Podcast Transcript: Episode 13

INTRO 

COURTNEY: Welcome to the Women & Work podcast, the show that inspires you to confidently step into your God-given calling & view your work as meaningful to the Kingdom of God. 

I’m Courtney Moore.

MISSIE: And I’m Missie Branch. We want to introduce you to women who through their own unique vocations are seeing what they do make an eternal difference.

COURTNEY: We pray these conversations will inspire you in your own calling to honor God, image Him to the world through your work, and leverage your potential for His glory. 

MISSIE: Thanks so much for joining us today.

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GUEST INTRODUCTION

Courtney: We are so excited about today’s show. Missie and I Are happy to welcome Amy Whitfield to the Women & Work podcast. Amy, welcome.

Amy: Hey, how’s everybody doing today?

Courtney: Doing great.

Amy: It’s fun to do this! I mean Missie and I are here in the same town. We’re not in the same room doing this, but I think we’re just right over the hill from each other.

Missie: Yeah it’s not even a mile, we are apart from each other right now.

Courtney: That’s awesome. I am all the way in West Texas so I am very far away. Thank goodness for technology. Okay, so if you do not know Amy, let me tell you a little bit about her. She works as the Executive Director of Communications at The Summit Church in the Raleigh Durham area of North Carolina. She came into this role after serving as the Associate Vice President for convention communications… For the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s a whole mouthful there.

Amy: Yeah, that was a long one.

Courtney: So there’s a little bit more though that you have done, that also quite a mouthful, but we’re gonna go ahead and spit it out, so before these two things, she did had another communication role. She was Director of Marketing and Communications for Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is where Missie works right now. 

And so Amy has also worked for LifeWay Christian resources, and even the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. So we’ve got a couple of seminaries in there- that’s awesome. 

She has co-authored the book, SBC FAQS, a ready reference with Keith Harper, which it’s kind of fun to say is those are a lot of… Acronyms: SBC FAQs- you can explain that in a minute. 

And besides all that, she co-hosts the SBC this week podcast with all of our BFF Jonathan Howe. Who doesn’t love Jonathan, right? 

She is on the steering team for the SBC Women’s Leadership Network, and last but certainly not least, she serves on the board of directors for our very own Women and Work, which… I am so grateful. 

She lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina with her husband Keith, and they have two children, Mary and Drew. And this is so much fun because actually I met… This is all… We’re a little family here because I met Missie through Amy. I wouldn’t even know Missie if it weren’t for Amy, and you guys have known each other forever, right? How long?

Missie: Well, I’ve been here probably five years, so I met Amy here. Amy was a leader here on campus, and that was a God send to get into leadership and have another woman leader on campus, like Amy was a blessing.

Amy: Well, and Missie, when Missie came into the community at Southeastern and was on staff, she was a God send because I felt like there weren’t very many of us and we needed more, so I was very excited to have her around on the team as well.

Missie: It was great. Well, Amy so what we do, and we always laugh at this, we call this our rapid fire questions, but we are always cracking up so much in between that it’ll happen rapidly at all, but we’re gonna do it. So we have three questions that we’re gonna ask you… That we ask every guest. And they’re just a lot of fun. So the first question is, as a kid, what did you wanna be when you grew up?

Amy: A teacher. My mom was a teacher. So that’s what I knew.

Missie: I love it.

Courtney: Alright, second question. We’re going pretty rapidly. This is good. Amy, what was your first job?

Amy: So, I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was part of a kids choir, and we had paid gigs, so I think I was 8 the first. I was eight until I was 16 and then… Yeah, yeah, you didn’t that comin.

Missie: That is probably my favorite first job ever. [laughter] I didn’t see that coming. I love it.

Courtney: Was it a choir? What did you say?

Amy: No, it was like… ’cause you’re in Nashville, and so people would be doing kids albums and stuff, and so they would need kids voices. So we would all go to… We would be, there’d be like 10 of us or whatever, and we would go to…

Missie: She’s a recording artist.

Courtney: Yes she’s a professional.

Amy: Yeah, I think that’s probably my mom… That’s what my mom used to tell people: My daughter is a recording artist. I was like, No, no, no one knows my name.

Courtney: She’s holding that microphone right now like she’s been doing it all her life.

Missie: What kind of work would you love to be doing when you’re 80 years old?

Amy: My goodness, that’s a very hard question. I’ve always said I wish someone would just pay me money to just read books all the time, so maybe I’d work in a library. That would be great!

Courtney: Did you grow up in a Christian home? At what point did you become a Christian?

