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The ally checklist: women in ministry edition

I sat down recently with a young woman who’d just graduated from seminary and is heading into vocational ministry. She asked me, “What’s the hardest part about being a woman in ministry?”

“...How much time do you have?”

Here’s the thing—there’s lots of joy being in ministry, and there’s no cornering the market on experiencing challenges. It’s an uphill climb for men and women and the long game is about being faithful to the best of our ability with God’s grace. But there are some unique challenges that women face, and there are certain actions that our friends can take to help make the uphill climb a tad smoother and more encouraging. Whether you’re a man or woman supporter, a colleague, supervisor, or congregant of a woman minister—you can be an ally and I wrote this list to help you.

So, if you want to be or already consider yourself an ally to women in ministry, here are some items you can use to evaluate yourself.

1. Do you believe women? We’ve heard these words thrown around in the #metoo era, but there is truth to them. When a woman tells you about her challenges, experiences, frustrations, different perspectives, and feelings—take her at her word. Try to understand from a posture of belief that those challenges, experiences, frustrations, perspectives, and feelings are valid.

2. Do you give women opportunities? I’ve worked for and with folks who’ve withheld opportunities from me and with folks who’ve introduced me to new challenges. This could be anything from leading a team, leading a meeting, succeeding in a new role, or preaching/public speaking. Those who’ve withheld these opportunities said I wasn’t ready, but those who connected me gave me resources and support so I would succeed. Even better, I’ve had people give me opportunities who believed that I could not only be successful, but that I could teach THEM new and possibly better approaches to these tasks.

3. Do you advocate to others to give women opportunities? Will you put your reputation on the line to connect a woman to a new opportunity that’s not directly yours to give? Will you advocate to the gatekeepers of opportunities with whom you hold sway? If behind closed doors you’re undermining access, sorry friend—you’re no ally.

4. Do you relentlessly question your assumptions? The worst allies I’ve known are the ones who think they’re good allies. Good allies spend time questioning their own assumptions. There’s lots of data regarding the role implicit bias plays in the workplace, and the trouble with this bias is that it is often invisible. Sometimes it’s even “benevolent”—wanting to protect women from perceived harm caused by experiencing hardship, or projecting certain positive qualities on to women just because they’re women. Questioning your own assumptions, and taking others to task for stereotypes, helps move conversation away from the general to the specific so that individual women are not held back by gendered generalizations.

This list is addressed to both men and women—friends, colleagues, head hunters, supervisors, and anyone who wants to make space for and encourage women in church leadership. We all have the potential to amplify the voices of new leaders so that they have access to the training, challenges, resources, and support to hone their ministry gifts. The beautiful thing about the God we serve is that in this economy, there’s no down side to giving away power or influence. In fact, it is only when you give it away that power has any significance at all. Jesus gave away all the ingredients to his secret sauce, and then poured it out all over everyone. He trained his people (kinda) and then he sent them out to do the work—the greatest challenge and opportunity in history, and the world will never be the same. Go and do likewise.

Note: There are lots of different marginalized groups with whom I’m learning more about what it means to be an ally. I can’t speak to many of those spaces. But there are lots of people who do, and I encourage you to pursue ways to be learning from those conversations. This list is just from my experience, specifically regarding women in ministry.

[asharedhome]

an existential wedding card

My beloved friend,

You’re getting married! How amazing! How beautiful! How full of promise!

You are probably hearing this a lot.  

You might also be hearing this a lot, too: You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. 

If you’re not hearing it, you are probably feeling it.

You met someone. You talked, you laughed, you texted, you debated whether you really liked each other… like, like liked. And now you’re spending hours upon hours and tens of thousands of dollars planning the moment you will stand in front of almost everyone you know to pledge your lives to each other. It doesn’t matter how long your ceremony is: the vows take 2 seconds to say and they promise a lifetime. I swear, blink and you’ll miss it. If there was a photo of the moment when they said it was time to kiss the bride it would have been my face, gobsmacked, looking frantically around thinking, “Wait, that was it? It’s done?” 

And you’re left in the before and after of that moment asking: what does it even mean?

