This fall’s top ten list cover a variety of bible studies on James. Each curriculum gives you resources to lead a group study, but is also perfect as your own personal study.

This fall’s top ten list cover a variety of bible studies on Revelation. Each curriculum gives you resources to lead a group study, but is also perfect as your own personal study.

Our most popular studies on prayer for fall of 2019.

This fall’s top three list cover bible studies on gray areas of faith. Each curriculum gives you resources to lead a group study, but is also perfect as your own personal study.

Our most popular studies for fall of 2019.

Discovering the sufficiency of Christ.

These were your favorite studies on this topic.

Finding comfort and reassurance from God.

Get the most recent headlines and stories from Christianity Today, including daily meditations from the president and CEO of Christianity Today written specifically for those struggling through the coronavirus pandemic.

Congregations and pastoral candidates are adapting the hiring process and getting to know each other online.

Phillip Bethancourt’s kids aren’t convinced other children actually live in College Station, Texas. They moved from Nashville a few weeks ago for their dad’s new job as pastor of Central Church, but because of the coronavirus shutdowns, the four boys have yet to go school, make friends in the neighborhood, or meet the kids at their new church.

Bethancourt too is living in his own strange parallel reality, preaching to a video camera in an empty auditorium and waiting for a congregation he hasn’t seen to officially vote him in. If all goes as planned on Sunday, he’ll become a lead pastor for the first time while his flock is still social distancing.

“Nothing matches the opportunity to be with people in person,” said Bethancourt, who left his job as vice president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to pursue the call at Central Church. “But I would say the process we’ve been using so far is the best substitute we can create.”

Several other pastors and churches are in the same predicament, caught in the process of applying, interviewing, and onboarding during the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is not the time to be without a pastor,” said William Vanderbloemen, who runs a consulting agency that helps Christian organizations with hiring. His phone has been “ringing off the hook” with churches wanting to get serious about their pastoral search.

Many have decided to forge ahead with the process despite the unique challenges of social restrictions and shutdowns due to the pandemic. Several congregations, including high-profile megachurches Moody Church and Willow Creek Community Church, were in the midst of leadership transitions and have named ...

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Victims’ advocates caution institutions against plans to “restore” fallen leaders.

Update (May 1): Cedarville University president Thomas White has been placed on administration leave by the school’s board of trustees. A week after Anthony Moore was fired by White over “additional information related to [his] past,” the board announced it will commission an independent investigation of Moore and an audit of his hiring.

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Another case of a leader with an abusive past moving from one evangelical institution to another has intensified scrutiny on Christian hiring practices and responses to abuse.

In ministry contexts, the desire to keep fallen leaders out of positions where they might again abuse their authority is sometimes met with another perspective—a hope that a redemptive and forgiving God would allow people to be restored to leadership. Both victims’ advocates and community members worry that administrators weighing those considerations at Cedarville University made the wrong call.

In 2017, Cedarville welcomed Anthony Moore six months after he was fired from the lead pastor position of The Village Church’s Fort Worth campus. President Thomas White wrote that he offered to shepherd Moore through a five-year plan of restoration at the conservative Baptist school while he taught theology, helped coach basketball, and served as a special advisor on diversity.

CT spoke with four current and former Cedarville professors who said they knew Moore had made a “mistake” related to same-sex attraction and technology, based on White’s introduction and Moore’s own telling. Some assumed pornography or an online relationship. They had no idea that he had reportedly filmed a subordinate at his previous church in the shower. The revelation, detailed by multiple ...

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USCIRF chair Tony Perkins gives CT a behind-the-scenes look at today’s annual report on “systematic, ongoing, and egregious” violations.

A new report aims to “unflinchingly criticize the records of US allies and adversaries alike” on religious freedom.

And there’s a lot to report, with more headlines each month confirming the Pew Research Center’s 10-year analysis that government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion have reached record levels worldwide.

Today’s 21st annual report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) identifies significant problems in 29 countries—but sees “an upward trajectory overall.”

“Our awareness is going to grow greater, and the problem will appear more pronounced,” USCIRF chair Tony Perkins told CT. “But as we continue to work on it, I think we will see tremendous progress in the next few years if we stay the present course.”

Created as an independent, bipartisan federal commission by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, USCIRF casts a wider net than the US State Department, which annually designates Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) for such nations’ violations of religious freedom, or places them on a Special Watch List (SWL) if less severe.