Amy: Yeah, I did. So I grew up, we were very involved like I said, it was a rural community, is a very small church, and very involved in it. It is the church my mom had grown up in, my grandfather had grown up in it, so it had been in our community forever and still is there, but I did grow up… 

As I came to understand the Bible, I was really, really eager. I took in a lot of facts and knowledge, I was very good at Bible trivia and Bible, just all those things. But I really took it in and understood it in a way that was much more about what I can do for God and not what God has done for me. That’s how I perceived it. 

And so I was very much… I am a rule follower. I was really into doing everything that fits in with good behavior. I loved being kind of the teacher’s favorite- things like that. I’m gonna get teased mercilessly for people who hear that, but that was my personality, so it didn’t always make me popular with all the other kids, but that was kind of my personality, so that kind of understanding of the Bible mixed with my personality made for a difficult way of life in that I didn’t necessarily see the Bible in a legalistic way that led me to judge others, but more in a legalistic way that led me to have a lot of personal anxiety. Was I ever doing enough or measuring up? 

And so I went to a Christian high school, and in that school, through teachers and Chapel speakers, things like that- over those four years, I had just pieces here and there of the Gospel and what it meant were being told to me. I would hear it in these different ways, I was still kind of fitting it in my own grid, but I was definitely getting the message. 

So -I was in college, I was a freshman in college, and I was at a retreat with one of my… Walking around with one of my friends, and she mentioned she was leading a huddle group, so she was going to hers and I was about to go to mine, and she mentioned that she had used the illustration with her huddle group about if you were to die… How certain would you be that you were going to heaven? 

And I was sitting there in my mind thinking about what she was saying, I’d never heard the illustration before, and I thought, Well, I’m at a retreat, I’ve been in all these sessions, I’m feeling pretty good and spiritual, so maybe I’m like a good… 75%, 80%. And then she just… She just very offhandedly- she thought I knew the illustration, she said, yeah, and then I explained to the group, it can only be zero or 100%, and then she just moves on… She’s telling me the story about this interaction. 

I’m trying to play it cool ’cause I’m thinking it doesn’t make any sense. And so then we parted ways and I was by myself walking on the way to my huddle group, and it was like playing in my mind like zero or 100. Zero or 100. How can that be possible? 

And it was like a light bulb went on, I always say. It was like the last piece of the puzzle went into place. All these things I had heard about the gospel through the years, that it was like, Oh, it’s because of what Jesus did for me. 

And so at that stage, then I have all this knowledge that had built up, and it was like the lens I was looking through changed. And so it’s such a kind… It was kind of a wild experience because then I didn’t have… My discipleship journey was really different ’cause I’m taking all these things that I had known, but I’m seeing and understanding them in a new way. 

Missie: Well Amy, I would love for you to share with us a little about your work journey because listening to your Bio, one would think Amy is pretty committed to the SBC. You’ve worked at the convention and several of the entities. How did this come about? And was it intentional to work at the SBC?

Amy: Yeah, no, so the only intention was that when we got married, Keith was a student at Southern Seminary, so he had on… He had moved away after we met, went to Louisville, and so we had long distance, and then we got married and I got up there, and the only intention was that we needed to pay our bills and the easiest thing… We lived in an apartment on campus. And the easiest thing was to go to their personnel office and to put my application in. So I got my first job there, it was a pretty entry level, but I enjoyed it, connected with people. I don’t have a Southern Baptist background, so it was kinda wild and people are always amazed when I tell them that because you have all these really influential leaders in the SBC, and I didn’t know who any of them were. So they would come to campus as speakers, I would be processing some of the stuff from their visit and I wouldn’t know who they were. I’d go walk up to him and say stuff, and then I would find out later, people we like, do you know who you just talked to? So I just needed a job, and so it was great.

So that first year, I had planned, well, I’ll do this job, it’s convenient, it’ll pay the bills, and then I will look… ’cause I had a college degree in politics, and so I thought, Well, I’ll look in the area for something that maybe fits more of my degree, or maybe I’ll go on to get my master’s, things like that. So that was what I expected to do. And then at the end of my first year, a position opened in academic administration at the seminary there, and that job was offered to me, so that was… I worked for Danny Akin there at Southern Seminary. That’s who I worked for. So I took it ’cause its a great opportunity, it was great for us, we still… We lived really close. I was like, Why not?

Missie: It’s like a great job.

Amy: Yeah, and that’s just kind of where the road started, so just one thing led to another, and so I did that and I worked there in academic administration and learned a lot about theological education. I learned a lot about Southern Baptist education. I kind of caught on to the mission of it all, and then some of my gifts and training fit the role there. So then we had our kids and I went home to be with them primarily, but that was really early in the remote work days, but sort of as a part time- Very, very part-time. I continued to do some work for Southern Seminary. And so I did some things for them for several years, and then at that stage I really just… I was in the system, I knew people. There were people I had worked with at Southern who ended up going to LifeWay, and so then I got… They remembered me, they had worked with me, thought I had done well in that role and could do some other ones. So it was LifeWay, and then the Lord called us to Southeastern and it just kind of went from there.

