Join us tonight for a great discussion on women in ministry. Aubrey will be leading the discussion and we will present all sides of the women in ministry issue including the egalitarian and complementarian positions. Check out our Girls and the Church tab for articles on the subject.
Tell us the story about you and God.
Not you and the church. But, you and God. The story you write when no one is looking. The raw facts…the hurt…the joy…the love…the fear.
Almost five years ago, I accepted a position at the Book Center at Dallas Theological Seminary with no intention of attending seminary or even pursuing ministry as a career. I’d graduated from college about a year and a half ago and was left with a bad taste in my mouth from the secular workplace. So, moving to Dallas provided me with a new venue and a new opportunity.
When I came to DTS, my only objective was to work in a field that interested me within a Christian environment. I was raised as a Christian and spent about half of my college years in Bible Study and Christian ministry and wanted to surround myself with others who thought like I did. I was fortunate enough to move with my sister and find a great church near our apartment. A few months later, God opened the door for us to help out with the college ministry at Irving Bible Church. Even though I worked at a seminary, I tried my best to keep that world and the work I did at church separate from each other. In my mind, theology (your belief about God) and practical service at a church really didn’t fit together unless you were a pastor. So, I bit my tongue through the first six months of work as I listened to seasoned academics throw around big words that I thought pretentiously described topics that could be understood by children. I mean, why must we call a class on salvation, soteriology? It didn’t make sense to me; and each time Kelly, my co-worker, asked me to audit a class or enroll in the seminary I graciously declined.
Around the middle of December she approached me again and asked if I would audit a class with her in the Spring. With a sigh of apprehension, I accepted. Then she told me that the class she’d picked was, you guessed it, Soteriology. How interesting, I thought to myself, I can teach children about salvation in a one-hour session at AWANA’s and now I’m going to be listening to a professor rattle on about it for an entire semester.
I was saved, I grew up in a Christian home and even attended Christian schools, what else did I need to know? Well, the first words out of my professor’s mouth answered that question and changed my life and the way that I think about God.
“I want you to know what you believe and be able to speak about it well,” my professor, Dr. Robert Pyne said passionately. He stood there with years of theological study under his belt and the greatest desire for us to know the God who sacrificed himself on our behalf. He knew the importance of theology in our daily lives. That small sentence humbled my pride and increased my hunger for the knowledge of God. It also showed me that I knew nothing about the God who came to earth and sacrificed his life to save us and bring glory to himself.
But, was I alone in this realization? Surely, my other classmates had not always had a thirst for knowing God? And if they had, where did they get it? How was it developed?
As the semester continued, I was fortunate enough to meet girl in my class named, Crystal. She was studying for a degree in Biblical Studies and had a grasp of theology unlike anyone else I’d met up to that point at the seminary. Unlike myself, she had not grown up in the traditional Southern Evangelical religious background that I was familiar with. Crystal was from Oregon and her religious background centered around a belief called Armstrongism. Not knowing much about this tradition I began asking questions about her background and how she came to such a complete understanding of theology.
One day while we ate lunch she told me that the religion she knew as a child was inaccurate and in reality a cult. She’d discovered this in high school and her experience with God began as a search for truth.
Crystal was a true academic, one of those people that just gets it. She disucssed with me the way she searched the Bible, commentaries and other literature for the real God and how she refused to accept what other people told her. If God was going to be real and Christianity valid then it meant hours of study and exploration. As we sat there discussing our backgrounds I realized that we’d both been gipped. Even though we’d both grown up with very different religious backgrounds each of us had come to believe things about God that weren’t true. And each of us were determined to help other college women come to know the true God. Not that we had him figured out but, we knew that it was worth it to try to bring God glory by discussing theology with college women.
Unfortunately, many women our age have no desire to know God or even the basics of their faith. Many Christian girls our age are content knowing what they already do or nothing at all. They have little desire for deep study of biblical truth and that is true both for girls who have grown up in the church and for those who haven’t.
Many college women usually feel one of six ways: (of course there may be more)
- Content and complacent accepting what they are told to believe.
- Hopeful and waiting for the day when they get married to a spiritual man who can encourage their growth.
- Cynical and uninterested in the role theology or belief plays in practical life.
- Eager to know the God of their lives.
- Uninterested with God and doubt His existence.
- Hostile toward God and those who believe in Him.
So, what did we do? We started a ministry called T-Tiime where we did our best to answer the hard questions and develop in them a desire to know God.