Last December, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced CPC status for Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

USCIRF now recommends adding India, Nigeria, Russia, Syria, and Vietnam.

And where the State Department put only Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Uzbekistan on the watch list, USCIRF recommends also including Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Central African Republic, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Turkey.

USCIRF’s mandate is to provide oversight and advice to the State Department. ...

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The Southern Baptist publisher plans to restrict its budget by at least $25 million through reducing staff and salaries.

LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing entity of the Southern Baptist Convention, has announced it will cut roughly 10 percent of its operating budget through staff reductions, a hiring freeze, and salary cuts.

The move comes after five consecutive weeks of steep revenue decline in the wake of the coronavirus and the expectation that sales may not rebound anytime soon.

The Nashville-based Christian publisher said revenue is down 24 percent compared with the same period last year, largely due to a sharp drop in bulk orders from churches for resources such as Sunday school curricula, Bible study materials, and Vacation Bible School curricula.

It’s not clear yet if SBC churches or other churches that buy LifeWay materials will hold VBS or camp programming this year.

LifeWay’s budget for this fiscal year is $281.3 million. It said it planned to cut between $25 million and $30 million from its budget.

The announcement is just the first indication of the financial blow many US churches and denominational agencies are facing as a result of the COVID-19 shutdowns—a blow that could reshape the religious landscape for decades to come.

“LifeWay stands to lose tens of millions of dollars of revenue that the organization would normally generate over the summer months from camps, events, VBS, and ongoing curriculum sales,” said Ben Mandrell, LifeWay’s CEO, in a news release. “LifeWay is mitigating these losses as much as possible through various expense reduction plans, including staff reductions and cuts in non-employee expenses.”

LifeWay said members of its executive leadership team will give up one month’s salary beginning in May. It did not say how it would achieve a staff reduction, ...

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The Christian magazine had halted publication without informing subscribers and has shared little about its founder’s sabbatical.

Last month, Relevant Podcast listeners heard a familiar voice in their earbuds: founder Cameron Strang, returning to the show’s lineup—and to leadership at Relevant Media Group—six months after stepping away due to public criticism from former employees.

Though Relevant promised to be transparent with its efforts to address Strang’s alleged racial insensitivity and difficult leadership style, it did not bring up the process again until the April 10 update announcing his return as CEO.

In the meantime, the bimonthly Christian magazine had not sent out an issue to its 27,000 paid subscribers since Strang left in September, leaving fans to wonder about its future.

Strang told listeners that he’s “excited to be back” for a new era at Relevant as it prepares to revamp and expand its podcast offerings, transition to a yearly print publication, and relaunch its website, all under an advisory board newly enlisted to oversee leadership of the 10-person staff.

Relevant’s loyal followers, some of whom have been around for its entire 20-year history, are excited to hear Strang’s voice again. But as much as they hope to see the kind of progress the company has promised and prayed for, a few have questioned the lack of communication.

“When the print issues stopped coming, I was disappointed but figured the company was trying to figure out how to move forward. I suspected they had lost a lot of advertisers & revenue,” wrote Erin Bird, an Iowa pastor, in a Twitter thread responding to the April update. “I’ve patiently walked thru this w/ you, actually prayed for you guys (& those hurt), & was hoping to see a repentance from Cameron that would show the world ...

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Russell Moore’s earliest appointees helped define a new era for the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm.

Three top leaders who served alongside Russell Moore at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) since the start of his presidency have left the Southern Baptist entity over the past six months.

Outgoing vice presidents Phillip Bethancourt and Daniel Darling and former director Andrew Walker embodied key emphases of the ERLC in recent years, as it developed new ways to equip churches to address racial justice, sexual abuse, and societal pressures around marriage and family.

The ERLC said in a news release that its mission continues uninterrupted, the staff changes providing an opportunity “to strengthen the work of the organization.”

Bethancourt—who stepped down from his position as executive vice president on April 26 to become pastor of Central Church in College Station, Texas—cited the trio’s work as evidence of “a generational shift on how Southern Baptists engage the public square.”

Days before Bethancourt’s departure, Darling, the ERLC vice president for communications, announced he too would be leaving, taking on a position as senior vice president for communications at the National Religious Broadcasters. Walker, former director of research and senior fellow in Christian ethics, departed October 31 to become a full-time ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

To fill their roles, the ERLC named former vice president for operations and chief of staff Daniel Patterson as the new executive vice president and spread Walker’s responsibilities among other staff. Darling’s replacement has not been announced.

