It is a great privilege and a weighty responsibility to serve as the chair of an emerging women's ministry, but for me it started out of exasperation. I had been a member of First Presbyterian Church in Amarillo, Texas, for eight years when I begged the senior pastor to let our female associate pastor, Mary Rogers-Ellsworth, and me put together a viable women's ministry that would appeal to younger and working women. Because of the amazing connecting gifts of Associate Pastor Murray Gossett, most men enter our congregation feeling welcome and involved from the first time they come through the doors of our church. Women, however, repeatedly told of difficulties feeling like they fit in at First Pres. I had felt this way myself when I joined, so I wanted to reach out to these women.

I am a lawyer, well-spoken and people-oriented. My spiritual gifts include leadership, administration, and encouragement. I have chaired many committees, presided over community boards, run a law firm, and persuaded juries, so I believed that surely I was up to the task of leading a women's ministry team. I was particularly excited about offering programs to women who didn't find their place among the more traditional programming of the Presbyterian Women in our church. I had been blessed by belonging to a wonderful weekly Bible study for four years and wanted more women in my church to be able to experience the support and accountability that a weekly small group can offer. I also longed for retreats, camping trips, dinner parties or any other opportunity to get to know other women in my church better. However, being a single mom and full-time lawyer left me no time for daytime circle meetings and weekday morning gatherings, which comprised the majority of the programs offered by Presbyterian Women. So I had a vision for a different kind of women's ministry and the agreement of similarly-situated women that it was needed.

My focus as chairman was on programming: If we offer it, they will come, I believed. I was impatient with the task force process that Mary described to you last month, in which we took six months to hold focus group sessions and strategically plan the ministry. Meanwhile, I was frustrated that we weren't organizing retreats or camping weekends. As soon as the focus groups were done, I pushed for us to get a team together, assign a program to each team member and get a brochure out to the 600 women of our church informing them of all the exciting activities that they could join. In the summer of 2003, I got my way and our ministry began with a kick-off dinner attended by 140 women who were introduced to our brochure and to small group Bible studies, affinity groups, fellowship activities, and PW circles and gatherings.

For the next several months, we progressed with programs and even held a wonderful retreat. But some of the same old problems kept creeping up on our ministry team. The conflict between Presbyterian Women and Women's Ministry arose time and time again. Team members disagreed on whether PW was simply one part of and accountable to Women's Ministry, or whether because of its history, organization, financing and experience, PW should remain its own entity, separate from and occasionally competitive with Women's Ministry. We had team members who wanted to work as lone rangers (including me), allowed to use their gifts and talents in the name of Women's Ministry but not asking for or appreciating input from the team. We also had team members, such as our Connecting and Prayer coordinators, who received very little direction from the team as to what kind of programming they were supposed to be originating. We agreed to meet for early-morning prayer once per week as a team, but none of us got into the habit of attending regularly. Finally, we couldn't get all the volunteers we needed to organize the programs we wanted to offer. Suddenly Women's Ministry seemed more like a quagmire than the team we called ourselves.

Notice I haven't mentioned God in this process yet. That's because, at least in my heart, He had only been invited to play a supporting role in our ministry. Granted, I prayed about our team and I asked others to pray. But I didn't really stop long enough to listen or to be still until I knew His answers. I should have known better. I had taken the Experiencing God course, and had learned that it is a believer's job to find out what God is doing and join Him in His work. I had studied J. Oswald Sanders' masterwork on spiritual leadership. I had experienced God's direction in my own life and knew that only when I surrendered control to Him could I hear Him clearly and do His will. I had plenty of knowledge, but not much humility or patience in listening for God's call when it came to women's ministry.

As it turned out, God was preparing the Women's Ministry team, and me, for a change in direction. It occurred last summer at a women's ministry leadership training at Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. The training reminded us that God designed all of us to work in teams, like the apostles and deacons of the early church. Andrea Minor, then the Women's Ministry director at Willow Creek, and her team told us that the best ideas come from many minds and hearts; the failures are less lonely, the successes much sweeter when shared with others. They directed us to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a book by Patrick Lencioni. The concepts hit home with our team. We were experiencing at least three of the dysfunctions: an absence of trust, a fear of conflict, and an avoidance of accountability.

God started remaking our team that day at Willow Creek. We began to see that we had to function as a small group, granting time, truth and grace to one another. We had to confess our sins to one another and pray for each other as James 5:16 commands. We had to learn to bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances we may have had against one another as the Word requires of us in Colossians 3:13. My focus and the focus of our team had to be moved off programming and onto God.

It became clear to me that the model is Community as outlined in the Bible, not Teams as used in sports. Look up every One another passage in the Bible and you will see God's outline for your women's ministry community (both the leadership team and the whole ministry). Read books like Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them by John Ortberg and you will probably be convicted of God's command to form a close-knit community with every committee, team, or ministry you serve. Community is what you were created for. It is God's desire for your life. It is the one indispensable condition for human flourishing Ortberg writes. This is true even though Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives as Henri Nouwen said.

The changes that these revelations wrought in our team have not yet come to complete fruition. But the process has started. First, we had to get to know one another better, so we began by sharing our testimonies and our personal lives with one another. Then we had to start investing more time with one another, so we changed from one to two meetings per month. Before, we met for less than two hours, once a month, quickly running through our business. Now one meeting runs for four hours and we share dinner, pray together, and honestly try to get all our issues with the ministry onto the table. Finally, we have slowed down on starting new programs until we are sure where God is leading us. Sure, I want to start a mentoring program, I want to put on another retreat, I want to connect with all the new women joining the church, I want, I want, I want. But it is high time that I stop wanting and stop pushing and get on my knees in prayer and really listen to what He wants for our ministry.