There are a handful of topics that can empty a room faster than almost anything else in evangelical Christianity, and the question of women in ministry is near the top of that list. It's become so charged, so politicized, and so tangled up in identity and tribe that a lot of people have simply stopped asking the actual question: what does the text say?

Dr. Lynn Cohick has spent decades trying to answer that question with rigor and integrity. A New Testament scholar who has studied women in the early church from the New Testament through the fifth century, she brings to this conversation something that is rarer than it should be: actual Greek, actual historical context, and actual humility about what the text does and doesn't clearly say.

In this episode, Dr. Cohick helps us work through the landscape carefully, starting with how Jesus related to women in a first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman world that was more complicated than we tend to assume, then moving through Paul's ministry team (Priscilla, Junia, Phoebe, Euodia, Syntyche) and what their roles actually tell us, before landing on the passages that have functioned for so many women as a closed door: 1 Timothy 2 and the question of women learning, teaching, and authority.

This is not a conversation about what your church should do. It is not a feminist manifesto. It is a conversation with a scholar who has paid a real personal cost to do this work, who loves Scripture enough to take its complexity seriously, and who believes that the woman in the confused, painful middle deserves better than a sound bite.

Dr. Lynn’s Website: https://www.lynncohick.com/
Dr. Lynn on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drlynncohick/
Dr. Lynn’s Leadership Community for Women: https://www.letherlead.com/
Dr. Lynn’s Podcast: https://www.letherlead.com/podcast
Dr. Lynn’s Books: https://www.lynncohick.com/
Resources to Read On This Perspective: https://tinyurl.com/2shrhu9k

Today, I'm sharing the eulogy I delivered at my Dad’s memorial service in February of 2018, but I’m also pausing to reflect on what those lessons look like seven years later, as I turn 50 years old.

My dad spent just shy of fifty years (the full span of my life) in full-time ministry. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity, contagious joy, and a gentleness that wasn't weakness but the result of a lifetime of submission to the Spirit. In this episode, I trace the direct lines from his life to mine through the second fence he taught me to build, the relational equity he modeled, the way he said hard things without ever making you doubt his love, and above all, the Gospel that was the center of everything he did and everything he was.

I also share something I've never said publicly outside of my eventual book… a moment early in his Parkinson's diagnosis that stopped me cold and has never left me.

This episode is for anyone whose father pointed them to Jesus. And for anyone who is still becoming who someone they loved taught them to be.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

We have a lot of feelings about our bodies. What we don't have (and what the church has largely failed to give us) is a theology of them.

Lisa Whittle has been a Bible teacher, bestselling author, and pastor's daughter her whole life. And even she admits she never thought to open Scripture and ask: what does God actually say about this from Genesis to Revelation, all the way through? It took a season of hearing women's stories, getting genuinely offended by the emptiness of the body-positivity movement, and a direct invitation from her publisher to finally take that deep dive. What she found changed her.

In this conversation, we explore why the church's silence on the body has been a teaching in itself, and not always a helpful one. We talk about Imago Dei and why knowing it intellectually isn't the same as living from it. We also unpack what "It is finished" means for the woman who still hates what she sees in the mirror, as well as for the woman who lives in chronic pain or disability and wonders if whole body theology is even available to her.

Spoiler: it is. Whole body theology leaves no body out.

We also go somewhere that doesn't get talked about enough… the particular weight that falls on women in ministry who step onto a platform and suddenly find themselves fighting a second invisible battle alongside the one they were actually called to fight.

This is a conversation that is equal parts honest, theological, and deeply freeing. Lisa's Bible study Body and Soul is linked in the show notes and it’s a MUST DO recommendation from me.

Lisa’s Website: https://www.lisawhittle.com/

Lisa on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisawhittle/

Body & Soul Bible Study: https://tinyurl.com/mv6kbrjj
Lisa’s Books and Bible Studies: https://www.lisawhittle.com/books

What if your “quiet time” doesn't have to look like everyone else's?

Kim Pepper never set out to be a creative faith coach. She was a blogger, a wife, a mom of three, until a blindside divorce in early 2020 left her sitting alone in a COVID lockdown, holding a life she didn't recognize and feelings she didn't know how to put into words. Journaling felt too exposed. Writing felt too raw. So she picked up a pen and started drawing instead.

What she discovered in the margins of a devotional book changed everything, not just about grief, but about the way God had always been trying to meet her.