Several additional staff shifts were announced last week, including the tapping of Travis Wussow, general counsel and vice president ...

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An alternative college admissions test, used by some Christian schools, draws a record 50,000 students.

The Classic Learning Test (CLT), a niche college entrance exam aspiring to bring a sense of virtue to standardized tests, saw a 1,000 percent increase in registrations over its short history when the SAT and ACT canceled testing for the remainder of the school year due to COVID-19.

“Because we are able to administer the test remotely, we’re kind of the only game in town,” said Jeremy Tate, who created the CLT four years ago amid a renaissance in Classical education, including among Christians.

At its first administration in June 2016, 47 students took the CLT. With the bump in registration, 50,000 students will take its suite of tests—the CLT, and the CLT-8 and CLT-10, designed for lower grades—during the 2019-2020 academic year. That’s more than double last year’s total.

Though not a Christian company, CLT references figures including John Henry Newman and C. S. Lewis in its promotional materials and stresses the moral, formational dimension to education. The exam has been popular among classical Christian schools, which educate over 40,000 students in the US, and homeschoolers, who make up about 40 percent of CLT test-takers.

So far, 178 colleges and universities in the US accept the exam, mostly Catholic and Protestant schools. For other institutions, the CLT can serve as a supplemental assessment.

The College Board and ACT Inc., the companies that administer the SAT and ACT, respectively, have canceled or postponed in-person testing until the fall, leading many colleges to make the admissions exams an optional part of their applications. In 2018, around 2 million students took the SAT and 1.9 million took the ACT.

While some registrants may turn to the CLT this year for the convenience ...

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CT interviews Stephen Rasche on Erbil’s Catholic presence, the need for Christian unity, and why Christians will “no longer be shy” with the gospel.

For 25 years, Stephen Rasche was a “bare knuckles” international lawyer. But in 2010, he offered his services to the Chaldean Catholic Church of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and has increasingly dedicated his life to the preservation of this ancient community.

Under the leadership of Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda, in 2015 Rasche helped found the Catholic University of Erbil, where he serves as vice chancellor. Also the director of its Institute for Ancient and Threatened Christianity, Rasche lived this title as ISIS ravaged Iraq’s Christian homelands in the Nineveh Plains and many believers fled to Erbil.

After testifying on their behalf before the United Nations and the US Congress, Rasche allows them to represent themselves in his recent book, The Disappearing People: The Tragic Fate of Christians in the Middle East. The book has won a diverse range of endorsements, from leaders such as Matthew Hassan Kukah, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Nigeria; Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in the world; and Thomas Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute.

The US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom reports that less than 250,000 Christians are living in Iraq, most in Kurdistan or on the Nineveh Plains. Two-thirds belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church.

CT interviewed Rasche about the logic of establishing a university during a genocide, how its Catholic identity functions in a Muslim society, and his enduring optimism for Christianity in Iraq.

What led you personally to invest your life in this endeavor?

In 2010, Bishop Warda had just been made archbishop, and I went to pay him a visit of respect, asking if there ...

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How the pandemic concentrated pressures on small churches—and how the body of Christ is stepping up to help, one $3,000 grant at a time.

Philadelphia pastor Kevin Cropper’s heart sank last month when he saw a message asking for food among the prayer requests emailed to his church.

“It was a request for something tangible, and we didn’t have it,” Cropper said.

His congregation, Ark of Safety Christian Church, had canceled its weekly food distribution since it ran out of donations when it stopped gathering in March. “It makes you feel bad because isn’t that what our mission is? We want to be able to help in this type of crisis, but we need the resources to do it.”

That’s the problem with being a small, inner-city black church during a pandemic. Black adults are more than twice as likely as whites or Hispanic Americans to know someone who has been hospitalized or died due to COVID-19. Their communities are afraid, grieving, and suffering from the virus themselves; and they are far less likely to have the staff, budgets, or space to help as much as they feel called.

“We are in the city. We don’t have acres, we stay close to each other, and it’s very easy to spread the virus,” said Kato Hart Jr., pastor of Hold the Light Ministries, a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) congregation in Detroit.

American counties with a higher-than-average proportion of black residents now account for half of coronavirus cases and 60 percent of deaths. Even in a church of 50, word keeps spreading of which members have lost relatives to the virus: aunties, uncles, grandparents. Hart has lost fellow brothers in ministry, citing a letter from denominational leadership saying 30 COGIC bishops have fallen to COVID-19—including a dozen in Michigan alone.

