Thirty years ago, I snuck into our college Bible study just as it was getting started and noticed a new person. When we went around the circle to introduce ourselves, she mentioned that she was traveling through our area from Florida after stepping down from her role as youth pastor. I felt a jolt of electricity flow through me. I had never met a woman who was a youth pastor. As soon as the meeting ended, I asked her to meet me for coffee the next day so I could hear all about her life as a pastor.
The next day we sat across a table from each other, and she told me about her journey to follow God’s calling for her life. She’d gone to college and seminary and had been serving at a church for several years, but she had recently stepped down.
My mind was blown. I wanted to go to seminary. I wanted to be a pastor. I told her I was so amazed that God caused our paths to cross, and I asked her for advice.
I was hoping to hear what classes to take at seminary or how to find a role in a church. Instead, what she told me echoed the advice from the fictional character in Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” in which a young girl, captivated by her vision of a performer’s life, feels compelled to wait at the stage door to meet her. When the girl sees the star, she exclaims, “You’re living my dream!” What follows is a catchy chorus embedded in a cautionary tale. The showgirl tells her hopeful protégé that she can’t possibly know what she is asking for. There is no way she would ever want that life.
Over coffee, the woman told me, “Don’t do it. The church will eat you up and spit you out and leave you for dead.” She shared the pain of her call and how it had caused her to struggle with the question of whether God was even real. I walked back to my apartment with a heavy heart. I knew that God was calling me into ministry, but I didn’t want to end up broken and full of doubt. I asked God to protect my heart and not to leave me desolate.
After graduation, I went straight to seminary. I have now been serving in ministry for more than twenty-five years. It has not always been easy. I have been excluded, told to leave, ignored, overlooked, dismissed, and disrespected. I now understand the life that youth pastor was warning me about, but I also know the goodness of our God. As a pastor, I have had the privilege to walk through life with people and see God move in powerful ways. I have witnessed God at work through the brokenness of our churches. God has been faithful to uphold my distressed little prayer from all those years ago.
In her memoir titled Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, Barbara Brown Taylor describes her sense of calling. She explores the longing of waiting for a specific role and the tension between seeing God revealed in Scripture and God’s activity in the present day. As I read her experience, I resonated with the strong pull toward the priestly and pastoral acts and her hesitation about imagining herself in those roles. Our own imaginations often limit our vision of the future. She quotes William Faulkner: “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” For many called to ministry, this is the first conflict we must sort through. Is God really calling me to this? What even is my call? Sorting through the conflict in one’s own heart about God’s calling is crucial work.
“I now understand the life that youth pastor was warning me about, but I also know the goodness of our God.”
— Mary Peterson
When I first began considering ministry, people were quick to affirm my gifts and passion for the church, but the only role they could see for me was that of a pastor’s wife. I have often wished that someone had taken me under their wing when I was seventeen and spoken into the ways God calls and gifted women. Over the years, however, I have realized the gift this inner conflict taught me was tenacity. As I wrestled with God about the calling God placed upon me, I became more and more sure of it. The inner conflict gave me the confidence to face the many hurdles I have faced as a woman in ministry.
As Brown Taylor describes the day she moved to her rural parish, she shares the anxiety of being a woman called to a place that previously had been reserved for men. As women, we embody the tension of tradition, Scripture, and practice. I have felt this tension in each role where I have served. As I move through the world, I am reminded of how important it is to remain aware of my own emotional responses to people who may not yet understand that God fully gifts and calls women to ministry. This tension, and sometimes outright conflict around it, cannot be ignored or avoided, but I can be aware of my own energy and health levels. Practicing self-care and focusing on the work God has called me to do are important ways to manage the stress that comes with this conflict.
Brown Taylor’s relationship with Scripture is also a tension I struggle with. I love to get buried in the word of God, and sometimes I forget to look up from books in order to participate in the work around me. I have also found this to be true of the people in the church. We want Bible studies, but we don’t want them to challenge our understanding of who God is or the way we see the world. That creates a kind of cognitive dissonance when the Spirit nudges us and we have to choose between acting in response to those nudges and preserving the status quo. Our task should be, as Brown Taylor says, “to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake.” Shifting from studying God’s word to embodying God’s word to a lost and hurting world can be a challenge, but it is the task to which we have been called. Navigating the conflict that arises from helping people learn this requires patience and courage, especially when challenging topics that are proclaimed from pulpits as “unbiblical” or “against the created order.”
Our work as God’s people is to become the physical representation of God’s intention for this world. The work begun at creation reveals the heart of God to partner with humanity and to bring people together to accomplish this work. God breathed life into the first human, and the imago Dei took on flesh. Then God created an ezer kenegdo (a strong helper) because humans were never designed to go it alone. We are, indeed, better together. Throughout Scripture, we see God invite women to lead, teach, preach, govern, extend care and welcome, and a myriad of other ways to further God’s work in the world. Women are active participants in the work of God throughout both the Old and New Testaments.
“God sees us. God knows the value of women and the gifts that have been bestowed upon those created with the imago Dei.”
— Mary Peterson
Church history reflects the influence of women in the early church. We see the writings of the desert mothers, the collective work of the Beguines, and the visionary leadership of women to start Sunday schools, hospitals, churches, and countless other ministries. For the past thirty years, I have been on a journey to notice the places where the roles of women have been erased, diminished, or ignored by the church and the world. But here’s the thing: God sees us. God knows the value of women and the gifts that have been bestowed upon those created with the imago Dei. Imagine a world with no barriers for living into the calling God has placed on our lives. Maybe the work we need to do in our collective imagination is to embody the unity Paul writes about in Galatians—a unity that is based on the removal of political, social, cultural, and gender divisions. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, NIV).
As the Covenant celebrates fifty years of ordaining women this year, we still have a lot of work to do. Our churches need to continue to see the giftedness of women leaders and to advocate for women who experience God’s calling to ministry. We need to invite women to preach, to serve in leadership positions within the church, and to serve at conference and denominational levels. We need to read books written by women, examine power structures, and look at systems that divide rather than unite. Maybe someday we won’t have to share cautionary tales about the challenges we face as women in ministry. Until then, may we all work together to ensure that all of God’s people can envision their callings to the fullest.
This article was first published in the Summer 2026 issue of The Covenant Companion the official magazine of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
