When I entered ordained ministry over 3 years ago, there were days when I felt rather alone. As a single woman, I was living alone in a manse built for a family. Four bedrooms left me plenty of space to spread out and get creative (home office space to house my book addiction – sure! [...]
A New Column: Along the Way
All of a sudden, they were everywhere I looked. There was the young woman just out of college we hired to work with our children and youth, the one who decided to go on to seminary after just a year with us. Then there was the female seminarian who came to spend a year getting [...]
A Day in the Life of a Pastor/Mother
I love this photo. Exemplified in this photo is where my life as a mom and as a pastor intersect. This is the day that my daughter was baptized. I love how my son is looking up and probably wondering what is going on. My husband who is also a pastor had the joy of [...]
The ABC’s of Christmas: A Worship Service
by Erin Klassen This past Christmas was my first in a new congregation. I inherited the early worship service on Christmas Eve. This service is intended to be family focused, and comes with the long standing tradition of having ALL children in attendance dress up and participate in the service in some way, usually in [...]
For Richer or For Poorer
by Angie Mabry-Nauta Editor's Note: This article is one in an occasional series called "All About the Benjamins," running this fall on Fidelia's Sisters. As many congregations and organizations are running stewardship campaigns and lining up budgets for 2012, we'll be taking a look at the sometimes-taboo topic of money, and the role it plays in [...]
Shame
by Name Withheld An online engagement announcement. In one second I was thrown from a bored moment at the computer, idly Facebooking between tasks, to crushing doubt, self-criticism, and questioning every decision I had made in the last four years. The last thirty five years, really. The last guy I had been in a serious [...]
This New Call
by Abigail Conley I miss my kids. No, I don’t have any children of my own, adopted, biological or otherwise. Instead, I had a church’s children to call my own—a whole bunch of them. From the babies to the high school students, they were mine. I was in seminary and Lawrenceville First Christian Church (Disciples [...]
Conspiracy Theories
by Diana Hodges-Batzka I had no choice but to join the conspiracy. In the summer of 2009, I started my first call post-seminary and ordination as a pastoral resident at a growing, mid-sized, suburban, mainline protestant congregation in the Deep South. During a planning retreat in August with my senior pastor, I was introduced to [...]
The Other Side of the Pulpit
by Name Witheld Life behind the pulpit has not gone as expected. I know God does the unexpected, but I cannot think God wanted my first call to erode my self-esteem and damage my desire to live into my call to the point that I wonder if I will ever have the nerve to [...]