“We’re in a fight, and we need help. These megachurches, ...

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(UPDATED) The St. Louis pastor spoke up about the difficulties faced by leaders and critiqued “celebrity culture” in ministry.

Darrin Patrick, a megachurch pastor, author, and speaker, has died.

Patrick was a teaching pastor at Seacoast Church, a multi-site megachurch based in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis, where he lived.

In a Friday evening update, Seacoast Church stated: “Darrin was target shooting with a friend at the time of his death. An official cause of death has not been released but it appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No foul play is suspected.”

Patrick’s unexpected death came as a shock to friends and colleagues. Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist, in Hendersonville, Tennessee, said that Patrick was scheduled to speak at his church next weekend.

“I just talked to him Tuesday and Wednesday,” said Gallaty. “This is the second close friend I have lost in a year.”

Gallaty first met Patrick in 2015 and had invited him to speak the following year at a men’s ministry event at Long Hollow. Just before the event, he said, Patrick called and said he was leaving the ministry.

At the time, Patrick had been a rising star among Reformed evangelical circles and was serving as vice-president of the Acts 29 church planting network. He was fired from Journey for what church elders called misconduct including “inappropriate meetings, conversations, and phone calls with two women” and an abuse of power.

Despite Patrick’s fall from ministry, the two stayed friends. Patrick admitted his faults and got counseling. He went through a restoration process that lasted 26 months, according to a 2019 blog interview posted at Christianity Today. He returned to the ministry as a preacher but not as a senior pastor of a church. ...

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It's not just my own kids' well-being that matters anymore.

My congregation's experiment in using market values to grow our mission.

An interview with Kelly Crow, who has reported on the contemporary art world for 'The Wall Street Journal' since 2006.

The power of partnerships across metropolitan dividing lines.

How we came to answer the question in Memphis.

A look at Staten Island one year after the storm.

The superstorm almost destroyed our home. What happened afterward shocked me.

How Bethany Jenkins's daily devotionals kickstart common-good Christianity in NYC.

And a bit of what our team learned along the way.

Don Coleman, Richmond's newly elected school board chairman, wants more churches to adopt local, struggling schools.

How discipline and commitment prove essential in your leadership ministry.

Andy Stanley said, “Leadership is stewardship, and you are accountable,” while speaking to a group of leaders at Catalyst Atlanta in 2006. This quote absolutely resonated with me, because we can forget that as leaders we are responsible for our own leadership. Not only are we accountable to ourselves and those we lead, but most importantly we are accountable to the God that called us to lead.

Leadership in its most basic definition is the action or ability to lead a group or organization. Having been in leadership in education, business, the nonprofit sector, and ministry, I know all too well the truth of this statement. You are only a leader if someone is following you, so we need to give attention to how we lead, the impact of our leadership, and the health of our leadership.

Leading effectively requires discipline, and I have learned I am most effective when I discipline myself. As a leader, I have found three disciplines that help me lead well and avoid leadership pitfalls and burnout. I have used these in every area I have been called to lead. These lifelines have proven viable, having saved my life and the lives entrusted to me. Through the lifelines of prayer, fasting, and flexibility, my leadership has been enhanced in multiple ways. Albeit, prayer, fasting, and flexibility are disciplines, I consider them lifelines because of the life-giving power they have provided.

The lifeline of prayer

We know the power in prayer. We can perform a historical analysis of scripture and see many of the leaders God used were given to prayer. Prayer is what brings our will into alignment with God’s will. Whether God calls us to lead in church or the marketplace, our prayer lives are essential to our success as leaders. ...

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When women (and artists and feelers) underestimate their leadership abilities

Yesterday, I think something snapped in me. I had heard a particular comment exactly the number of times my heart could take it, and I decided I’m done hearing it. For all our sakes.

I was listening to an intelligent, educated young woman—a leader in her congregation who has brought life into the world, knows how to tend it, and who also knows how to tend the life of the spirit in herself and others. She was describing a painful conversation she’d had with her senior pastor who said, “I need you to be more biblical. You’re often too emotional.”

Now, it should be said that we all can let our emotions run the show. There are times when we need to take a moment to discern how we’re handling our emotions, to decide when emotion is a sign of something significant to be heard and when it’s an overreaction in the moment which we need to set aside. Having said that, this kind of comment from a senior pastor can be incredibly destructive to the souls of women and to our recognition of what women bring as leaders.

