Women. Daughters. Sisters: Exploring Our Identity and Purpose in Christ and in the Church

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy. 

Katie McCoy
I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if they’d get there quicker if I was a man, because if I was a man, then I’d be the man, I’d be the man who wrote that, Taylor Swift, some Swifties in the House, she’s an icon, she’s a brand, few can rival her success, right? Except for maybe this woman. My persuasion can build a nation. Endless power with our love we can devour. You’ll do anything for me. Who runs the world? Girls, you know who that’s from, right? Beyonce. Curious to hear those lyrics side by side, though. Isn’t it one defies or one deifies being a woman? The other laments that she’s not a man. One claims her female identity is the object of worship. The other claims her female identity is the object of disdain, one says she runs the world under her rule, and the other one is saying she’s running to try to keep from being ruled. Both are grounded in the same idea. Both express that the existence of woman is in a woman’s relationship to power. Now, this is nothing new. Goes way, way back. 1950s philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said as much in her book, The Second Sex. She said female embodiment was a prison. If you were born a woman, you were enslaved to your body in reproduction, so what was the solution? Liberate a woman from her body, and she’ll finally be free. Make a woman’s body as biologically independent as a man’s body is, and then she’ll be liberated. See, power was in autonomy, freedom was in self-determination. Now her ideas have evolved into what I would say is the dominant framework of our own culture. Right, we see this running throughout the way that we think generally about womanhood. Female embodiment is a barrier. Your biology might be a fact that you have to live with, but it’s incidental, not informative to who you are. Nathaniel Blake observed that our culture has grounded female empowerment on rending female embodiment indistinct just doesn’t have to mean anything that you were made a woman, and so the result, he says, is that both men and women are increasingly alone, and do we not see that the crisis of loneliness in our culture today, two generations after Simone de Beauvoir, women have effectively been liberated from their bodies biologically and socially. The dynamics of power have all shifted, and women are now free to live with autonomy and self-definition, and yet, and yet, as a culture, they’re deeply unfulfilled. A Harvard study surveyed young adults between 18 and 25 and found that nearly three out of five of them reported a lack of meaning or purpose. 44% of them said that they had a sense of just not even mattering to others, and here we find the lyrics of a new female anthem, this time not in terms of power, self-worship, but in terms of isolation and despair. Demi Lovato crying, God, is there anyone? Please send me anyone. Lauren Spencer Smith, will I be sad forever? And Billie Eilish asking into the void, what was I made for? In the end of her book, The End of Woman, highly recommend, by the way. Carrie Gress described it this way. She said, for 50 years women have been clamoring to make themselves into men, but they frittered away, frittered away what it means to be a woman. And as a result, women have been erased. The erasing of women, by the way, it’s much deeper than just gender confusion, and it’s much deeper than gender roles. See, all those things, those are symptoms, those are expressions of the root issue. Because the root issue is this: we know what a woman is, but we can still miss what a woman means. What does it mean? To be an embodied female, which brings me to the question that I want to explore with you this morning. What is the why of you? To answer that, I would offer the following axiom, and I hope it will be a path to discovery for you, one that helps reframe your sense of who you are and why you’re here. Here it is: structure reveals being, and being reveals purpose.

Katie McCoy
So, said differently, your biology, the structure that you have your body reveals ontology, so essence or being the stuff of who you are, and ontology essence or being reveals teleology, design, purpose, and this is so interwoven into who you are, who God made you, so comprehensive that they kind of bleed into each other. So, here’s the big headline this morning: the point of your embodied femaleness, the point of you being made a woman directs or reflex the point of life itself. Now I realize that’s a really heavy lift for 830 in the morning, but hang with me. I think once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it. Let’s start with structure. Structure, or biology, Abigail Favale defines a man as a person whose body is structured around the possibility of generating or creating new life. It’s external to himself, but a woman is a person whose body is structured around the possibility of gestating or nurturing new life. It’s internal to herself, it is interior, and from what is internal, life comes forth. Now, this doesn’t mean that a female who doesn’t have a baby is less of a woman, and I don’t say that as a throwaway line, I say that as a testimony. I stand before you as an over 40, never married, no kids female, but my biology is structured according to the possibility of pregnancy and childbirth, and ultimately my body and yours are designed to fulfill a life-giving, others-oriented purpose, Carrie Gress again describes a woman’s biology as implicitly vulnerable. Vulnerability is intrinsic to, tied up in womanhood, and vulnerability, by the way, is precisely what the sexual revolution wanted to eliminate to our very post-feminist culture, that statement, womanhood is vulnerability, that is grating, offensive, something we want to overcome, but lean into it with me for a moment. Consider this: the male hormone cycle is 24 hours, the female hormone cycle, that’s true, by the way, is you know, about 28 days, and every day your body is a brilliant and intricate confluence of hormones, this complex system that is sensitive and reactive to the food you eat, the workout you do, the stress you feel, the sleep you get, the toxins you ingest. It is magnificently complex and is also vulnerable to internal and external factors. And this is just a normal day. We’re not even talking about pregnancy and childbirth, right. This is just what it is to be a woman. We also haven’t even started talking about the neurological differences, differences that begin at the eighth week in utero that make the female brain what one neuro researcher calls a machine built for connection, a machine built for connection, designed, structured to connect with others, the hippocampus, the limbic system, the temporal lobe, all of which are creating greater emotional receptivity, verbal fluency, and relational empathy. Female vulnerability is not the absence of strength, that is an idea that we have inherited from our power-obsessed culture. No, it’s not the absence of strength, nor is it a deficiency to overcome. Instead, it is. Part of how you and I fulfill what God reveals about Himself through male and female together. Perfect example, vulnerability is not the absence of strength. Men have more of what’s called fast twitch muscle fibers. They also have greater muscle mass, so they are more capable of producing a burst of energy with really great force. We, however, have more of what’s called slow twitch muscle fibers, which means we are able to produce – we’re not able to produce the same burst of energy with the same force as a man. We can, however, endure sustained activity for a long period of time, and what this means, ladies, is that you and I probably can’t pull a car by a rope, but we can sustain unrelenting contractions for 19 hours straight without quitting. It’s a different kind of strength, but look at what it’s for. It’s suited to the structure, it’s suited to the overall design. And this is just the beginning. I mentioned how this neuro researcher called woman a machine built for connection. She described the male brain as a machine built for protection, males, she said, are wired to protect loved ones and territory. Our connection-oriented brains, this happens way before that nurture versus nature debate can even come into play.

Katie McCoy
For instance, within 24 hours after birth, a newborn girl is more sensitive to hearing the cries of other babies. Isn’t that sweet? So, thus far, males structured to generate life, wired for protection, females structured to gestate life, wired for connection. Every person’s reproductive potential lies in one of these two categories: creating or nurturing, generating or gestating. So, you’ve got two different bodies, two different potentials, each designed to fit and correspond each other, and each designed to create new life. The whole body is structured around one of these two purposes, vulnerability is something that we despise in our culture today. We want to overcome, but Louise Perry, in her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, she described that the idea of woman’s vulnerability is not something to be despised, but something to be protected. That is a fundamentally Christian idea. And it’s worth noting that when she wrote this, she was not a Christian at the time. She is now, but she calls for a counter revolution, one that recognizes human beings as real people who have value and dignity, and yes, and amen to that. But there’s one problem: human dignity is a moral category, one that assumes an objective moral standard that is ultimate and transcendent and even religious. Without that, it’s impossible to establish or defend without an objective moral standard. All we’re left with is a very Nietzschean concept of weakness and power, which is what we see dominate our world today. Because if women are truly vulnerable, that’s what it means, it’s wrapped up in being female, then they’re intrinsically weak, and if they’re intrinsically weak, then perhaps men should dominate and exploit them in the name of power. Maybe the Andrew Tates of the world are really onto something here. Defining humanity in terms of power does not produce the belief that every person has essential worth. Worth, but if every human being does have dignity and woman’s vulnerability is intentional and intentionally created, then her structure reveals and reflects that creator. See, her biology is didactic, it’s teaching something about who she is, and consequently about the creator in whose image she was made. You with me? All right. Structure reveals being, or biology reveals ontology. So, just as male and female are physically created in different but complementary ways, male and female spiritually reflect God as His image bearers in different but complementary ways, as male and female structures are mutually dependent, so. So are male and female ontologies, Genesis one introduces humanity in relationship to the rest of creation, and like the rest of creation, humanity is binary, so creation story, you’ve got day, night, sun, moon, land, sea, male, female, so like other living things, humanity is binary, but unlike the rest of creation, unlike other living things, humanity was made in God’s image. They reflect and represent Him, unlike anything else He’s made. The ontology of the woman is both general in Genesis one, so it’s the same as the man, but then it’s particular in Genesis two, gets really specific, so in Genesis two the Lord, you know, this calls the woman a helper, helper corresponding to the man, the Hebrew phrase “et ser connecto. Now, to our Western ears, we typically hear helper in terms of rank inferiority, but the Hebrew idea of helper corresponding to means standing in front of, face to face. It’s a term of honor and strength. The Lord calls himself the helper of his people. In other words, God describes the substance of a woman with a term that he uses to describe himself. How could that be disparaging? Edith Stein compares the female as helper at Zerkedo to a mirror in which man is able to look upon his own nature, so Genesis two, it’s this reintroduction of humanity, but this time in relationship not to the rest of creation, but to God and to each other, it’s this intimate, deeply relational account of creation, complete with poetry at the end. So, instead of male and female, now they are man and woman, ish isha, ish, isha. The woman comes from the man, is like the man, is equal to the man, but is not the same as the man, male and female, man and woman connected to God and connected to each other in unique relationship, and this relationship between male and female is the only relationship from which new life can come forth.

Katie McCoy
It’s also the only aspect of human biology that depends on somebody else’s biology, we are, in the words of Christopher West, complete in all of our systems but one. So every other function of your body occurs independently, except reproduction. Isn’t that interesting? Your skeletal system, your respiratory system, your nervous system, every other physiological system fulfills its purpose within itself, except your reproductive system, except for the one system from which new life comes forth. So, here’s what this means. It means it is impossible to understand the meaning of womanhood in isolation, male and female mutually reveal each other, vice versa too. For manhood, by the way, but we’re focusing on what it means to be a woman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this being in encounter. I know who I am by encountering the other, and it’s only by encountering the other that I can truly inhabit who I am. To be a person presumes to be in relationship. This is deeply important, by the way, as we are embarking on the new world of AI, AI friends, AI boyfriends, AI counselors. Embodied relationship is intrinsic to what it means to be a person. So, in other words, you cannot know what it means to be an embodied female within yourself. We don’t look within our hearts to discover it. No, it’s expressed and revealed in relationship with someone outside of you, and it’s so unique, it’s so irreplaceable that it is the only relationship in which the man understands who he is from someone else. He couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to be a man without the presence of woman, and then vice versa. Yes, now the female body reflects the receptive love of humanity to God. Remember, it’s that internal interiority, it’s reflecting the receptive love of humanity to God. Her physical vulnerability is not a weakness to overcome, but it is the means through which God brings life. Man initiates, gives, protects, generates. Remember, it’s that external life. The biology, the neurobiology, are all wired to fulfill that same purpose. Those are external actions. The woman responds, receives, nurtures, brings forward from within herself. Those are internal dispositions. So here we’re seeing your biological structure is telling a story, whether or not you have a baby, and here’s how just as her life giving capacity is biologically internal, she signifies you signify the internal work of God in a human soul, that is what you display, the female body reflects humanity’s receptivity to God’s spiritual work, so biologically, for a man, for a woman to fulfill her life-giving potential, she has to receive the generating contribution of a male. We know this. This is basic sex ed. So, from within herself, though, even though she didn’t create it by herself, she brings forward something new, something that was previously hidden, something that is beyond what we can understand or comprehend how it came to be. But new life is formed and launched into the world. Can you see now how your body is imprinted with reflections of your creator. This is part of how you image God. This reflection then brings us to purpose. Structure reveals being, being reveals purpose. The purpose of male and female is not only reproduction but reflection to reflect the God who reveals himself in creation, for just as in biology reproduction can’t happen on your own, can’t happen in isolation, and just as the essence of male and female doesn’t make sense on their own. They have to have relationship, be in relationship. So, the same way, the purpose of male and female is impossible to grasp in isolation. Man’s physical structure and being reflects God’s story in a particular way. God generates new life where it doesn’t exist. He uses his power to protect and serve those under his care, even more. He names himself in masculine relational terms: father, son, husband, brother. This is how he relates to us, but woman’s physical structure also reflects God’s story, but in a different way. God works through vulnerability to bring life even more. God employs vulnerability to bring redemption into the world. Think about the Exodus, the event in which the Lord liberated Israel from slavery. It’s described as the conquering of a nation, no, the birth, the birth of a nation, the incarnation in which the King of everything comes to earth. How does he come?