Each connection sort of unfolded. What’s interesting though, is that I did begin to see how… I guess there were two things. One, that networking really does matter. and sometimes you’re networking when you don’t even realize it. People just remember you for the work you did or whatever… So that’s important. Sometimes you think no one’s watching and they are. But also I didn’t really see a path for the things that I was best at, or for the training I had gotten, or the education I had gotten in college. I didn’t see a path in denominational Life for that and then one day I stopped and I thought, you know, all the things that I was best at that I can even look back to high school and college are the things that I’m actually doing now and… Yeah, and so some of that I just see as of the hand of the Lord, some of it I see as you really do bring your own gifts to be in situations, and you can do that, you can kinda live- be yourself and live fully in who you are and the things that are kind of like breathing to you…

I heard a great interview one time with a screen writer, and someone said, When do you find time to write? And she said, I don’t find time to write, writing is like breathing to me. And I thought… In that moment, I thought, Okay, everybody’s got something. What are the things, what are the things that you just do without even trying? Whatever it is. And I’m always thinking, strategy all the time and I’m always seeing how do neck and things, so I started to realize those are the things that I would come to the surface, so yeah. I just… I took a job and here I am.

Missie: And the Lord did what He does.

Courtney: No, I think you’re right. Even just going back to what you said about the networking, just as we already mentioned, just even you introducing me to Missie and here we are three years later or so interviewing. It’s just so fun to see how the Lord connects and brings about His purposes in ways that we we would have… You could have never seen that you would use your degree within all this Southern Baptist world.

Missie: I love it.

Courtney: So as you have worked in all these various entities within this denomination, where have you been encouraged, Amy?

Amy: I have been most encouraged by the people and the people in every entity I’ve worked in and now when I’m working on at the church level-which I love, by the way, because I remember hearing somebody, a faculty member at Southern Seminary one time talk about how he had thought as a student that the pinnacle was to become a seminary professor. And when he got to that role and started having students come through his classroom, he realized that those who were going out to work in the local church are on the front lines of ministry, and that’s the place to be, so… I hear his voice in my head and have realized that now, after all these years, for the first time I get… I’m actually getting to be on the front lines and that’s an exciting opportunity. So at the local church level, and then also at the denominational level- I have been amazed by how many people I have encountered who are just hard workers and they just want… They just want to do well, and they want to make things better.

And the Southern Baptist Convention is a system, and it’s a complicated system. It’s a peculiar system, and I don’t even mean that about the people you can take… Everybody can as that as they will be, but the design of the system is so different. There’s nothing else like this… And every entity, the principle of autonomy that flows through everything means that all the entities are kinda connected together, but they’re held in sort of a tension. And so it’s the type of thing that because it’s not top-down, you don’t just get edicts from somewhere that come down it actually… The system only works if everyone works at it, and so what I have loved has been all the people that I’ve encountered that are… Many of us that folks don’t even know, but everybody, we’re all just trying in our spot to make the system better. That’s when I’m most inspired, is people who really wanna engage.

Missie: So that is -one of the things you said was just that idea of a… People wanting to engage, and then the idea of the church being the front lines. And just the thought of that, that makes me wonder how can women contribute intentionally the flourishing of this denomination or any denomination, how can women and use their gifts and skills on the front lines, to make things better?

Amy: Yeah, so one thing that I really encourage other women on is just keep showing up. Sometimes it can be discouraging because folks may feel like- Women may feel like they do things for a long time and no one sees. 

I think first of all more people see than we realize, and second, I think what’s important is there are more and more leaders who are beginning to invite women into conversations into the room, ask for perspective, want participation. And I think that a huge important piece of that is we need to be ready. Be ready. Go ahead and have thought out your input so that when you’re asked for it or when you have an opening and you’re able to share it, you’re ready to give it to be articulate and thought out. I think that’s a huge piece is to begin… Just to be prepared. 

I heard, I think it was a speaker and a writer that was with LifeWay, Angela Thomas, I think was her nor and I heard her speak one time and she was talking about women who really wanted to be speakers, and that her advice was two-fold. One was, take every opportunity that you’re given that as long as it can fit on your plate. If you get asked to go speak to the Garden Club with eight people, go do it and get experience, build your network and get practice. 

And the other thing is while you’re waiting for the opportunity, go ahead and be studying what you wanna talk about. That’s incredible, that’s incredible advice for a speaker. That was not the kind of pathway that I wanted to pursue as far as public speaking, but I turned around and applied that to what my pathway was, which essentially was: number one take every opportunity that you have. 

