By women, for the church

How Mary changed my perspective — and can challenge our expectations

Five years ago, Mary of Bethany transformed my perspective on women, ministry, and the church. Since then, her example has inspired me to re-think many of my assumptions about what it means to follow Jesus. 

While I’ve written and given talks about her quite a few times already, they were all in my former church (and at an Acts 29 conference), and some of my thoughts have shifted following the abuse I experienced at that church. 

So now, on Substack, I want to revisit her story and mine, sharing what I’ve gathered already while learning more. This will be the first in an ongoing, occasional series on Mary and what I believe she can teach us. 

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All I ever wanted to do was teach Bible study. 

And in 2018, I had just started planning the first-ever women’s study at our church, which a friend and I were going to lead together. So when the pastors announced plans to create a formal women’s ministry, I wasn’t fully invested in the idea. 

I had some disappointing experiences with “women’s ministry” events — programs that seemed to emphasize frilly feminine stereotypes, where I just didn’t fit in. I was worried a women’s ministry at our church might head in that direction. But my goal was to make sure we had chances to learn. I would leave the event planning to others. 

Of course the Lord had different plans for me.

Within a few months, the original leader of the women’s ministry had to step down, and the pastor asked me to consider the role.

I was willing, but hesitant. How could I lead a women’s ministry when I wasn’t even fully on board with the idea of “women’s ministry”? 

I needed to figure out what the point of this was, both in the big picture of the Church, as well as how it would work for our church.¹

That’s how I ended up in Mary’s story. 

I read the different versions of the anointing (in Matthew, Mark, John), and considered Mary’s history with Jesus: the way he defended her right to sit and learn from him as a disciple; how he received her grief when Lazarus died, allowing her to accuse him as she fell at his feet. How he wept with her. And then, how he raised her brother from the dead.  

This was a woman who knew Jesus loved her. Who knew Jesus welcomed her desire to be with him and to learn from him. 

When she came to anoint him that evening, it was an expression of love and gratitude. 

And it was also an act of ministry. 

Mary’s story challenged me to reconsider my definition of ministry. In our church, as in many others, a “ministry” meant a group that offered programs and services geared to a specific demographic: kids’ ministry, women’s ministry, youth ministry, men’s ministry. 

But the more I reflected on Mary’s story, I realized how much American consumer culture was defining my expectations: I saw a women’s ministry as something that would primarily offer programs to women. I and a small group of leaders and volunteers would do the work, while the women in the church would come to receive it. We would produce and they would “consume.” 

But the word ministry has its root in the Latin word for “servant.” To “minister” means to attend to the needs of someone. And this is what Mary does, according to Jesus: “By pouring this perfume on my body, she has prepared me for burial.” 

Caring for dead bodies was women’s work at that time. When someone died, women would wash the body, using ointments or perfumes, then wrap it in strips of cloth. But when Jesus died, there wasn’t enough time to do this before the Sabbath began.² There may still have been traces of Mary’s nard on Christ’s body when it was laid in the tomb. 

In pouring the perfume on Jesus’ body, she served him, doing something for him he would not be able to do for himself. The ministry of Mary was what she did for the body of Christ — literally.

Working through this helped me understand one source of my resistance to the concept of “women’s ministry.” For most of my life, women’s ministry was presented as something women receive, rather than what women DO. Mary’s story offered an invitation to something far more compelling: women’s ministry isn’t about becoming a passive recipient, but rather engaging in passionate service to the Lord.  

Mary’s ministry is not passive. Unlike many “women’s ministries” today, her ministry is not aimed exclusively at women, but rather at Jesus, and it serves the male disciples in the process. Mary’s ministry is active, provocative, beautiful, memorable, and most importantly, commended by Christ himself. 

My time with Mary helped me embrace the role of women’s ministry leader at our church. I now believed it was possible for us to participate in something more challenging and fruitful. I didn’t have to run a women’s ministry as if it were what the church, the body of Christ, could produce for women. Rather, I could look for ways that we as women could serve and honor the church as the body of Christ.

To me, this was a beautiful and exciting vision. And so, as was typical for churches like ours, I incorporated it into a “vision statement” for the ministry, one we printed on t-shirts and in our Bible studies:

“We believe that women’s ministry is not just ministry to women in the church, but it is ministry by women for the church.”

Women (and men!) were encouraged by this perspective, and it shaped our programs and the ways we recruited volunteers and created teams. It was a perspective that worked in our complementarian church, where women weren’t allowed to serve as pastors or elders. We could encourage women to explore new opportunities to use their gifts, but this didn’t require crossing any boundaries.

Mary’s gift, her act of ministry, truly was a beautiful thing, as Jesus said. And I wanted to see more of that kind of ministry:  

By women, for the church. 

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1. In hindsight, I think it’s funny to see my Enneagram 5w4 tendencies here: I felt like I had to “fully understand” the ideas before I took action, because I wasn’t satisfied with the “status quo.”

2. This is why the women brought spices to the tomb on Sunday, to take care of what they hadn’t been able to do on Friday.