Katie McCoy
He comes as a vulnerable infant through a vulnerable girl, and of course the crucifixion of Jesus. He allowed himself to become vulnerable to pain and death. Why to bring forward redemption in life, even our own conversions. How do we describe? How does scripture describe our conversions? It’s not in terms of power and strength, right? It’s in terms of birth, the miraculous mystery of spiritual birth reflecting the miraculous mystery of physical birth again. This does not mean that the whole point of women is having babies, but having babies reflects in the physical what God does in the spiritual. It’s imprinted into our bodies, because whether you’re married or not. Whether you have children or you don’t, we are all created for a life giving, life producing purpose. We are all created for self giving, others oriented love. Where are my single ladies, right? Y’all are in good company. So, First Corinthians seven.. I’m focusing on you here, because let’s just be honest, there’s a lot more of us than there were 10 years ago. In First Corinthians seven, Paul describes the unmarried saint as devoted to the things of the Lord. What is that but expanding and nurturing the family of God. What is that? But being a vessel through which the Holy Spirit can bring about new life. It’s the same story. It’s the same purpose. Christopher West again says it this way: our bodies tell God’s story, and because of that, the body is not just biological, but it’s theological. It’s revealing theological truth. It’s proclaiming a divine story, and if we miss the meaning of the body, we’re going to miss that story altogether. But here’s the really incredible truth for us this morning. You don’t have to do anything for this to be true. It just is. The meaning of being a woman isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. It’s not something you achieve, it’s something you receive your body tells God’s story, and what is that story? It’s the story of the eternal love and unbreakable union of Christ and His bride. It is the culmination, the consummation of God’s redemptive acts in all of human history, this story is so significant, so enduring, that the creator himself imprinted it onto our bodies, so we wouldn’t miss it. Married or unmarried, male or female, we are universal signposts directing us back to our creator, in whom and from whom is life. Your body is telling God’s story. It is teaching something that we cannot understand in isolation. And now, here, here we come back to the beginning. What is the point of being made woman, it’s the point of life itself. Because the ultimate purpose of male and female reflects the purpose that we have been made for another relationship, the relationship with God Himself. The same way that male and female are created to fit one another at the cellular level of our structure, you and I are created for the purpose of knowing God at the deepest level of our being. This relationship to know God is the point of view. It is the meaning and purpose of your life. It is what everyone struggling with this question is searching for John 17, Jesus said this is life, that we would know Him. First Thessalonians four, Paul says those who possess their bodies in holiness and honor are those who what know God. This is not separate from what it means to be a woman, and this is where we, in our kind of Western Greekness, have been very ill served, because a very Hebrew idea of the body is that it’s not separate from the spiritual, it’s deeply integrated to the spiritual. What I’m trying to tell you here is that your meaning of womanhood is not separate from your body, it is everything that being made a woman is designed to reveal. It’s all the same story, physically, spiritually. We are fundamentally relational, and try as we might, we cannot turn that off. Off, even those in our culture, by the way, who have championed autonomy as power, they end up kind of telling on themselves. Anybody know who Alex Cooper is? I know, I’m sorry. Alex Cooper has one of the top podcasts in the world, and it’s all about, like, sex positivity for women.

Katie McCoy
She’s, she’s telling women in her, in their 20s, sleep around with as many men as you can for as long as you can, and telling women, just live in the hookup, hook up life, live life on your own terms, do with your body. What is expressing you, and nothing outside of you has authority over it. So, this is what she says is the empowered female life. She built, like, $100 million brand around this message. And then what happened? She got married, and a year later announced she’s pregnant, and she’s thrilled. Now that’s wonderful, right? Of course, but for all her autonomy and counseling women to do the same, and hypocrisy aside, isn’t it fascinating that the impulse for permanent life-producing love wins out? Wall Street Journal last year did a report on how women are giving up on marriage. They’re basically just kind of consigning themselves to loneliness. It’s not because they don’t want to be married, it’s because they’re looking around at the world and just saying it’s too hopeless. It’s this isolation, chronic isolation that we feel, why? Because deep within us we’re made to tell God’s story, and our bodies tell the story of life-giving, life-producing love, the love of God, who created us in His image, and because we’re in His image, it is deeply ingrained with us physically and spiritually, so deeply ingrained. This is that when we miss the meaning of being a woman, we miss the story that God is telling through women, and when we miss the story that we were made to embody, the results are far-reaching and deeply damaging. As a culture, we’ve traded God’s story for autonomy, the story that we want to tell about ourselves and pick a metric, any metric, and we are worse off. That should come as no surprise, though, because the God who made us in His image is good, and everything He does is good and for our good. So, is it any wonder that denying or suppressing what He designed would lead to widespread harm, not only personally but society-wide? Let me end with this: your vulnerability is not a problem to overcome. It is not a weakness to mask. It is not a deficiency of which you should be ashamed. It is part of how God designed you to reflect and embody His story, because if structure reveals being and being reveals purpose, then the purpose of your embodied female existence is for something much greater than yourself. Christian thinker slash philosopher Martin Shaw, he, he compared this way of thinking to the Christian life with lyric and epic poetry. Lyric poetry, he said, it has a lot of I in them. I feel I want it’s deeply personal. Epic poetry, though, he says there’s far less attention to the I statements, epic poetry lifts you out of that completely into a much bigger drama, and he described his own recent conversion as moving from the the little I of lyric poetry to the big epic we of Christianity, the kind where we are part of a greater story. The meaning of being a woman, it is dignifying your body without worshiping it, without disparaging it. It is lifting us out of self-absorbed, self-defined narratives and framing our structure, our being, and our purpose in terms of the very purpose for which we were created to know God. It is all in terms of God’s grand story. You, by existing, are proclaiming God’s story. This is what it means to be made woman. This, my friends, is the why of us. Let me pray for us. Father, thank you so much for these women, these women who bear your image, who influence, who serve, and Lord, who are encountering so many ideas that run contrary to your truth and to your story that you want to tell through us, I pray. Pray that you would mark us as women who have a deep and abiding, enduring sense of our purpose, and that we inhabit and embody the femaleness with which you have created us, not as a barrier to overcome, but as the way that you have chosen to reveal yourself to the world. Thank you for the dignity. Thank you for the worth of being a woman. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Jen Wilkin
If I’d known I was going to hear that message this morning, I wouldn’t have even started with coffee. I would have just showed up and been like, let me have it. Thank you, Katie. As you can probably, I don’t know anyone who speaks on this quite the way that Katie does, and so I hope you will, you’ll get the chance to hear from her again on our panel after we hear from Blair this morning, but I hope you will look into what Katie has written. If that sparked any degree of curiosity in you whatsoever, I do just want to give you a heads up that after Blair comes up and we have our panel discussion, there will be a break for those of you who are wondering if your bladder can make it to the end of this, so obviously feel free to step out if you need to, but we will have a break put into the program for you. I should have said that up front to give you some hope and a future, but right now it is my great joy to introduce to you our next speaker, Blair Lynn. Blair is the author of Made to tremble, and finding my father. She is a Bible teacher, she’s an actress, she is a spoken word artist. Many of you probably know that about her, and she’s the creator of the podcast Glow with the Gospel Coalition. Blair has toured globally and is known as one of the originators of the Christian spoken word genre, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ through speaking and spoken word, is her passion. She and her husband, Shy, live in, can you guess the great nation of Texas with their three children? Blair, come on up. So excited to have you here, you

Blair Linne
Amen. Good morning. I’m new to Texas. It’s only been about a year, but we do love it. I get why people are so excited about Texas. One thing that you should know about me, the greatest thing about me is that I am a daughter of the King. That’s the best thing about me, and I’m here to talk to you about being an adopted daughter of God. So, just to share a little bit of my story, I think of three very pivotal moments that had a very huge impact on my life, specifically when it comes to my identity as a daughter. Okay, so I’m going to share these three moments with you. Okay, the first moment was me growing up in a single parent home, and I was a teenager, and I remember my mom sitting me down in the name of transparency, and she kind of explained my birth story, and one of the things that she said, that as a 21 year old, when she found out that she was pregnant with me, she had already had a daughter, she had my sister when she was 17 years old, so she decided that she was going to abort me, and she spoke with a Baptist minister who convinced her otherwise, and then she decided after she had her C-section in the hospital that she was going to place me for adoption, and then someone convinced her otherwise, and, and she said, you know, because I really wanted a boy, and that was really hard to hear as a teenager. I remember feeling abandoned. I felt unwanted, and yeah, that was my first pivotal moment. My second moment was in 2019 2019 I was at my grandmother’s funeral, and someone made a comment to me, as I said, I was raised in a single parent home, and so my dad lived 2000 miles away. We lived in California. He was in Chicago. I’m at my grandmother’s funeral in Michigan, and someone made this comment suggesting that my father was not my biological father. It was just a statement made very carelessly, but it actually proved to be true. Okay, so everything that I was told about my father was a lie. And in 2020 March of 2020 a week before the whole country shut, the whole world shut down with COVID, I met my biological. Father, for the first time, first time in my life, where I looked at a man and I saw parts of myself looking back at me. The third pivotal moment rests somewhere in between those two moments, they rest on the timeline between those events, and that is when I met my heavenly Father, so I was 22 years old, I heard the gospel, someone was very patient and sharing the gospel with me, and I over time believed, I believed that I was a sinner, I believed that I had need personally for Savior, that I needed Christ, the person, and God came into my life and transformed me, and I slowly then had to learn. God began to teach me about His grace and His love, because you know what I did, I came to faith thinking that I had to earn my way with God, I believe that God was very much like my earthly dad, that he was inconsistent. I thought maybe I, maybe I should perform for him, maybe if I do something wrong, maybe he’ll disappear, and despite these very broken relationships with my earthly mother and my earthly father. God was helping me to see something, to see that I was His daughter. And I remember reading scripture, and the Holy Spirit began to teach me about God’s love for me, and that specific truth, the fact that I am an adopted daughter of God, that God is my heavenly Father. It really began to make more sense, and it was the exact truth that God used to stabilize me when my whole world was turned upside down in 2019 It was this God-given identity that kept me grounded. It was that identity that helped me forgive my mom.

Blair Linne
God’s truth is what allowed me to not be completely shaken by learning about my biological father the way that I was shaken when my mom sat down and had that conversation with me when I was a teenager, you know, in this room, you know, we have already established, Katie did so well establishing that we are all women in the natural sense, that means that we are all daughters in this room, and the role of our parents was supposed to be to teach us what that identity entailed, but I know for some of you, some of you in this room, that means that you have been loved. There are women in this room, you’ve been nurtured, you’ve been cared for unconditionally by a loving mother and father, or by a loving single parent, or by an adopted family or family member, you’ve been loved fully and graciously, but I know based on my own story, and because of the fact that this is a fallen world, I’m certain that many others of you connect to the role of a daughter, but you were not loved unconditionally, your view of what it means to be a daughter is scant, because the experience of what it should have been was not your experience. You are really on the receiving end of all that it shouldn’t have been, and you know we can’t control the choices that our parents make. We can’t go back and change the ways that we have been mishandled, but we can decide how we’re going to respond, and even more than that, how we will respond to what God says about Himself as Father, and the fact that he calls us daughter, because see, our earthly role was ultimately meant to be a pointer to a much greater reality, whether we had the best parents or the worst. If we have been born again, we have an eternal identity as daughters, and this identity was given to us by our only perfect parents. He’s the only one, our heavenly Father. The question I want to consider with you today is this: What does it mean to be an adopted daughter of God, and what difference does it make? If you have your Bibles, I want you to open up your Bibles to Romans chapter eight. We’re going to be in verses 14 through 17, Romans chapter eight, verses 14 through 17. And I’ll read it says, for all those led by God’s spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out Abba Father. The Spirit himself testifies, together with our spirit, that we are God’s children, and if children, also heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. If indeed we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him. So I’m going to briefly just walk through this passage, because there is so much encouragement here for us. Just look down at verse 14, it says, “For all those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. Now, I’m not mad at the fact that Paul uses sons here, right? Paul does this because we are united to Christ, right? This is it’s a theological idea that we need to grasp. We need to be okay with being called sons. We know that he’s referring to sons and daughters because just a few verses earlier he says that brothers and sisters, right? Okay, and Paul uses this being led by the spirit here, and it’s actually all throughout the chapter to say that we are no longer obligated to the flesh. At one time, we were completely enslaved to sin. We had no choice, but the Spirit gave us life and the ability to live out the gospel by the Spirit’s power. And so we have put off our sin because we died with Christ, and now we live unto God by putting on a new nature. So, for example, if at one time your life was marked by sexual morality, now by the Spirit, you can repent and ask God to help you live in purity by His power. If at one time your life was marked by religiosity and performance, like my life was, you can ask God to help you put that to death and walk in the freedom of Christ’s righteousness.