I was in one job at LifeWay and my boss called me into the office and said, Hey, I wanted to see if you could help out with our blog, so I said, Sure, I can help. And he said, I need you to draft up the basics of a post on apostolic harvest church planting, and I just like straight face as if I wasn’t phased. I was like Yeah- I can go do right now. 

And then I went next door and I looked up apostolic Harvest Church Planting to… And so, because that was my opportunity. Little things to show, I can figure this out and I can do it. And then the other piece, like she said, was to spend time getting ready for the day when I might have an opportunity, so in that job with that same LifeWay person, when he would receive an email from Tom Rainer, who was telling the leadership team, I want you to read this article. 

And he would say, Hey, can you print that out? I would print out two, ’cause I was like, If he’s reading it, I wanna read it. So I really did- Selma Wilson at LifeWay used to say own your own development. That’s how it is. And that’s what I did, I took every opportunity and then I prepared when I didn’t have any.

Missie: That’s really good. Show up, be prepared. Be willing to do it. Be ready to do it. I love it. 

Courtney: So another thing that kind of runs through your work history is this ongoing development with communication, you seem to love communication. So tell us what you do now at the Summit Church as the Executive Director of Communications.

Amy: Sure, so it’s kind of a new position. There’s already an amazing team there that handles kind of the creative side of communications and the digital side, so they’re doing an unbelievable job there. I came in in a role that does a lot more on internal communications among the staff. It’s a really large staff and it’s a multi-site church. So we have campuses all over the triangle. So there’s various, there’s the central staff and then there’s the campus staffs, and not everyone is able to spend time together all the time. So how do you make sure everybody’s on the same page and use the tools that we have to communicate in a way that connects us all? So a lot of that also a lot of ways… Certain things when we’re letting the church know about things, it might be something that at one campus is an issue of major interest, and then another one, it’s a different level of interest, so how do you share the news in such a way that really meets the people where they are in the various campuses or whatever. So thinking about message continuity and then also just helping the leaders as they think about their own messaging. So this is more with how to get information out well to the church, externally to other constituents, things like that. So it’s great! I’m loving it because you have incredible leaders who have this great mission, and I get to come in and help think through the words. Just think through how to say in such a way that people will really capture it and understand it.

Missie: So I am a lover of words. I tell people, I listen to people’s words, If you mispronounce it, I can barely get through a conversation because I wanna… The words you’ve said. Yeah, I’m sorry “L” is silent, you should have… I know we moved past it, just about words and communication, and clearly you are… You have experience in this, both our communication and inward communication, so how can women who work in this field in the field, which it may not be at a church or anywhere else, how could they say that they are able to image God in this work?

Amy: Oh yeah, that’s great, that’s a great question, because we have a God who created the universe by speaking. So words are like… They come out in the very beginning “let there be..” that’s how he did it. So throughout everything that we have in Scripture is He has come to us through His words- he’s told us this story through his word, and so we get to see already that his message came that way. And then we also know that God is a lover of truth and He brings truth. And so I think it’s an incredible thing to be able to take something, especially when we’re talking about his mission in the world, to say, if you have someone who is a leader or someone who is trying to communicate something, and if you get the chance to come along and help them to do that in such a way that the hearers can really hear it, or that the hearers don’t get distracted by this kind of random sentence over here that all of a sudden kinda pulls their attention. Getting to fine tune things like that, it’s just… It’s a great way to kind of help us all get out of our own way and let the words actually do their- Do their job. So I think it’s one of those things that I didn’t realize I loved spending my time on. And then one day I thought I get to do this, this is what I do all day.

Courtney Is really important. So you talked about how the summit church has multi-campuses, so are you with this internal communication there at the church that you are overseeing, is there a team that you’re leading and what does that look like? And tell us about that.

Amy: Yeah, I’m really more of a dotted line connection to people all throughout the organization, so they’re… Like I said, there was already a team of people that is like the creative team and digital team and things, and they were already in place, so I work sort of alongside them, so that’s a different… When I was at Southeastern, I had a team of about eight or nine people. At the executive committee, I really only had… I worked alongside a number of people, and then I had one person who worked directly for me, and then I had another person that kind of shared with someone else- that the whole organization only has about 30 people, so that was pretty small, anyway. This time I’m in a spot where it’s a little bit of a different kind of leadership where it’s sort of bringing maybe some assistance and support to a lot of people, guidance in whatever processes we’re having, but not necessarily having a large team with a lot of moving parts, and I’m kind of enjoying that. To be honest, I love to lead teams, I think that’s great, and I will do it again one day if that comes, but I am… mean, I do love to spend a lot of my time doing strategic thinking. And so in some ways, when you lead, you have to execute a lot of things, and so in some ways, my mind is freed up to focus more on strategic thinking, and then I’m working with different teams all over the place.

