True Woman 101 - Week 8: Sisterhood Is Powerful

Nancy: As we think about this study we’ve done together over these weeks, I just wonder what part of this study has been particularly impacting to you? Something that really encouraged you or challenged you or just a takeaway.

Kim Wagner: Well, first of all, I’m just thankful that you wrote it. I think that this will be so helpful for women just to put handles on: What does it mean to be a true woman? What does it mean to be a woman? What does God expect of me? Can I really start to apply His Word to areas of my life where I struggle? 

Maybe the last chapter was my favorite because it launches us off into the future, the journey that He has us on and gives us hope for what He wants to do.

Holly Elliff: I had a hard time actually deciding which part was my favorite because all of this has been so core to my life in the last decade since we started talking about all this stuff. It was hard for me to separate it into what I loved the most. But I especially like the chapter

that talked about women’s lib. For me, understanding those things turned a light bulb on in my head about the connection between what I was seeing in the lives of women and what they struggled with and what needed to happen with that and how God might want to change that. And so, I love that part. I also love the last chapter because it’s not really the last chapter, and there is so much more that I believe God wants to do in this area among Christian women.

Nancy: It’s kind of where to from here.

Dannah Gresh: Well, I wholeheartedly thank you for a kick in the seat of the pants.

Nancy: A what?

Dannah: A kick in the seat of the pants. It seems to be that every True Woman event I attend or every resource that I read I really do feel the conviction, not the condemnation, but the conviction of the Spirit. And in this particular case, it was in the chapter when it was talking about how our desire is towards our husbands. And you phrased it this way. You said, “God is saying to the woman, you have the urge to control, resist, oppose, and act against your husband.” And, oh, did I feel like you wrote that about me.

Mary Kassian: She has written in the margin, “Wall.” She hit a wall.

Dannah: Right—wall. But praise God, it’s not a brick wall because it never is when the blood of Jesus is applied. Whereas you were intended to function as one in harmony and peace and unity, there is a barrier between you. I really did see a picture of the wall that I create with every act of authority.

But you know what’s beautiful is that God really said to my spirit. He said, “Dannah, it’s a wall of foam. If you can just apply the truth that I’m pouring into your heart and the accountability through the sisterhood, this is a foam wall. You can walk in the unity and harmony that I created you to walk in.”  So I’m always grateful when you guys hit me over the head with a little truth.

Mary: You can’t write it and not be hit over the head with a little truth. I mean, I’ve lived in this material for how many decades, months, and writing it for decades . . . it didn’t take us decades.

Nancy: It just felt like decades.

Mary: It felt like decades sometimes. We spent months on this, and I dealt with it so many times. And yet when you go back to the Word, I just found, a fresh . . .

I think I emailed Nancy once and I said I just feel the wonder all over again. Just the wonder of who God created us to be. And more than that, the wonder that who we are showcases who God is.

Nancy: You drafted the first draft of a lot of this material, so I was getting it kind of at the second stage. The chapter that we discussed last on gentleness and quietness and that word you love and have taught me to love—amenability, that responsiveness . . .We’ve talked about it a lot; I’ve written about it. But it’s amazing how the words you write or teach others come back to haunt you.

Holly: That total makeover.

Nancy: That total makeover. And I just say, “Oh Lord, it’s me, standing in the need of prayer. It’s not my brother; it’s not my sister. It is me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”

It’s just been so good for me to be reminded. I’m in my 50’s now. I’ve known the Lord for a half-century. I came to the Lord at the age of four, and so some of these truths I’ve been dealing with, aware of them, seeking after the Lord, and sometimes I look and I think, Why am I not further along in my own journey? Why am I acting like such a shrew? I know nobody else has been there, but . . .

Everyone: Yes, we have. Oh yes. Guilty

Nancy: It’s just so good to go back to the truth and see how your life measures up or doesn’t measure up to it. But then, you also see God’s grace. You get to grace, and God gives grace to the humble. As we’re working on this material, I’m having to say, “Lord, change me.” This is not what I am, this true woman profile picture here, and I know when you’re a public person and you write books and speak and all of us . . .

Dannah: Everyone thinks that you’ve achieved the ideal.

Nancy: Because they’re seeing us with makeup on, right? Dressed up.

Mary: But we’re just aiming for it.

Dannah: We’re aiming for it, that’s right.

Kim: But I’m thankful for the power of the gospel, which is real and does bring change. I’ve seen transformation in your [Nancy’s] life since I first met you.

Nancy: Thank the Lord.

Holly: As we all have with each other, and it’s progressive. I mean, we’re not done with that. We’re all aware. Even in reading the story in the study I thought that there is so much that the Lord still wants to teach me. You know, we won’t be done until we quit breathing.

Nancy: That’s why it’s True Woman 101. There’s 201, 301. There’s more. This is True Woman for beginners.

Kim: Basic.

Mary: Do we have to get this before we move on?

Dannah: What I’m so grateful for is the sisterhood. Don’t you feel just so blessed that we have each other to walk it through with? I just have this sense right now that the women that are watching [in small groups] have had nacho parties and Chinese food and all this stuff they bought together while they look at this. They feel that sisterhood, too.