Blair Linne
Now notice there’s a few things that Paul doesn’t mention here when he’s talking about the spirit, and all of the talk about the spirit, he doesn’t mention spiritual gifts here, and I think it’s because you can be used by God, but still not be a child of God, right? But you cannot fake being led by God’s spirit. You can’t fake walking in the spirit and denying the lust of the flesh. You can fake a gift, right? You can fake a gift. You cannot fake being led, Jesus said on that last day, many will say, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not? And they list all of the accomplishments, but He said, ‘Depart from me, I never knew you. We pray that would not be any of our stories here. Paul deals with gifts later in chapter 12, but before we get to what we do here, we have to be certain of who we are, and that’s what Paul is emphasizing. God wants a relationship with us before any call to do anything for God. You must belong to God. Justification is a word, it’s not in the passage, justification being justified, being declared righteous by God. It’s a term that takes us into the courtroom, but adoption takes us into the family room. I want you to think about a judge sitting high on a bench in a cold, sterile courtroom. Now, if you are a defendant on trial, and you know you’re guilty, but yet the judge declares not guilty, and says that his son is actually going to do your time. Your heart leaps, you’re relieved, your record is clear, but when the gavel drops, you don’t walk up to the bench and crawl into the judge’s lap and tell them you know I need an oil change, I need money for college, right? That would be nice, but what you do is you leave the building, right, and you go about your way. Justification clears your record, sisters, and we praise God for that. But adoption does something more. Adoption means that the judge steps down from the bench, takes off the black robe, walks you out of the courthouse, and takes you home for dinner. He doesn’t just clear your case, he claims you as his own. He might get the oil change money for college. This is our heavenly Father. God is not a deadbeat dad. He’s not far off. He is present, active, and he wants to be in your life. One other thing Paul doesn’t mention here is emotions. Emotional feelings are fine, it’s great, but they are not the focus. They are the byproduct of having the spirit. Being emotionally moved is not the same as being spiritually changed. Emotions are not the means to securing our place as daughters. The spirit is the means. It’s the spirit that helps us mortify the flesh and live in the spirit, and so we cannot emphasize one and neglect the other. It’s important for us to know it’s not just about us dying, but God came so that we might have life and more abundantly. So God wants us as daughters to live, to flourish, to thrive in Christ, to be led by the Spirit. It means to be continuously, moment by moment, compelled, directed, controlled, restrained, revived by the Spirit. Does the spirit ever restrain you? Does he convict you? Does he give you a holy boldness? When you’re living your life at home amongst your daily rhythms, are you led by the spirit? Look at verse 15. He says, for you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, Abba Father. Now, verses 15 and 16, they actually clarify what this looks like, right? So, we didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. What does that mean? That means that we don’t have to live in the anxiety that we held before we believed, when we constantly fear judgment and condemnation under the law, and when we fear death. Our position before the Lord is one where God the Father embraces us in love and peace, not fear. So look at the contrast Paul sets up.

Blair Linne
He says on one side you have the negative, and that’s the bondage, the fear, the anxiety, the worldliness, the slavery, but then on the other side you have the positive love adoption sanctified life, right, spirit-filled life. At one time we were slaves, but now we’re daughters. Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people. Once we had not received mercy, but now we have received mercy. Praise be to God. You know to understand just how deep this goes. Excuse me, we have to understand Roman law regarding adoption. So, in the Roman world, adoption was a legal act, and it was a legal act done out of love. Thank you. It was a legal act that was done out of love. A slave could be adopted into a family in order to perpetuate the family name and inherit the estate. And so, in ancient Rome, this wasn’t just a quiet agreement that was done in secret. No, the law required seven witnesses to be present, and they would watch the transaction, and then they would take a hot molten wax and seal the adoption with their personal signet ring, and those seven seals meant that if anyone from the adoptee’s past life, any old master or any debt collector or any old family member showed up later to say you still belong to us. The new father could pull out that scroll, show the seals, and say your authority is canceled. You don’t have authority here anymore. Look at the seals, the debt is paid. You know, when the devil comes and tries to whisper to you about your past mistakes, when he says, “You know, God is no different than your earthly father, or “You’ll never break free of that sin struggle, or when fear creeps back in, and you hear those voices that were spoken over your life, all the negative things that were said about you, maybe you were told that you were worthless. I want you to remind your fears of your new identity. Remind fear that your debt has been paid. Tell yourself that you have a father, a father who will never leave you nor forsake you. Remember, you have been sealed by a higher authority. Your past has no legal right to claim you anymore. That old life is dead. You’re no longer enslaved. You’ve been predestined for adoption. Ephesians one says God lovingly chose you and takes you in, you were a slave to your sin, but God, in His mercy, He’s given you a new name and a new inheritance, and He legally satisfies every demand, and He does that through Jesus, our redeemer, our purchaser, who cancels our debt, and this is why our old life is dead, and we now live under God with a new identity. Adopted, He is our Father, and the church is our family. You know, being adopted is our greatest privilege. We get to call God Father. In the original Greek text, there was an intense emphasis right here. Paul is saying this is the great truth. I don’t want you to miss in my Bible. There’s an exclamation point there, right? What he’s saying is we don’t get to just call God God, we get to call him Father, the intimate name for God, right? Jesus told the apostles to call him our Father, right, Abba, who art in heaven, and this is our privilege, sisters. It’s not a duty, it’s a gift. We call him Abba, the most personal, intimate name for a father. You know, I never had the ability to call out dad in my house if I needed something, didn’t have an earthly father to do that with, but I can now call out Abba Father, and he hears me, and he is near to me. You know, those of you who had your fathers in your life, you know what that’s like, to need something and be able to say, Dad, this is a telephone, by the way, right? When you had a flat tire, when you needed protection, Dad, I need you, and that’s exactly what Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Blair Linne
He cries out, Abba Father, his disciples, they can’t wait and tarry and pray with him, but he hears, he is able to call out to his Father, who hears him, and he prays, Abba Father, each one of us in this room, we are able to call out to our Father and say, God, I need you. I need you today. I need you to be my father. If you’re in this room and you are not born again, and you’ve never called out to God as Father, you’ve never asked Him to come into your life as your Father. I really want to encourage you to do that today. Don’t let this day pass without coming and talking to one of us who are here about what it means to have God as Father, and if you’re here and you know Him, what do you need from Him today? How do you need to depend upon your heavenly Father today? Pabba, I need you to heal my marriage. Abba, I need you to save my child, Abba. I need you to comfort me while I grieve. What do you need? Are you weary? Are you tired today? What is your urgent prayer? Later in the chapter, we see actually in verse 26 sometimes we don’t even know what to pray, and God, the Holy Spirit comforts us, even in the midst of that with groans. In 2023 I actually lost my mother, and I remember after experiencing that grief, I couldn’t pray. I never experienced that before, but I didn’t even know what to say, and the Lord just comfort me, sent me others to walk with me in the midst of that, and it took a couple of weeks, and then eventually it was like, Abba, Father, okay, I’m grieving, this is hard, I’m angry, I need you to, I need you to deal with me, and he was right there. He was there the whole time, even when I couldn’t utter a prayer. He is your Father. My prayer is that you will depend upon him. I’m going to skip to verse 17. It says, “If children, also heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. Verse 17 gives us promises that cover our entire lifespan. We see we’re children, we’re born again, we’re suffering, that’s our entire sanctification. And then it says that we’re heirs and co-heirs in Christ, that’s our glorification. Often we want the regeneration, we want to be children. God, we want the glorification, but we don’t like the sanctification. Okay, we don’t want to suffer, we don’t want to crucify our flesh, but that is how we show that we are united to Christ in every way. We suffer for a little while, but we have to know that glory is coming. Glory is coming. Right, the suffering won’t last always, like that old song used to say. It won’t last always. Glory will come. Our Savior will return, and He will make it all right. Our brother Jesus is the way to the Father, and He made us a promise. He said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? If I go and prepare a place, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also. Jesus, the Son of God, is taking all the children of God to glory. When the Father looks at us, he sees Jesus, right? He sees his son, because we are united with him, daughters who suffered with Christ for the sake of righteousness while on earth, daughters who made it to the end of the race, who endured. And I’m just going to say this, and I’m going to.. I’m closing, because I’ve really run out of time over my time. It’s important when we think about this race that we’re in. When we start, we look to the right and the left, there’s a lot of people, oftentimes with us. And the more that we walk, the more that we run this race, we start seeing other people. They began not to be led by the spirit, but they start moving away from the spirit, and they’re going towards worldliness.

Blair Linne
Decide, oh, I’m not going to read the word, I’m not going to go to church. And then you look off, and these are the people who started with you, and it just kind of thins out as we continue to run this race, and we’re looking at the finish line with our eyes on Jesus, right? We’re looking at him, and we see, oh, when I look to the right and the left, why is there less people here? And we must finish the race by God’s grace. We must be led by the Spirit. We have to endure, because we know that there’s glory in the end, that there’s a promise in the end, and in the end we will be with our Father, right? He will be with us. So I want to encourage you, sisters, in your role as a daughter, continue, continue to walk in the Spirit, right? Continue to trust in the Lord. Keep your eyes fixed upon Him. What God started, He will finish. We have a beautiful God who is our Father, and He’s able to heal any deep hurt that you have, and we have a beautiful family in the church who sometimes hurts us too, right? But we are called to link together and love one another until we reach home. We’re going home, y’all. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, we give you praise. We thank you so much for your goodness to us. Thank you for adopting us as your daughters. We pray, Lord, that you would fill us with your spirit, help us to endure, help us to keep our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Jen Wilkin
Amen. Thank you, Blair. You can, you can stay up here. Come have a seat. Yeah, you cannot escape the acquaintance now. Have a seat. Wow, that’s amazing. I don’t, I, I have a wonderful father, earthly father, and well, maybe we can talk about this on the panel, but when I hear these stories, I know how rare my story is, because I would imagine most of you have have difficulty there. I kept thinking about how Katie said we women understand themselves in relationship, womanhood is understood in relationship to manhood, and how that first glimpse we get is our fathers, so so foundational, and to know that our heavenly Father tells us the truth about who we are and who He is. So, thank you, thank you for that personal and beautiful word. We are going to have our panel discussion now, and so I need to come to the stage. I need Katie McCoy and Jen Osman. Come on up here, and can we get microphones for these lovely women? I’m going to have a seat over here, and I have my phone, so I can keep an eye on the time, because I know all of your bladders are keeping an eye on the time at this point as well, so don’t worry, we will not forget, we will not forget the break, so we’re going to have a discussion now about what it means, what does it mean to be women and daughters in today’s world when we start when. We started talking about topics for this discussion. We all kind of thought about the conversations that we’re seeing that are taking place on our phones, or on Instagram, or in voice memos with friends, or on Threads, or TikTok. Is anybody out on Threads? I don’t know if that was, yeah, Threads, no, but other places I know that my daughters and I have a regular conversation that is happening, and we’re batting around ideas and trying to figure out the way forward, and you’ve heard some issues raised by these women. And before we jump in, I do want to introduce you to Jen Oschman. Jen will be talking to us after the break, and Jen is Jen. Where is my.. I know you don’t want.. I know you don’t want me to read it, but I’m going to.. Jen is an author, speaker, church planter’s wife, and mom of four young adult daughters. Let me just say that again.. Mom of four young adult daughters. She has served as a missionary and church planter for over two decades on three continents. She currently resides in Colorado, where she is the director of women’s ministry at Redemption Parker, which her family planted in 2017 Her book titles include Enough About Me, which is why she didn’t want me to read the bio. It’s good to be a girl, cultural counterfeits, and welcome. She’s the author of the Bible study, very good. What the Bible says about being a woman and created on purpose, God’s very good design and plan for being a girl. So, Jen, welcome to the platform. We’re so glad to have you here. Yes. Yes, my fellow Jen, you could throw a rock and hit a Jennifer, and we’re here to prove it. So, as we dive into this discussion, I mean, keep top of mind, like, what are you hearing, what are you seeing around you. This is a group of women who are particularly ears perked up for these kinds of conversations, but Jen, let’s just start with you. You’ve got the four daughters, and so I know that this is an unavoidable conversation for you when you think about the cultural issues that are in our cultural moment. How do you have those conversations with your daughter? Some of this is really sensitive, some of this is it’s a, it’s a friendship in real life, it’s not a hypothetical for your girls, and so what advice would you give to us, whether it’s talking to a family member or even to just a friend who’s seeking counsel?

Jen Oshman
Yeah, that’s really good. It’s true, these are unavoidable, these are daily conversations. I think, as much as moms, as we want to maybe put our heads in the sand, or hide our family in a rock, or under a rock, or go off the grid. That’s really not a possibility. So, the first thing I would say is have the conversations. I think that it starts there, because a lot of moms and dads and churches aren’t willing to have these conversations. They, I think, are afraid of saying the wrong thing, so they don’t say anything at all. And I think the void is really dangerous, because our girls will go looking for answers somewhere, they’ll go, they’ll look for identity and answers somewhere, and there are a lot of people talking and offering answers. So, I think first and foremost, be willing to have the conversation, and I say that from a place of security, as both Katie and Blair have talked about beautifully, we have no reason to be afraid. We are created by God and saved by Him, adopted into His family, and so are our daughters. And so we can have these conversations from a place of security and a place of confidence. And so my encouragement would be, don’t be afraid and don’t hide, go forward in the grace and sovereignty and power of God, and face them head on, and start early in age-appropriate ways, because I promise you the conversations are happening whether you know it or not, and so I would say in age-appropriate ways start having them from a very young age and keep moving forward. Yeah,

Jen Wilkin
that’s good. And in my experience in the local church, this is a conversation that has to be had in student ministry as well, or at least be top of mind, so that whether you’re addressing it from the platform, you’re certainly able to address it in one on one conversations as they arise. Katie, you wrote on this in To Be a Woman, you talked about the social contagion aspect of all of this, and I would just love for you to share a little bit of that with the room, and then to give us sort of a more of a pastoral framing of like what do we do with this in real life terms.

