Ladies, pack up the wagons, pick up your walking sticks, and prepare for adventure! God is calling his new generation of pioneers to break a new trail; to birth a new movement of radical friendship and community. For too long we have sat isolated in our homes and churches waiting for an invitation. We have grieved our loneliness, believing life would always be this way.  We read about the first Christians in the book of Acts, breaking bread and eating together in their homes and dismissed it as a cultural thing.

But what if it’s more than that? What if God created us to do this thing called life together? What if the very core of who we are is designed for community, and this discomfort we feel in being alone is really a hunger we were meant to fill? What if God wants to use us to feed others with the gift of our friendship?

My Journey on the Oregon Trail

This journey is one God has had me on for over 25 years. Ever since he called my family to literally travel the modern-day Oregon Trail from Pennsylvania to our farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon I have been wrestling with this concept of community and hospitality. By nature I am a people person. I love nothing better than a phone call or text from a friend inviting me to lunch. I am a socializer and a herd animal. Being part of a group is my safety net and is where I bloom. When we arrived in Oregon, I was desperate to rebuild the community I had left behind.

However, many times this desire for community was met with feelings of pain and rejection. I expected to find my people in church because we call ourselves a church family, right? If I’m honest, though, church wasn’t always the most welcoming place, and even if we were welcomed on Sunday morning, it usually didn’t lead to connecting outside of church. There were times I was tempted to give up on church entirely because I hated feeling alone in a crowd, but God kept patiently watering the seed of community He had planted in my heart that I had carried with me on the trail.

Enter 2020, a worldwide pandemic, and the forced isolation that went with it. I believe God used that to open my eyes, to sharpen my vision of what church was supposed to be. We had our sermons, our weekly “feedings” livestreamed into our living rooms, but worshipping from the couch got old fast. I realized that what was missing was the whole point of church: gathering with our people to worship as one body. But we couldn’t do that, even when the doors opened back up, if we didn’t know each other.

The Call to Action

That’s when God began speaking to me in my quiet times about pioneering; about stepping out and doing a new thing. He began to fine-tune this passion that was building over the years for hospitality and bringing people together to build friendships. I’m so excited to share with you in this blog stories of how women are making community happen in a multitude of scenarios and how God is using even the hardest moments in our lives to bring us together. Being the church is so much more than what happens on Sunday morning. A successful Sunday is birthed out of multiple small connections during the week on the trail with our friends. 

I would love to hear your stories of how God is using women doing life together in the trenches during the week to build the church, taking you from acquaintances to friends to sisters. The Bible says encourage each other and spur one another on to good deeds, so let’s do it! Let’s be inspired together to link arms and blaze a new trail!