I know there’s a whole book literally called The Meaning of Marriage, and I’m sure it’s great but he’s kind of sexist and I’ve never read it so I thought I needed to write something myself. Especially because I’ve developed an allergy to people telling me what things mean. Especially academics. Ugh. 

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, too, watching you and talking with you as you walk through this time of engagement. There’s something about this fraught in-between time that drags up so much shit from the rest of our lives. We are so good at establishing emotional equilibrium (keep your head down, nose to the grindstone, don’t think about it) and there’s something about engagement leading up to the wedding that blows all the lids off our well curated emotional management and makes us want to hide under the bed. It makes us ask, what is the point of all of this? What is the point of… ANY OF IT?!

I think our ancestors knew something that we’ve forgotten: that life itself doesn’t have inherent meaning. It’s not one-size-fits all; there’s no secret code that will open it up for you. They knew that meaning is made by stopping to watching sunsets, and wailing at funerals, and dedicating babies surrounded by your whole village. We’ve been able to burrow ourselves away from the brutal realities of life and think that experiencing them is a misfortune, not a given. That death is an anomaly that comes to the unlucky. That tragedy is something we escape if we work hard enough. That if we wait long enough and act good enough, eventually all this mess around us will resolve and life will stop being hard and get back to “normal”—smooth seas are somewhere out there, just keep heading toward the horizon.

Our ancient primitive ancestors were so much smarter than us. We’ve added so much to convenience to life—washing machines, dishwashers, robot vacuums! I think this invention was driven from the hope that removing the hardship of labor would remove the hardship of life. But all it did is smooth out some of our day to day wrinkles and leave us with a horrible yet necessary truth: that the hardship is just part of the package, a thorn on the rose of the beauty of it all. Wouldn’t our ancestors be horrified that despite all of these conveniences, we still don’t stop to watch the sky at night and tell the stories mapped out in the stars.

Our ancestors knew that meaning is made over time, and that there’s so much more to life than just having a pulse. They brought ritual and symbol to find some way to express this “brutiful” (brutal/beautiful, thanks Monastery) life. We have so few rituals anymore, it seems like weddings and funerals are the only ones left, but we have so little practice that by the time those roll around we’re not really sure what we’re doing. We miss out on something when we don’t acknowledge the purpose of lining life with days and times that say: this is important. Pay attention. At birth we should pass the placenta around and all take a bite, at menstruation we should all gather in the red tent. Think of all the little girls who heard the cries of a mother giving birth, who watched the mystery from afar until they lived it themselves, and then taught it to a new generation of little girls. Symbols are meant to point to the importance of change, growth, death—together watching, waiting, experiencing, listening. We’ve sanitized so much of life to make it comfortable, scrubbed these bloody sweaty moments clean; we think we’re so civilized. But we still have weddings. 

We moderns like to impose meaning on the front end. “Marriage is this, and so you can’t get married until you have your ducks in a row and you’ve met your soul mate and everything is running smoothly. Then you get married.” “Sex means this, and so you can only do it in this very tiny box in which the act fulfills its meaning.” Promising meaning on the front end feels like a set up for a lot of disappointment.

I think the ancients knew that meaning is made throughout a lifetime, by living into these symbols and unraveling their mystery over time and space. Marriage and sex don’t contain meaning on their own, they're a symbol. 

So, I guess what I want to say to you is that you don’t have to be scared because you don’t know what it means, or worse—you don’t feel like you can live up to what you’ve been told it means.

Sex is not meaningful because it's an exchange of goods or a transaction. You don’t contain some limited commodity that you have to guard and cherish. It’s too simplistic to say that sex is inherently meaningful. It’s a symbol, and maybe the beautiful thing about journeying with another person into that symbol is discovering together what it will expose in you, what it will become to you and express for you. You don’t have to be scared if your heart is not ready for sex to mean what you’ve been told it means. I think your person knows. And maybe the beauty there is that in this often rote physical act, that passes so quickly and then you’re left in the afterward, your person is there, holding your scared heart while you figure it out together. That’s why you picked him, right? Because you knew he would do that for you.