Katie McCoy
Yeah, the social contagion of young women forming their identity by the beliefs and behaviors of their friends, it swept us culture certainly about six years ago now. No coincidence that when the world shut down and we all moved online, you saw this huge uptick of young girls, especially going down these rabbit holes of Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and they were hearing these. Gender influencers say things like, well, if you don’t feel just like joy about being a girl at 14, maybe you’re actually going through the wrong puberty. Who liked puberty? It was awful, and it was essentially pathologized and medicalized away the social contagion. What we mean by that is, think about it like an idea virus. So, anorexia is a social contagion. If you have your daughter has friends who are starving themselves and finding ways to deceive about that, your child can pick that up. It was the same thing with gender identity, what’s incredible, though, is we’ve seen it precipitously drop just in the last probably 12 to 18 months, and it proves just the social element of all of this, and that’s not a surprise. We’re social beings, we’re made to be social beings, girls especially are relational, they’re going to identify with their friends, they’re going to take on the offenses of their friends. You remember what it was like being in middle and high school. It doesn’t matter if this girl offended you, she offended your friends, so you hate her now. And so these are these are the same ideas, but but now applied to very dire consequences related to how girls are defining who they are in terms of how to address this. What Jen described is precisely the right thing in age-appropriate ways. Start having those conversations early, and you know, talking about God made our bodies, our bodies are good, and we live in a world that says that only what you feel is true, but is what we feel true? Do we feel things that a year later, a month later, we feel differently? How can we really know what is true, and so this is something where it’s deeply worldview oriented, deeply foundational. By the time you’re talking about gender, there are like six or seven different worldview conversations that you have to have to get to the gender conversation, and so this is this is about worldview formation. How do you know what is true, and having those conversations with your children early,

Jen Wilkin
that’s really good. And I think it is fascinating to see this begin to shift in the culture, because I think that’s going to present a new challenge for those of us who are in the church who have said, hey, this is not a good thing, because what do we tend to do when we find out we were right? Does it breed humility in us exactly? And so I think that as this conversation begins to shift, we will have a unique moment to exhibit compassion and care for those who maybe are suffering the fallout of this movement that swept through, or for those who are still grappling with how to think about things, and so as those who have a voice into the lives of spiritual sisters and daughters, we want to make sure that we temper the way that we talk about these things, so that we exhibit the love of Christ as we do so, but you know it’s anxiety inducing, and so I’m glad that we have someone here who’s actually written a book on anxiety, and I kept thinking, you know, as Katie was talking about vulnerability, well, it’s no wonder that women have anxiety, we know that we live in a world that takes advantage of vulnerability, and anxiety seems like, honestly, a rational response to that, and so I’m wondering, Blair, if you can help us think through how we should view anxiety. Is it always wrong or sinful? Like, give us some categories for that.

Blair Linne
Yeah, that’s a good question. I kind of faced anxiety really strongly in 2015 Our young family moved to Philly to help plant a church. We had three kids, three and under, and our house was leaking. And then I got into a car, and a deer totaled our car, and so it just spiraled me into a season of panic attacks. And prior to that, I wouldn’t have thought that I was an anxious person. I wouldn’t have.. I would have said, “Oh, anxiety is always sin. This is always a bad thing. As I work through it, the Lord really helped me to create some categories that I think might be helpful, and I found it actually from a Puritan, John Flavel. He talks about natural fear and sinful fear and religious fear, and so natural fear is that fight or flight? This is actually by design what God has placed inside of us to help keep us alive. It’s the result of living in a fallen world that we’re going to come across things where sometimes our body reacts, right? It also is a good thing, because it can help, you know, like we talked about a woman’s strength, you know, there are. First cases in history where a mom has lifted a car in order to save their child, right? That’s that adrenaline, that’s the fight or flight that is good, right. And then we have sinful anxiety. Sinful anxiety is primarily what we see in the New Testament. We see both in the scripture, the positive and negative, or if you want to say natural fear and sinful fear, but primarily in the New Testament, you see this sinful anxiety, this anxiousness. That’s what we see when the text says, “Do not be anxious about anything, don’t worry, and that means it means to be divided. Your attention is divided away from God, it’s diverted from God and placed onto your worry, so all you see is the anxiety, the thing that you’re concerned about. It’s really like the Psalm 131 you are entertaining things too wonderful for you, and so you have to learn to cast those cares, those worries over to the Lord. But when we’re having an anxiety attack that’s not the same as the New Testament sinful worry that we see, it’s not always the case. There might be sinful worry there, or sinful fear, but it’s important to parse that out. And I believe the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness there.

Jen Wilkin
So we ought not to quote be anxious for nothing at somebody’s having a panic attack.

Blair Linne
Please don’t.

Jen Wilkin
Do you know my big advice. First of all, let’s have a moment of authenticity, shall we? If you’re comfortable joining me in this exercise, how many of you in this room have had a panic attack? I want you guys, hold your hands up, everybody, look around, look around you. Okay. And so I think it’s time for us to stop criminalizing this and begin helping each other with it, but my daughter Claire is in the room, so I can’t resist a call out. I used to tell the kids when they were feeling any, any kind of illness, but certainly anxiety, drink a glass of water, like drink it, and I really, I would drink a giant glass of water, because it was like it let all of that adrenaline sort of dissipate. So, there’s my medical advice to you. My daughter now is a doctor, and I love the day that she texted me and said, “Mom, it’s actually true, a lot of things are solved by drinking a glass of water. So, that’s just free medical advice for you from me with absolutely no training, but I do think it’s important for us to understand, understand, like women recognize vulnerability, like we, we know intuitively that we are vulnerable, we know what it means to walk through a world where the vulnerable are not seen, who are not protected in the way that they should be, and so it’s no wonder that we find ourselves dealing with anxiety that’s sometimes rational and sometimes irrational, and we have to have a place where we can say to each other, this is what I’m dealing with, and find not just the help that we need, but also the companionship we need, and walking through this, each of us has probably a different observation about what has helped us to, to overcome, or at least to learn coping skills with this. But if you’re walking around thinking that you’re crazy and no one else is feeling this way, I hope that moment just dissipated. And for those of you who didn’t raise your hands, I hate your guts. I’m kidding. Congratulations, I had a good father. You don’t have anxiety. Okay, yeah. So, so the Lord, Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. So, along the lines of vulnerability, this is a little bit of a selfish moment for me to introduce another idea here, but I’ve been thinking so much about aging, and I’ve got this book coming out on aging, and I keep having new ideas about aging that I wish I could just sort of like hand write in the margins of the book, but it’s too late. But what’s fascinating, one of the things that I came across in the, in, in writing the book was it was actually written by a third wave feminist, so you know, a radical feminist, or actually I heard it in an interview, a podcast interview, and she talked about how, if men live into old age, they rediscover the vulnerability that they lost when they reached adulthood. I thought that was so fascinating, because it means that women have something. Remember, this is about reciprocity. Women have something to offer to men in our lived experience. I’m seeing this with my husband, who he’s forbidden from getting on ladders above a certain height now. Why? Because he is not keeping up with his increasing vulnerability, and I have never not known vulnerability. So I would just be curious, everybody up here has experiences of vulnerability as an embodied female. How has it shaped the way that you think about your relationships, not just with the men in your life, but even with other women and children, and with the vulnerable in general. We’ll start with you, Blair.

Blair Linne
Yeah, you will mind going first. Excuse me, I was just gonna say I just had a vulnerable moment here. Thank you for your grace there. I think, especially going through my season of anxiety, that was one of the things that Lord taught me was weakness, vulnerability, that it is a good thing, and, and so now I’m like, you know, I’m snotting like it’s just a part of life. I’m human, so I think being comfortable with being human and not feeling like I have to be God or have to be something that I’m not. But that took that low season of, you know, several years of dealing with anxiety and panic attacks and feeling out of control, where I was able to relinquish control and say, okay, this is a good thing. It’s a good thing to say, like, I’m human, I’m weak, I’m needy, and that’s okay.

Katie McCoy
Anybody else got any thoughts? I think being done with kind of the boss babe mentality of just like I can’t, I can’t get it all done, I can’t, I can’t at 41 work with the same energy I had at 21 If you know a protein shake that could fix that, I’d love to know your thoughts, but, but with that, recognizing your own vulnerability, I think there’s a sense, a greater sense of responsibility that I know I feel to especially women around the world, women who are sort of unseen in our culture today, and I think that even that’s deeply theological, and that’s very faithful to the history of our own faith. You look back at the early church, and it was the most vulnerable in that society that the early church zeroed in on, like if they were wanting social power, they would not have championed legal non-persons in the ancient Greco-Roman world, and but that’s exactly what they did, because not because of their social standing, but because of a deep principle that every human being has dignity and has worth, and I find that principle, though challenging to me, where there are segments of the population, perhaps even in our political conversations that are inconvenient to think and apply that

Jen Oshman
to. I’ll just share one brief thing in relation to raising daughters and knowing that they’re vulnerable, especially because we raise them overseas. So, as foreign children, immigrants in other countries, I knew there was an extra layer of vulnerability for them, so leaning into that and wanting to train them to be prepared for that, to be ready to be to move about in public in a safe way as foreigners, especially, but also wanting to communicate to them over and over deeply that they were made very good, and that though they are vulnerable, that is good, and what God made is very good. And so I would teach them from a young age to walk into rooms with their shoulders back and their head held high, confident not in themselves but confident in the God who made them, and that He ordained that they would live here and now in this moment and move into that room with the gifts and the skills and the resources that he gave them,

Jen Wilkin
that’s really good. I would even push it further and say, because they are vulnerable, they are created very good. I think sometimes we forget or we lose sight of, and this is what Katie brought home so beautifully for us, that our vulnerability doesn’t occur after the fall. Our vulnerability is before the fall, and so it must be good that we are vulnerable, and it must be necessary for human flourishing that women be vulnerable, and that men enjoy greater agency. Those are things that, and that’s this, my, my, when people start talking about the C word, complementarianism, I get like, so nervous, because I’m like, I don’t know what you mean by that, but the more I think about it, the more I see it fall into categories of vulnerability and agency that are looking toward each other. Like, isn’t it interesting how the number one need that male leadership has identified in the church over the last 20 or 30 years is community. Oh, so you’re saying that we need each other to get stuff done? Interesting. And when you are vulnerable, you know that intuitively, right? I’m going to use a – I’m going to use an example here that is – it’s hyperbole, okay? So I don’t mean to over categorize, but think of the lion and the ant. Okay, the lion is an alpha predator. He can hunt alone, and he has a lot of agency. The ant is very weak in many ways, alone. And so, what does the ant do? The ant works in community with. Other ants, there is a reason that women go to the bathroom with other women. I think there’s a deeply seated biological reason. It is the basic difference between men and women that if I ask my husband, when you walk down a dark alley, what are you thinking, he stares at me blankly and says, where did I park, and I’m like, none of us would give that response, right? What are you thinking about when you walk down a dark alley?

Blair Linne
Who’s in the alley?

Jen Wilkin
That’s right. What are you thinking, Katie?

Katie McCoy
How do I get out of here?

Jen Wilkin
What are you thinking, Jen? How am I going to stab him? Yeah, that’s exactly right, and that doesn’t make us second-class citizens. It means that we actually have a way of seeing the world that is essential and indispensable to the way that the church functions, to the way that our homes function, to the way that communities function. And so I think the plea from everyone up here would be, stop apologizing for the way that God made you recognize what you now uniquely contribute, and I don’t mean uniquely you, the individual, I mean women uniquely contribute to being human and have confidence in that agency and vulnerability, in other words, men are called to draw women toward agency. Women are called to draw men toward a remembrance of what vulnerability. What if we actually needed each other in that way? And so, as we close out our time.. Oh, we’re four minutes over. I want to ask you guys one more thing. If you had one book that’s not your own book that you wanted to recommend, maybe it is your own book, I mean, own it, that you wanted to recommend for further reading on some of the things that you have talked about today, what would

Blair Linne
it be? I would recommend J. I. Packard’s Knowing God, He has a wonderful chapter on being a sons of God.

Jen Wilkin
So, good. Katie

Katie McCoy
Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. That’s

Jen Oshman
what I was gonna say. Oh,

Jen Wilkin
you got anything on daughters?