I know that as we’re in process this summer, I just felt like my marriage needed tended to, my family needed tended to. I emailed all of you and I said, “I’m taking some time off. I need some accountability. I need to back away from the work.”

And it doesn’t matter if your work is writing books or teaching AWANA or leading a mission’s trip. Sometimes a woman has a season where she has to sit back and there are needs . . . whether it’s her elderly parents or her high school children or a new baby being born. You all were so loving to just walk me through that in the sisterhood. And Nancy sent me a book, it was an email, but it was a book. 

Nancy: I said, “Dannah, Dannah, dear Dannah . . .”

Dannah: It just called me to truth.

Nancy: But we’ve done that for each other.

Kim: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve called Holly or Nancy just in tears and have said, “Speak truth to me right now. Speak truth.”

Mary: Remind me, remind me.

Nancy: By the way, we’re part of a group of women that exchange weekly email updates as to how we can pray for each other, just acknowledging that we need each other. Before we jump into the “leaving a legacy stuff” today, I just want us to maybe put a bow on some of what we’ve been talking, about some caveats, some reminders that this sisterhood group is a reminder that true womanhood doesn’t look the same.

Mary: Isn’t that the truth!

Nancy: And there’s no cookie cutter true woman here.

Holly: Because we’re all very different.

Dannah: Hugely different.

Mary: Even planning a meal. I mean, how hard is that?

Nancy: Okay, I gotta tell. My friends, if they come to dinner at my house, they’ve got to bring their own food, because I’ve got one friend who’s in this group, I won’t say who . . .

Dannah: We’re not telling names, please . . .

Nancy: . . . who is gluten intolerant. Okay, that’s a serious medical/physical thing.

Dannah: We don’t want to kill her.

Nancy: There’s one who doesn’t eat vegetables, anything that grows in the ground.

Dannah: And we won’t say who, Holly.

Holly: Only if it’s green. If it’s green, it’s evil. If it’s not green, I’m okay.

Nancy: But we have a friend who’s in this little group, sisterhood, who only eats vegetables.

Mary: Yes, no meat.

Nancy: And at any given time, the rest of us are on some kind of diet that prohibits . . .

Dannah: No, Mary and I will eat anything.

Mary: You and me, we’ll eat anything.

Dannah: We’re the sisters who will clean it all up.

Nancy: But the point being, there’s no cookie cutter true woman. Sometimes when we talk about biblical womanhood, true womanhood, there’s a sense you’re trying to press everybody into this little mold where everybody looks alike. And that’s not right.

Mary: Not so. I mean we couldn’t be any different. Nancy, you and collaborated to write this, and we could not be more different.

Dannah: Well, maybe a little bit.

Holly: But there’s such a distinctiveness there. I can remember vividly one of the first times that I was with Mary she said, “You and Nancy have had a long time relationship?”

I said, “Yes.”

And she said, “You are kind of different personalities.”

And I said, “My role in Nancy’s life is to get her off the couch. That’s what I do.”

Nancy: Holly, you make me sound really bad. It’s not like I sit on the couch watching TV. It’s away from my laptop.

Holly: She’s working.

Mary: And Dannah’s a horse lover?

Dannah: I am. I am so excited as my childhood dream was to be a missionary who was also a veterinarian. Full time. And now I have horses and llamas, and my husband just texted me a picture of our brand new baby chicken that just hatched moments ago.

Mary: Nancy, what would you do with a chicken?

Dannah: She would probably eat it.

Nancy: Grill it.

Dannah: I am going to name it.

Nancy: Okay, here’s something else we want to say about true womanhood. And we’ve said it, but I just think this is really important, and again, we’ll move into this chapter 8, but before we do . . . we cannot be true women that God calls us to be on our own.

Kim: No, no. I have a friend that said, I’m thankful for the True Woman Manifesto, and when you were encouraging women to sign this, I mean, she’s a biblical woman, she loves the Lord, she loves doing your studies and your books. But she said, “I will not sign this.”

Nancy: Because . . .

Kim: She said, “I can’t be this.

And I said, “None of us are this, but this is what we’re aiming for. This is what we’re asking God’s grace for. This is what we’re committed to. It’s an intentional calling on God to create in me the true woman You desire for me to be.”

Mary: And apart from the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, apart from a relationship with Jesus Christ, this is just foolishness. It’s foolishness.

Holly: And women will strive and they will try and try . . .

Mary: Get the checklist, right? I did this; I did this; I did this.

Nancy: It’s a firstborn’s way we do things.

Dannah: Don’t you love that the Word says, “Cease striving and know that I am God.”

Mary: But it’s not the message. Even as we talk about a counter-revolution, this is not a strive message that we’re going out into culture and saying, “This is what you need to be doing. Get this checklist right.” That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re presenting a message that really at its core is get your relationship with Jesus right.

Nancy: The vertical.

Holly: And what it is, is then knowing those truths. They are truths about biblical womanhood, how God designed us. But then going to God’s Word understanding that He provides grace for us to take every step that He calls us to.

