What pictures do the words “women’s ministry” bring to mind? We come from different contexts, all of us. Some will picture a small circle of women gathered at a friend’s kitchen table or maybe sitting on folding chairs in a church meeting room. Others will recall crucial conversations one-to-one at a local coffee shop. For some, the scene may be a church kitchen, where women with flushed, focused faces are wearing oven mitts to handle steaming pans. Others may envision auditoriums filled with rows of attentive women listening to a woman up front standing behind a podium. And others will have entirely different sets of pictures—these are just a few from my set!
How can we gather all our varied pictures into one album we might legitimately title “women’s ministry”? There would never be enough pages—or gigabytes. And that is a good thing. Women’s ministry is not simply ministry programs but also an ongoing flow of ministry happening in diverse ways among women in local church congregations. How can we encourage that flow to be strong and full of life—and how can we begin to talk about that flow in any way coherently? Only through a central focus on the Word of God.
Women’s ministry is not simply ministry programs but also an ongoing flow of ministry happening in diverse ways among women in local church congregations.
All our various snapshots will come together if we see each of these scenes as a place where Word work is happening. Women’s ministry must be first and foremost grounded in God’s Word. We must not start with the needs of women—although we must get to those needs. As in the case of any church ministry, in women’s ministry we must start with the Word of God at the heart of everything we do.
Searching for Personal Meaning
There’s a growing general tendency these days to focus on our own personal experience in our thinking and in our speaking—and even in our Bible study. That tendency, of course, is as old as Eve. She was drawn by the Serpent into evil through a focus on her own sensations, desires, and self-perceptions—as opposed to a focus on the clear Word of God that he had spoken.
Certain kinds of phrases float regularly by women in particular these days, calling women to pay attention to who they are, release their God-given potential, listen to their longings for significance, embrace their doubts, dream the dreams in their hearts, and so forth. The call not to neglect our inner experience is a valid one, but everything turns on the question of whose voice is directing us, whether it be our own or the voices around us or the voice of God given to us in his Word.
In our thirst for deeply personal meaning, we can forget how deeply personal are the Scriptures. Sometimes the voices around us talk about the Bible as a textbook for theological formulas that we have to learn, as if for a test in school. And so we might think of taking in the Scriptures as a dry, academic thing—and we’d really rather do something warm and personal.
An Unfortunate Distinction
This is a perennial struggle in women’s Bible study circles. Two distinct sorts of camps seem to develop: Shall we be warm and welcoming and personal, or shall we be academic and study the text? What an unfortunate distinction! Here’s the question: What could be more personal than feeling the very breath of God—actually hearing him speak? According to 2 Timothy 3:16, all Scripture is inspired, or “breathed out,” by God.
Indeed, all the words of the collected canonical texts are the very breath of God’s mouth—breathed by his Spirit through the minds and imaginations of the authors who wrote them, who “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). This is about as personal as it gets: the very breath of God from the mouth of God, received by the people of God.
If the Bible really is God speaking, then it follows that each of us human beings needs more than anything else in the world to look up and receive this Word, every day of our lives. This is our logical response and our most basic need, both as individuals and as God’s people together.
Word-Based Ministry
When we shape a ministry, we tend to ask first how that ministry can meet the needs of the particular group involved. That is not a bad question. But what if, instead of starting with that question, we started by asking how that group can best be taking in the Scriptures so that they can understand their own stories in light of the big story of God’s creating a people for himself through his Son? According to the Scriptures, how can that group be all about the story and the glory of Christ, who shines through the Scriptures from beginning to end?
Word-based ministry opens up for people the big story of the Scriptures with Jesus at the center, so that they can understand the stories of their own lives as centered in the story and the glory of Jesus.
The voices out there will ask: “Can’t we just be all about loving and serving Jesus in our ministry?” Yes, but what does it mean to love and serve Jesus? Who is Jesus? How do we best love and serve him? There will be as many different answers to these questions as there are groups of people until we take our questions to the Word of God.
Word-based ministry opens up for people the big story of the Scriptures with Jesus at the center, so that they can understand the stories of their own lives as centered in the story and the glory of Jesus.
The Scriptures tell us clearly who Jesus is, and it’s a quite different description from the various ones floating around in the culture, even the evangelical culture. To get the whole story of Jesus, we must be regularly reading and teaching the whole book—New Testament and Old, narrative, poetry, Gospels, apocalyptic, epistles, wisdom literature, prophecy—all of it! All the parts work together, in God’s providence, to feed us fully on this one who comes and tells us that he is the living water and the bread of life.
Even now, along the way, our ministries can be sprouting more and more with fruitful life as they find their center in the Word. We have nothing else on which we can eternally depend. That album of women’s ministry with its varied pictures can become increasingly colorful and beautiful as it shows the process of opening ourselves to words from the very mouth of God, coming down to us like rain and snow from heaven, watering the earth, bringing forth life, accomplishing all that God purposes for the glory of his name.
This article is adapted from Word-Filled Women’s Ministry: Loving and Serving the Church, edited by Gloria Furman and Kathleen Nielson (TGC/Crossway, 2015). Used by permission.
Involved in Women’s Ministry? Add This to Your Discipleship Toolkit
We need one another. Yet we don’t always know how to develop deep relationships to help us grow in the Christian life. Younger believers benefit from the guidance and wisdom of more mature saints as their faith deepens. But too often, potential mentors lack clarity and training on how to engage in discipling those they can influence.
Whether you’re longing to find a spiritual mentor or hoping to serve as a guide for someone else, we have a FREE resource to encourage and equip you. In Growing Together: Taking Mentoring Beyond Small Talk and Prayer Requests, Melissa Kruger, TGC’s vice president of discipleship programming, offers encouraging lessons to guide conversations that promote spiritual growth in both the mentee and mentor.