Courtney: I get that, I love it.

Missie: I don’t know if you remember this, but when you were here, I had you come and speak to the ladies for our… I think it was a work luncheon, women in work or something, it was really called something like that, women work or work place, and you spoke on ambition. And that message wrecked me. It was just so encouraging and freeing at the same time, and it just really talked… Just the idea that it’s okay to be ambitious. That ambition, if itself, is not a negative thing, and we don’t need to be afraid of it. Because people who see themselves as leaders, women who see themselves as leaders are often afraid of that because they don’t want perceived as being ambitious, but it’s nothing wrong with being ambitious.  So did you always see yourself as a leader and what has been the hardest part in taking what you knew about yourself whenever that came about, and then actually going and doing it?

0:33:55.9 Amy: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I don’t know that I ever really articulated to myself like, Am I a leader or am I not a leader? I can look back throughout, even all the way back to when I was in school, and I guess I did… I was class president when I was in high school and things like that. So I ran for things, I tried for things, I did things in college. I would step up into leadership positions, but I didn’t think much about where I fit on things. And when you move into an area where I… Let’s just be honest, I’m not trying to knocn anything, but just be honest, where there are not a lot of women in leadership roles. It’s kind of hard to navigate how you fit into that, where does the leadership impulse go? And I will say that I have learned that leadership comes in so many different ways, it may come just in your input in a meeting, you may start to realize that the projects you get to work on the things, the way you’re getting to speak into things you really, actually are leading… You don’t have to be the top person on the org chart. So it’s kind of something that I think was always there, but I didn’t really recognize it or acknowledge that I didn’t see it. And then I think Selma Wilson at LifeWay was the first role model I had to really look at and say, “I can actually pursue this as a good thing, I can develop as a leader” I think I always was.

And I don’t speak up, I don’t hold back. That’s just in me, and I don’t know if that’s always a good thing or not. I try to be… I think the communications out of me, I’m pretty measured in what I’m gonna say and when, but I’ve never held back in that way. But I didn’t think it was something that I could actually aspire to until I saw Selma

Missie: Right. So there’s a follow-up, what do you think women should know about leading teams, particularly if they’re just seeing themselves as leaders now?

0:36:18.5 Amy: Yeah, so the first thing is that you need to… You never know, ’cause I didn’t ever anticipate that I would be in a spot to be able to lead teams in this world. So I wasn’t preparing for that, I was more preparing for how to think about things, how to pitch in. And so you come into a spot where all of a sudden you are leading a team, honestly, just developing your people skills. Your ability to read people, your ability to have good, strong relationships- that’s a skill that it doesn’t matter if you’re leading a team or not, that you can already develop and it will benefit you. Also just pursuing personal humility, things like that, can begin to prepare you. But then also, but then also realizing that when you lead a team, you have to really care for those people, every single one of them as individuals, I… Honestly, a lot of things that I think prepare you to be a team leader are… There are some great books out there, there are some great exercises to sort of be able to learn how to lead teams, but it’s a spiritual development process to a just what it means to kinda walk with other people.

Courtney: It’s very helpful, thank you. Well, in the circles that you have served and worked in – these would all be complementarian settings… so I’m just curious though. I’m thinking about the seminaries you worked in, these are not churches, they’re institutions, academic institutions. Have you had the opportunity in those situations to actually lead men, did you have maybe some guys on your team that you were leading and instructing will tell us how that worked out. We’re kind of curious. How’d that go? 

Amy: Yeah, sure. So yes, I have worked in only complementarian settings and I’m a complementarian. And so that works. But I did have men on my team, and in some ways, some of it may have been made a little bit simpler by the fact that they’re younger than me, it doesn’t have to be  that way, but I can just say that I think that helps sometimes. But in my area, first of all, the guys that were on my team were just incredible. They were incredible, incredible people. Godly, kind people and hard workers, and I don’t think I led them in any different way than the women, I just tried to get to know them as people and come alongside them. Two things I think I did though was one, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t gonna be difficult with them, but I also wasn’t afraid to say, “No, we’re not gonna do that in that way. Here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s why.” And so I would try to teach as I was leading, whether it was… One was doing social media, and so I had some expertise in that… In social media strategy, and so I really did that. The other one, another one was in graphic design, and I had no expertise. I could only say, I like that, I don’t like that. And so I honored his skill and talent but I still knew that I had to make decisions. And so I did a lot to build those relationships. And then also to just just try and not be weird about it. Let’s all walk together. And the other thing that I think is important… I think it helped with that, but it’s also important for leadership in general, is also- what is the illustration of player coach or whatever. I got in there with them, I mean, when it was crunch time when we were redoing the website, we’re all hands on deck. Give everybody a log in, you’re updating that page. I’m updating this page, we’re all in this together, and I’m gonna be doing the grunt work right alongside everybody and let’s all bring snacks and hang out and share our lives with each other, and so I think that just allowed it to be a natural…Build a natural team sense. But they were incredible, and they really made up for my shortcomings where I didn’t know what to do or where I was weak, they were strong. And so that team was an incredible group.