My only advice is to go slow, kiss lots, and if you cry afterward it’s okay. We cry a lot while we’re making meaning. Even if you know where to put what, you might not really know what to do, so use your hands a lot, too. Orgasm a lot, regardless of how you get there. Don’t be afraid to do what you know. Committing to your orgasm teaches patience, humility, and sacrifice—to both of you.  It is hard to process because it’s abstract and concrete all at the same time but you still have to fill in that middle space in your mind. That takes a little while. But you know how to touch and love each other so do that a lot, too. You don’t have to abandon all the old meaning you’ve already made together.

And as you’re discovering what meaning is held in this marriage, there will probably be nights where you cry yourself to sleep, where you feel alone and scared. You’ll ask yourself what did I do? It might happen on night 4, it might happen on day 1,000. You will wonder if you should have waited for someone else who didn’t do that thing your person does that is so abhorrent to you. Surely, your actual soul mate is out there somewhere and he would have known what you wanted without you having to spell it out. The worst part about that is it’s probably true. There probably is someone out there who can do the thing that your person can’t do and would have loved to do that for you. But he’s not yours. This one is. You saw him. You journeyed. You vowed. God led that. Take a deep breath and cry it out. It’s okay.

Matt and I have a canvas print from our wedding day. It’s the exact moment we are being pronounced as man and wife. I look at that photo every day and see our innocence, our love, our hope. Our naiveté. Every time I see that photo, for better or worse, I think, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. I look back at those two dumb dumbs and know that they were standing at the beginning of a long and winding path that they couldn’t see the end of.

But nowadays, on a good day, I catch a glimpse of what we were then only hoping for from a far distance. We have experienced pain we couldn’t have imagined, but in the end it’s just a little thorn on this great rose of life. Because the beauty is so big--sometimes when I stop and think about it I feel like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me at all the beauty we’ve gotten to see, too. And in the end, the beauty far outweighs the pain. And the pain casts a light that makes the beauty glow with more depth. At the beginning, we had no idea what intimacy meant. I had no idea what trust meant. We had no idea what self-sacrifice meant. But we are chiseled and hewn in the daily grind of life.

So, be willing to fight it out. Be a brave person who asks for what she wants. Remember that he doesn’t know what he’s doing either. He doesn’t know how to be a husband. He’s scared, too. Be a servant leader in your home. Make him his lunch for the next day after a fight. Give him a back rub even though you’re annoyed. Because you know you chose a humble man who will learn from his mistakes, and he will be humbled and will learn from your love and service. Say thank you a lot. Just be polite in general.

Remember that we are transformed by love, not punishment. Even when you can’t say a word, give a hug. Hold hands when you fight. Touch toes while you sleep. Roll over in bed and give a hug after you’ve gone to bed angry, even when it’s the last thing you want to do. Don’t be afraid to say it’s hard. It’ll free you and others if you’ll just admit it’s hard.

At the end of the day, no one can tell you what all this means for you. But that’s where the beauty lies. Discover it together and do your best to shrug off all the meaning that has been imposed on these things for you. Because we are all living into these symbols, these moment markers, catching a glimpse of something more.

 With love,

Jocelyn 

[asharedhome]

Strange stories

the story of God is strange.

for God to create and people to be happy and then they fail and boom the whole thing falls apart in 3 chapters

every story of suffering and pain and empty eyes and hurt people hurting people wandering around not knowing what they’re looking for not even knowing that they’re looking for something stems from that moment in time

stranger still this God betrayed by God’s own creation can’t seem to take a hint and keeps coming back saying, “You could come back, too.“

and a few of us also hurting, broken, and looking for something having stumbled upon this story offer it to the people we meet asking, does this look like the thing you were looking for?

is that more strange

than 7.2 billion people orbiting the sun on a rock floating in space for 20 billion years until the whole thing explodes and then it’s over.

