A Ministry Is Birthed (7/12/2024)

I am proud to identify as a Lover girl for Jesus Christ and a child of God. 

In short, I grew up a PK (Pastor’s Kid) in the South. This means that church quite literally was my life (I am talking every day and twice on Sundays.) Sadly, as I presume is the case for many PKs, it also meant that I saw a lot of struggle, hypocrisy, and pressure to never represent my parents (thus representing God) in a bad light. 

Throughout the years, specifically middle school-college, I turned my back on Jesus although I never outwardly denied being a believer. Even into adulthood, after finding my way back to Christ and being ordained/serving as a Minister in church, my faith and my mental health drastically declined. I couldn’t understand why what I heard and was trained to perpetuate, looked so different in public than in private. This led to me denouncing my “title” as a minister and questioning why God allowed the things that He did.

However, in my determination for answers, He helped me see that the lack of healing my childhood wounds/insecurities led me to chase after/seek a kind of love in people that was preached but was never given. My last church hurt experience revealed how these recurring relational experiences with church folk and non-church folk alike had produced a lack of faith in God’s goodness and ability to be trusted. It was the spiritual abuse and manipulation during my time as a minister that led to the brokenness I needed to seek out the truth of God and to take up Jesus’ offer to test Him and see that He is Good. 

In FINALLY reading/studying the Word for myself, I realized that who I was taught God was and who He is couldn’t have been more different. I committed to falling in love with Him and His words the way I would with a person. In relationships, I am so intentional. I learn what people like/don’t like, their struggles/success, their hopes/dreams, to understand what makes them…them. Then I take action to love them and choose to see the best in them often without boundaries. Without Christ (when I loved within my own capacity) this left me broken, abused, confused, co-dependent/insecure, and taken advantage of (by people who professed to be led by the Spirit of God.) However, when I chose to fall in love with Jesus in the same way I would with people, my entire life flipped upside down in a few short months. For the first time, as a lifelong believer, I experienced a true intimate relationship with my Creator.

Because of this, a ministry was birthed. My heart was burdened by the lack of love in the body of Christ as well as the lack of truth about who He is, what He says, and how He has called us to live. It broke my heart to know that there are people out here like myself, desperately seeking family or sisterhood, in all the wrong places (even when we thought the right place would be the church.) 

I reject the belief that genuine love in this world is unattainable or naive to give/have. I believe that we are called to love a broken world but can only do so when we are connected to the source of love, Jesus Christ. He makes it possible to love without fear of coming out more broken in the end. 

This ministry is for the lover girls out there who have been told (or shown through experience) that their love for people is their biggest weakness. 

My testimony, every broken and beautiful part, has led to this moment and this dream: to edify, encourage, and build a biblically sound community/sisterhood that is committed to loving Jesus Christ, experiencing true friendship, and fellowshipping with the Body of Christ.

In Christ, we are a family. I chose to rebuke every part of my flesh that attempts to associate love with pain. Instead, I will embrace the truth of Jesus Christ and be known as His by my Love for Him and the people He created (despite their willingness or ability to love me back.)

I invite you to join me. I can’t promise this way will be easy or that it will come without its bruises, but I can promise that picking up your cross and enduring until the end will produce a reward that no person, no amount of money, no status, no relationship, and no false sense of peace ever could. 

Your sis in Christ, 

Jocelyn