Missie: I will say too. I had the privilege of seeing some of that, of witnessing the team you led, which you’re right, they were great men, great people on that team. And seeing where some of them have gone from there, it’s been great to see how the impact of your leadership really did bless them. And then, yeah, it was also inspiring to watch as a person who… This was my first time leading teams, professionally. I did at church, but this is the first professionally. It was fun to watch you even in those situations that I’m like, She’s just really not making it weird. It just doesn’t have to be weird. Alright, that’s great. Well, the Summit Church under pastor JD, they’ve made strides in terms of how they are being intentional with showing their value for women in the church and in leadership and different things like that. What are some wins that you see in your church that you’re grateful for and that you’d love to see maybe some other churches adopt?

Amy: Yeah, of course, I wanna be honest, I’ve been there three months now, so I’m still kinda learning, so a lot of what I know about my church is what I’ve seen from the outside. But what I see there is a real- not just a willingness for letting women have different kinds of roles, but also a desire to model something that is great in relationships between men and women in the church. With wisdom and with care, and also with just love as brothers and sisters moving together and honoring all of the gifts that men and women both bring to the table. And so there’s a real desire on the part of leadership and that’s been modeled and expressed both from the pulpit, but then also in how they have wanted to bring women on to the team. So I love that. What I see right now is that we are in a culture that really traffics extremes, and we’re seeing that in this discussion too. You either have to have this super extreme model in one direction or some very, very specific extreme applications of what the Bible says about men and women, or on the other side, if you’re not that, then you have to be full-blown egalitarian, and I think there is a -there are great ways to model men and women walking together in their gifts flourishing and also doing so in a way that is in the order that God has set up in the church. I see an opportunity for our church to really model that for others. I’m all about- Let’s not feel like we have to go all the way to one extreme or the other- on a number of issues. And I’m talking specifically about applications, I’m not talking about doctrine, things like that, but on a number of issues, let’s model… Let’s model that. And so I think there’s one, but it’s been a great three months, and I have met so many people that are just devout people of prayer and truly mission-focused, and it’s just a great… It’s a great place to be.

Courtney: Well, a few months back, our women or book club had the privilege of reading pastor JD Greear’s book, What are you gonna do with your life? And we were able to have him on and interviewed him, and it was just so, so encouraging. He had written an article, actually, it was from a sermon, and it’s called The church needs more Deborah’s, and we’re actually gonna link to that in the show notes because that article alone, it’s just a short little article and then the message- but it is just so life-giving two women. How his own heart and how it seemed like he’s leading your church to really value women. I was so encouraged and uplifted by just talking with him through that interview, and one of the things that he brought out in that interview was that there was a time, and maybe it still is, but whenever a position comes open at the church to hire someone-in the past, the way, they would just automatically think what male can go in this spot, right? Especially if it’s… Even if it has really very little to do with teaching or making some strategic leadership decisions of the church body, it was just assumed they were gonna hire a man. And so he said, one of the things I started to do was really think through, wait a minute, there might be women that This could be… There’s no reason, there’s no good reason we haven’t thought are considered hiring a woman, and so honestly, just seeing you in this role is really cool because he kinda had talked about that, and so… So I’m so happy to hear you feel so supported there. There are so many women who listen to this podcast and who follow women and work, who are women, they serve on church staffs in all kind of various roles, some feel more supported than others, for all different kinds of reasons, but is there any just encouragement for these women who are in the trenches? They’re in the trenches, they’re serving the Lord to the best of their ability, but they’re just feeling a little discouraged for… How would you encourage them?

Amy: One thing I would just say is, press on because the Lord sees you. Even if you think that not everyone sees you. The other thing I would say is, there may be more people who see your work than you realize and let your work speak for itself. And that’s an entire body of work, ’cause I will encounter women who… And it really probably has been in the last two or three years that I’ve seen this, that will talk to me and they will have desires to be in a role, getting to do some of the things that I was doing. And there are two things that I learned. One is, I learned that you get into some of these roles and into some of these rooms and it isn’t as fun as you thought it would, so remember that because it’s hard. The other thing is, some things that… It took 20 years. It took 20 years of relationships, it took 20 years of building a body of work that has to speak for itself, and so don’t lose heart and then also find ways to really pursue your passions and your loves, even if you don’t know where it’s going to go…If you love to read, if you love to study certain things. I have come to realize that the Lord ends up using a lot more of that stuff that we think is sort of futile, those developments that we think… “This isn’t going anywhere”. It ends up in the strangest ways… One of the things I did for the SBC for several years with serves a parliamentarian. That was like, there was no- 10 years ago, there was never in my wildest dreams did I think that I could do something like that, that the opportunity would even open up. It was like a series of events that kind of led to that. I just was this random person who had an interest in Robert’s Rules of Order, who does that? Like it doesn’t matter. But I just gave myself permission to still be interested in study it anyway, ’cause I liked it, and then the door opened up that I would have never imagined. And I also wanna encourage people, it’s okay if you don’t know where this thing is gonna end up, but that you just love it. Just do it. It’s great to at and and get fulfillment in some of those things too.