.

maybe there’s something beautiful about this story too about the finality of it all the punctuation at the end of a life the pure physicality of being born living working eating sweating bleeding breathing until one day you’re not and none of it really meant anything no one will remember your name. Living: hoping and searching but then one day the search ends nothing found And then dying. you can’t tell me there isn’t something poetic about that

.

so which is it? the real comedy of it all is we don’t know we pick one of the stories and live it every once in a while peeking in to the other wondering if it’s going any better over there

and the one thing that makes me stick to this God story despite the strangeness of it all is this:

in both stories we suffer and there is death and pain and agony …more than I really want to think about but in this God story God suffers too to know what it feels like to ask God why and be left in silence God suffers too to know what it feels like to walk around on this planet looking for God. God suffers to better know the people who f*cked this whole thing up in the first place.

it’s so so strange

it might just be true.

[asharedhome]

Good Friday: some delayed thoughts

I struggle with Easter and I have for a while. We don’t have many high holy days in Protestantism, mostly just Christmas and Easter, and I’ve gotta say that Christmas usually wins out. It’s not just about the presents (although it didn’t help as I got older and the baskets of chocolate slowed down). Presents are great but that’s never really been my thing. I think Christmas is just more… palatable, even to a post-modern world. The idea of a baby being born, coming to a strange and inhospitable world as an act of love, it’s relatable. Everyone’s been born or knows someone who’s been born. I click with the narrative of the inn and not being able to find a place to rest and give birth. The Christmas story is rooting for an underdog, inviting friends and family in from the cold, sharing love and presence with those who matter most in the world. The whole story is meant to be relatable: God, an abstract being, puts on flesh and moves into the world so that we can understand him. 

Easter, on the other hand, is totally abstract. First of all, very few people who are in the Easter services have died, so this isn’t a shared experience we can relate to. Pretty much everyone has had someone in their life die, so I guess there’s that. And Easter is the exciting part: resurrection! triumph! life! lunch! It’s a big strike against Easter that it’s got to lug around Good Friday with it. I just don’t know what to do with Good Friday. You think about death. Is it supposed to be somber all day? How serious do I need to be? Good Friday lacks the immediacy of the punch in the gut of being told someone died. We remember the death of someone from thousands of years ago that we did not witness or experience. Death anniversaries are often very somber affairs, the day that marks the loss is a greater reminder of the grief. The absence of that person becomes all the more palpable for that season. But it’s not like Jesus was with me yesterday and isn’t anymore. We always think of death in the sense of all the things we’ll never do together again: no more family dinners, no more Thanksgiving or Christmas or other annual traditions you may have had. There’s no difference, there’s no change; there wasn’t a “before" to my Good Friday. Jesus was never present to me in a physical form so it’s always been hard for me to feel like a sense of personal loss or sadness.   

One way people attempt to get a more personal connection to Good Friday is by spending time researching crucifixion and then describing/imagining the process. Perhaps that helps them feel like they’re reliving it, or have a more personal connection with the experience. I had a teacher in middle school (private Christian school) who I distinctly remember told us in very graphic and gory detail the entire process of crucifixion. As he started wiping away tears I remember thinking, strangely detached, I feel like I should be really upset about this but I’m not. 

So what do you do with it? That style of reflection doesn’t click with me at all. I appreciate the concepts of sin, God taking upon Godself the consequences of the sin nature and making a way for relationship and wholeness. Triumphing over death. I actually do believe all that stuff, and catch me just right and I can dance with that. In some ways I so often don’t resonate with how people describe all that. Because at the end of the day it just sounds like more cliches, like something I’m supposed to believe, like facts that I’m supposed to check yes on. But none of that moves me. I was so bored tonight at the Good Friday service. I’m so bored all the time in these sermons and through these services. I’m so tired of sitting there while men explain why what they’re saying should matter to me. I. Don’t. Care. And if I am baaaaaarely hanging on 90% of the time, I don’t know how we can think this is a compelling story for anyone who’s not currently on board. It’s not even compelling to me and I already agree with you. 

When I say that at church people like to tell me: you’re not the target audience. We’re not talking to people like you. 

Bull. Shit. 