Mary: Grace and wisdom and discernment.

Holly: Yes, if I need to love my husband, or I’m a single and I need to know how to deal with loneliness or hope, God has grace for every step that He calls me to as I pursue Him. And that’s lifelong.

Mary: And in the most broken circumstances.

Holly: Right.

Nancy: And it then helps us also to extend grace to others who are in a different season of life, whose challenges are different than ours, whose calling is different than ours, and who may be broken themselves.

So the danger would be and what we would not want at all is for people to take this resources and hit people over the head with it—“You know, these young people, they’ve got to get true womanhood. They’re all so immodest,” or the whatever. It’s grace—breathing grace in, breathing grace out.

Mary: I am so glad that for the women in my life that have been so patient with me. I’m so glad that when I was a young woman that I didn’t have women shaking their fingers in my face, but who just came along and loved me and modeled truth for me and really challenged me from just their depth of character and not sort of a list or condemnation. If somebody would have given me a list, I would have run the other direction.

Nancy: Although that doesn’t mean that we can’t be direct or forthright. That’s needed, too, at times.

Dannah: I’m thinking of a true woman right now who this morning another true woman and myself rescued in her quest. She’s a young, twenty-something-year-old woman post-abortive but in her second out-of-wedlock experience who chose to give life to the baby. And so my friend and I and a whole sisterhood of woman are just around this sweet woman. And she is in process of becoming this true woman. She wants so badly to become everything God wants her to be.

This morning because she had a bad weekend and she fell in her mind, she didn’t act out in sin but she began to dwell on sin again. She didn’t want to go to her post-abortion Bible study this morning. So my true woman girlfriend texted me and said, “I’m on my way. I’m picking her up.” She said to the girl, “Brush your teeth. I don’t care what you’re wearing. I’m driving there. I will sit outside the door till you finish with the Bible study.” And she just said, “I want you to pray it through with me.”

And you know what? She’s a true woman, too. She is moving towards it. And right now she needs us to walk with her and hold her. But one day she’s going to be walking and holding someone else in the sisterhood.

Holly: I love the fact that when Christ tells us about the armor that He has for us in Ephesians 6, there are moments when somebody else can come to us and say, “Here, let me put this helmet on your head. Let me help you put on your breastplate, and here’s your sword.” And encourage you or hold your arms up until you can hold the sword yourself.

Dannah: Sometimes all we need is willingness. The “Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. I don’t have the strength on my own but if I call my girlfriends and I tell them how far away I am, I know they’re going to say, ‘Brush your teeth, I’m coming to get you.’”

Mary: That’s what sisters are for.

Nancy: You know the byline of Revive Our Hearts ministry is “calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.” And we’re really talking here about not getting something for ourselves but getting filled with Christ and His Word so that we can be givers of life to others.

I love that word “legacy.” And you think of legacy as passing from one generation to the next, but it can be in the same generation as well, passing on a way of thinking, a relationship with Christ.

Kim: An ideal.

Nancy: An ideal, but you know everybody is passing on legacy in some way. And the feminists, as we looked at that over these few weeks, they left a legacy. Talk about for a minute, what is a kind of legacy that many women today, apart from Christ, are passing on to the next generation. We want to look at the good legacy in a minute. But what’s the kind of legacy we don’t want to leave which is more the legacy our culture is leaving for the next generation?

Dannah: It’s just so me-centered—self-centered. It’s all about me, if I’m happy. If you can make me happy, if the relationship can make me happy, I’m in. But you know, even that, we’re not thinking towards and for others.

Holly: It’s about strength that glorifies yourself rather than glorifying God.

Kim: I think we’re leaving a legacy, sadly, of a lot of young people not wanting to enter marriage. They’re not wanting a lifetime commitment because they’ve seen so many broken marriages. They’ve seen such miserable states of relationships around them. And they’re questioning, “Well, why marry a man? Maybe a relationship with a woman is better because I want to be with somebody that’s more like me. Everything is up for grabs right now.

Mary: So we’re leaving a legacy of gender confusion; a legacy of really disdaining things that God values, things like: not liking children or family or men.

Holly: Or a single woman thinking her life has no purpose.

Nancy: It’s not hard to talk about the negative legacy. It’s just kind of everywhere in the air we breathe. But give me some words or phrases that describe the kind of legacy as God’s women that we want to leave. No long speeches here, but what are some words, some phrases. This is the kind of legacy we want to leave…

Holly: Eternal.

Kim: Faithfulness.

Holly: I’ll say contagious. Transparent.

Dannah: Must be transparent. It has to be transparent for them to feel it’s possible.

Mary: Powerful.

Dannah: Transferable. Impactful.

Holly: Joyful. I mean, it’s not miserable to become the woman God has for you to be. That’s a joyful thing.

Nancy: I think that’s one of the lies of the enemy, that we will be miserable.

Holly: It’s a huge lie of the enemy.

Kim: Fulfilling. Purposeful.