Jen Oshman
I can’t think. Okay, I’ll say one

Jen Wilkin
while you think. Okay. Okay. Actually, Katie referenced this one. I want to warn you up front, it’s a tough read. The case against the sexual revolution by Louise Perry. She wrote it as an unbeliever, and it’s reflected in some of the language that’s used in it, but it is so important. I would ask you to press through the case against the sexual revolution by Louise Perry.

Jen Oshman
Okay, one that I would a little bit on a tangent, a little bit neither complementarian nor egalitarian, really. Barnwell, Elizabeth Lee Barnwell.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, and I think what I want you to hear in these recommendations is sometimes if you want to get a good perspective on the whole conversation, you have to do what’s called reading promiscuously, okay? And that doesn’t mean that you, you know, fall off the brink and all of a sudden you’re a raging liberal. It means that you have to read from a diversity of voices. We think that there’s everything’s a slippery slope, but have you ever had the experience of reading a counter argument and having your own argument reinforced? Okay, so, so stay humble before the Lord. Have good dialog, partners. Don’t read alone, but I would encourage you to look into some of these titles that have been given to us here today. It is 1006 We are going to be back in our seats and eager to hear from Jen at 1020 so you have 14 minutes to serve one another in the women’s room by getting in and out of there quickly. You are dismissed. We’re going to go ahead and get started. We want to stay on track, because I know you guys are going to have a full schedule while you’re here. I feel so grateful that knowing you’re going to drink from a fire hose over the next 48 to 72 hours, we started with this. What a great orienting space to start with. But our next person, who we will be hearing from, is Jen Oschman. Jen, come on up. You’ve already heard a little bit about Jen, but actually, do we have the mic stand? You don’t. Oh, she doesn’t want it. Never mind. You’ve heard a little bit about Jen already. Jen, is there anything you know since I read your wooden bio that you hate? Is there anything you would like us to know that we don’t yet know? Oh man, I don’t. Any pets? I have a yellow lab, a yellow lab, not a pug. It’s not a pug, but you know what? You can keep trying. Yeah, yeah, you can keep trying. So, Jen is going to be talking to us today about what it means to be mothers and sisters in the. Family of God, we’ve known each other for a while. I am so thrilled to hear you open up this topic for us. I’ve heard her teach on this before. I once sat and watched a video of her and cried in my home when she was teaching on this to a group of people who really, really needed to hear it, and so I appreciate your courage and your clarity on this, and you guys are in for a real treat, if that’s a way to talk about something like this. But let me pray for you as you begin. Father, I thank you for my sister Jen. I thank you for a co-laborer who understands the value of women within the family of God, and I pray, Lord, that you would grant her clarity of speech and thought, and that we would all be edified, understanding not just better who we are in the role that we have to play, but who you are as a father to us as a result, and we ask these things in the name of your son. Amen.

Jen Oshman
Thank you, Jen. Okay, it is sweet to be with you guys. Let me start by asking you this question. Have you ever met someone who’s related to someone famous, or have you ever met someone who’s descended from someone famous? You might know the conversation, like it comes up, they’re like, well, you know, my mom lived here, my dad lived here, we did this, and then someone’s like, well, my relatives came over on the Mayflower, and you’re like, okay, okay, that one, that one won, or someone will be like, you know, I mean, my, he was founding father of the United States, and you’re like, okay, that one, that one wins too, you know, it comes up a lot when people know they’re descended from someone important or someone famous. This guy in my church recently realized that he is descended from Vikings, and Vikings now come up in every conversation. He’s like, well, you know, the Vikings, you know, and then it kind of inserts himself into the Viking history, I actually have a friend in Denver. Those of you from Denver will probably know who I’m talking about. He’s a pastor, and he is the 12th generation from Jonathan Edwards. And so that comes up a lot in conversation, of course, when people find out, you know, you’re in the same room, and they’re like, “Do you know he’s related to Jonathan Edwards? And then everybody in the room is like, “Oh, tell us about how you’re related to Jonathan Edwards, it just becomes a big thing if you, if you are related to someone famous, or if you’re descended from someone famous, it becomes super interesting, and everybody around you is so curious, and the greater the person, the greater the impact, you know. If there is, if you find that you’re kind of related to some skeletons in the closet, you’re like, kind of keep that hush-hush, but if you find that it’s somebody important, somebody who made a difference, then you want to walk in that legacy. You’re like, well, I sort of resemble them in this way. It’s kind of a family trait, actually. We’re all like this. It’s a huge industry now, actually, the like the ancestry industry. One in five Americans are on ancestry DNA, or 23andMe. Raise your hand. Anybody send in your blood or spit, or whatever you do to send it in. One in five. A lot of, okay, clearly a lot of you are too embarrassed to admit it, because it’s one in five of you do this, because we all are, we want to know, we want to know, where do we come from? What’s our story? Who am I descended from? Before it was an industry, before you could send away your DNA and find out all about your life history. My mom was so obsessed with this. Now I remember from the ages of like three to five, being with my mom in the great nation of Texas, as Jen has called it. I’m from Colorado, Colorado native, but every summer from the ages of three to eight, my mom would take me with her to Texas, and we would sit in the back seat of my grandfather’s boat of a car, and my grandmother would be in the passenger seat with a big map of the nation of Texas, and we found ourselves zigzagging all across that state with my mom taking us to cemeteries in places like Nacogdoches and Crockett and Carthage. These are the names I remember, and as a 345678, year old, being in these cemeteries for hours and for days, and having to squat behind tombstones, and learning the hard way what chiggers are. We don’t have those in Colorado, but my mom was obsessed. She was like, I want to find out where my dad came from, where my mom came from, where the people came from before them. Who’s my family? What are they like? Or, as my grandfather, grandmother from Georgia, put it, my people, you know, who are my people? What do my people do? What did they do? What were they like, and in what way? Am I like them? There’s something in us that just wants to know. We’re driven by this curiosity about our legacy, the heritage that we’ve received, our inheritance. Who are we?

Jen Oshman
Because when we find out where we’ve come from, it really makes a difference in discerning where we should be going, where we come from impacts where we are going. So, this is true in our biological families, but it’s also true in our spiritual family. The ladies who’ve already spoken this morning have referred to our adoption by grace through faith, we now are sisters in the same family, because of Christ’s work on our behalf. He made a way that we might be reconciled to the Father. So now you and I belong not only to the Father, but we belong to each other, because we are in the same faith family. This is actually a family reunion. Here we are, sisters gathered together from all over the country, actually all over the globe, but united in our faith. So, in the New Testament, as you’ve heard already, the primary way that Christians refer to one another is as brother and sister, because they knew they were adopted. They saw themselves as siblings in the same household of faith. So we see that Greek word Adelfoy, it shows up 271 times in the New Testament. It’s the primary way the first generation of Christians referred to one another, brothers and sisters, so what’s our heritage? Where do we come from? What’s true of our biological families is true of our spiritual families. There ought to be something in us that wants to know what’s our story. Who are our people? What were they like? How did they behave? Because when we discover where we’ve come from, it impacts where we’re going. Now, there is a place in the scriptures we’re going to go this morning. Thankfully, we do not have to zigzag across the state of Texas. Nobody has to squat behind a tombstone this morning to find out where our ancestors were laid to rest and what their life stories were, we can actually turn into the scriptures and read the biographies of some of our first and greatest grandmothers in the faith. We would have to say great 75 or 80 times, and so I’m not going to do that, but if we were to go back 2000 years to the women who are at the top of our spiritual family tree, that first generation of mothers in the faith. What would the word say about them? We’re going to be in a chapter that might surprise you. The greatness of their stories is often overlooked because it’s a place in the scriptures that we often flip past quickly. We’re going to be in Romans chapter 16. If you have studied Romans or read Romans, by the time you get to chapter 16, you wipe the sweat off your brow, and you’re like, oh, thank God, I have made it through some really dense theology. The Lord helped me dive into the commentaries and into the language and the conversations that I had with my pastor and the church and the podcast. And you finally get to Romans 16, and you’re like, okay, he’s just saying goodbye, he’s just saying thanks, bye, love ya, peace out, and you don’t really read it, but that is so unfortunate, because did you know in Romans chapter 16 we have the longest list of women in ministry in the Bible, there are 10 women in this precious chapter, and the Apostle Paul writes about them, and if you and I would read our Bibles slowly and with some imagination, and wondering, okay, what was that like, we would uncover the stories of our first and our greatest ancestors. So let’s do that. Flip with me to Romans chapter 16, and I’m going to pause here and just offer a brief word of prayer and ask the Lord to help us understand His word. God in heaven, we thank you that we belong to you and we belong to each other. Lord, we thank you for your word, and that we can read it this morning. Thank you for the Apostle Paul. Thank you for the church at Rome. Thank you for his letter to the church. Holy Spirit, would you inform us and transform us through Romans chapter 16? Listen, God, we beg you for understanding and illumination and a heart transformation in Jesus’ risen name. We pray. Amen. Okay, look with me at Romans chapter 16.

Jen Oshman
I’m going to just start in verse one, verses one and two. Paul says this: I commend to you, so he’s writing to Rome, he’s saying, “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church in Sen Cray. So you should welcome her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and assist her in whatever manner she may require your help, for indeed she has been a benefactor of many and of me also. Okay, like I said, we’re going to read our Bibles slowly, and I want to take apart the story of Phoebe. Now we’re going to get through all 10 women. Paul writes more about someone than others, so don’t worry if you’re like, well, she really spent a long time on the first and second women. Are we ever going to get through this? We are, because some are brief. But let’s linger for a minute, because there is a lot here about Phoebe, and it kind of keeps me up at night that a lot of women don’t know these stories. So, the first thing Paul says is, I commend to you Phoebe, our sister Phoebe. This means scholars agree Phoebe is the letter carrier. Paul wrote the letter to Rome in Corinth. Phoebe sent Senkrey, and that’s near Corinth. And so Paul has sent his letter with Phoebe to Rome. He has asked Phoebe to carry this important document. Paul knows what he’s written. He knows that it is dense with theology. He knows that he was led by the Spirit to instruct the church in some really fundamental and important, and at times complicated doctrine. And he goes to Phoebe and says, “Phoebe, I trust you with this letter. Will you carry it to Rome? So imagine with me what that was like. Paul clearly already has a relationship with Phoebe. He obviously trusts her. He’s going to send Romans with Phoebe. He trusts her, but I would imagine that Paul says, “Phoebe, sit down, let me read you this letter, so that you know what’s in here, because you’re going to deliver this for me. So, don’t you think maybe the first Bible study on the book of Romans was Paul chatting with Phoebe and saying, here’s what I meant, here, here’s what I was getting at, here, Phoebe going, well, Paul, what did you mean by this? I want to know, because you’re not going to be there when I get to Rome. And at that time, the tradition, the history behind letter carriers is that oftentimes they would deliver it to the church and then read it orally to the church. Remember, they’re not all taking this document and passing it around and reading it one by one. Probably Phoebe showed up and said, “Hey, church at Rome, listen up. Let me read this to you. Paul sends this to you. Let me tell you what it says, and she proclaims this rich, theologically dense letter to this first generation of Christians, and maybe it’s possible it’s not hard to imagine that these brand new believers in Rome. I mean, these are fresh baby Christians who don’t have the benefit of 2000 years of church history. They don’t have commentaries, they’ve got Phoebe telling them what the Apostle Paul has said, so you can imagine they, they might be like, ‘Hey, Phoebe, what did that mean? Phoebe, do you have any idea what Paul was getting at? There we don’t, we don’t actually know for sure. Did he tell you? And maybe Phoebe was explaining to them the ways of what Paul was saying more specifically. We don’t know for sure, but what we know is that Paul trusted Phoebe with this precious letter, and he says, “I commend her to you, receive Phoebe. She’s bringing you this letter, and I want you to receive her. She is trustworthy. Open yourselves up to her, and he calls her his sister, my sister Phoebe, our sister Phoebe, and he says she is a servant of the church. She is a diakonos, where we get the word deacon or deaconess, meaning she served wholeheartedly. That was her reputation. The region knew, oh, Phoebe, yeah, she serves in the church, she sacrifices. In the church, we know her. She serves wholeheartedly.

