Excavate

This week we’re digging into an area of guidance and discipleship that is often overlooked for women. We’re talking about money, being a good steward, and the way that has uniquely impacted women. Christian women have often been socialized to depend on men in their lives to the detriment of our own financial literacy. We’ll look at women in Scripture that can inspire our stewardship journeys, incl...

This week we’re talking about the overwhelming and often scary topic of aging. Western society tends to idolize youth and prize youthful beauty and agelessness. We also praise those who achieve great success at young ages which can create pressure to live up to unrealistic standards of age and achievement. It’s easy to feel inadequate and behind the curve in our modern society, which is why we thi...

On today’s podcast we are so excited to welcome special guest Kaitlyn Schiess. Kaitlyn is the author of “The Liturgy of Politics” and the perfect person to help us dig into the story of Jezebel and her influence in Old Testament history. Jezebel has become a symbol for either maligning women as dangerous seductresses, or as a New Age feminist icon of women behaving badly. Her legacy is a complicat...

Last week we talked about the overall themes of Proverbs as one of the wisdom books. This week we’re focusing on Proverbs 31, “the virtuous woman.” This passage has often been a place of pressure or tension for women so we’ll excavate those layers and see the strength and dignity of this passage and the invitation for women and men to celebrate the valor of women around them. Read along with us: P...

Today we’re beginning a discussion about wisdom literature in the Bible and this unique genre of scripture. Proverbs personifies Wisdom as a woman and contrasts Wisdom with Lady Folly. We’ll discuss how these are portrayed and how the proverbs discuss the roles of women in the home and world. Read along with us: Proverbs 9:1-7, 13-18 Prov. 12:4, 5:18 Prov. 19:13, 21:9, 21:19, 25:24, 27:15 Prov. 15...

It's the week between Christmas and the New Year. This is the perfect time to reflect on the past year so we wanted to consider what it looks like to step into a new season as people of hope. We’ll look at two women in the Old Testament that may not be the first ones you’d consider at the new year, but who have much to teach us about courage and hope. Whatever time of year you’re listening, the Wi...

It’s striking how little the men of the Christmas story speak and how much space is given to the women of this story. So this week we’re going to look at the women in and around the Advent story and the way that God elevates the voices of women surrounding Jesus’s birth. We’ll talk about the strength we can draw from their stories and the way these women may represent biblical types. This is a gre...

We are so excited and honored to be welcoming Whitney Trotter to the podcast this week! In our previous episode we talked about a biblical theology of food and the body, and this week we’ll be digging deeper into how disordered eating can impact us and the ways that generational trauma connect to dynamics around food. We’ll discuss the story of the Israelites coming out of captivity in Egypt and h...

In today’s episode we are beginning a conversation about our relationship with food. We’re starting with a discussion on the biblical and theological aspects of food, then in our next episode we’re welcoming Registered Dietician Whitney Trotter to lead us in a conversation about the ways eating and our relationship with food can become disordered and how to address that in healthy ways. This is a...

Welcome to Season 2, we’re so happy to be back! As we’re all navigating the holidays we know that can be very emotionally complex and bring up loss, trauma and grief. Today we’re going to talk about grief and gratitude and the way they pair together. It’s also something that we think women in particular navigate often and can be leaders in for our communities. We’ll look at models in Scripture and...

In recent years there has been a rise in the popularity of witchcraft and feminist spirituality. This often goes hand in hand with other trends like astrology and manifesting. Things like Spooky Season and Halloween are also more popular than ever, especially among women. Today we want to dig into a few stories in the Bible about a witch and a ghost, and a fortune teller, and see how the Bible off...

This week we wanted to spend time talking about themes that jumped out at us as we walked through this first season of the podcast. You know we love the Bible but one of the reasons we love it is because there’s always something new to glean and things to uncover. In season 1 we very intentionally stuck to what helped us understand the metanarrative of Scripture and the role of women in it. In sea...

