The Em & M Show

02/10/2024

How true it was, what the ministerial director had said to me in that fateful December meeting when he announced the end of my employment:

“We all serve at the pleasure of the conference.”

Even as I was being fired, I was still asked to serve at their pleasure, to engineer an exit from my current church that would conceal the truth of my departure. As an employee of the denominational system, I was being asked to prioritize the same thing that conference leadership was prioritizing: the best interests of the church organization. The needs of myself, my family, and even my church were secondary considerations at best.

(Read more in this week's blog.)

In last week’s blog, I shared how the conference informed me that within six months, my employment with them would be ending.

22/09/2024

The ministerial director reiterated what he had shared with me at our last meeting: the conference wanted to make a change in leadership at my church. “That’s still the plan,” he said. “But we don’t have a place for you. Your employment in the conference will conclude in six months.”

My heart sank. All along I’d had the sense that something bad was going to happen. But nothing really prepares you for news like that. My whole world had just been turned upside down. I was facing not only the loss of my career, but the loss of our family’s main source of income. It is impossible to overstate how distressing this announcement was.

(Read more of the story in our latest blog on Substack.)

In my last blog, I shared how the conference ministerial director, my direct supervisor, told me that the conference wanted to make a leadership change in my church, and that I should expect to be in a new ministry setting sometime within the next six months.

15/09/2024

"It’s difficult to know where to start a story like mine. The context is really my entire career as a pastor. We could go even further back to my childhood experiences that planted the seeds for my eventual decision to go into pastoral ministry. And maybe at some point we’ll get there.

"But for now, let’s start in November of 2022..."

Read the first installment of Matthew's story in our latest blog on Substack.

It’s difficult to know where to start a story like mine.

22/08/2024

https://open.substack.com/pub/emandmblog/p/life-in-the-messy-middle?r=2szzq0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

22/08/2024

Emmalee wrote again!

It's More Than the Instagram Highlights

19/08/2024

And why I'm writing again

12/08/2024

"Some years ago, I visited Honolulu on my way home to Tennessee from Micronesia. I had just completed a year as a student missionary on the island of Pohnpei. My friend and I decided to visit the beach in Honolulu. Since I had just spent a year on an island where it was considered taboo to show too much skin, I felt self-conscious and exposed in just a bikini. To counteract this reverse culture shock, I put on a pair of board shorts over my swimsuit. Since I’m a 5’11” women, these were men’s shorts, as women’s shorts weren’t long enough for Micronesian standards.

I must have stood out like a sore thumb. In Honolulu, women often wore bikinis everywhere when they were around the beach area. As we walked down the sidewalk toward the beach, some people leaned out of their 2nd-story window and shouted an anti-gay slur at me. 'We don’t want your kind here!' they screamed. 'Get out of our state!'"

Read the whole story on our new Substack!

How Gender Stereotypes Harm Women