The Challenges of Leadership

Dannah Gresh: How are you managing and using the gifts God’s given you? Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth reminds us of this powerful truth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We are blessed to be a blessing. We’re not supposed to be this repository of truth, this reservoir where this water just goes in. We’re supposed to be channels through whom that truth and that blessing can flow to others.

Dannah: Channels or as Karen Hodge puts it . . .

Karen Hodge: I’m just a pipe. As a women's ministry leader, everything is from Him and through Him and to Him until there’s nothing that I can offer that doesn’t come from Him. And so that’s why I give all glory to Him.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together,” for August 2, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Do you serve in women’s ministry? Has God given you as a woman, a heart that wants to help other women grow closer to Him? Well, if that sounds like you, it’s no surprise to you that leadership in women’s ministry comes with some challenges.

Today, we hope to encourage you and help you see the huge value of what you’re doing. Even if you don’t have direct leadership responsibilities in your church, you are a leader, and you are called to teach younger women. So really, this program applies to any woman listening.

We’re going to hear from Karen Hodge in a few minutes, but first, let’s have Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth set up our topic for the day. For many years Nancy has encouraged you as a woman to believe God, to create a culture within the Body of Christ and within your local church, a culture of women helping women.

Nancy: This is not just programs. It’s not primarily programs. There may be programs that help do that, but it’s a culture. It’s a mindset. It’s a way of thinking. To help others is a reflection of God’s heart because God is the helper of the helpless, the poor, the weak, and the needy. As we help others, our goal is to help women know Jesus—to really know Him—not just know about Him. 

And then to see them become mature followers of Jesus Christ, to see them develop Christ-like character, to learn to walk in the Spirit, to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

We need to not lose sight of the goal in our women’s ministry programs. There’s so many things we could be doing, a lot of those things that aren’t necessarily bad or wrong. But ask yourself, “Is this something they could get just as easily at the Y or at another place?” That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have an exercise class at your church, but you’ve got to pick and choose. You want to pick priorities of what will help you help women really become those mature, reproducing followers of Jesus Christ.

Sadly, in our generation, we’ve become dependent on a handful of professionals to help multitudes of needy people. Even if those paid professionals worked full time around the clock, there is no way that they could meet all the needs of all the needy people that are in our churches. The tendency is to look to pastors and therapists and counselors to do the work of ministry in needy people’s lives.

But just a reminder that it is not your pastor’s job to counsel and disciple every member of the church. It is our job as mature women of God to be discipling and building into the lives of younger women in the church.

I really believe that we would need a lot less crisis counseling in the church if we were consistently practicing the “one anothers” of Scripture, discipling women, getting them in the Word, loving them well, cultivating godly relationships and friendships. If we were just living that way, again, not perfectly . . . We are sinners who need a Savior, helping other sinners who need a Savior. Our weakness and our failure help put the gospel on display if we run to Calvary when we fail.

Now, some of us are too busy running to Mt. Sinai, and that’s where you get judgment and law and condemnation. But we can run to Calvary. As we breathe in God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness, our lives say to others, “There is grace for you.”

I think another concern I have about women’s ministry in the church is that we’ve tended to make discipleship something that is structured and formal and official. Nothing wrong with that, but we don’t want to miss out on the discipleship that takes place in the context of everyday life and relationship.

Dannah: Again, that’s the host of Revive Our Hearts, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, in a message she gave to women’s ministry leaders.

Speaking of women’s ministry leaders, I want to introduce you to Karen Hodge. Karen is the wife of Pastor Chris Hodge, a mom of two adult children, and she serves as coordinator for women’s ministry in the Presbyterian Church in America. So, she’s been around the block a few times when it comes to being a women’s ministry leader.

Karen is on the line with us today. Karen, thanks so much for joining us.

Karen: Of course. Yes.

Dannah: So tell me, first, a little bit about why you love serving as a leader in women’s ministry.

Karen: Well, I think women’s ministry in the context of the church is about strengthening the overall church. So it’s over half of the congregation. At its root is the health of the church. I’m part of the church. And each part of that church matters, each woman matters. And so, it matters to God, it matters to me. It’s a really great privilege.

Dannah: I love it. It’s such a privilege. It is an honor. Every day I wake up, and I think, I get to do this as my job?

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are, as in every job, details that I wish, “Could somebody else do this administrative work? Or could somebody else do this?” But what a privilege, what an honor, that we get to do this.

You know, many women are probably sitting there feeling a prompting. They’re not recognizing that it’s an urge from the Holy Spirit pushing them into women’s ministry in their church. Tell us how that happened in your life so that maybe it will encourage somebody.