You can pretend like me not connecting with what you’re saying is more about me than it is about you. That I’m the weird one. But show me the people who are walking through the doors. People who have never heard this stuff before and are coming to embrace it for the first time. It doesn’t happen very often. I’m not saying never, but for the most part we are a congregation of church hoppers and lapsed Catholics. So we’re beating out the Catholics—hooray! They have Pope Francis now, so we won’t have the lead for very long. 

I guess I’m just tired of people telling me what faith is supposed to look like. I want people who are in the mud with me. I want people who aren’t satisfied with easy answers, people who aren’t afraid to say: I don’t know what to do with that. It’s really, really complicated. I want people who don’t just repeat the party line and hand down pat answers from generation to generation. I want someone who’s willing to get a little bit messy. I’m tired of looking for a Jesus who will move me and shake up my whole life in the answers. I don’t think he’s there.   

I was talking to my friend last night in the bathroom of a restaurant at midnight and she was talking about this very thing. That a Jesus on the cross is a God who suffers with us. Not an open and shut case from millennia ago that’s supposed to finalize my ticket to heaven someday. I felt so free having someone say that this cross stuff isn’t so black and white. That if that whole translation of the story isn’t resonating with me it doesn’t mean it’s all a wash.   

It means there’s more. And I know I’ve been all about this lately but I feel so upset and despondent that there are NO WOMEN SPEAKING at our church anymore. There are no women’s voices that matter. They’re not reflected in the drawing board or the cutting room. They’re not in the prep phase or the presentation. I think there’s something incredibly feminine and beautiful and strong about sitting with someone in their shit. And all day I dreaded going to this stupid good Friday service because I didn’t want to sit and listen to another man explain things to me. I wanted to sit with my people in a waiting room and talk about death and suffering. The million places and ways where we are seeing and experiencing death in our lives and our world these days. I couldn’t figure out why that picture came to me but it seemed like it was a worthy tradition of women to follow in. Men would be welcome, but they have to do it the ladies’ way. 

And then I read Luke 23: And everyone who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance observing these things… It was the Preparation Day for the Sabbath, and the Sabbath was quickly approaching. 55 The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph. They saw the tomb and how Jesus’ body was laid in it, 56 then they went away and prepared fragrant spices and perfumed oils. They rested on the Sabbath, in keeping with the commandment.

This is the tradition. Not to talk about it, not to explain it. You can’t explain this. No explanation can do this day justice. The women stand at a distance and hold vigil. And then they bind up broken bones, and they smear oil on broken skin and they hold this space, this sacred space of taking the body of a man they loved and preparing it for burial. This is what we do.   

And isn’t that what the cross is? I still can’t explain the mystery of it, but how beautiful that at the cross Jesus experiences suffering, abandonment, isolation—the experience of following through with the plan that God has for you but wishing it could have been any other way. I guess this means that for me Good Friday is all about being in the mud together. And yet there is something distinct about it because Jesus’ death does bring with it some final word, some conclusion. There is triumph over death. But we don’t get to see that right away, we don’t experience that victory in its fullness right now. We still stand in that place of waiting, suffering, embalming.

[asharedhome]

But for those of you hunkered down on Good Friday, identifying with the loss of this day in agonizing ways, ways that you did not want to understand the cross, I am your sister this year. When too many things still feel dead and resurrection feels as unlikely and impossible as it must have on this day all those years ago, I can’t help but believe Jesus has his eye on us specifically. Who can better understand the cross than the man who chose it? Who better to hold us close in our loneliness than the man who was left to suffer all alone? Nobody, not one human being on this earth understands a dark Friday more than Jesus, well before anyone thought to put a “Good” in front of it.

Jen Hatmaker

[asharedhome]

preeeeettyy

For more Visit MY BLOG HERE.

[asharedhome]

Stop apologizing for your food and just eat what you want. A PSA.

Three girls peer into the mirror and make disparaging comments about their bodies. One sits by, confused at the female ritual happening in front of her, until the stares of the others compel her to jump in: “I have really bad breath in the morning?”

Yes, this is a scene from the movie Mean Girls. Watching it, you laugh and shake your head—because you know it’s true, but it’s painful to watch it play out in front of you. Yet we know that this ritual takes place every day, especially when food is concerned.

