoors, or in secret. If you’re in a season or context of isolation, may you see your sisters’ lights flickering across the global landscape and know you are not alone.
Why FireFall, when there are so many resources online? Click here to review. To recap, FireFall is a resourcing hub amplifying the voices, ministries, and scholarship of women in ministry, church leadership, and the academy; it’s more traffic roundabout with a coffee shop to the side than destination itself.
Specifically, FireFall encourages women in ministry by:
Connecting across silos (denominational, geographical, a few linguistic).
Amplifying over algorithms by linking and directing traffic to a variety of online resources (I arm-wrestled a search engine displaying complementarian summarized search results for certain key words.) Linking to resources helps them rank. Amplifying the diverse voices of women in church leadership is important in part because women get cited less, and for better or worse, publishing contracts and keynote gigs often require online platform engagement benchmarks.
Learning from what other women in ministry are struggling with or doing well - some challenges for women in ministry are universal, some shaped specifically by denominational, cultural, geographical, and historical factors.
Boosting global connections. The global church is increasingly online, and research and historical archives are increasingly online, digitized, and accessible - much more so than when I was in seminary a mere *cough* years ago.
Each weekly FireFall newsletter will feature a curated assortment of multi-denominational resources for women in church leadership, pastors, seminary students, professors, and maybe your fine arts-teacher aunt who just likes to learn things.
This Week’s Practical Tool for Women in Church Leadership:
Sisters, would it be meaningful to have a scheduled space to work on your sermon or research paper while other pastors are typing away, too? How might that melt a sense of isolation?
Enter Preacher’s Block, an initiative dreamed up by Dr. Jessica LaGrone, Dean of Chapel at Asbury Theological Seminary.
I love this innovative, practical solution for any and all preachers struggling to carve out sermon prep time. From the Preacher’s Block website:
“Join the most focused community of preachers on the planet for Preacher's Block: an online co-working community intent on eliminating distractions in pursuit of their most creative, productive work.
Preacher’s Block offers a focused Zoom space for 90 minutes of incredibly fruitful time where we produce our deepest work.
Setting aside this block of time in an online co-working community of preachers removes the two biggest obstacles most preachers face when they write sermons:
Distraction – Our thoughts are more fragmented than ever, with pastoral needs and to-do lists creeping into every moment.
Isolation – In a very social vocation, preparing sermons is perhaps the most isolating part of our work.
Preacher’s Block is a focused space where we put our distractions away and work individually but together…in a supportive environment of others who are also doing the hard but rewarding work of getting ready to preach.”
If you’re in a season of isolation, schedule unpredictability, or discouraged distraction – sign up with Sign Up Genius today for a Preacher’s Block virtual co-working Zoom call.
Across Denominational Silos: Snapshots of Women in Church Leadership
I’m learning more about the ways women leading in other Protestant traditions connect across denominations.
As someone from a Wesleyan/Methodist background, one of the most meaningful spaces I’ve been in remains the annual invitational clergy and spouse Order of the Flame conference, where church leaders - women and men - gather for a week. Conference speakers, leaders, and participants come from denominations like The AME Zion Church, The Wesleyan Church, The Church of the Nazarene, The United Methodist Church, The AME Church, The Free Methodist Church USA, and The CME Church.
Connecting with women pastoring and leading in historic Black denominations was a humbling gift, opening up opportunities to learn as well as ongoing friendship.
Later, I’ll create space to feature a variety of denominational statements and organizations on women in ministry and church leadership.
This week, I’m highlighting the AME Women in Ministry web page. (You can read about Rev. Jarena Lee and Rev. Carrie Thomas-Hooper here.)
AME Women in Ministry hosts virtual Maximizing Ministry webinars: “Maximizing Ministry is a virtual mentoring session, sponsored by Connectional AMEWIM. The sessions are held on the 4th Monday of the month. During the sessions, mentors are interviewed for their thoughts, wisdom, and insight around issues that impact women in ministry at all levels of the church. Mentors are Women and Men, Clergy and Lay, and are selected based on their experience in a particular topic and their willingness to pour into others.”
Currently, webinar topics are listed through November 2023, so when I asked permission to share their page, Rev. Dr. Erika D. Crawford suggested visitors check the webpage for ongoing updates and information on how to register.
Listen: This Week’s Featured Podcast for Women in Church Leadership
This “Equity in the Christian Workplace” episode of CBE’s Mutuality Matters podcast is a great under-40 minute listen featuring Eeva Simard and Beth Birmingham, “about their practical book on organizational leadership and gender equality: Creating Cultures of Belonging: Cultivating Organizations Where Women and Men Thrive.” Listen at the embed below or listen here or explore other episodes.
Among other things, I was struck by the similarity of a challenge that’s simply amplified at a different scale: in denominations with congregational-call systems of church government, sometimes local church boards don’t invite women to candidate for a pastoral position, even when their denomination supports and affirms women in pastoral leadership. Take that dynamic then apply it to boards of faith-based relief and development organizations.
This episode is about so much more than that, though; it’s about dying to self, trusting God, and passing the mic.
One of my favorite quotes - and a good prayer focus: “God, let me live long enough to see an African woman CEO of World Vision!”