Missie: That’s great. That is so great. I can’t even imagine. I can’t even tell you the sheer number of women who I have spoken to who was like, I started life this way, God gave me these experiences, these experiences, the experiences, and then now I’m doing this, and I never would have thought that these experiences would have gotten me, this job, and so… Right, it’s so great. Okay, so I know you have worked with some incredible men. I know that you have had some really good doors open for you, and it’s because of men advocating and really giving you opportunities. But I do also know that you have to have faced some challenges working in spaces that are really more male-dominated, so what are some of the challenges that you faced? And then, how have you overcome those?

0:50:25.7 Amy: Yeah, and I wanna be careful here and answering that, but I think every woman experiences this. Of course, you go into rooms where there are people that don’t understand why you’re there, and maybe they don’t even think you should be there. They may think that you’re there to just bring them the coffee or whatever. I can be the master of the stone face and act like I don’t know what’s going on, I just… Inside, I’m taking it all in, but I just sort of let it roll off of me, and I can play dumb. And I don’t even mean that in a derogatory way- but I just mean act like I don’t even know what’s going on here. And I… And I would also be just really circumspect that I would be careful in conversations to not speak up at everything, but I would wait for the moment when something got said in my area of expertise, so that… And I would be proactive, like, I’m gonna hold back until something comes up that I know I know the answer to this, or I know I have something to contribute, and I’m going to speak up. And then when I would, you could kind of see on some faces like this surprise, like, Oh my goodness, she has… She has a great idea. Wow. So it was very… I think I’m kind of wired like that anyway, but it’s very strategic going into situations like that. And then recognizing that, Okay, maybe some of the people around this table don’t think I should be here, but the person who invited me does and I am going to take that to the bank and I’m not going to be afraid or hold back, and I’m gonna take the opportunities to kind of speak and participate as they come. 

And then, as you said, I’ve had a lot of opportunities for some incredible just encouraging men, and my husband is one of those too. He’s been very encouraging to me, and so when incidents might happen that were uncomfortable or awkward or whatever, he’s a great person for me to come home and talk to… And we would laugh and then you just kinda get ready to move on. And every now and then something might come that has to be addressed, but I always try to make sure if I address it, I’m gonna give this person the benefit of the doubt. I am going to try to think the best of them and to be as gracious and kind as possible. And then also be ready and open to say, that’s probably someone that I don’t need to work with that much. That just may not work. So I’m gonna need to go and work with the people as much as that can. So some of it is just kind of endurance, some of it is saying, I gotta just let some things roll off and keep going. So I don’t mean like knock me down and I’m out, but just I’ve gotta let them roll off. Give grace to that person and recognize maybe they don’t know… Maybe they don’t know that I have the right or the ability or opportunity to be here. I’m just gonna keep going and kinda put some blinders on that. And in a lot of cases, things have sort of worked out like others might have advocated on my behalf or kinda stepped in and said, :That’s not appropriate”, or things like that. But also, I’ve been very, very fortunate ’cause I’ve been in spaces where there are a lot of people who advocate for women to be a part of things.

Missie: Okay, so this has been my experience, so I’m wondering how it is going for you. So people assume that when you have a job that is a leadership position, and you do- you have a boss job right now. When you have that job, that must mean that your husband is either weak or there’s this tension with you having success in your job, because how could a strong, capable, respected woman have a strong, capable respected man, right? But I happen to know who your husband is, I happen to know  your husband is a strong, capable, respected man, boss, job himself, as our provost here, so talk about that dynamic of mutual respect in your relationship and even what that’s modeled even for your kids who are a male and a female.

