The Call to Lead

It would be impossible for me to even begin to answer the question ‘Why PROJECT2031?’ without first talking about my own calling.

I grew up as the daughter of a prison chaplain. Three sisters. Stay-at-home-mom. Christian school. Southern Baptist.

The Holy Spirit began speaking to me at a very young age, but there was no one around to tell me what Eli told Samuel to tell the Lord in chapter three of First Samuel:

“Speak for your servant hears.”

But eventually, I rebelled, against my parents and my faith. For a lot of reasons, some valid, some ridiculously stupid. But over the next seventeen years, God lovingly but firmly brought me on a very circuitous route back to my calling, until three years ago, the Holy Spirit burdened me to write Letter to A Christian.

I am convinced that God’s primary reason for having me to write the book was to give me first hand experience of divine inspiration. I now understood that the revelation of God is ongoing and never-ending. God also used it to convince me that He wasn’t looking for perfect vessels. Willing, but flawed would do just fine.

But about three months after the book was published, I found myself in a quandary. I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the book. Occasionally, my husband, Jim, would ask me, “What’s going on with the book?” and usually, I would just shrug and give him a vague monosyllabic response or “I don’t know”.

Six months later, still nothing. Finally, my husband asked me, this time in a slightly different tone of voice, “Austine, what are your plans for the book.”

Finally, I turned around and asked God the same question,“What am I going to do with the book? What am I supposed to do? Why am I stuck? Why am I procrastinating?”

I can still remember exactly where I was when the Spirit of God answered, and the response was as clear as crystal:

“You’re not doing anything with this book because you’re a woman.”

I was in Durham, NC on Old Chapel Hill Road when I pulled over and said, “What does that mean?”

Very clearly the Holy Spirit explained, “You’re not doing anything with the book because you don’t believe that you can or that you should.”

For the record, Letter to a Christian is not a soft book. It’s not the kind of ‘here’s how to be joyful while washing the dishes,’ kind of book that women are supposed to write. Talking about the book would have meant moving past some of the things that I had been taught about women and women in ministry. I did not realize how much I had internalized what I had been to taught, which was now crowding out what the Spirit of God was telling me to do.

My hands were shaking as I explained to Jim later on that night what had happened. God began to show me quite clearly how the women of God have allowed themselves to be excluded from the work of the kingdom. Politely though, and of course, for their own good.

We have a very interesting dynamic in the church today. No longer do we call women the “seed of sin” and most theologians don’t make a habit of implying that women are more prone to sin than men. As a matter of fact, we look at women today and admit that we are all spiritually equal in Jesus Christ. Yet ironically, Jesus’ breaking the curse of sin and death has changed nothing in the here and now for women.

In 2013, I want women to realize that we have made a very deliberate choice—a choice that has placed the church of Jesus Christ on a trajectory that makes it no different from that of any other movement, and certainly not revolutionary.

If you look across the span of history, whether the Arab Spring, the French revolution, the American civil rights movement, or the early church, unfortunately, it makes no difference, the outcome is the same. Women and men march side-by-side to face tanks, pitchforks, machine guns or the lions. Yet, without fail, as soon as men begin to form institutions, hierarchies, and to glimpse the possibility of position or power within those institutions, no matter how benign the intentions, the camaraderie of the early movement is replaced by power structures and struggles that deliberately omit women.

The fact that this has proven to be no different in the church should give us pause.

As the church of Jesus Christ moved out of the streets and homes of the early disciples, and we began to establish creeds, doctrines, schools of theology, women were just as quickly shunted aside. Whether Deborah, or Huldah, Priscilla or Junia, modern theologians work desperately to erase any hint of female authority or leadership within Scripture from.

God spoke prophetically to Eve when he said:

“…Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

And the fact that so many otherwise well-intentioned men of God cannot or will not see that their efforts equal the fulfillment of this passage is the ultimate in Biblical irony.

Or perhaps, they do see it. Perhaps this is why we have traditionally placed the burden for verse 16 on the woman and not the man. Instead we refer to a man’s ‘natural desire to lead’, which allows us to avoid the obvious implications of the passage. And to support this, we celebrate a vision of manhood, which requires as its starting point a weak, read feminine, and dependent woman, which is not only unwise, but also unscriptural.

The result: a church that is hidebound, institutional in nature, interested only in preserving its hierarchy, devoted to political gain and the attainment of state power, yet ineffective and ineffectual in its discipleship, outreach and its influence for Jesus Christ.

I have always been a leader, of men and of women. With years in the Marine Corps, in no other arena would I be afraid to say what I believed to be the truth. That day when the Holy Spirit began to speak to me, I thought,

“I’ve lived around the world. I’ve been a leader in every aspect of my life. If this is can stop me in my tracks, how many other women has this stopped?”

I believe that time is shorter than we think. I believe that God is beginning to pour out his spirit (Joel 2:28). And God has given me a very clear vision for the women of the body of Christ. So what are we doing?

PROJECT2031 has a threefold mission:

The first is to lift up the hands of women who are in the ministry. You need to see and hear the faces and voices of women who have heard the unmistakable call of God. Tomorrow you’ll meet one of them on this site, Maggie Mraz, a church planting pastor in Durham, NC. An amazing woman of God, wife, mother, who heard the call of God and said, “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”

The second mission of PROJECT2031 is to inspire and to encourage women who hear the voice of God calling them into pastoral or public ministry but quite frankly, are afraid. I understand this because I was afraid. But we have only one short life in which to prepare for eternity. Use it wisely.

Last, we must have women of God who will stand in the gap and make up the hedge. Whether called to public ministry or not, every woman of God must find her place in the work of the kingdom.

Jesus said that the fields are “white unto harvest, but that the laborers were few”. We have time, but we don’t have all day, and I do not want any more women to be sitting on the sidelines ignoring the call of Jesus Christ on their lives. Do you?