The Young Clergy Women Project
A network of the youngest ordained clergy women.
Editor’s note: In celebration of our book partnership with Chalice Press, we are giving away a book from one of our YCW authors! Please consider buying, reading, or even writing a book for TYCWP’s imprint with Chalice Press. In a Q&A for the Patheos Book Club, I was asked if I wrote Any Day a [...]
Most of my pastor friends who are also moms have either younger children than I do, or much older. Much has been written, and rightly so, about parenting a baby while you lead a council meeting, night nursing followed by church in the morning, and how to manage day care and babysitting with the odd [...]
I was sitting alone in the darkness of my seminary dorm room. There was an exceptionally sad song playing on my iPod. The tears were pouring down my face. As I pulled another tissue from the box, I said out loud: “I am not equipped to do this. I don’t have what it takes to [...]
If you ever watched much of “Will and Grace,” the name of my city might sound familiar. Schenectady, oddly not a fictional name, home to fictional Grace, that unknown, upstate city that was fodder for more than a few jokes. I never got the feeling that the writers had ever actually been here, and [...]
A Sermon based on Psalm 139 verses 1-18. In 1944 two people feel in love with each other. She was the daughter of tobacco farmers; her father tended the fields while her mother tended the children. He was the son of a carpenter and a gardener; his father built houses while his mother fed the [...]
“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21) “What do you do?” Oh, how quickly this questions bubbles [...]
My 35th birthday was a difficult one. I had been serving as a solo pastor in a small Presbyterian Church in Washington State for 5 years, and it just didn’t seem to grow, no matter how hard I worked. In my aging congregation, I had lots of opportunity to care for widows, but I also [...]
Editor’s Note: This article by a future young clergy woman is the final installment in an occasional series called “A Lenten Pause,” running on Fidelia’s Sisters. As many young clergy women plan to come to our summer conference, Sabbath in the City, in Chicago we’ll be taking a look at the sometimes terrifying topic of sabbath and [...]
This week the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, the denomination’s governing body, is convening in Tampa. The Rev. Katie Dawson is in Tampa as part of the delegation from the Iowa Annual Conference. Her post, reprinted here from her blog, “salvaged faith,” raises questions particular to the UMC, but also for young clergy [...]