We’re concluding our conversation about the book of Revelation and the very good ending of God’s story. The resurrection of the body is not something that is often discussed yet it has tremendous implications for how we navigate our current relationships with our bodies. Especially for women who are often socialized and conditioned to have very ambivalent perceptions of our bodies, so this is such...

We’ve been tracing the metanarrative of Scripture as we look at the consistent role of women and God’s heart for women. Like all of the best stories, the ending of God’s Story is very good. Jesus teaches us to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” so we should be consistently aligning our prayers and subsequently our lives with this reality! God’s endgame is to bring healing and wholeness to our expe...

Today we are in part two of our episodes about women in the early Church. we’ll spend a little more time in Acts before shifting to Paul’s greetings at the end of his letter to the Romans. We’ll see a very clear picture of Paul regularly collaborating with and co-laboring with women in his ministry. These passages are such an important addition to his teachings on the role of women in the church a...

It is imperative to pair Paul’s teachings about women in his letters with the way we see women integrated and highlighted in the early church in the book of Acts and beyond. This is the first of two episodes looking at the way women were a core part of the Church from the beginning. Today we’re in the book of Acts, next week we’ll also study Acts and Paul’s greetings in his letters. We’ll see the...

In light of all the recent coverage of abuses in churches and pastors advising women to stay in abusive relationships, we wanted to devote an entire episode to passages that have often been used against victims in the Church. It is all too common for women to have the Bible quoted to them about why they should stay in unhealthy relationships or why their abuse is being covered up. We believe this...

Paul’s teachings have been a major basis for the belief that women should not have leadership roles in the Church. On the surface his writings can seem extremely harsh and dismissive, and have been a source of pain and confusion for many women (us included). In this episode we are digging deeper into the historical context and Greek translation of 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2-3, the main place...

We’re moving into the wider New Testament and looking at Paul’s letters. His teachings about women are most often used to reinforce patriarchal gender norms, and have been a source of pain and confusion for many of us. In today’s episode we’ll begin digging into those very entrenched biblical interpretations about male headship and gender roles in marriage. We believe that God was instilling great...

Jesus empowers women during His ministry and also through His death and resurrection. In this week’s episode we dig into the crucial role women played in being present with Jesus during the crucifixion, and the ways Jesus reveals Himself to them at the resurrection and emboldens them for evangelism. We believe this was not just for the sake of creating an airtight apologetic for the validity of th...

We’re thrilled to welcome a very special guest to the podcast, New York Times Best Selling author, Cole Arthur Riley. Cole’s work in the last 2 years through her Instagram account @blackliturgies, her online writing, and her recent book “This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that make us” have been such a powerful voice. The three of us dig in to the story of the Woman at the...

Who do you picture when you hear the word, “disciple”? Most of us probably instinctively picture a man, but the Gospels show us that Jesus encouraged and empowered women disciples in his ministry. Today we’re looking at Jesus’s interactions with women from a grieving widow to a wealthy benefactress. Jesus has an inspiring track record of involving women in His life and ministry, and making a place...

Today we’re digging into the Magnificat (Mary’s song of praise), and her stories with Jesus after his birth. Patriarchy has so often assumed that Jesus takes a dismissive or irritated tone with Mary in their interactions, but we believe these stories reveal the depth to which Mary knew and understood her son, and partnered with his ministry. Perhaps more than any other human in his life, Mary exem...

The Protestant evangelical church has historically been all too reluctant to elevate and honor the legacy of Mary the mother of Jesus. We think Mary is such an important woman in scripture that she deserves 2 episodes! Today we’re talking about her call by God and her yes to being part of the salvation story, and her crucial time with her cousin Elizabeth and what they teach us about encouragement...

We’re moving into women in the New Testament! And to do that we’re going to dig back into the Old Testament. The Gospel of Matthew starts with the genealogy of Jesus which has some peculiarities that would have been surprising to its readers, namely that 5 women are included in what would normally be a list of men only. This was a deliberate choice by the author to teach us something about who sha...