Karen: Sure. Well, my husband and I started planting a church from scratch. It was just my husband and I and our two kids. And really, it was his idea. He thought the foundation of the church needed to be embodying the welcome of the gospel. He knew if you reached a woman, you’d reach a family.

And so, I was very clueless as to how that would work. I picked up the phone, and I called a woman named Susan Hunt, who’s dear to Revive Our Hearts.

Dannah: Oh, we love her!

Karen: Yes. She was a coordinator for women’s ministries in the Presbyterian Church in America. (That’s where I hold my job now.) Instead of giving me a formula, she offered me a relationship. She said, “I’ll pray with you. I’ll listen to what it looks like to have evangelistic women’s ministry in the context of this church plant.”

And so that friendship and that relationship, that spiritual mother-spiritual daughter relationship has been going for over thirty years. That’s how it all started.

Dannah: I love that. You just said something really important, and that is relationship.

Back in maybe 2002, 2003, God opened the door for my husband and I to start some ministry in Zambia. We developed plans. We developed formulas. We raised money. We struggled. Now that ministry is ongoing today without us. But there was heartache and there were hardships.

So when the Lord called us in about 2015 to start something in Latin America, we said, “We are going to just build relationships with people. We are going to befriend the people who feel called, and we’re going to ask how we can encourage them.”

No plan. No action point. Just relationship. I think that is key. Jesus walked with twelve men. He ate with twelve men. What bonding and what encouragement.

How does a woman who’s in leadership in ministry create that relationship? I feel like that’s a place where the enemy really tries to attack and tell her she can’t let her guard down, she can’t have relationship.

Karen: Yes. When I think about women’s ministry at its heart, I think about it being Word-based and relationally-driven. So, actually, you have to start in the Word and align our minds and our hearts with truth. And then the overflow of that is horizontal. So it goes vertical first, and then horizontal.

I do think that as we build bridges for relationships, there’s wisdom, there’s grace. There are opportunities to build that one layer of truth at a time, one layer of service at a time. I say time because it takes time to develop relationships that will go the distance.

I start with that Word-based, relationally-driven women’s ministry because I actually think that’s what’s eternal. That’s what lasts forever—the Word of God and the people of God. So you can’t go wrong, but it’s going to take time. It’s going to take intentionality. It’s going to take wisdom and discernment to know how to build healthy relationships that will go the distance.

Dannah: Yes.

Tell me a story about what motivates you and fuels you, because it’s not like women’s ministry is easy. I was on the phone until, I think, 10:30 two nights ago with a woman whose marriage is just in a really impossible place. It can be exhausting. There can be burnouts if you don’t remember, “Ah, God is at work. There is fruit.”

Tell me about one of the most fruitful stories in your many years of women’s ministry.

Karen: Well, I think it is that dailyness of walking into the fallenness of the ball breaking relationships and everything around us. Understanding what kind of helps us go the distance is understanding the brainwork of the big story—the Bible.

In other words, I like to talk about women’s ministry is like walking each other home. Sometimes we walk a few steps, and sometimes we walk for a very, very, very, very, very long time. What gives me hope as I’ve walked alongside others . . . Several examples would be walking someone through grief, or walking someone through maybe a child who has fallen away from the church, or someone who may be actually doubting their faith.

We keep our eyes on the end of the line, the end of the story, and that gives us hope as we walk that this radical now and not yet where everything is kind of yucky and hard is not the end of the story.

I think in women’s ministry, and so many people have done this for me, too, is we get an opportunity to lift people’s eyes and look toward the eternal versus the temporal. In those hard moments, we’re able to encourage one another to have hope that this is not the end of the story.

I try to remember that every day when I kind of re-up for whatever God’s got for me.

Dannah: Yes. Do you ever feel like quitting?

Karen: Absolutely! Almost every week I think I want to say, “Stick a fork in it. I’m done.”

But that’s the nature of calling, right? It’s not about how I feel. It’s about a certainty of God’s call on my life and asking that it’s His love through me, His faithfulness, His grace, His wisdom. As a women’s ministry leader, I’m just a pipe. Everything is from Him and through Him and to Him. So, there’s nothing that I can offer that doesn’t come from Him. That’s why I give all glory to Him.

Dannah: We have to start in the Word every day. We’ve got to fill ourselves up to overflowing so that we can pour ourselves out and go back and get filled up again.

Have you ever believed any lies in the world of being a women’s ministry leader that you’ve overcome and you’ve found the freedom in because you’ve discovered the truth?

Karen: Yes. I think one of the lies that I often believe is that God actually needs me. I think that understanding my finiteness and my weakness, and that God does His best work in weakness, and that it’s not only sufficient, it’s glorious. What I have to offer as a leader is my weakness, my neediness, my dependence.