“CBE’s Mutuality Matters podcast is part of Christians for Biblical Equality International’s online library of free resources! Hosts of CBE’s Mutuality Matters team offer weekly conversations with leaders, pastors, authors, scholars, activists, and humanitarians on women, men, shared leadership, and Scripture.”
For the Local Church: An Eight-Week Bible Study
Sometimes there’s a disconnect between denominational values and the materials used in small group studies, discipleship classes, or “Sunday School” gatherings.
So Women in the New Testament: An Eight Week Bible Study is a great curriculum option for groups with both men and women: it’s not a “women’s study,” it’s a Bible study for everyone, and it’s about women in the New Testament. It also happens to be written by Dr. Suzanne Nicholson, who has a PhD in New Testament studies.
“As a general rule, women had fewer rights, social status, and power than men in the ancient world in which the Bible was written. But Jesus regularly defied these social conventions, fulfilling his mission and purposes through faithful women and giving them dignity and purpose. In this OneBook study, Suzanne Nicholson highlights the qualities of several women in the New Testament that Jesus asks all believers to possess: faithfulness, persistence, and a boldness to follow him even at great personal cost to ourselves. These stories help us to better understand not only our own calling, but the very nature of the gospel itself.”
Visit here to discover more and order a softback copy or twenty or select from ebook, DVD, or video streaming options. (DVDs include eight 10-15 minute sessions.)
A Six-Month Devotional by Women in Ministry, for Women in Ministry
A while back I was privileged to serve as line editor on a project that blew me away with the breadth of voices: women in church leadership exhorting and building up other women following God’s call.
If you’d like a six-month daily devotional book by women in ministry, for women in ministry, check out This Holy Calling: Daily Wisdom from Women in Ministry, a collaborative volume published by Wesleyan Holiness Women Clergy + the Wesleyan Publishing House.
With themes including “Called as Image Bearers,” “Called to Think & Speak,” and “Called Together,” topics range from justice and discernment to community and the Great Commission. It features “representation of women of differing countries, cultures, ages, races, ethnicities, relational and parenting experiences, economic backgrounds, languages, and denominations.” Dr. Jo Anne Lyon, General Superintendent Emerita of The Wesleyan Church and founder of World Hope International, launches the book with one of the most compelling, tightly-packed forewords I’ve ever read.
If You Know Your Calling, You Cannot Hide from It: Rev. Inocencia Piliin
I’m delighted to share this beautiful testimony from a pastor in the Asia-Pacific Region of the Church of the Nazarene. In just under 5 minutes, Rev. Inocencia Piliin shares her call story and offers encouragement to women. God called her to ministry at youth camp; she says, “I saw myself preaching.” She continues, “My husband was the one who really encouraged me, that I can do it no matter what. He was the one who encouraged me to stand up and take the ministry that God is placing in my heart.”
One of my favorite quotes from Rev. Piliin, though, is this, as she chuckles then shifts, giving an earnest, pastoral word to women:
“If you are surrounded by great leaders - especially old and traditional leaders - they don’t want you to step up and go out and preach. But - if you know your calling, you cannot hide from it, even though they underestimate you. But if you know your calling, [switches languages] God called you to be firm in your conviction. All I can say is, be faithful to him. Continue serving the Lord. And most importantly, whatever talents you have, use them for the growth of God’s ministries…Because God called you, stick to what you were called to do. If you have the talents and abilities, use them to advance God’s works. Wherever you are now, that is where God wants you, to be blessed and be a blessing to others. So keep blooming. Continue to listen to God’s calling, because you are exactly where he wants you to be.”
According to Thriving Together, “Rev. Inocencia Piliin has been serving the church together with her husband, Rev. Arnel Piliin, for the past 28 years. She is the current Philippines-Micronesia Field office manager and the Women Clergy Coordinator.”
Okay, stop the presses.
I overestimated what should fit in one weekly newsletter.
As they say in the American South - y’all…
I have so much to share with you! The amount being done by women leading the church or about women who are following God’s call is an “embarrassment of riches” -it’s just scattered across the internet like confetti.
I selected just a “few” things to highlight in this newsletter, but I feel like an intro plus six segments is probably full-capacity -
and your time is valuable and limited.
So what do you think?
Maybe I’ll throw a few things I was going to include into Substack “Notes.”
Uh-oh, Substack just started playing “near email length limit” “wrap it up” music.
Okay, I’ll wrap up! Two last notes:
Please check the right-hand sidebar of the home page for links to fantastic organizations and websites equipping and empowering women for pastoral leadership.
Feel free to browse Bread for Shepherds, a limited-run Lent devotional for pastors I sent out last spring. Currently, it’s still a free resource. (I sent it during Lent, but sometimes life and the liturgical calendar don’t match, so if you’re in a difficult time or season of grief, there might be something for you.)
I want others’ resources that I’m amplifying - like what I included in this newsletter - to be broadly accessible: that’s the entire point of amplifying them.
For commenting or community interaction, I’m asking free subscribers to bump up to paid subscriptions. This will be a speed bump for trolls.
Paid subscriptions will also unlock original content I write, distinct from the weekly newsletter resource roundup that’s meant to broadly amplify others.
If you’re broke, we’ll get you in the door, just email.
If you’re doing okay and FireFall is a helpful resource, consider sharing a gift subscription for someone else.
I am wondering how the Preachers Block works. Do you know of anyone who has used it in the past or is currently using it? Sounds interesting :)