“I was so bad last night, I had two rolls at dinner. I don’t even know myself anymore.” “Shut up, I could not stop bingeing on chocolate. I think I’m getting my period.” “I brought a salad for lunch but I went and got a burrito anyway. But I threw out the last bite!”

I catch myself doing it all the time, talking about how I replaced one ingredient with a healthier alternative, confessing my chocolate-covered indiscretions or the extra ounces of wine I snuck. Words like cheated or bad leave our mouths when we talk about food.

The scene from Mean Girls, while of course an exaggeration, demonstrates an interesting phenomenon that I think is true: this kind of negative self-talk is a learned part of being a woman. We don’t come out of the womb hating our belly buttons or ears… we catch it from the way we hear women talking about themselves around us.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be one more person telling women when and how to apologize for anything (so forgive the title). But I think there’s some value in examining our own participation in this female ritual. My friend’s house has this old knick knack in their bathroom that says: Some people don’t count calories… and they have the figures to prove it! I feel my shoulders sag a little bit every time I wash my hands. If a knick knack can be so discouraging, how much more powerful are the words people say? We have tremendous influence in the lives of the people around us, both young and old, and for just one person to break the cycle, to be the one who makes a choice, owns it, and doesn’t apologize for it, can be incredibly freeing to those around us.

So, whether it’s a kale salad or a large pizza—you do you, baby.

[asharedhome]

People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe and those who don’t believe. They do not really listen to the other side of conversations, and they are too ready to impose their views on others. It is impossible to be certain about God.

This article is great, but the comments are where the real education happens. I hear so many Christians talking about what atheists believe and how they approach faith. It was really helpful and fascinating for me to hear a lot of different people’s reactions to this essay.

[asharedhome]

Burnin down my barns

Reading Luke 12 after a budget meeting is not a good idea. We look over numbers and data and dollars and cents and get frustrated that this fixed pot of cash can only go so far. We want more, of course we do! We think of how much good we could do with just a little bit more. It’s almost a principle of accumulation: the bit you’ve stored up never seems like enough. My pile becomes the starting point to compare with the piles of others. But it seems like comparison usually occurs upward. We look at the people who have more, and all the people who have less than us are left out of our formula.

And that’s the part that gets me about Jesus--his whole thing is to strive for less. It’s all a race to the bottom.

Seeing everyone else’s bigger piles just makes me want to hustle for more. But in Jesus’ economy, if I’m jockeying to be the lowest, does that mean that more is achieved by getting less? Is that the real race? 

It’s not practical. It’s dumb, actually. It’s irresponsible. But then again so is handing yourself over to death. So is riding into town on a donkey to take on the fate that awaits you without a fight.

Less forces us to rely on God. A burned down barn means certain death without God’s provision. Life in a tent in the wilderness means manna new in the morning and the rest rots out. There’s no productivity plan. It’s not a great business strategy but I can’t help but think that’s the Jesus way. I see so many people numb from their constant having. I feel it, too. 

I choose less. 

[asharedhome]

An Open Letter to People Who Write Open Letters

stop.

[asharedhome]

God

Oprah: Your definition of God?

Rob Bell: Like a song you hear in another room and you think, "boy, that sounds beautiful but I can only hear a little bit." So you start opening doors and rearranging furniture because you have to get in that room and hear that song and when you get in, you find the knobs and you turn them all the way to the right because you think, "I have to hear more of that." And then you open the windows because you want the people in the next houses to hear.

[asharedhome]

This woman is unbelievable.

The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize is shared by Pakistani girls education activist Malala Yousafzai and Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, the Nobel committee has announced. At 17, Yousafzai is the youngest winner in history.

Photo: Malala Yousafzai. Credit: Susan Walsh / Associated Press

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I love these prayers. So peaceful.

Evening Prayer

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Evening Prayer ~ from A New Zealand Prayer Book

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Another day at the Cape.

[asharedhome]

I wanted to BE Daria.

Sarcasm of Daria, part 2.

and the first one.

[asharedhome]

Cats in piles