Holly: Fulfilling. That it’s not demeaning in any way. It is not that we suffer for Christ’s sake our whole life and then die and go to heaven. It is that we are becoming moment by moment, day by day more of the woman that God has for us. It’s big. It’s big.

Mary: Yes. I was trying to think of a word. I was thinking blossoming in the sense of . . . I guess feminists use the word “empowering.” But it’s not quite the right word. The word that a woman becomes who she is. You become more of who God created you to be, and there’s a fullness in that, a blooming.

Holly: And it’s a continual growth. Maybe you move from being a little sapling to an oak or something, but you’re growing. Your roots are going deep; it’s founded on the truth of God’s Word. So that, to me, is the foundational difference between the biblical womanhood that we love and the philosophy of feminism which is that there is no foundation other than my own needs.

Nancy: Now, we’re all women—it’s no secret—in our forties and fifties, sitting around this table. We have had some friends in this discussion who are a little younger, some are a little older, but we’re kind of those . . .

Kim Wagner: What are we Nancy?

Holly Elliff: Are you going to use the word “middle-aged?”

Mary Kassian: [whispers] You were going to say middle-aged! [normal voice] Well, that means we’re going to need our reading glasses.

Nancy: Well, unless you’re going to live to be a hundred . . . (laughter) We are certainly nearing the category of “older women.” That’s been a joyful thing for me to contemplate. I’m so thankful for the women who’ve invested in my life when I was a younger woman.

You always have younger and older women in your life.

Dannah Gresh: You’re my only friend that I know who loves that verse about the gray hair.

Nancy: I do love it. We talk a lot about Titus 2, we talk about it in this chapter. And there is a mandate—but it’s not just a mandate—it’s a paradigm. It’s a vision that God gives us as older women.

Holly: It is a lifestyle.

Nancy: How do we leave that legacy? How does that legacy pass from one generation to the next? Talk Titus 2 here for a minute.

Mary: Well, sisterhood, right? That’s how it passes to the next generation. There has to be an awareness and an engagement with sisterhood.

Dannah: You have to take that seriously. If I am an older woman . . . I want to just say that I believe that teenagers listening to this are older women to somebody. When I left the first True Woman event, I was so fired up. I was so illuminated regarding what needs to happen in my life that I wanted to share that with other women.

That’s really how the feminist movement grew. So I just said, “Lord,” (and I challenge every woman listening to ask this) “who can I influence? Who is in my sphere of influence?” My husband founded a Christian high school, so I went to him and said, “Sweetie, can I develop a True Woman curriculum?” So, we have a True Woman class for girls at our Christian high school, because that’s where I can influence; that’s where I have a captive audience.

Everybody has a sphere like that, where they can say, “Okay, Lord, show me.” Maybe it’s not developing a class, maybe it’s handing out a book or mentoring one person.

Holly: Maybe it’s your friend . . . picking up a younger woman and driving her to a place where she can get truth.

Mary: Or maybe it’s just engaging with a girlfriend at Starbucks and asking her the hard questions. 

Nancy: We’re going to talk here in a moment, as we do in the chapter, about some other practical ways that we can leave that legacy, but I think the starting place is just being intentional . . . realizing this is a responsibility.

We have women’s Bible studies coming out our ears in this generation, and how thankful we are: Precept Ministries, Community Bible Study, and all these different teachers—and we’ve written some of those studies. We’re glad for people like these. But the danger of that is that we start to just get spoon-fed and get spiritually fat. We have a responsibility to take what God has poured into us.

There are women taking this study right now who have been in a Bible study every semester of their life for decades. Great! Hope you do it next semester—but have you ever thought to consider that God wants you to invest what you’ve learned in someone else?

Mary: And there’s never a point when you feel ready to do that. You never feel ready. Do you feel ready, Nancy, on radio? Do I feel ready when I go speak at conferences? Do you, Dannah?

Dannah: Nooo! I want to throw up!

Nancy: Do you know what happens? As we give out—of our weakness, of our weariness. Giving out of feeling, “I don’t have it in me to do one more thing,” or “I’m not there.” God sanctifies us, changes us. As I’m working on this book, as we’ve been doing this table talk, God’s speaking to me, He’s changing me. So as you give to others, you really grow.

Holly: There’s a reason why Titus 2 says the older women are to train the younger women in how to do these things, because it doesn’t come naturally to us.

Mary: Because of sin.

Nancy: “Train them to love their husbands.” You’d think that would come naturally, but it needs to be trained.

Holly: And even at the very beginning, “to pursue sound doctrine,” to love this Word. Those are not things that always come naturally to us. When I mentioned in an earlier session about my mother-in-law, who was so gracious to just speak truth to me as a young woman, and it changed my life.

All of us have women who are older and younger, who I believe the Lord has put there for that purpose.

Kim: A lot of women don’t have this, but I had a mother who, from the time I was very small on up, would speak truth into my life. I remember a time that my marriage was just really struggling. I went to my mom and dad’s home, and my mom welcomed me with loving arms. 