Studies of fiber pathways in the brain show men naturally think in more centralized ways, whereas women often consider information across both rational and intuitive ways of thinking. Given the scientific evidence that the problem-solving tendency in men naturally favors logic, perception, and action, when emotional, subjective, relational information is communicated by women, it’s easy for men to say, “I’m rational. She’s emotional.” This thought process denies the possibility that the woman has anything reasonable or logical to contribute, undermining her argument or education. Consequently, in the frustration of those kinds of disparaging false ...

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When you experience hurt from those who serve beside you

When I was twenty-three, I left the United States for a scary, exciting job as an international campus minister. I was all nerves with my year of seminary, husband of a year, and life packed into five large suitcases. It was an adventure into the unknown, following God’s call to places I’d only visited briefly. I’d speak a different language, learn new customs, and celebrate new government holidays—all in a bid to be a little-Christ to students at a university in Europe.

I returned at twenty-six, an older, wiser, and more broken woman. The years had not been easy or kind to me. My exterior circumstances in Europe had been easy. I was a campus minister on a cosmopolitan campus with students from 130 different countries. I had running water, plenty of delicious restaurants nearby, friends I liked, and a city I’d fallen in love with. But…

And this is a big but…

I hadn’t been emotionally or spiritually supported during our ministry years. I’d been told I was a liar, that I wasn’t trustworthy, that I was needy and demanding, and that I was trouble. The word had been given to me as an identity marker. I wasn’t making trouble; I was the trouble. And for a woman already uncertain about my welcome and position in ministry, that was devastating. It became a toxic environment that sapped me to nothing. I lost weight. I grew gray hair overnight. I withdrew from friends. I developed an unhealthy relationship with chocolate and books.

In short, I showed some of the signs of an abusive relationship.

And it wasn’t the students. No, they were wonderful. It wasn’t my husband either. He was my lifeline. Unfortunately, it was a fellow team member. We’d been friends ...

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Ministering to children as the fully spiritually aware, intuitive thinkers they are.

Much can happen when we learn to equip and empower the children among us. For one woman in ministry, it’s not so much about children learning from grown-ups, but it’s about grown-ups learning from children. Samantha Trimble, Director of Children’s Ministry at The Creek Covenant Church in Walnut Creek, California is a denominational coach for the Evangelical Covenant Church and ambassador for Faith@Home Ministries International. She has experienced firsthand the benefit of approaching each member of the body of Christ as valuable and vital.

“Children are fresh eyes and hearts,” she states in an interview. “They are born fully capable and spiritually aware, but unsullied by our own ideas of how things ‘should’ or ‘must’ be done. They are intuitive thinkers that can make connections that we linearly-thinking grown-ups would not.”

Trimble equates the capability of children to having “lantern-like focus,” a concept coined by U.C. Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. Soaking in everything of the world around them (seemingly all at once), young minds learn to experiment with how things connect. This is in direct opposition to adults who, with their tendency to exhibit “flashlight focus,” oftentimes miss what kids naturally see because they fixate on a single spot.

I am one of those guilty of fixating on a single spot, but it’s something Trimble never seems to have succumbed to—which made me all the more eager to hear the rest of her story. After all, who doesn’t want to glean a little bit of a childlike, lantern-like focus?

Trimble met Jesus when she was seven years old. Working out her faith in playground friendships ...

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Why it’s especially hard for women to take critique and how to discern what to do with it.

I hate criticism!

Not because I think I’ve arrived.

But because I fear I never will.

There are some personality and family issues at work there, but it also has something to do with the challenge of being a female leader. When I hear criticism, even from well-meaning people, it sounds just like all those voices that told me I shouldn’t or couldn’t do something I felt I should or could do. And in addition to actual faces and words—try as I might, I can remember who communicated those negative messages—there is a gaping void in the place where I might look for positive reinforcement to help me combat the sinking feeling that criticism brings. There are no women I can look to and say, “But I’m just like her, and she could do this, so I’ll do it like her.” There are no moments I can remember when my pastor looked at me and said, “I see something in you. Have you ever considered ministry?” So, the apparatus I use in the rest of my life that helps me filter criticism just isn’t there to help me process it well in my ministry. My problem is not with healthy, helpful criticism. My problem is that the work of discerning whether and how to internalize criticism is exhausting.