Jen Oshman
In the church, and then Paul says, “I want you to welcome her, treat her in a manner worthy of the saints, give her whatever she may require, give her all the help. He says she’s been a benefactor, or your translation may say she’s been a patron, a. Patroness Phoebe, who we only know by her name, we don’t know her by a father’s name or a husband’s name, but she’s obviously a woman of means. She’s a woman who has given her resources not just to Paul but to many in the church. It’s possible maybe she is a successful business woman, someone you know involved in something where she’s got financial means, and she’s going from San Craig to Rome, maybe on business, and taking the letter with her, but Paul says she’s been generous, and so I want you to be generous right back to her. There’s so much in these two sentences, so much we can learn about our great time, 75 Grandmother Phoebe. She’s a woman who was trustworthy, a woman who laid herself down over and over and over for the church, such that Paul took note and said, this is a woman I can trust this inspired letter with, so as her descendants, friends, how might she urge us on? She did all of that because she believed the gospel. She did all that because she believed in the Lord Jesus and said He is worth it. She became brave, she became generous, she became trustworthy, wise, a mature sister in the faith, because she believed the gospel. So may we use her example to spur us on to do the same things. That’s Phoebe. Let’s look at the next girl. Look with me at verses three, four, and five. Paul says, give my greetings to Prisca, same name as Priscilla, by the way. Give my greetings to Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in Christ Jesus, who risked their own necks for my life. Not only do I thank them, but so do all the Gentile churches. Greet also the church that meets in their home. Greet my dear friend Epinatus, who is the first convert to Christ from Asia. Okay, Prisca, our girl Priscilla. First of all, Paul mentions her first. Now we’re not going to build any grand doctrine around that, but it’s cool that Paul wasn’t like, ‘Hey, greet Aquila and his wife greet my boy Aquila, and that whatever her name is, you know, he knows Priscilla, he places her name first. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, it just rolls off of his tongue, and he places Priscilla right there first, and he says Priscilla and Aquila are my coworkers in Christ. Okay, if my first Bible study tip for you was to read the Bible slowly. My second Bible study tip for you is when you come across names in Scripture, flip to your index in the back and see where else those names might show up in the Word of God, and you will learn a ton about the different names on the page. So, if you did that with Priscilla or Prisca, it would take you to a few different places, but especially to Acts chapter 18. So, when Paul says, “My coworkers in Christ, we know from Acts chapter 18, verses one through three, that Paul was in Corinth as a tent maker, and so were Priscilla and Aquila, so they’re his coworkers in Christ, but they’re also his coworkers as tent makers. They’re there in Corinth together, because Priscilla and Aquila were Jews, and all the Jews were kicked out of Rome for a time. Remember, this letter is going to Rome, they’re in Rome, but for a time they were in Corinth, because all Jews were removed from Rome, and so they’re they’re exiled, and they’re in Corinth, and according to Acts chapter 18, they’re with Paul, and we know they’re there together, and they’re coworkers in Christ, and they’re also coworkers as tent makers. Acts chapter 18 verse 18 tells us that Paul set sail from Corinth with them, so they left together from Corinth, and they eventually arrived in Ephesus. Now, if you know your Bible, you know anything about Ephesus, you know that as a place that was contrary to the gospel. We know that as a place that hated the early church. So, maybe it was in Ephesus.

Jen Oshman
We don’t know for sure, but maybe that is where Priscilla risked her neck for Paul, maybe it was in a riotous situation in Ephesus, but in any event, Priscilla put her own life on the line for the Apostle Paul. If we were to keep going in Acts chapter 18, more about Priscilla and Aquila, we would come across this little story about Apollos. Apollo shows up in Acts chapter 18. He, it says in that chapter, was publicly teaching about Jesus, that he was instructed in some ways, and that he was sharing from the scriptures, and he was teaching. But verse 20-six, Priscilla and Aquila took him aside and explained. Trained to him the way of God more accurately. So, Priscilla was a woman who cared about doctrine, who cared about the truth. She was like, ‘Yes, Apollos, you’ve got it, but I want to tell you more. I want to make sure you have the complete story of who Jesus is, who our God is, what the Scriptures say. And so I’m guessing that took some bravery. I mean, she’s already risked her life for the Apostle Paul. She’s in a context where it’s dangerous to be a believer. Apollos is publicly teaching, and she and Aquila decide to go toward him and say, ‘You’re doing great, but we want to tell you more. We want to instruct you more fully in the way of the Lord, this is Priscilla. Apparently, she’s got a ministry, along with her husband, to the Gentile churches. Paul says all the Gentile churches can thank Priscilla, so she has made an impact, some kind of lasting impact on all the Gentile churches as a Jewish believer. And then clearly they’re back in Rome, because he says, “Greet the church that meets in their home. They’ve been allowed back in Rome, and they don’t waste any time. They’re like, “Come on in, this is where the church can meet. They can meet in our home. So our grandmother in the faith, Priscilla, I mean, this woman, so brave, an exile from her own hometown, a tent maker by trade, along with her husband, a teacher of the gospel, a woman willing to risk her very life, so that the apostle Paul might continue preaching, so that the gospel might go forward. This is our heritage. This is the first generation of our family tree. This is Priscilla. May she embolden you and me. She who believed Jesus was worth it, that the gospel was worth it. May we believe the same. May we walk in her footsteps. Well, let’s move on. Who’s next? Verse six. Greet Mary, who has worked very hard for you. That’s all we got on Mary, but she’s worked very hard for you. Okay, moving on. Verse seven. Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews and fellow prisoners. They are noteworthy in the eyes of the apostles, and they were also in Christ before me, well, there has been no little controversy about our sister Junia over the years, and that primarily is because the word of God says she is noteworthy in the eyes of the apostles, and the Greek there is a little bit unclear, and so the question has been, well, did the apostles know about her? Like, were they taking note, like, look at Junia, she’s awesome, or was she an apostle that was noteworthy? That’s where the confusion is. And if the Greek sort of says, well, she was an apostle, then they’re like, well, then she had to be a man. We’re not going to settle that controversy now, but what I will say is that scholars mostly almost totally agree that Junia is a girl, and we have a couple kinds of apostles in the scriptures. You could think of it this way: there’s sort of the apostle with a capital A, these are the men who are called by Jesus, sent by Jesus, and who bore witness to Jesus’ resurrected body, this would be the 12, this would be the Apostle Paul, but then there’s those lowercase apostles, which includes you and me, meaning sent ones, ambassadors, those who go and tell, and that’s all of us either way. What we know about Junia is that she was Jewish. She was a believer in Jesus, even before Paul was. She was imprisoned for her faith, and the apostles knew about her. She was noteworthy.

Jen Oshman
They were like, check out Junia and her faith. She loves the Lord radically, her reputation preceded her. She believed the gospel. May her example spur us on to do the same. Okay, verses eight through 11. I’m just going to skip those. They’re all guys, and they are our brothers, and I love them. But I only have a few more minutes. Let’s just jump down to chapter verse 12, where the next women appear. Verse 12: Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, who have worked hard in the Lord. That’s all we know about them. I like to think of them as sisters, because their names are so similar, and maybe even twins, because whose mom names you Tryphena and Tryphosa if you’re not twins? But either way, they worked hard in the Lord. Palm goes on, he says, “Greet my dear friend Persis. Persis is another girl. Greet Persis, who has worked very hard in the Lord. And then let me tell you about verse 13. Paul says, “Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, also his mother. Other, and mine. Let me tell you Rufus’s backstory real quick. So, when Jesus was heading to the crucifixion, you know there was a man who was compelled to carry the cross on his behalf. Well, in Mark chapter 15 verse 21 we learn that that man is Simon of Cyrene, and Mark 1521 tells us that he was the father of Alexander and Rufus. We don’t know for sure if it’s the same Rufus, but the fact that Paul’s like, you know, Rufus, that maybe he’s a well-known person in the church. So, what if I think it’s very possible, even probable, that the day that Simon carried the cross for Jesus, Simon and his wife and his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, watched Jesus be crucified, and then they bore witness to his resurrection, and they believed, and they became a first generation of Christians, and followed after the Lord wholeheartedly, passing on the gospel, and then they find out, well, Paul’s a Christian now, Paul also is a first generation believer now, and so Rufus’s mom is like, that man needs a mama, that man needs a spiritual mother, he doesn’t have one. He’s the first believer in his family, that’s like us. I’m going to move toward him and offer him some spiritual mothering, but what that also means is that Paul was like, I could use a mother, I need spiritual mothering, I actually need a woman to come alongside and be like a mother to me in the faith, and clearly they had a tender relationship, because he says, “Greet Rufus’s mom, she’s like a mother to me. Let’s be spiritual mothers, you guys. Let’s follow after the example of Rufus’s mom and have eyes to see those who need a spiritual mother and come alongside them. Okay, there’s two more women in Romans 16. He says in verse 14, greet a synchritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patribas, Hermas, and the brothers and sisters who are with them. And I did pronounce all those names just right. Okay, verse 15, greet philologists and Julia, Julia’s number nine, Nearest and his sister, Nerissa’s sister is number 10, and Olympus and all the saints who are with them greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ send you greetings. Friends, this is our heritage. These are our four mothers in the faith. This is our family tree. This is that first line, that first generation in the family that you and I belong to, that is 2000 years old. It’s the family of Jesus, and this family is eternal. These are our siblings in the faith forever and ever and ever. These are the saints who we will be united with around the throne, who we will work alongside and worship alongside in the new heavens and the new earth. Will we take up our heritage? Will we walk in the footsteps of the mothers who have gone before us? Will we pour ourselves out, not just for our biological families, but for our spiritual families? Will we give sacrificially? Will we risk our lives? Will we pull people aside and say, “Hey, you’re doing great, but let me teach you more. Will we pour ourselves out for this faith family? Because remember, where we come from makes an impact on where we’re going. Will we carry on this legacy?

Jen Oshman
We come from an amazing lineage, and my encouragement to you and to me is, don’t get distracted now. Let us carry this on. Let us run this race. Let us pursue this good mothering work, so that 2000 years from now, 2 million years from now, there would be a heritage of daughters and granddaughters, and great, great, and on and on granddaughters who walk in our footsteps as we walk in theirs. Let’s pray and ask the Lord to make us willing. God, would you, would you do this work in us? What an amazing heritage, Lord. What a privilege to belong to this family, Lord. It is easy to forget, it is easy to pursue ourselves, to pursue safety and comfort, to hope that someone else will take up the good work because we are afraid to, or not sure if we’re called to. God may Romans 16. Be the reminder, the calling, the commission that would send us out in your name, that generation upon generation would know. Jesus, help us. It’s in your risen name that we pray. Amen.

Jen Wilkin
Thank you, Jen. You get to have a seat. Jen’s doing all the heavy lifting at this thing. I realized we have you up here constantly, so thank you. I can’t resist saying there were 10 women in Romans chapter 16. How many fingers do you have? How many toes do you have? How many commandments are there? How many times was Egypt judged in the plagues? 10. Why? Because the number 10 signifies divine order and human responsibility. And I love that we have 10 names listed. Paul doesn’t do anything by accident, so enjoy that. Just enjoy that little extra thing there for you in the midst, so it also makes a good argument for Junia being a woman, just in case we needed another one. Okay, where were we? So we’re going to go into a panel discussion now to explore more about these questions of how are we to be mothers and daughters and sisters within the family of faith, and for that purpose I get to introduce you to two more of my favorite people, come on up, guys. We have Courtney Doctor and Elizabeth Woodson. Oh, they’re clapping for you already, no pressure. And I’m going to take my seat with my pen. Yeah, that’s great. I won’t forget you’re over there, I promise. Courtney, let me tell you a little bit about Courtney and Elizabeth. Courtney Doctor received an MDiv from Covenant Theological Seminary and currently serves as the director of women’s initiatives for the Gospel Coalition. She said, “Thanks for coming to my party. I don’t think you heard that part. It’s always a party. If Courtney’s there, she is a Bible teacher and an author. She’s written From Garden to Glory, that’s a book I have recommended many, many times. If you want the full story of Scripture, she also has written several Bible studies, including Titus, and In View of God’s Mercies and Way of Wisdom was a collab that we got to do together. She teaches for the Lifeway Women Academy courses, the New Testament survey, and Prepare, Teach, and Lead. You’ll see her in those. And Courtney and her husband, Craig, have four children and five beautiful grandchildren. So, welcome, Courtney. And then Elizabeth Woodson. Elizabeth is the founder of the Woodson Institute, where she helps believers understand and grow in their Christian faith. She is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary with a master’s in Christian education and the author of several books and Bible studies, including Habits of Resistance, Embrace Your Life. She also did The Way of wisdom as part of our collab, and from beginning to forever, a study of the grand narrative of scripture, and live free, a study on Galatians. She’s also a teacher in several Lifeway Women Academy courses. You see what we’re doing here: how to study the Bible, protect, prepare, teach, and lead, and what we believe in the New Testament survey. So, Elizabeth, welcome. Yeah, Elizabeth, and I logged a lot of miles together. At this point, we’re stuck with each other, and we’re happy about it,

Jen Oshman
right? Right? Yes,

Elizabeth Woodson
yes, happy. Okay,

Jen Wilkin
okay. All right, here we go. So we’re gonna let’s let’s kick this off. I think it’s nice to hear Romans 16. I think it’s a, it’s an assuring message. It helps us realize, oh yeah, yeah, it is important what we contribute as mothers and as sisters. But then comes the big question, right? Like, how, what does this actually look like? And good news, there are zero obstacles whatsoever to doing this. So just go forth and conquer, but one of the ways that we can begin to have this conversation is to talk about probably the simplest mechanism for this happening, but not always the easiest to sort of figure out how to do, and that would be mentoring. The topic comes up in every space where we talk about women in the church. If you’re an older woman, you probably feel like you have a target painted on you when you walk into the church, because somebody told all the 20 somethings that if they didn’t have a mentor, were they even a Christian? And then the younger women are feeling like, I don’t know what I’m doing, where is this person who’s supposed to help me? So, I think a good question for us to start with is, for the young, younger among us, well, I mean, really, I mean, I need a mentor, and I’m not super young. Can I get a witness? How do we.. how do we find that person? And then, if you’re the wise older woman, how do you be that person? So, I’m just going to let you kick us off, Courtney. Tell us a little about how to mentor. Well, first of all. You raise your hand if you’re an older woman.