Dannah: This happened to me years ago. Me and my man are good! But I went to their home and I expected my mom to just feel sorry for me. “Oh, I’m so sorry, my baby!!!” [bawl, sob, wail] and badmouth him: “That man!” None of that! She listened to me; she let me cry; she held me; she handed me a tissue.

She said, “You’re welcome to stay tonight, but you belong in your husband’s home, and he’s a good man.” And that’s the kind of true woman truth we need to be giving—where we comfort and then we challenge—not necessarily what we want to hear, but what is God’s truth.

Kim: And what’s so rewarding for me right now is that I’m seeing women whom I’ve discipled when they were young, and now they’ve turned around and they’re teaching Bible studies, and they’re discipling young women, and they’re leading young women to the Lord. That is so rewarding!

Holly: It’s generational. My children are having children now, and my daughters believe something different at twenty than I did at twenty. What they believe at twenty is not at all what I believed is truth. So my daughters have grown up hearing God’s truth and now want their daughters to move on and carry that torch into the next generation—it is so ongoing.

Mary: It’s such a domino effect, it really is. It reminds me of that commercial. Didn’t we talk about that in the lesson—the Faberge commercial? “She told two friends, and she told two friends, and she told two friends . . .” Most of the women are going to be too young to remember that, but it went something like that. Do you remember that?

Dannah: Unfortunately, I do. That means I’m not too young. We’ve had Erin Davis on the panel for several of these weeks. I met Erin when she was fifteen, and I was in my mid-twenties, and the Lord called us to a relationship, and I was the older woman. But look at her! Just look at her! Look what God has done!

I watched from the green room as, on some of these weeks we recorded her thoughts and her wisdom and her life. And she is the older woman now, and there are flocks of little ladies—teens—under her ministry now.

Nancy: Lots of little ladies!

Kim: And bearing fruit like that is living for something bigger than yourself, and there is no reward like that, that you get when you’re just living that self-centered life. And that’s what I’m hoping women will capture from this . . . that they’ll get a taste of, “I want to do that. I want to sit down with a group of women and take them through this Bible study.”

Holly: And that they’ll be released from the fear that they do not have the right to do that, or they do not have anything to say or to teach.

Dannah: Well, do you know what’s really cool about it is? It’s a part of your healing. That are things that I’ve been able to pass on to Erin and my daughters and other girls that I’ve mentored that they get to learn, rather than on the field trip of life, they learn it through my hard knocks.

Nancy: And you’re sharing out of your failure and your life message. We all have a life message that God entrusts to us to help another pilgrim on the journey. Now, what happens—again, I’m going back to Titus 2 here—if we’re not intentional about older women being what God wants them to be (teaching the younger women), then the Word of God is reviled.

Mary: It’s smeared. It’s like a smear campaign against the Word of God if we don’t do our job. I think we’re actually living in a time right now when God’s Word is being smeared.

Dannah: There’s graffiti on the wall.

Mary: There’s graffiti on God’s Name right now.

Nancy: Not only because of Hollywood.

Mary: But because of our behavior as Christian women. We have the opportunity to clean that up or to pass that along to the next generation. If they don’t clean up that graffiti, it’s going to get more and more obscured and a bigger mess.

Kim: Sadly, they don’t want to pick up the truth of the Word because they are not seeing it lived out in so many lives that claim to know Christ, and that’s why this is so essential. As you were saying, Nancy, about so many women that have had Bible studies, they’ve taken Precepts courses or many other good Bible study courses. But if they’re not then going home and treating their husband with kindness and serving others or asking their children to forgive them when they’ve wronged them—you know, those practical everyday things, for them to be able to see the gospel in this generation.

Mary: Making the gospel attractive.

Nancy: And we can’t sit there and say it’s somebody else’s responsibility. “All these kids in the youth group, why are they acting like this?” Well, maybe it’s because of the middle-aged women that they’re seeing that aren’t creating for them a hunger and a thirst and a longing for Christ. We’ve got to take personal responsibility.

Mary: I will never forget a conference where I went and talked about wellness and wisdom and talked about what womanhood was about. It was on a college campus. I will never forget two college-aged girls who came up arm-in-arm afterwards to talk to me, tears streaming down their faces.

One looked at me in the eyes and said, “Where are our mothers? Why have we never heard this before?” And it cut me to the core, because we’re the mothers—the spiritual mothers. Sometimes it’s a fifteen-year-old or a twenty-year-old who is a spiritual mother . . . women who have never given physical birth, but who are the mothers who God has raised up to start displaying His glory in this generation.

Nancy: That’s really the vision that has captured our hearts over a number of years. We’ve come to it by different paths, but I just love the way the Lord has put this vision for leaving a legacy of godly womanhood (what we have sometimes called the quiet counter-cultural revolution). We came to it in different ways, but God has caused our lives to intersect, and we’re walking lockstep with each other now.

I want to just rehearse—it’s fun for me to think about. I think for those that are participating with us in this talk, it helps them to know how all this came about. Mary, years ago God put a burden on your heart about this whole thing of womanhood.

Holly: And you were a very young woman.

