Stewarding a call

in which I publish my mess to get unstuck and move forward

Sometimes, when the mind is full, it is hard to begin. Here’s where I will start. I felt a call to ministry when I was 19 years old, and while I shared that with someone back then, I mostly did not know what to do with the call. I would ask people, usually one by one - what do I do? Where do I go? How do I steward the call? These were pastors, ministers, and regular people, but no one could answer the question. I sure didn’t know what to do, so I did my best. Every day, I thought about my love of Jesus and how to love someone through it. Sometimes, my main ministry has been to myself. I can’t remember a day in my life since then that I haven’t been led from the call in some way - even the days when I was lost and in desolation, seemingly far from God.

In 2020, when I was interviewing for a job I would not get, the pastor who interviewed me affirmed my call. It was the first time someone spoke affirmation over me. It was life-giving and life-changing to be given affirmation. Others may not have spoken affirmation, but I’d received affirmation by being given opportunities many times. Those opportunities were often accompanied by some explanation about how I didn’t fit the true measure of what it meant to be whatever I was doing, so the verbal affirmation meant so much.

I did all sorts of ministry—teaching, leading, writing—and I was like a river, forging a path where none had been made, but let me clear, I was ordinary, even plain. I think my perspective made me unique, but it was often suspect or edited out. I grew up in a tradition that says women can do all but be the senior pastor. My experience told me different stories about how women were really viewed. I was given many opportunities to work within the bounds of my tradition. I felt very honored to write Sunday morning lessons for my entire church, and men and women used it. I didn’t know how quickly it could be stripped away, but I knew that as a woman, I needed to give thanks for every lesson I got to write.

There is a story that is not mine to tell about two women who were harmed by the system in my church. Unbeknownst to me, I got caught up in the crosshairs of their stories. Patriarchy is real. And there are men in power who control the men not in power. The power figures determine the moves everyone makes. And so I found myself teaching men and women, and then the elders were meeting about women teaching men because one elder called for a meeting about it. But I didn’t know about it, of course, until the meeting was over. They discussed where and how women could teach, but no woman was invited.

Probably fairly unrelated, but maybe very related, I’d written a lesson on Romans 16. If you don’t know much about it, it’s hard to read it without seeing that Paul invited a woman to preach his letter. Everything I found about women in that passage was stripped out when the pastor edited and formatted it for consumption. I was not surprised by this, but it saddened me. It was genuinely risky to write about Romans 16 as I did because I knew it wouldn’t be the typical way of viewing that bible passage. It is not wrong for me to assume that doing so made me less trusted.

Getting caught in the crosshairs means I was accidentally used as a power move by one male in my church back toward another. I say accidentally because I am trying to assume the best about the person who did this, but it may have been intentional. He is kind and gentle, and I cannot believe he would intentionally use my desire for ministry against me on purpose. But I think this happened because he didn’t understand the power dynamics at play. It also meant I became susceptible to a highly influential woman targeting me on social media. I reached out to the woman, and rather than speak to me about what happened, she hung up when she found out who was calling.

Because of many of these power differentials, I was asked less and less to teach, write, or lead, except by other women and the women’s ministry leader. (And maybe I’m the cause? Maybe I’m not taking credit for not doing something well?)

When I started at Friends, I had lots of ah-ha moments. I realized that the pace I’d been keeping to stay palatable for the men would not be sustainable with my school workload. I knew I needed to say I could not write that lesson, and I knew that if I did, I would no longer be asked to write. And that happened. So I went from having a ministry I loved to only being given piddly tasks at best. There are ways in which I failed, but God also opened my eyes to the true nature of things. Things we aren’t allowed to say.

I don’t know if this is a story of spiritual harm or not. But it affects how I walk into a room today as a human who wants to steward her call. I applied for various ministry jobs, but God did not open doors or windows for me.

So, I find myself relegated to what feels like making way for myself—sitting at the writer’s table, hiring a business coach, and wondering if I can do the work of a spiritual director (this is what my post was meant to be about but sometimes other things want to come out and be given dignity to). Whether I am over-the-top sensitive or it is intentional, I keep finding fun little barbs in things people write or say about these things. Knowing how hard it is to break into book publishing, I don’t have dreams of doing anything many deem successful. I want to be faithful to my call to minister to others and love them well. Success for me is being faithful where I am today and learning always to love well.

I find that the writer world is not unlike the ministry world. There is a writer hierarchy, too, with power differentials and dynamics, though they are very different. The ones with platforms generally pump up and promote people with platforms. I don’t expect a big fry to share my small work. I do not want to sound ungrateful to the platformed women who have shared my work and my voice. It was so risky for them to take a chance on me.

But I wonder if most would even think the work I do is work. Is this article worthwhile even if it takes me 8 hours to write, without any references, or without ten points of how-to help or is it just somebody’s idea of a hobby? ←It’s a question that’s mostly too depressing for me to ask, so I usually save it for the recesses of my mind. I wonder what kind of difference it would make if I were to write, write, write every day.

I have no dreams of mass followers here or on social media. I don’t even know if I can truly afford to give myself the opportunity to minister well since I likely will never receive an income from the work. Is ministry for the privileged? If male pastors are underpaid, and most are, women are often forced to give their ministry for free. Maybe all ministry should be free. But I’m reminded of Paul and how a rich woman named Phoebe likely funded his ministry. She affirmed him when she did that, and while I have been toying with the idea that I should take off the paid option here on substack since I am mostly doing work you cannot see, I have convinced myself to keep it open.

My writing group and business coach have been helping me with things like message, audience, and things that feel so hard to me and always have. Is there a problem I am trying to solve and give value to? That’s what a real writer is supposed to consider at all times, but what if I am the kind of writer who is more like a spiritual director? What if I need to have space not to solve the problem? This post is brought to you by the letter “honesty” instead of “should.”

On the docket for my next post: What if I only have the capacity to write for myself? What if I am just a person and not a very well-put-together one? What if I am allowed to be still becoming? Maybe put together people are the only ones allowed to make an income for whatever they are doing. If that’s the case, I’ll be stuck here. I want to talk more about the different aspects of spiritual direction and writing that feel too hard to do like spinning plates in the air, but I keep writing posts that sit in my drafts folder until I have something solid to say. It’s another way we pretend - by not sharing the things that might make us look like we do not know what we are doing.

Guys, I do not know what I am doing, but I do not want to pretend.

So I think I will hit publish today.

Talk to me. What has your experience in ministry been like? What is your experience as a writer like? Or tell me a story about your life today. I’d love that, too. You can leave a comment or hit reply.

And thanks for making space for me. I have to believe that there’s something valuable here for somebody - even if it’s just me.