Courtney Doctor
I want to see every single hand in the room up there. Is somebody younger than you, and there is somebody younger in the faith than you. So, I do want to be really careful with the older woman, younger woman language, because we do need to view ourselves all. Now, I do remember the first time somebody said to me, oh, I’ve been wanting to meet with an older woman, and I thought, is she wanting me to connect her with one, or is am I the one? But I think even the language mentoring and discipleship, you know, you get asked that a lot. I think we have, we use those very interchangeably in the church. I think discipleship is, you know, the more biblical language we can mentor somebody in the workplace, we can mentor somebody in a skill, but discipleship is uniquely Christian, and so it’s really the idea that we’re helping each other grow in godliness, and I like that kind of definition, because there’s, there’s movement, like we’re going towards something, and we’re going towards this idea of being conformed more to the image of Christ, we’re understanding the gospel more, we’re anchoring our lives more in the gospel, and so we’re helping each other do that, and the normal, natural way of that is for those who have been doing it longer, aka older, to be helping those that are newer in it, and so, so it’s this idea that we’re pouring into, but we’re not, we’re not pouring good advice, we’re not pouring, we’re not trying to create other people in our image, and so it’s this idea that we’re actually pouring the gospel into the next generation of believers. And Jen, I loved how you were. Can we just.. I’ll call you by your last names up here, Ashman. I liked the way that you know that you were like really anchoring us in this, in this flow of the gospel. You know, Paul says in Second Timothy two two, he says, “I have passed on what I have received, and I’ve passed it on to you, and I want you to pass it on to faithful men. And there’s this idea, that’s what we’re doing, and so really at its root, it’s at its core, that’s what discipleship and mentoring is going to be, that we’re passing on that which we’ve received, which is the gospel.

Jen Wilkin
Well, and I think it can be, whether you’re the older woman or the younger woman, is highly contextual, as you were kind of pointing out, like I remember moving from Houston to Dallas in 2007 and I went from being too young to know anything at my church in Houston, to being too old to know anything at my new church. At 38 I became the wise older woman, and that was a shock. Let me tell you, because so many people at my church were younger. In your experience, each of you, this is a question for all of you. Like, how has mentorship played out for you practically in your own life, both as someone who mentors and as someone who’s received mentorship. Jen, oh, we’ll start with you. I want to be J Dub. Can I be J Dub? J O,

Jen Oshman
that is actually how I refer to you when you’re not around. I call you J Dub. So, I think that’s good. Yeah, the way that discipleship has played out in my life. Well, as I’ve shared with you guys, we have lived on three continents, and so it has been a constant search for the, you know, a new mentor, and to be pouring out. And so it actually has not been fancy at all. It’s been like arriving in that new place, getting acquainted with the family of God that is there, and going, she seems godly, maybe she’ll have coffee with me once a week, or maybe she’ll get up at 5am and go for a walk with me once a week, but it has just been that intentional. I see you, I want some of what God has given you. Will you meet with me and make you setting apart a time to be with that woman? It’s just been very practical. It hasn’t been anything fancy in my life. It’s just been you’re a believer with more years under your belt than I have. Can we spend time together? And then conversely, I’ve done that with younger women, but it has been an intentional invitation in every place, and a starting over each time to make sure it happens.

Jen Wilkin
That’s great, that’s a lot of work starting over each time,

Jen Oshman
it is, but it’s worth it. Yeah, like, where? What do you.. we cannot do this alone. Yeah, I need.. I need these women who are ahead of me and behind me. I need them

Jen Wilkin
both. Absolutely. Elizabeth, what about you?

Elizabeth Woodson
Yeah, I think in terms of mentoring, it has been women I’ve served alongside in ministry. So, I think you asked the question of where do you find the mentor, and I have – I’ve just learned that I just, whether it’s the greeters ministry or it’s small group discipleship, you start to see who people are and why that person is worth spending time with, and then having the courage to ask them either to get coffee or lunch, or just engaging them for the more intentional conversations. I will say our friendship kind of started in that capacity, you know. Did a cold call email, and Jen was willing to help me in a specific area of what does it mean to write Bible studies? What does it mean to help create curriculum in the local church? On the flip side, maybe I am the older woman to Courtney, and trying to get my head around that, and I just make myself available. I have found when the invitation comes from the person that wants to. Mentored that relationship has sticking power because they are invested in what’s happening versus me trying to push it forward, so I’m always available. I try to be present and engaging and open, and then that right person will be courageous enough to ask the question.

Jen Wilkin
That’s really good. That’s what you did with me. You just kept calling me.

Elizabeth Woodson
I did nonstop. Then you blocked me, and I found you.

Jen Wilkin
No, it turned into what I like to call friend to worship, because it was like, oh, I actually like you. It’s not an obligation to hang out with you, and I think the ideal is friend to worship, right, where you have a friend tour and a friendee, because you don’t have to like schedule it, you don’t have to schedule your friends, you can’t wait to get together with your friends, and I actually, to me, one of the ways that I know whether it’s going to go the distance is whether I like you, so maybe that’s shallow. You be the judge, Courtney. What do you think about this? Judge me, you know I do. I

Courtney Doctor
think that you know the little maybe the secret sauce here that we just need to talk about is there is a difference between just grabbing coffee with somebody that you love and having a really fun conversation about all this stuff. What’s unique and what we are specifically talking about here is the idea that we are going to talk overtly and specifically about how the gospel impacts whatever conversation we’re having, so if we’re talking about how we write Bible studies, if we’re talking about where our marriage is, if we’re talking about our singleness, if we’re talking about our work, or, or our parent, whatever it is, we, the thing that makes it unique in what we’re talking about here is that we’re saying, and how does the gospel, how does, how do you believe the gospel in that particular moment? And I’ve done this really poorly through the years. I have a friend, I don’t think she’s in the room, but she’s at the conference, and I finally just had that. We had been meeting for several years, and I said, you know what, we are not praying. It had just really slid into just some really fun conversations, like lots of friendship, I mean, I’m 25 years older than her, but you know, I’m like, we got to get this back on track. How are we going to be talking about the word and the gospel and prayer and bringing that to bear? So I just want to make sure that we don’t like miss that part, so don’t be, don’t miss the gospel, friend, dubs,

Jen Wilkin
okay? So one of the things that I think we have to bear in mind is just the fact that you’ve lived longer than someone means you do have a wisdom that they can’t get from someone who has lived only as long as they have, and we live in a generation where people turn increasingly to sages who are between the age of 18 and 24 on TikTok, and so within the church there’s never been a greater need for those of us who are further along in the faith than others to recognize that we have a form of generational wealth that cannot be found in the, in the young, it just, it’s not there, they can’t access it, they don’t have it yet, and so it’s mission critical that we view ourselves as having a form of generational wealth to pass on from one person to the next. When we talk about this, I do just want to say, I mean, you talked a lot about Jen, the interactions between the women that Paul mentions, and not just women. So, when we think about spiritual mentorship, should we, and this is, we’re talking about mothers and daughters and sisters, that is the focus of this, and no one loves the estrogen pond more than me. I am a big fan of pink ministry, but is there more to it than that?

Jen Oshman
I definitely think so. Yeah, I mean, as you have said many times, and kind of said earlier today, the family includes mothers and fathers, and sisters and brothers, and so the church needs to do the same, and I think in our current context, relationships have become so sexually focused that in the church we’re so afraid to have relationships with the opposite gender, and I think our culture has really trumped scripture in this particular way in the church, and that we need to actually go back and look at how Paul referred to these women, my dear friend, my coworker. I commend her to you. Like, he’s like, these are my girls that I have been working side by side with. A

Jen Wilkin
single dude,

Jen Oshman
right? Right. I mean, he is very involved. So, man, how we long for that in our current church. Like, when’s the last time a mature man in the Lord was like, you are my dear friend, and I love working alongside you. That’s not really our norm in the church, and I think it’s a big loss. I

Jen Wilkin
think the ESV says the beloved person, and I’ve tried to think about what men in ministry have called me beloved. You’re laughing, but I actually, I am so grateful that I have people who have treated me that way. I think everybody up here does. It’s one of the reasons we’re up here. Can I just say that? Because a man said, “You’re beloved, and held a door open for us to do the ministry that the Lord called us to do, and so. Um, but I will say that in some cases I had to initiate that friendship because there are so many concerns, and the concerns are not unfounded. We just don’t want to, we don’t want to give in to the cultural message that every relationship is sexual, that’s cultural, that’s not Christian. Brothers and sisters, remember, is the dominant metaphor, and so a brother and a sister are two people of different genders who regard each other non-sexually, and so that’s the goal. I’m not saying it’s easy to get to, or that we’re all going to get there the right way, but that is the goal, and so I think that’s important to have in view, but just returning us to this question of what does it mean to be a mother in the church, and I’m just going to send you another question, Jen, and then you’ve done a lot of work for us, so I’m going to start turning my head this way, but you’ve done research and you’ve written about how women are leaving the church, and I know it’s linked to what we’re talking about here. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, you’re a spiritual mother. It’s another thing to feel like you have a place in the, in the, in the community of faith to be a spiritual mother. And so, can you tell us a little about what you’ve learned in the, in the work that you’ve done around that? Yeah,

Jen Oshman
yeah. So, for the first time in American history, the attendance on the male church attendance is outpacing female church attendance, and that’s across every single generation in Gen X, millennials, all of us – we’re all females are attending church less and men are attending church more. So we have to ask the question, why? Like, what is the deal? Because Katie mentioned that the first generation church was so attractive to women, because the dignity and the value that they recognized and rightly assigned to the women who were in their, in their sphere, and so what’s going on in the church now, and there’s a lot, I mean, we could see, and we could be here for the rest of the conference listing what’s going on, you know, some of it is scandals and abuse and lack of trust, and that is very real and needs to be addressed, some of it is the pace of life that women are living, and we’ve just got a lot going on, and church kind of bumps down the list, but I think one of the primary barriers is that we, many women, feel like they don’t belong. What I hear so frequently is my church isn’t really for women like me, and women are saying that from a number of different perspectives, if they’re stay-at-home moms, or if they’re working women, or if they’re one political party or the other, if they’re one age, or if they’re single, or if they’re married, like, there’s this sense of, like, my church is for different people, it’s not for women like me. When I walk in the door, I feel different, I feel like I don’t belong, I feel like I’m a threat, I feel like I’m not valued. And so, how can we, as a church, see this diversity, the beautiful diversity of women, and invite them in, remove barriers, which is like really practical. Have women’s Bible study at a number different times a day, or you know, different days of the week. There’s some really practical offer childcare, do different things, but then the deeper you know, do I see you? Do I see your gifts? Do I feel like you are essential and necessary for the kingdom of God to move forward in our context, or do I think maybe could have you or not.

Jen Wilkin
Thank you, that’s really good insight. And I know that this is a conversation that we’ve all had, either with each other or as a group, or you know, one on one. And so I’d be curious to hear, Elizabeth and Courtney, how do you guys see this problem being solved? And I don’t mean there are things that we can’t solve. We know that, like, there are things we’ll have to pray about and wait for, but as women serving in the local church, how do we inhabit spaces where maybe we feel like we’re not welcome? You know, are those feelings accurate? Should we be policing our feelings, or should we be police? What do we police? Do we police anything? So, Courtney, let me just start with you. How do we.. how do we own mothership and sistership and siblinghood in the family of God?

Courtney Doctor
Yeah, I think part of it is just doing the own your own hard work of making sure you’re an emotionally healthy person and growing in your own appreciation of just even everything that’s been talked about today of your own humanity, your own womanhood, and understanding what that is and what you bring to the table. I know for me, I look back over years in my life where what I really ended up doing was in order to be in some of those rooms, I really did not bring my whole self to the table. I brought my more male attributes to the table, and you know, kind of shut down that whole feminine side of who I am, so that you know I wouldn’t be too anything in those rooms, and I just.. I really tell younger women all the time. Now I’m like, just bring your whole self to the table, bring your whole self to the table. I remember being, I was looking at a PhD program, and one of the women teaching, she was a professor, she had two PhDs, and she stood in front of that room and she cried as she prayed for these her students, and I thought, there is a woman bringing. Her whole self to the table, and it was beautiful. She had nothing to prove, and I just really thought that that that was an encouraging thing to me to do the same.