Mary: I was a very, very young woman when God laid it on my heart to really just dig into feminist theology and philosophy and to understand it. The reason I did it was not so that I could write a book, but because there was a girl in my life whom I was interacting with and trying to mentor in the faith.

She didn’t want to become a Christian because she didn’t think God loved women, and so we started doing a Bible study together and wrestling with this together and then looking at the material together. At one point my young husband, Brent, said to me, “This has been so helpful for other women. Why don’t you try to get it out into the hands of more women?”

So it was nothing I had ever orchestrated. It was just a divine kind of assignment that I had to do.

Nancy: And you wrote a book. The first title was The Feminist Gospel. I happened on to that book. It was providence.

Mary: Yeah, I want your autograph. Of all the twenty-five people who read it, five of them are right here!

Kim: Well, Nancy mailed it to me.

Nancy: I remember, I read it the weekend of my thirty-ninth birthday. I had grown up on the cusp of the feminist revolution. Because of the home I was in, it really wasn’t on my radar, what was going on out there. A lot of this was new to me, as you traced the development of the feminist revolution.

What particularly struck my heart was seeing how that revolution had come to church and how it had penetrated and infiltrated the church. I can just remember, Mary, I was struck deeply in my heart. It was so enlightening that it was jaw-dropping to me. I understood how the Christian world had bought into this philosophy, even people who would never consider themselves feminist . . . but it had become part of the air we breathe.

This was back in 1997. There was almost a visceral, palpable sense in my heart, “Something has got to happen!” God began to place this vision in my heart. We talked about at the top of this program, if a small group of determined, angry women could be so influential, what would happen if God would raise up in our day a small band of women who love Him, who trust Him . . . this was gripping me.

First I was mesmerized by the vision of what could happen, and then the immediate next reaction was terror, because I’m not a fighter at heart; I was not looking for new hills to conquer. I knew if I accepted being part of what God wants to do in this counter-cultural revolution among women—taking back the ground that we’ve given over to the enemy for so many years—I just knew I would spend the rest of my life swimming upstream.

Holly: And you had no idea, at that point, what was going to happen.

Nancy: We didn’t have Revive Our Hearts radio. I hadn’t written any books. We had not met. But then God in His providence a few years later brought our lives together. I can still remember. Holly, you were there; Kim, you were there. Mary, you came into Little Rock to record a radio program.

Holly: Tell about the sniffles . . .

Mary was coming in to do radio. We picked up food Nancy was sick. Do you want to tell what Nancy looked like? [laughter] She was sick. She had her fuzzy bathrobe on. We came in that night and sat on the floor—I don’t really know why we sat on the floor.

Nancy: I was in a rented place; I didn’t have a lot of furniture. I had just moved in.

Mary: And we were empathizing, so we were all huddling over our tea.

Nancy: But we had been reading your book—they had been, and that was the topic of conversation.

Mary: It was the topic of conversation, and we were just kind of bouncing it around. It was mostly the three of us engaging and every once in a while Nancy blowing her nose and saying, “That’s good!” And we included in the opener to this session and also in the book what rumbled out of your mind that night. It really the fruition of what God had been working in your heart—just that burden of what could happen.

Nancy: “Now is the time . . .”

Mary: It started with one, and now there were two and then there were four, and “they told two friends.”

Nancy: And now look what God has done. I remember that first True Woman conference in 2008. It sold out ten weeks in advance; sixty-eight hundred women there and ten thousand watching it online.

Kim: There was electricity in that convention center, and that opening night there was a sense among so many of us, “God is doing something!”

Mary: There was no way we could have done it. It was God.

Holly: I can remember standing at the back of that auditorium and thinking, Lord, would you do for women what You desire to do in this nation?! I walked out of there with just a buzz in my spirit about what God wanted to do.

Kim: Early that morning, He just woke me up and there was just such a sense of “Today it begins.” That was the day that we signed the declaration, the True Woman Manifesto, and there was such a sense that this was a historic moment as we did that for the first time.

Nancy: And so many of those women left that conference . . . At so many events you do it and it’s a buzz, and then you leave and it’s over.

Mary: We went home, and we were so tired. Then all of a sudden we start hearing news of all these True Woman groups springing up, and we said, “What True Woman groups? Who told them to do that?”

Nancy: True Woman chapters. I was in Dallas speaking at a luncheon and a woman brings me over to her table and says, “We’re the Dallas True Woman chapter.” I didn’t know we had any chapters!

Kim: Did we write that into it?

Mary: I think we need to talk about the True Woman Manifesto briefly, because there are a lot of women listening who may not know what it is about. Nancy, why don’t you share?

Nancy: Well, early on in the feminist movement there were some key moments where there was a document that a small, handful group of women would sign. “Declaration of Sentiments” was one of the early ones, and there have been other moments where they would record, “We affirm this, we agree to this.”

We just wanted something for the True Woman movement to explain what we’re talking about, and what are the key non-negotiables. We don’t get into specifics of details here, of applications of truths that can look different for different lives, but these are the core, fundamental—what does the Bible say?