It’s been said to me more than once, you’re too sensitive. This is one of those criticisms that, when you try to defend yourself, only serves to affirm the criticism. The meta-level thinking folds in on itself and leaves me crumpled. Yes, I am sensitive (to the input of others and also to the needs of others), but not all of my discomfort with criticism is a result of sensitivity in the way people mean it to be. When a woman is told, “You’re too sensitive,” it can ...

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Equipping for the challenges and blessings of being called.

For many women leaders, we must be more highly educated than our male counterparts to receive the same acknowledgment of our calling and equipping. That has certainly been true in my experience.

I grew up in a liminal time in my home church. The conversation around women leaders was becoming more and more visible. Capable women were asking hard questions. Traditional pat answers were no longer sufficient. I was lucky to be born in that era because I grew up encouraged to be a leader and pastor by a man who had formerly said women couldn’t be called to preach. But a slow evolution in his beliefs started when I was born.

A granddaughter can change a lot.

I grew up thinking I could do anything until I reached young adulthood. Then the cuteness of having a thirteen-year-old girl read scripture or pray in church hit the asphalt of what do we really believe about women and their callings? It was a tumultuous time. My parents and grandfather shielded me so I only heard rumors of elders fighting or heated disagreements. Slowly, opportunity changed and grew scarcer.

My journey to seminary was perhaps not an extraordinary one for many female leaders. It isn’t surprising that most women pursue seminary for the same reasons men do—the education itself and increased opportunities. I craved education. Increasingly, I’d found the recommended women’s ministry books were light on the theology I found so fascinating.

I read on my own, making my own informal study plan, yet it wasn’t enough. For all that my informal reading was helpful to me, I found it often didn’t count as a female leader. Too often, it was labeled as experience, not knowledge (a difference I still haven’t parsed as being unequal), ...

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How to know whether to leave or stay in your ministry context.

“You’re called in until you’re called out.” I’ll never forget the words my mentor spoke over me when I found myself at a crossroads, wondering if I should stay or go in ministry.

My calling in had been clear: after four years of teaching high school English, I knew God was calling me out of the traditional classroom and into full-time outreach ministry. Sitting in the back of an auditorium one night, I felt the speaker’s words directed solely toward me. If you can’t imagine doing anything else with your life, maybe this is God’s way of directing you into full-time work ministry.

Two and a half years later, I stood at another crossroads: this time, I wondered whether I should return to the classroom, accept a ministry position close to home, or pursue another ministry position hundreds of miles away from home. Soon enough, I heard the words, clear as day: You’re free, my dear. You’re free! Free to follow my heart, I pursued the position eight hundred miles away from home and didn’t look back for another six years—until it really was time for me to go.

By that point, I clearly felt called out. Even though saying goodbye felt like a wrench to the heart, my time was over. Although the pain of leaving sometimes overwhelmed the joy of staying, a single choice to go remained. This time, God didn’t whisper words of clarity to me as much as God sat in silence beside me.

I’d been called out, just as I’d been called in.

Perhaps like me, you find yourself at a similar crossroads in ministry, wondering whether you should stay or go in your particular ministry context. You love the church, and you don’t have to think too far back to remember that ...

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Angie Ward discusses cultivating leadership amid ever-changing responsibilities.

Angie Ward, author of the recently published I Am a Leader, has 30 years of leadership experience in diverse roles in ministry. I was excited to talk with Angie about how our calling shifts through the various seasons of life.

How can a woman’s calling change over the course of her life?

Sometimes we think as young women that we have one calling, and that’s it. We just have to find it, and we put so much weight on that one thing. But for most people, it changes how it looks and how it’s lived out based on seasons of life and age. Our calling can also change because we change. Who we are, our gifts, our passions. And that’s okay.

For me, I started out in youth ministry, but then God expanded it. It didn’t shift entirely. It was still vocational/occupational ministry, but it went to more broad ministry—leadership and to leadership development. When I was 22, just out of college, I didn’t have the experience or the wisdom to train other leaders. I was just working with students who were sometimes only four years younger than me. The Holy Spirit moves and flows. Working with kids in children’s ministry at your church may make you aware of the needs of foster kids. It opens a door to a whole new thing.

How can we discover what our calling is today?

Cultivate an ear for the Holy Spirit—a heart and a mind that's receptive, that knows the Shepherd's voice, and a heart that's obedient and responsive to whatever it is during that season. A lot of times we get focused on the wrong question: What is it? We focus on trying to figure out the it. Instead, the real focus should be on cultivating our relationship with Jesus and walking with him. We want steps to cling to. If I ...

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