Elizabeth Woodson
Probably what I would, I think, add of how do you live in the fullness of who God has created you to be in spaces that may not be able to receive that yet. Honestly, for me it’s been a lot of prayer, because sometimes those spaces, you, this is the hard feelings that go alongside that when you see what should be based upon what you read in the scripture, and then you kind of show up to the church that you kind of feel like, hey, this isn’t for me, but what I know to be true across church history is the Christians who stood in the gap of what is and what should be, and so to have a vision that God is still changing people, and God is still opening up doors of opportunity. A lot of the women that I have been deeply impacted by, their story doesn’t start in this really perfect environment, it starts with one open door, and then another open door, and then another open door, and the threat is what God is doing, and so to believe that God has a really big vision for His women, and that He can do things that might be unimaginable to you, and so when you’re in this space, I guess it’s prayer and big vision that allow you to make the most of the space you have, but believe that God can open doors to do things to maybe expand the space in your church.

Courtney Doctor
Can I flesh one thing out that I just want to clarify one thing that I said, because I think when I say bring your whole self to the table, I think we can fall on either side of that. We can either be like I’m going to bring my boss woman self, and I’m like, okay, well, that’s a little, or we’re fakely deferential and where you know we pretend to be something that we’re not on either side, so I just wanted to make sure I was being clear on both sides.

Jen Wilkin
I think that’s a hard part of this conversation. I think it’s a hard part, even of the conversation we were having earlier. There are a lot of us who feel like, but I don’t fit what I’m supposed to fit, like even hearing, you know, Katie’s conversation about vulnerability, like we can all relate to that in our physicality, but a lot of times in the way that we present, it’s like, I don’t know, I grew up with four brothers, I communicate more like a dude, I just do, and I’m very aware that that is one of the reasons that men have been able to hear some of what I have to say, because I don’t, you guys know I cry when I teach Bible study, but I don’t cry in a meeting, you know, I don’t, because in the home that I grew up in with my brothers, if you cried, you lost, that was it. And so I wonder if you guys would speak to a little, I mean, I think it’s important what you’re saying, bring your whole self. A lot of the women in the room are like, man, I read the biblical womanhood books, and I’m like, well, shoot. And then, and so we’re not all Enneagram twos, you know, we’re not all the helper, you know. And it’s like, but the Bible says I’m a helper. So, how do we live in the distance? What are we mentoring women into? You said don’t make them into our own image, but like, what are we headed for? Elizabeth, you’ve got your mic up, so I’m gonna let you go

Blair Linne
first. I do.

Elizabeth Woodson
When I think about how I point women to is, I point them to be cultivators of Shalom. That’s when pointing back to Genesis one and two, and the cultural mandate, and that we are created to cultivate flourishing for all of creation and humankind, and so to me that includes the uniqueness of your personality, your gifts, and your talents. Some of y’all can say a straight word and give somebody like a direct statement, and some of us go all the way around. Some of us love details. One thing I say is I love an Excel spreadsheet, and some of y’all would rather get a root canal. There’s all sorts of giftings, and so part of it is one thing I think that women see outside of the church is opportunities for professional development. So, my gifts and skills, people have a pathway for me, they have a vision for me, and so sometimes we have to be intentional about doing the work of learning ourselves. How has God created me? How He’s created me is good. I’m not supposed to be just like the next person, I’m supposed to be the best version of myself in Christ. But for me, all of that is rooted in I’m supposed to be a cultivator of shalom in God’s world, and so how do I do that with what He’s given me, not with what somebody else has, but what God has placed in my hands.

Jen Wilkin
Okay, I want to hear from the rest of you, but I also want to just point out that Elizabeth has a podcast that has the best name I’ve heard in decades. It is called Shalomies, and so if you would like

Elizabeth Woodson
to, two homies, to talk about,

Jen Wilkin
talk about Shalom, Shalomies, so that’s there for you when you need it. Anyone else want to weigh in on this? Oh, no. I mean, I’ve talked enough. I’ve talked enough. Got anything? I love it.

Courtney Doctor
No, I think it’s just you said that a lot better, because it’s, you know, that’s like why I tried to start off by saying you still have to do the hard work. I mean, sanctification is real, so it’s not just like this is who I am. I remember saying to my mom in my 30. I said, this is just the way I am, and she goes, well, you don’t have to stay that way, and you know, so, so I’m not saying, like, when I say bring your whole self to the table, I’m not like, hey, this is who I am, you’re just gonna have to deal with it with all my stuff, and it’s, you said it, like it’s that idea of, you know, we’re being sanctified, and we’re, we’re letting the Lord refine us, but what I do mean, when I say bring your whole self to the table, is whatever, whatever your Enneagram is, whatever the way you’ve been created, like you bring, we know Satan made the Enneagram,

Jen Wilkin
so don’t send us emails after that. No,

Courtney Doctor
I know, I shouldn’t have repeated it, but you know, we, we all are given certain gifts, we’re made a certain way, we’re wired a certain way, and that is exactly like you’ve been placed in your church, in your community, in your home for that purpose, for the one that’s going to bring Shalom. I mean, I love, you know, Eve is the mother of all the living, like we are life givers, and we’re meant to be life givers, and we can be life givers in the way we shalomy with people, so

Jen Wilkin
well, and I think every virtue has a corresponding vice, and the way that we present as virtuous can be a vice, because our interior motive might be self-promotion, and so those of you who are more openly given to helping and encouraging, you get a lot of credit for being more feminine or female than those of us for whom that is less intuitive, and conversely, there are ways that those of us who are maybe very direct and very sort of uncomplicated in the way we present ourselves, we get credit for things that we don’t deserve credit for sometimes, and so showing up as your whole self means you have an accurate assessment of yourself, and you’re not trying to be omni-competent, like I’ve thought so often about the failures that we see so often with people who are in the pastorate with men who fall and I think these poor men have been told to be every single thing and they don’t have to be and so this is one of the things that being a part of a family does is we recognize interdependence we recognize the priesthood of all believers and that we aren’t interchangeable in the things that we do, but we all are here to be the best version of the gifts that we do have to bring, and that takes a lot of work, and that’s why you need a mentor, because one of the things a mentor needs to be is a truth teller, right, and I, my experience with my mentor is she pulls no punches, and that’s why I kept showing up. Some of you show up because it’s a nice person. I show up because it’s someone who’s going to just sock me in the face every single day. No, that’s not, that’s not the whole, that’s not the whole nature of our mentorship, but it has been a feature for me because I’m an intimidating person. So I need my mentor to be someone who is not intimidated by me at all, and so humility has to be our guide, and when you’re thinking about who you want in your life, speaking into who you’re becoming, you want a person who, with their life, has a demonstrable track record of not thinking they are awesome, so we’ve laughed about being I remember when people started calling me Mama Jen, and I’m like, I’m sorry, am I not still Sister Jen to you? Like, is that what I.. and then sort of settling into it, but we’re very aware that one of the things that we have a responsibility toward is just being ourselves in a world where everyone is asking you to be more than yourself. I am going to ask you to tell a funny story. You can, you tell that one, the one about the girl who was telling you how great it was.

Courtney Doctor
Oh, my word, this was maybe last time, last conference, or last. Yeah, yeah. And if this woman

Jen Wilkin
is here, we want to say, you’ve done us a huge service, done

Courtney Doctor
us a huge service. So, thank you so much. But the three of us, plus a couple other people, I don’t know where Ashman was, were on a panel and getting their makeup. No, can I just.. I mean, can I just say, I just sat in hair and makeup for like an hour and a half. I, Ruth Joe Simon, sat in my room for an hour and a half yesterday, making me try on everything, telling me exactly what to wear. So I’m just giving you the backstory. I took pictures of every pair of shoes, every pair of everything I was bringing, and sent them to, you know, five trusted friends. And sorry, Jen, I didn’t

Jen Wilkin
send.. well, you can tell from my outfit how much time I spend..

Courtney Doctor
nothing was black. That’s not.. yeah, that’s not where Jennifer, Johnny Cash

Jen Wilkin
of Women’s Bible Study,

Courtney Doctor
so we serve on this panel, and I mean, you know, like, look at Elizabeth, she always looks amazing. Anyway, so this young woman comes up to me and she said, I just have to tell you, y’all are so encouraging, she goes, I go to other women’s conferences. And they just care so much about their hair, their makeup, and their clothes, and y’all, she goes, y’all just don’t care,

Jen Wilkin
and I was like, Wilkin doesn’t care, but I do, I just spent.. I told you, I grew up with brothers, this is my A game, guys. Y’all, you, I mean, if y’all saw me in the grocery store, you would know this is putting a lot of effort into it. I did wash my hair last night. I have a form of trying, it’s just not as it, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but seriously, we’ve talked about this a lot. We were laughing one time, we, you know, you never talk about weight in a room full of women, because you never know why people are gaining or losing, but we were laughing about, like, well, if I couldn’t drop five pounds to stand up in front of 9000 women, ain’t nothing gonna make me do it.

Courtney Doctor
Yeah, these are real, real, yeah,

Jen Wilkin
but all that to say, like, this is this is who you need in your life, someone who’s calling you to to what’s real and true and important, and who keeps saying, I know everyone’s telling you to care about the things that don’t matter the most, I’m going to keep telling you care about what matters the most, and and then just generally speaking, most of us didn’t get into a mentorship that went the distance with someone who said, “Hey, can we meet regularly for indefinitely for the rest of our lives? It started with one coffee. Just think about how you met your spouse. You probably didn’t. He didn’t walk up and say, “Would you like to marry me after one date? And so don’t be weird, guys. Like, let it, let it develop, let it, let it kind of feel its way forward. The family of God, no less so than a nuclear family, cannot think of the tragedy of a motherless home. Think about the differences in dynamic if you know a family where it’s all boys or family, where it’s all girls. Now the Lord is, you know, He gives us all of these different ways of understanding family, and the many different ways that family occurs. But it’s often fascinating to me how often we speak about the tragedy of fatherlessness in our culture, and even within the church, we hear it a lot. I don’t want us to lose sight of the fact that the tragedy of a motherless home is no less sobering, and so to everyone sitting here, you heard Courtney say everybody in this room is a mother to someone who is not as far along in the faith, and so as we close our time together, I want you to think of this as a commissioning moment, I want you to remember to go back to your local church and understand yourself, certainly as a daughter and certainly as a sister, but as a mother who possesses a generational wealth of wisdom, without which the home that we call the family of God will not thrive. There’s no such thing as a church in which men flourish and women don’t. There’s no such thing as a church in which women flourish and men don’t. There is no flourishing of one gender without the mutual flourishing of the other, and the reality for us is, let’s say you never have access into purple spaces. Let’s say you’re always in the pink room. The pink room is the first place where a woman tends to take a risk, recognize her abilities, put herself out there. It is sacred and beautiful and important work, and so view yourself as commissioned to go back to your local church and impact the most obvious thing right in front of you. We’re all praying that for you, every voice you’ve heard of today, heard from today, is praying that for you as well. And we don’t want you to be without resources, and so I would be remiss if I didn’t close us out without mentioning, can you guess that Lifeway Women Academy has some opportunities for you where you can have help. You shouldn’t have to wonder. Hold on, my paper clip is sabotaging me. You shouldn’t have to wonder where to start. Hold on, we know that the local church can feel lonely and isolating, and it doesn’t have to. We want Lifeway Women wants to help. We don’t want you to have to spend extra time and years trying to figure things out on your own. There are old and good and reliable ways of thinking about things and doing things, and Lifeway Women Academy is bringing those forward for you, and there is a summer sale on those courses, so you can go and check that out. I want to thank you for being with us today. Before we close, I do also just want to thank Lifeway and B&H Publishing for sponsoring this event. Will you take a second to express your gratitude to them? I. I also want to thank all of our speakers who were here today. Melissa, Melissa, she gets credit even when she’s not in the room. Courtney, Elizabeth, Jen, oh, Blair, and Katie. Thank you, guys, so much for being a part of this today, and sharing your wisdom with us.

Jen Wilkin
You can visit the Lifeway B and H publishing booth in the exhibit hall after this, if you would like to, and you can find out more information about lifeway.com academy at lifeway.com/academy or at the Lifeway Women booth in the exhibit hall. I want to thank you all for being here today. Let me close this in prayer, and we will be dismissed. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the rich privilege of being created female. Lord, for those of us who came into this room frustrated or discouraged, I pray you would remind us continually that you love women more than we do. You care more about the cause of women, about the concerns of women, than any women’s ministry director or author or teacher or speaker who is herself a woman, and we place the cause and care of women back in your hands. And for those who came in here encouraged today, because they see hope and light in the place where they are serving. I pray that you would bolster their courage for greater good work, and that the discouraged among us would draw courage from them and from the words that were spoken here today. Lord, when we hear that it is good to be a woman, so often we need to say to you, Lord, I believe; help my unbelief. We confess it to you, and we pray, Lord, that you would give us daily reminders, both in the Scriptures and in the fellow women that you’ve placed around us to co-labor, that this is not only true but profoundly true, and true by a good design, and we ask all these things in the name of Your Son. Amen.