We start with the authority of Scripture, that we declare our allegiance to Christ as Lord and to the authority of His Word. And we’ve got a whole series, on Revive Our Hearts and at the True Woman website, about the Manifesto. But it was such an amazing thing at that first conference to have 6800 women read aloud together the core tenets and to affirm: “I agree. Amen.” “Yes, Lord,” is what we said.

Mary: This Manifesto contains the Word of God and important things about womanhood, but it’s probably not a perfect document . . . but it’s like sticking flag in the sand and saying, “We are going to affirm what God says as being true, and to aim for that ideal in a broken world.”

 

Nancy: Early on in the feminist movement there were some key moments where there was a document that a small handful of women would sign. 

Mary Kassian: Declaration of Sentiment.

Nancy: Yes, that was one of the early ones, but there had been other moments where, “We affirm this, we agree to this . .  ” We just wanted something for the True Woman Movement to explain what we’re talking about and what are the key non-negotiables. We don’t get into specifics or details here of application of truths that can look different for different lives, but these are the core, fundamental truths.

Mary: What does the Bible say

Nancy: What does the Bible say. We start with the authority of Scripture, “That we declare our allegiance to Christ as Lord and to the authority of His Word.” We’ve got a whole series on Revive Our Hearts and at the True Woman website about the Manifesto, but it was such an amazing thing at that first conference to have those 6,800 women read aloud together the core tennents and to affirm, “I agree, amen, yes, Lord.” That’s what we said.

Mary: This contains the Word of God, and, I think, important things about womanhood, but it’s probably not a perfect document. But it’s like sticking a flag in the sand and saying, “You know what? We’re going to affirm what God says as being true and to aim for that ideal in a broken world.” It’s just a tool also to have. 

Nancy: It's a tool to help spread the message of what true womanhood is all about. We’re not worshiping or creating an organization. We’re just trying to resource women who want to be godly women in our day and to pass the baton of faith on to the next organization.

So what was exciting to see was how women are taking resources like True Woman 101, the True Woman Manifesto, the TrueWomanblog@TrueWoman.com . . . did I say True Woman enough there?

Mary: And we’re now having TrueWoman101.com, which goes along with the new Bible study resource.

Dannah Gresh: I think it’s really important, this is so key to my heart, in just really understanding. I remember when you described it that night in Schaumburg in 2008. You described it as nailing the colors to the mast.

Nancy: That’s right. It means we’re not backing down.

Dannah: Yes. We’re not backing down. There’s no other option. We can’t go back.

Nancy (from 2008 True Woman Conference): You may have heard the phrase: “Nail the colors to the mast.” Are you familiar with that phrase? The origin of that phrase was in the context of naval battles. A sign of surrender was to lower the flags, or the colors, that identified your ship, and nailing the colors to the mast meant that those flags could not be lowered. It indicated that you had no intention of surrendering. You intended to win the battle or die in the attempt.

So “nail the colors to the mast” is a phrase that has come to mean “to make a firm declaration of what you believe.” The implication is that the declaration may not be popular—and if you doubt that, go on the blogosphere and look up True Woman. There’s some ugly stuff out there.

The calling is not to be popular. You may be criticized when you nail your colors to the mast, but you’re saying, “That doesn’t matter. I believe in my cause. I’ve committed myself. I’ve taken a stand, and there is no turning back.”

C.T. Studd was a British missionary in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. He said,

Nail the colors to the mast. That is the right thing to do, and, therefore, that is what we must do, and do it now.

What colors? The colors of Christ, the work He has given us to do. Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible by faith in the omnipotence, fidelity and wisdom of the almighty Savior.

Is there a wall in our path? By our God, we will leap over it.

Are there lions and scorpions in our way? We will trample them under our feet.

Does a mountain bar our progress? Saying, "Be thou cast into the sea, we will march on."

Soldiers of Jesus, never surrender. Nail the colors to the mast.

Nancy: Saying, “I want to be a part of what God is doing through this movement,” is costly, and it involves sacrifice. I have learned that in spades since that first conference. There was such joy and exhilaration and exuberance there about what God was doing.

And it has been thrilling. That launched the most fruitful season of my life and of our ministry, and I think some of you would say the same thing. But it also launched me into a three-year period of great battle, too—a lot of opposition, a lot of my own flesh, on various fronts. I found myself over the next two or three years really struggling, “Do I want to stay in this battle?”

So I want to say that anything worth subscribing to, promoting—we’re talking about promoting Christ. But when you do, the apostle Paul said if you’re going to be a Christian, there’s going to be opposition. And it was true in the New Testament. Whenever the Word of God flourished, there was also opposition.

So we’re not saying this is going to be easy. It’s not easy. If we’re women who are, in different ways, laying down our lives in the private sphere and in our ministry’s spheres for Christ, but it is for Him, the conclusion I keep coming back to: He is worthy and worth it.

Mary: We hope that this message is really resonating with the women. I believe it is. I believe that we’ve seen this message resonating with the young women of this generation—the teens, the early teens. There’s a sense that this is something important, and they can be a part of it.