Amy: Yeah, so we’ve really… From day one, we have kinda worked as a team in our home, but also kind of in the world. We’ve done so much together. When I was home with our kids, he was a pastor and I was there in this small community a lot of times for a season, he was the only pastor on staff at the church, and so I’m doing that alongside him. So we have sort of been in the trenches together so much that we saw it that way. One of the things we’ve had to, for sure work on is we are always… We are always out for the others success. We want the other to thrive and to flourish. We have had to navigate, particularly as we have taken on more leadership roles in each of our lives and jobs, we’ve had to recognize the amount of mental and emotional stress that that can just put on a person. When it’s on both of us that just adds a layer. Sometimes you need to be able to come home to your spouse and to unload and say, “I’ve had a really hard day, here’s what all has happened”- but if you’re both in roles that have a lot of intensity, and at times we’ve both worked at the same organization which adds a whole other layer. We’d have these conversations in the kitchen, he’d come home and say, :Man, I had this meeting. And it was so crazy.” And this person said this. And all of a sudden, I’m like, Wait a minute, that’s not how that’s supposed to happen. And next thing you know, he and are having a meeting in the kitchen. What we’ve had to realize is we have to work hard at how to manage those things, we’ve even had to really think, and some of that in my role at The Summit the transition, I just made… That’s been part of it. Because we have teenage kids, we have to… It was right and good for me to be in this role here that’s local, I was doing something where I was having to travel a lot and stuff. So we have to make decisions together about how much we can really manage in terms of stress and load, but we’re so proud of each other. We just… I love to watch him lead, and I feel like he does so much to really cheer me on too. So it’s kind of a team approach. We’re out there on mission, so.

Missie: I love it.

Courtney: I think what you’re saying too, there’s not enough conversation, maybe… Maybe Missie and I can pick this up on another episode, but the mental, the pressure that you feel from work that you do bring home a… We need to talk about that more. Missie, we’ll put that on the radar for next time. Speaking of just women in leadership and just what you’re talking about, some of the challenges of walking, you’re at the table and people and they’re wondering why is she even in here.

Women from that might get a subtle cue, don’t step into these leadership roles. I guess it wouldn’t be so subtle, but they’re thinking, No, I’m gonna back away, I’m not gonna pursue this because of… It might even be within them, it might even just be their own fear keeping them from stepping forward. So how would you just encourage them to not shy away from possible gifts that the Lord put within them that they’re just for a myriad of reasons aren’t stepping into?

Amy: Right. Well, Impostor Syndrome is a real thing, and it’s a thing that is very, very prevalent for women. That you always feel like “I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be, and one day they’re all gonna figure out that they made a mistake”. And sometimes you just have to have some grit and sort of push through that and say, “I feel like I’m not supposed to be here, but I’m here, so let me just jump in.” A a lot of that gets better with time, but you have to stick in order for that time to pass. And I had to really coach myself a lot. Like I said, I would go into settings where I would get the sense…These people may feel like I shouldn’t be here. But I would remind myself, Well, my boss who hired me thinks I should be, well, I’m gonna… So I’m gonna cling to that encouragement and he paved the way or whatever, for me to be here. I have a job to do. I’ve been asked to come into this setting, so I’m just gonna do a great job. But that takes a lot of mental work to say, to remind myself, ’cause it can be really easy to listen to that voice that says, you should just give up, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about this. This isn’t for you. So that was one thing, and then finding relationships with other people, other women who are in similar roles or who have similar interest, whatever, that you can have that kind of space to be able to speak freely and also encourage one another.

Courtney: It’s really good. Well, as we wrap up, a question we ask all of our guests and we wanna ask you is, what is one piece of advice to you would leave with women who want to honor God through their vocational calling?

Amy: One piece of advice I would leave with women. I would say, Don’t give up. Be faithful. Be who you are. And then always remember like, You’re not doing this as an end unto yourself, you’re part of something bigger, and tap into that story. The story of the universe says that this is a victorious mission, we just get to be a part of it. And so when we struggle or feel discouraged, we’ve got to remember: we’re part of something bigger that has already been won. So that’s a longer way of saying… Hang in there.

Courtney: Yeah, a big perspective really keeps you in there, keeps you hanging in a… Well, thank you so much, Amy. This has just been super helpful. A lot of practical tips women can take with him… I know I will. And we really appreciate you coming on.

Amy: Well, thanks for having me. I’ve been excited and looking forward to this… Not a long time coming, so I do to get to be on the loan.

Courtney: Thank you, friend. This has been great. 

CONCLUSION

MISSIE: And thanks to our listeners for joining us today. Be sure to check out our website at women work.net for today’s show notes. There will be more information about today’s conversation there.

COURTNEY: While you’re there, take a look at the Women and Work podcast discussion questions. We’ve provided those so that you can lead your friends from work, your neighborhood, or your church into useful conversations that will encourage you as you take  *your* next step of faith into your calling. 

MISSIE: If you enjoyed today’s show and don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We’d also love for you to take a minute to rate and review our show so more listeners can find us.  

COURTNEY: And with that, we hope you’ve been inspired to more confidently step into your God-given calling and view your work as meaningful to the Kingdom of God. 

See you next time!