For those of you who missed it, we approved our 2024 budget at our congregational meeting after the service this week (attached). While that doesn't sound exciting, it is: buried deep within the bowels of the spreadsheet is our desire to pay for Jill Gentry to attend seminary, in a hybrid role (online and in-person) for the next three years, the better to equip her to do the work that she is already doing. Below is her testimony and brief description of her sense of calling to ministry, which both the session and the congregation have affirmed. You should give it a read!
When I was in fifth grade, my mom brought me to her office one afternoon. As I waited for her to finish work for the day, I pulled out a white Precious Moments Bible with my name engraved in silver cursive in the bottom right corner. My mom came out of her cubicle to check on me and laughed nervously. “Jill, you know you don’t have to take your Bible everywhere, right?” She gave a coworker that look parents give other adults when they’re embarrassed by their kids (I know this look because I give it all the time; my kids embarrass me, too)—this isn’t my doing, just so you know. I don’t know how she ended up like this.
I don’t know, either. How did I end up choosing to read a KJV Precious Moments Bible in my spare time as a 10-year-old? Why did I keep reading after I was discouraged from doing so? The only answer I can possibly give to those questions is that the God of that Bible is a real, relational, present being—and he has loved and pursued me all my life.
I read The Brothers Karamazov last year (I’m still reading weird books, Mom). When I read this excerpt, I grabbed a pen and underlined it and dog-eared the page. I’d never read such a beautiful articulation of how I feel—how I’ve always felt—about following Jesus:
“As soon as he reflected seriously and was struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist, he naturally said at once to himself: ‘I want to live for immortality, and I reject any halfway compromise.’ […] to Alyosha it seemed strange and impossible to go on living as before. It was said: ‘If you would be perfect, give away all that you have and follow me.’ So Alyosha said to himself: ‘I cannot give two rubles instead of ‘all,’ and instead of ‘follow me’ just go to the Sunday liturgy.’”
Of course, every journey has its stormy days, and every traveler has her baggage. I have struggled deeply with insecurity, perfectionism, codependency, boundary setting, anxiety, and a host of other issues. I spiritualized all of it away for many years, until in 2016, when my husband Scott and I became foster parents in our mid-20s. I was working for an organization that served the homeless population, both of us were helping plant an inner-city campus of our megachurch, and we served in demanding leadership roles at Bible Study Fellowship. Despite our inexperience and overcommitment, we welcomed two elementary-aged sisters into our home for seven months.
Our eyes were opened to systemic racism and oppression, to a level of brokenness in people we couldn’t have imagined, and, for the first time, how our own wounds were triggered by these girls’ stories. My savior complex and subsequent burnout, combined with what we experienced while fostering and the horrible vitriol that unfolded among Christians during that time, shook me to my core. To add to the chaos, we had our first biological child six months after our foster children left. Yes, we went to counseling.
In 2019, my husband was transferred for work, and we moved to another state. When I no longer had endless obligations to keep me in constant motion, I broke. It was a true “dark night of the soul.” At the same time, a sexual abuse epidemic in the church came to light, prominent Christian leader after leader was exposed for abusive behavior, the in-fighting increased, and I began to struggle to call myself a Christian. I still loved the Jesus I met in the pages of Scripture, but the stories of people being hurt by the Church I had loved so deeply broke my heart. It felt like a divorce. My doubts became overwhelming, and I put my Bible away for a year. If the people who taught me to read this book couldn’t be trusted, could I trust myself to read it? I felt so alone in both my faith and my doubt—it seemed like my options were to reject orthodox Christianity altogether or ignore my convictions and align myself with a faith that felt insincere, cruel, manipulative, and political.
I had another baby the day the world shut down in March of 2020. We moved again that October, this time to Savannah, Georgia. We stumbled into a tiny church one Sunday, and the 30 people there seemed shocked. “How in the world did you find us?” they asked. “Are you hiding from the authorities or something?” I thought. But something felt real and honest there. As we continued attending, it became obvious that this church’s orthodoxy was uncompromising, but there was also a sense of intellectual honesty, humility, and curiosity that I hadn’t ever experienced. This church had diversity in age, stage, class, political persuasion, and personality. There were couples mending marriages, addicts learning to heal their wounds, and a few other recovering overfunctioners. Christ the King was a group of broken people who were desperate for Jesus, just like me. Their unity was only possible through the Gospel.
I got stuck at this point while writing this essay and asked my husband what he thinks has changed in me since we walked into Christ the King three years ago. “You decided to use your energy to love the church in front of you instead of fighting the ideological battle of the American church in your mind,” he said. He knows me.
Early on at our time at Christ the King, Soren, the pastor, and his wife Emma invited us for lunch at their home. Sitting at their table, I joked, “I’m at the point where I’m either going to become an atheist, or I’m going to seminary.” And here we are. I am so grateful for the countless hours Soren has spent listening to my angst, challenging me to take my brokenness to Jesus, and finally affirming a call to ministry I’ve been trying to figure out for decades. In all my years in church, I had never actually been pastored—I had instead been identified as a high performer, recruited to work, and praised for the overfunctioning that ran me into the ground. Simply being seen and heard was healing and empowering. I would love to use my story to pay that gift forward to others.
In my current role as women’s ministry coordinator, I’ve been honored to sit across from women as they share their stories, their fears, their questions, and their insecurities. I have cried with women grieving losses and celebrated more babies and birthdays than I can count. I’ve taught about the power of confession and write liturgy that helps people practice it week after week. I delight in Scripture again and have margin in my life that allows me to pray or sometimes just sit in silence with the God who has never left my side. Our children yell “It’s our church! It’s our church!” when we pass the building, and we listen to them recite ancient prayers and creeds from memory alongside their church family every week. Their daddy, who is an elder, serves them communion. I have never felt more at peace.
I understand that ministry to a tight-knit local church is a vulnerable and humbling calling, and for months I’ve been counting the cost of pursuing it. I tried on the idea of becoming a counselor instead, but as I prayed, the desire to spend the rest of my career serving my church in a ministry role became overwhelming. Marilynne Robinson says it better in Gilead than I ever could:
“Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.”
My hope is that the training I receive from a seminary education would help me steward well those precious things that have been put into my hands. I hope to continue to know myself better, so I might be able to teach, counsel, and mentor future leaders more effectively. But most importantly, I just want more of Jesus. I love learning, and I love the Word of God. I am excited to study it more deeply and know I will continue to be amazed by the story of how the love of a perfect God has transformed imperfect people since the beginning of time.