I’m so glad that we’re able to just sit here and, really, offer resources, offer some ideas of how individual women, in their homes and in their lives . . . We’re all busy women. We all have families. We all have things we need to do. Some of us are career women. Some women are single, and some married. We’re all in different ages and phases of life, and we all have our different priorities.

But I think that there’s ways for every women to get involved in this and to really spur her sisters on and to keep the sisterhood in mind, and to do it for the sisters.

Holly Elliff: I want to encourage the women who have been through this study to take up that mantel as well. You mentioned, Nancy, there were moments where it was frightening to pursue. It was frightening to move ahead.

And there are women who are in the midst of battles in their everyday life, but I just want to so encourage them to nail the colors to the mast and pursue Christ because it is worth it. It’s worth it not just for us, for our generation, but it is worth it for every woman they will impact during the course of their life.

Nancy: Long after we’re with the Lord.

Kim Wagner: Long after those coming behind us.

Nancy: Mary, you said something when we were at dinner last night, our table-talk group, and it just resonated with all of us around that table. I just want to ask you to repeat it. You said, “This is not about exalting womanhood.” As we’re looking at this whole study in review, can you just take us there for a minute?

Mary: Yes. We will go wrong if we think this is about womanhood, or if we think it’s about us, because it isn’t. When we’re talking about womanhood, we’re just wresting with how to honor Christ. This is about telling a story of the gospel. This is about telling God’s story. This is about bringing God glory.

This is about being daughters who display the “Wow!” of Jesus, daughters who display the “Wow!” of Jesus in the way we do our lives as women in becoming who God created us to be, in becoming the beautiful women God has created us to be and having that inner beauty just radiate the presence of Christ in the way that God created us to radiate it.

So we can never ever lose sight of that. We can never ever think that this about a list of prescribed behaviors or this is how you’re going to do life or how you’re going to do marriage or what you’re going to do with kids or how you’re going to do singleness or any of that.

Ultimately, it’s for the glory of God.

Nancy: Yes. We live for that day when the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. It’s a touching and humbling thing to think that being women, being designed by the Divine Designer as women, and living out that divine call is part of what makes that day possible.

Mary: It’s what that day points to.

Nancy: It’s the power of God that does it. We don’t do it, but we’re seeing where God is at work, and we’re joining Him as women in believing Him and living in the hope that that day will come.

I think it would be appropriate if we would close this series by just joining our hearts in prayer. I want us to pray for the women who’ve taken this study. Just a couple of you pray, and we’ll join our hearts, and those participating in this video series or are listening to audio, to just ask God to work in these women’s hearts. I’d just appeal to them: Don’t leave it to us to be the True Woman Movement. You be a part of what God is doing in our day for His glory.

But we want to pray for you. So join us, if you would, and, Mary, I’ll ask you to close in just a moment, if you would. Let’s join our hands and our hearts and cry out to the Lord.

Kim: Oh Father, I thank You so much that You’ve given us this calling as women. You’ve created us as women to live out the purpose of glorifying You, to show others Your goodness, to show others the transformation power that You are able to do within us. Please be glorified.

I lift up these women that are watching right now. Would You plant in their heart the vision for what You can do within them and through them; that Your great name, Oh God, would fill this earth, and people would be able to say, “The Lord alone is God”?

Dannah: Lord, I just want to lift up the woman that feels so inadequate and just has that lie in her heart that she’ll be found out, that she’ll be exposed, that she can’t possibly be the true woman that You’ve called her to be.

Lord, those are lies from the enemy, and I just lift up her heart to You, and my prayer is that she would find one friend, one sister to just confess her fears to, to confess her past to, and to commit to a glorious future together. Lord, be with her today.

Holly: And, Father, I just thank You that, as You call us forward, as You call us into change, we don’t have to produce it. We don’t have to have the energy or the drive for it in ourselves, but, Lord, we can turn and depend on Your grace, the grace in which we stand. And, Lord, You give us then the power and the desire to walk in obedience to You.

Lord, I pray that every woman listening to this would recognize that it is not about her. It is about who Christ is in her.

Mary: Father, I just pray for the women who are watching, our sisters. We don’t know them by name, but we know they are our sisters because they love You. And for those who have not yet entered into a relationship with You, I pray that their hearts will be drawn to Christ, Lord, and that they will see this as being so attractive, and that they will see Christ as being so attractive that they will be drawn into a relationship there.

And, Father, I pray that You will give us a vision to be the type of women You want us to be, that we will be the women that You created us to be so that we may experience, really, and become who we are, but more than that, that we may see the lives of our families changed, that we may see our homes changed, that we may see our communities changed, that we may see our churches changed, and, Lord, that we may impact a generation, that we may leave a legacy that our lives may be something that counts for eternity.

So, Father, I just pray for every woman that You will stir in her heart what You would have her do to obey You, the areas of sin that she needs to confess and get right in her life, and just the next step to take along the path toward Your idea.

Father, we just love You, and we want to exalt the gospel. We want to exalt the story of Jesus Christ by becoming God’s true woman. Amen.