I was leading youth group devotions before I could drive. That is what happens when you grow up with a dad who is a Presbyterian minister.
You learn the rhythm of a worship service before you learn your times tables, and you learn that the real theology happens at Sunday lunch, over reheated pot roast, with everyone picking the sermon apart like a novel assigned in English class.
My mother asked the sharpest questions at that table. Who is being left out? Both my parents raised me to know my Bible. Yet, my mother raised me to notice who was missing from it.
At eighteen I became a youth pastor while studying full-time at Tyndale, and I found myself living between two worlds. In my literature classes, wise and faithful women handed me Margaret Atwood and bell hooks and taught me to read for the voices a story leaves out. In my theology classes, we parsed headship and debated what women were permitted to do. I would walk out of a lecture on complementarianism and straight into a church basement to lead teenagers through the book of Judges.
I knew how to teach from Deborah's story. I just wasn't sure I was allowed to become her.
Like many women in ministry, I learned to serve faithfully without always being seen fully. I learned how to lead without making anyone uncomfortable and I loved the Church through all of it. I still do.
I did graduate school while on maternity leave, in the hush of the pandemic, with my daughter napping beside me. In those long months I went back to the women of Scripture, not for a paper this time, but to listen. A question rose that I could not set down: if we trust that all Scripture is God-breathed, why do we hear so little from the women who lived it?
That question became a book, and this January it becomes a course. She Believed is a twelve-module course from Ministry Forum on CHURCHx, filmed last spring at my dad's church in Bradford. Each module pairs a short teaching video with Scripture and reflection, and closes with a recorded prayer offered by a woman serving in ministry. Their voices are part of the point.
We will also do something new: read these women together, live. Over four Monday evenings we will gather on Zoom, three modules at a time, and at the centre of every session is lectio divina.
Years ago, during a long flu season, I led a group of teenagers through lectio in a darkened sanctuary in Nobleton. We read Psalm 91 slowly, again and again. The first time through they shifted and snickered. By the second, they leaned in. Afterward a boy who never said a word whispered, “It kind of makes me feel like God actually notices what’s going on.”
That is what I want for us. Bible study asks what a passage means. Lectio asks what God is saying to you, here and now, through it. We will take real time there, letting these women speak before we rush to speak about them.
The course opens January 11, so you have a week to begin the first three modules. Live sessions run Mondays at 7:00 pm ET on January 18 and 25 and February 1 and 8. Registration is $25 plus HST.
This is for the daughter of the Church who loves it and carries questions she has never said out loud. It is for anyone who has taught these stories and wondered whether they were allowed to live them.
I don't come to this as an expert. I come as a companion and a student of the Word, still learning that my voice belongs in the Body of Christ.
She believed. And by grace, so will we.
Taylor Scott-Reimer is an author, educator and communications scholar, and the author of She Believed: Recovering the Fierce Faith of the Women of Scripture and Ourselves. She lives in Barrie, Ontario.