 

As I come to Him, I just offer myself as a living sacrifice. I say, “Lord, I’m all in. I want You to use me in the way You want to use me. I want to be faithful, and I acknowledge that You are God, and I am not.”

And in that moment, there’s freedom as a leader to say, “God is on the throne. He is the King. I get to participate in the King’s work. I get to be His steward. I want to be faithful to the finish.” I offer my weakness and my neediness and my dependence, and the Spirit does the work through me. So, it’s about yielding myself.

But when I believe that it’s all about me and all about my strengths or my abilities, that’s when I hit the brick wall of leadership.

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth mentioned another lie that leaders need to watch out for. It’s the lie that says, “Isolation isn’t going to hurt me. I can do this on my own.” Let’s listen.

Nancy: The enemy wants to keep us and the women in our churches isolated, enduring pain privately, enduring shame and guilt privately, and striving to fix it all on our own. The hoping of independence and isolation, that is the enemy’s strategy. That is his plan.

What do you see in the Garden of Eden? The husband and the wife, they sin. What are they doing? They’re hiding. They’re covering. They’re separated from God, separated from each other.

God wants us to come out into the light, to walk in the light in our vertical relationship with the Lord and in our horizontal relationships with others. You can walk in the light, and it’s okay. Not only is it okay, it’s right. That’s where you get the grace of God.

We were created for relationship and getting help and helping others is a body-life matter. It is a community affair. Discipleship and nurture take place in the context of a network of relationships.

You’re not responsible for all the women you know. You have the pieces and the parts that God has given you to be there in their life where God has put you there. But there are other people God wants to bring into their lives. That network of relationships, healthy, godly relationships, is where discipleship takes place.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. We’ll be hearing from Nancy in the upcoming online event for women’s ministry leaders. It’s titled, Overcoming Lies Leaders Believe. Karen Hodge and I will be there, too, along with Kesha Griffin.

Kesha is a pastor’s wife who had to watch out for a tendency toward the opposite of community, and that’s isolation. Here she is talking to Leslie Bennett from Revive Our Hearts.

Kesha Griffin: Isolation. Because I do have a background of childhood sexual abuse, there was a lot of struggle with knowing who I am in Christ. Isolation was definitely a coping mechanism for me. I know all about isolation.

Leslie Bennett: A lot of women need that as well with situations and circumstances that’s common in the lies.

Dannah: We’ll hear more from Kesha on Tuesday.

We’re looking at some of the challenges facing women’s ministry leaders, the lies we can so easily believe.

I’m talking with Karen Hodge today. Karen, I have kind of a personal value. I say to myself frequently, “Prayer is my first work.” I got that from Dr. Juli Slattery, who got it from Linda Dillow, amazing women of the Word. 

I just need to remind myself that my work isn’t to organize this women’s event. My work isn’t to be behind this microphone and interview you today. My work is not to write a killer speech that’s going to get women to fall in love with their Bibles. My work is prayer. That’s my first work, and everything else flows out of that.

But this year, the Lord really revealed to me that it was a belief in my brain, but it wasn’t a functional belief. I was believing the lie that because I was so busy, because I was so necessary, because I was so needed . . . There’s your lie. The Lord doesn’t need us. The church doesn’t need us. It’s a privilege to get to do what we do. I had been praying on the fly. That was the lie I believed.

And the Lord has just been taking me through a year . . . It started in January. He said, “Dannah, I would like to teach you how to pray.” Of course, not audibly, but everything in my life was showing up. This Book, that speech, that message from my pastor. The Lord was saying, “I would like to teach you to pray.”

And I thought, Teach me to pray? I’ve been a women’s ministry leader for two decades. I know how to pray! And yet, sometimes what we believe in our head is not a functional belief that we’re living out in our lives—even as leaders. I’ve been telling my staff, “This is the lie I believed, and this is how I’m correcting it in my life right now.”

You mentioned Susan Hunt. I cannot even not talk about that woman because she has blessed us so much at Revive Our Hearts. We have gleaned so much from her wisdom.

How important is it for a women’s ministry leader to have a Susan Hunt-type woman in her life? Now, obviously, they’re probably not going to have a Susan Hunt who’s an author of books and who’s a well-known woman. But how important is it for us to have someone like that as you’ve had Susan in your life?

Karen: So we’re talking about the woman who wrote the book on spiritual mothering. She embodies that truth. So, I think we look for people who embody what that truth looks like, clearly from the pages of Titus 2.

Susan and I often talk about leadership that is going in front of or alongside another person to get them to an intended destination. We need people who are in front of us to get us there. As I talk about walking each other home. They’re a few steps ahead of us. They’re a few steps ahead of us in their faithfulness, in their long obedience in the same direction.