In this conversation, Kim and I dig into what it means to connect with God through creativity, why so many women walk away from traditional Bible study feeling like failures, and how the fear of doing it wrong has kept a lot of us from showing up at all. Kim's answer is simple and quietly revolutionary: it's a prayer on paper. And there's no wrong way to pray.

Whether you've never been able to stick with a Bible study, or you've been doodling through church your whole life without realizing why, this one might be the permission slip you didn't know you needed.

Kim’s Website: www.kimpepper.com

Kim on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimpeppercreative/

Free Resource: https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/708118/121489178478249893/share

Some stories don't fit neatly into a testimony card. Ro Elliott's story is one of them. In this episode, Ro sits down with me to walk through a life marked by unexpected loss, hard-won faith, and the kind of redemption that only makes sense in hindsight.

Ro grew up in a tightly-knit Italian Catholic family outside New York City before her father's job transfer landed them in the deeply unfamiliar terrain of East Tennessee where she encountered Protestants, Baptist churches on every corner, and eventually, Jesus. What followed wasn't a neat conversion story. It was a slow unraveling and rebuilding that touched every part of her life,

and yet… Ro kept her grip on the God those communities had distorted, asked him hard questions, and found her way back, not just to church, but to genuine healing and community.

This conversation is honest, unhurried, and full of the kind of hope that has actually been tested. If you're in the middle of your own hard story, this one's for you.

Ro’s Website: https://www.roelliottconsulting.com/

Ro on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roelliott/

In the South, you can drive down the same road and see both of them… Spanish moss and kudzu… sometimes on the same stretch of trees. Both draped. Both familiar. Both so much a part of the landscape that most people don't look twice.

But up close, everything is different. One takes nothing. One eventually collapses what it climbs. One rests and receives. One covers until you can no longer see the shape of what was there.

This final episode in the Dormancy Is Not Death series holds both plants in the same hand. And the question I keep coming back to, the one I'm asking myself and asking you, is simple: which one am I tending right now?

Because the honest middle most of us are actually living in is that we have some of both. There are places in our lives where we've genuinely learned to rest and receive. And there are places where something has been growing longer than we intended and covering more than we realized.

I also want to tell you about the bald cypress, the tree that drops every needle in winter and looks completely, entirely dead, and why it might be the most important image in this whole series for anyone who's standing in their own stripped-bare season right now.

This episode ends with three questions. They're not homework. They're an honest invitation to look at your own landscape and tell yourself the truth about what you see.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

If you've driven through the South, you know the image… entire treelines swallowed whole, every individual form buried under a mass of relentless green. That's kudzu. And I think most of us have some version of it growing in the interior landscape of our lives.

Here's the part that I couldn't shake when I started researching this: kudzu wasn't snuck in. It was invited. Celebrated, actually. The U.S. government paid farmers to plant it in the 1930s because it looked like a solution to a real problem. By the 1950s it was classified as a weed. By the 1970s, a federal pest. What was subsidized and welcomed became what devoured the landscape.

That's the episode. Because the things that do the most damage in our lives are rarely the things we chose in obvious rebellion, they're the things we welcomed in because they looked like solutions. The coping mechanism that made total sense in the season we adopted it. The way of thinking about ourselves that started as protection and became a prison.

And here's the harder truth I had to say out loud first. You can deal with the vine all day long. Cut it, name it, make a commitment. But if you don't deal with the root, it simply waits and resends. The kudzu root goes seven feet deep and weighs four hundred pounds. The vine is just evidence. The root is the conversation.

This one's a little uncomfortable. But I think it's the kind of uncomfortable that's actually really good for us.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

I was standing outside in Florida looking at the trees when it hit me. That gray, ghostly draping hanging off the branches stopped me in my tracks. And my first thought was: that's dead, right?

Wrong. Completely wrong. And what I found out next sent me down a rabbit hole that turned into this episode.

What most of us call Spanish moss isn't a moss at all. It's a flowering plant (an air plant) with no root system in the ground, no connection to the tree it rests on, and no need to take anything from what holds it. It draws everything it needs straight from the atmosphere. And those gray threads that look so lifeless? Wet them, and the whole plant turns green. The life was there the entire time. You just couldn't see it in the dry season.

I think a lot of us are in dry seasons right now. And I think a lot of us have been misreading them. We look at stillness and call it death. We look at dormancy and conclude something is fundamentally, permanently wrong. We do it to ourselves and we do it to the people we love.

So this episode is my case (biblically and botanically) for why that diagnosis is almost always wrong.

Dormancy is not death. And I think you need to hear that today.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/