Our Passion: Giving Voice to the Voiceless
One resounding passion has motivated our writing of Sacred Friendships: to be a voice for the voiceless. For far too long, people have silenced the voices of women believers throughout church history. We address this imbalance by illuminating the forgotten history of over half of the Christian community.
G. K. Chesterton observes that history is democracy extended through time. History gives “votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to those who merely happen to be walking around.”
Sacred Friendships gives vote and voice to our female forebears in the faith. It listens to their voices communicating the unique shapes and textures of their practice of soul care and spiritual direction.
A Sacred Legacy: Uncovering Buried Treasure
Sacred Friendships uncovers the buried treasure of wisdom about soul care and spiritual direction as practiced by women throughout the history of Christianity. Christian women from all races and nationalities have always helped hurting and hardened people through the personal ministries of sustaining, healing, reconciling, and guiding. Sacred Friendships uncovers the great spiritual riches of this diverse feminine Christian tradition.
By listening to their historical narratives, we learn to speak to today’s world with relevance—sharing Christ’s changeless truth for our changing times. Sacred Friendships assists female and male lay spiritual friends, spiritual directors, pastoral care-givers, professional Christian counselors, and students of all races to become more spiritually aware and skillful by deriving modern implications from these recovered resources.
Sacred Friendships contributes to contemporary soul care and spiritual direction as seen through the eyes, experienced in the souls, and told from the lips of a multi-cultural rainbow of past female believers. As we drink at the well of these amazing women, they water our souls by helping us to develop contemporary models of lay spiritual friendship, spiritual direction, women’s ministry, pastoral care-giving, and professional Christian counseling that are distinctively grounded both in the Word of God and in the sacred legacy of women’s ministry.
A Spiritual Ministry: Telling the Untold Stories
To accomplish our goal, we tell the untold story of women’s soul care and spiritual direction from the early Church to the modern era. Sacred Friendships listens to the voices of these previously voiceless women—hearing the feminine story told by women of all races and nationalities for the benefit of all women and men.
We begin our narrative where the amazing journey began—with the records of the lives and ministries of the Church Mothers and martyrs. Many of them were the physical mothers and biological sisters of the great Church Fathers. By listening to the voices of these courageous women of the faith, we detect new textures from the halls of church history.
The story continues with the sayings of the Desert Mothers who boldly provided feminine soul care and spiritual direction, not only for women, but for men. Their unsilenced voices provide readers with a new melody in the ancient ministry of spiritual friendship.
Moving to the Medieval times, we hear the feminine words of lay women, wives, single women, writers, and poets. Here, for the first time, whole books of spirituality furnish comprehensive manuals for soul care and spiritual direction from a feminine perspective.
The story also visits women of the Reformation and post-Reformation era. We hear the thought-provoking insights of wives of Reformers, pastors’ wives, mothers of denominational leaders, and women who directed substantial ministries of their own.
We then trace the continued development and growth of women’s soul care and spiritual direction in the modern era. Letters of spiritual counsel and books about women’s ministry express the depth of individual and corporate mutual ministry.
Throughout each chapter, we weave together individual stories and highlight common themes. We invite you to enjoy the voices of diverse famous and not-so-famous women who tell their own stories. We pray that their stories will impact your life and ministry.
Listening to the Silenced Voices
Throughout Sacred Friendships we will listen to the previously silenced voices of over fifty godly Christian women spanning nearly two-thousand years, five continents, and a great diversity of nationalities and races. Centuries later, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, we build upon the foundation they laid.
Our prayer as you read Sacred Friendships is that you will marvel at the depth of the spiritual riches that arose through the previously unheralded history of women’s soul care and spiritual direction. More than that, whether you are female or male, it is our desire that when you finish Sacred Friendships you will be empowered to sustain, heal, reconcile, and guide the people you love based upon the wisdom and practice of these female predecessors in the faith.