We also have gospel friends who are alongside us in the trenches that we do ministry with—shoulder to shoulder and face to face. We have people that are following us. Leadership is saying, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”

And so, how important is it to have somebody like Susan Hunt? You want to find a woman who takes you to Jesus, who says, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”

And, of course, as we follow Christ, we serve. We don’t live our life to be served. We lay down our life. We die to live and lead. We seek to embody the truth by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s not just what we say; it’s how we live. We’re showing and telling the robustness of the gospel along this line where it’s not only invitational, but it’s compelling, to want to follow somebody like that.

And so to be able to say I’ve followed Susan Hunt as she’s followed Christ for over thirty years, I mean, it’s a tremendous privilege. And so now the question is, “Who is following me? Who am I saying, ‘Follow me as I follow Christ’”? It’s a “trusted to be invested” moment. A moment where we say, “Yes, I’m a steward of what God has invested in my life in the lives of other people.”

So, we’re always an older woman. We’re always a younger woman—reaching forward, reaching back. And so along that line, we get the privilege to walk together.

Dannah: I love that.

Are there any Scripture passages lately that the Lord has really been using to fuel you as a leader?

Karen: Well, Dannah, this is what I read when I’m on the plane on my way home. This is my re-entry fuel. You’re probably very familiar with it: 2 Corinthians 4:16–18.

“So we don’t lose heart . . .” You asked if I wanted to quit. Sure. There are lots of days I think, I’m done. But that’s okay, because at the end of myself, that’s where I get the promise here. 

“So we don’t lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Leadership really has everything to do with where I’m fixing my eyes. Am I captivated by problems? Past? Agendas? Events? You name it. Or am I captivated by the unseen, the eternal? That’s what will help me to go, to be faithful to the finish and not lose heart.

Dannah: I can feel the “wasting away.” 

Karen: Yes. Amen.

Dannah: At the same time, I think, Ah, there’s more in me than there was when this body was stronger. There’s more wealth of Christ. There’s more wealth of the Word. There’s more discernment. There’s more wisdom. And yet, on the outside, I’m a lot less impressive.

I said something today, I don’t even know what it was, but I said to the girl, “I think if I was twenty-five and I said that, you would think it sounded so awesome and so cool.” But I didn’t say it when I was twenty-five. I said it when I was fifty-five. 

Ah, the wasting away. But inside we are being renewed day by day. What a good thought.

We are excited. You and I are going to be two of Leslie Bennett’s guests on an upcoming Revive Our Hearts’ special event, an online event, Overcoming Lies Leaders Believe. We’ll be joined by Kesha Griffin, Karen Allen, Bob Lepine. I don’t know how we’ll get the Karens straight. We’ll have to have Karen A. and Karen H., I guess. But why are you excited about this event?

Karen: Well, I think that gospel friends remind each other what’s true. I think we’re all susceptible to lies, so we need to gather together and lift up the truth and be reminded, first of all, we’re not alone, but also that it’s that truth that sets us free as leaders.

I’m excited just to be one participant to remind each other what is true and also to say, “In the struggles, Christ is there.”

Dannah: It’s a good thing for leaders to get to communicate with and be encouraged by other leaders. It is a lie we believe that there is no one quite like us. They’re out there. Sometimes you have to set your calendar aside to get connected to them. That’s what we want to create for you.

In fact, this isn’t just an online event. The online live event is Tuesday, August 6. But we’ll have access to stream that any time up to February 5. So, lots of time for you to sit down on your own or with your own leadership team and marinate in this content.

But you’re also going to gain access to a four-week book club. And this is what I’m so excited about, because this is leaders getting to communicate and interact with other leaders. It’s a Facebook group. You’re going to get to unpack that content and the truths in the free ebook that you’re going to receive as a part of this workshop. That ebook is called, Here to Serve: Breaking Free from Lies Leaders Believe.

Karen and I hope you’ll join us for this workshop for women leaders. It’s titled, again, Overcoming Lies Leaders Believe. It’s happening this Tuesday, August 6.

To register, just head to ReviveOurHearts.com/overcoming. Even if you’re not able to watch it live, you’ll have access to it for months to come. Once again, head to ReviveOurHearts.com/overcoming, or call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Now, I don’t know what kinds of thoughts you might have when it comes to the Proverbs 31 woman. I think a lot of women feel under the pile, like, that Proverbs 31 woman is an unattainable ideal. Well, on Monday, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will start a series looking at that description in Proverbs 31. I think she’ll help us set aside some of those fears about the passage.

Karen Hodge, thank you for joining us today. We’ll see you on Tuesday. I am so grateful for your insights on leadership and keeping Christ at the center.

Karen: Thanks so much.

Dannah: And to you, our listener, have a great weekend. Go to church. Worship the Lord with His people, and then be back on Monday for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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