I recently had the privilege of gathering with over 1,300 women for a weekend retreat. There was a main speaker (a well-known author in the world of women’s ministry) and several breakout sessions led by women from our local church which is made up of several different satellite locations. It was an event, to be sure, with much of the normal Christian conference flare, full of polished worship, energetic teaching, swag bags, coffee … the works. We spent a good portion of it in the Bible, and I was quite literally surrounded by women who genuinely loved the Lord. And yet, on this side of it, why do I feel so disjointed?

Women’s ministry is a delicate subject. There’s a lot of good happening right now when it comes to building up women in the faith. We have more female authors who hold fast to biblical theology over feelings-based ministry than we’ve had in the past. There’s a welcome push in local churches to train women to teach the Bible and to lead. The problem is it’s often mixed with “fuzzy,” diluted theology that intends to draw out emotions but too often leapfrogs over the harder and messier parts of Scripture, which can make navigating theology confusing at best and distressing at worst. 

At the retreat I attended, this fuzziness mixed good things like reminders of how fruitless we are outside of the vine of Christ with not-so-good things like how we need to chase after Jesus (why is he running away in the first place?) and extensive “take home” lists on how we can do better to serve him in our daily lives. There were songs about how Christ promised to save us mixed with songs about us promising to choose him. All of these were wrapped in flowers and served to us as if they could fit in the same vase together and not choke each other out. Where’s the connection between getting a swag bag — free stuff! no strings attached! — and “Christian” teaching that sounds like anything but free?

And we wonder why women in the church are so exhausted. 

Throughout my life, I have been at the helm of a few different women’s ministries. I’ve been the one making the decisions about what we teach and what we send women home with. Looking back on it, I see how easy the trap is to fall into. I know that I too often offered self-help instead of Christ’s broken body, and platitudes instead of dependence on Jesus. It felt validating when women would tell me that they could use those things to become better versions of themselves. But I look back on it, as a woman who has been humbled greatly by a brokenness that uncovered self-reliance that posed as righteousness, and I cringe. My intentions were good. But now I see that if there were women in my care who were desperate like I am now, which there undoubtedly were, I may have been only rubbing salt in an open wound. I pray that God met them where I could not at that time in my life, and I trust that he did. 

It’s all too common to try and elevate women by urging them to be more like the women they see in the Bible. Be dependent on Jesus like Ruth, be firm in your faith like Esther, fight against evil like Jael, etc. These can be good things, but when they’re overemphasized, made into islands, or unhinged from Christ’s one-way love to us, they give us that hit of dopamine that doubles down on the belief that we’re something when we’re nothing, which is never a good thing. And the more we do it, the more we rely on our habit-building, our perfect church attendance, or our ability to give of ourselves unselfishly and unrestrained, the more white-knuckled our grip will become. Fatigue sets in, followed by panic, followed by desperation, followed by emptiness. And the thing about us humans is that we repeat this cycle endlessly, always believing that we’ll do better next time. I grieve just writing this, understanding how stuck in this cycle so many women are – myself included.

But what would it look like if we turned up the volume on where Scripture truly focuses our attention? Before we hold Ruth up as an example for us to emulate, the New Testament wants to proclaim over us how she’s a picture of Christ clinging to bitter and broken sinners like us the way Ruth clung to her bitter and broken mother-in-law. What if this good news was the first thing we wrapped around the women we serve, around ourselves? The ‘therefores’ we’re going to draw based on this view of Ruth will look far different because we’re not the main character, which is good news to bitter and broken people. It gives women joy, unadulterated joy, in knowing that Christ ran down the holy hill of his glory to pull them from the miry pit, and that kind of grace creates the space to come alongside them as they begin the life-long process of taking themselves out of the center of their universe and letting Jesus take the throne instead. Looking at Scripture this way reminds them, and us, that we will never graduate from the grace of God. That grace will always be what we desperately need. 

In the “women’s ministry of Christianity,” the swag bag of the gospel really is free and isn’t followed up by heavy-handed teaching or endless lists of high expectations for our post-conference spirituality. He’s the main subject of our lives, and of all Scripture, whether we fully live as though that’s true or not. And we never do. But thankfully, his generosity always trumps our impulse to pay him back. His scars speak a better word, one that invites us to sit at his feet and to receive from him grace upon grace (John 1:16).