Ladies Ministry: Abiding Through Every Season

By Sarah Stutler

If you’ve ever felt disconnected at church, you may relate to the way Bev Dyck felt in the years following COVID. 

"It was just a dry and weary land," she says. "There was really nothing — no groups, nothing. I felt very disconnected from everybody." 

She had just become her church's Christian Education Director. The congregation, Christian Fellowship Chapel in Winnipeg, Manitoba, had fewer than fifty regular attenders. Bev was looking for signs of life. She found one. 

"The women wanted to get together." 

Bev Dyck and Linda Edwards had been meeting together for years — every week, just the two of them, to pray for their church. Linda has attended since she was twelve years old. Bev had come to Winnipeg in 1979 and never left. They had prayed through seasons of growth and seasons of loss, and now they were praying through a season of quiet. 

Out of that quiet, something began to stir. 

They decided to start a women's Bible study, small, low-pressure, structured in four-week sessions so women could commit without feeling overwhelmed. They would offer it four times a year, one session per season. They would see if anyone came. 

Before they promoted anything, they asked Carla, an artist in their congregation, to paint something that captured what they were sensing. They knew the theme they wanted to teach: abiding in Jesus, drawn from John 15. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in Me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing. 

What Carla produced was a painting of a vine — grapes and leaves, organic and flowing — that resonated immediately with both women. It became the image on their invitations, the opening slide at each gathering, and on small prayer cards they gave to every woman who came. If she had a prayer request, she wrote it on the card and shared it with the group. If she didn't, she could use it to write an encouragement to someone else. ​

Painting by Carla Dyck. Click the image to see more from Carla.

The name followed naturally. Ladies Fall Abiding. Ladies Winter Abiding. Ladies Spring Abiding. Ladies Summer Abiding. Each season its own study. Each gathering a continuation of the same root. 

Around nine or ten women showed up that first Wednesday evening, a significant number for a congregation their size. 

"It felt like a little flame we were fanning," Bev says. 
  
To understand what Ladies Abiding is, it helps to understand what it is not. Linda and Bev were the last two leaders of their church's previous women's ministry before it folded.  

"It was becoming burdensome," Bev says. "Young moms were supposed to run this group and we had to do this, this and that. It just became burdensome." 
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This time, it's intentionally different. When they get together, their agenda is to form a supportive group for each other, where you know you can come and you're safe and you're loved.  

“We focus on building each other up,” Linda says. “So often in our churches it's performance based or evangelism based. You need the love of each other and experiencing the love of Jesus before those things happen. But often those things are put first and then people are just worn out because there's no inside energy coming for the things that we're supposed to do.” 

The group holds what they call "group identity statements": a few simple commitments that set the culture from the start. One is that they are under the authority of God's Word. Another is that they are safe. What is shared around the table stays there. 

"We had a very strong, giving group," Bev says of the women in their church. "We could all give, give, give. But we needed to learn how to receive love freely, just like a baby would. It's something we have to learn. We shouldn't feel anxious about it or feel we don't deserve it. That's not how God wants us to function. We need to just be able to relax and receive love." 

Linda frames it in terms of what Christian maturity actually looks like, and what it doesn't. "Maturity is being able to receive the love of Christ and pass it on and have that love shape your character. It's not knowing a lot about the Bible. It's not how many times you go to church or how you perform." 

More than two years in, the group has grown. The tables in the back of the sanctuary have multiplied. The women span every generation: new mothers, unmarried women, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. 

"The best group for growing is a group that has all ages," Linda says. "Everybody learns from each other." 

Each gathering begins the same way. Linda plays the group's theme song on a Bluetooth speaker and the women sing together. 

"Our Salvation is Bound Up Together” by Paul Zach 

"It sets our hearts to worship," Linda says. "We sense the Holy Spirit. It's very, very powerful." 

Between sessions, a WhatsApp group keeps the community alive. Prayer requests come in. Good news comes in. When someone has a need, someone with the capacity to meet it simply does, without a committee, without coordination.  

Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2) 

"When the Holy Spirit prompts us to love one another and tells us what to do, we can do it," Linda says. "When it's His love in the group, things aren't hard. They're easy." 

Ladies Abiding has not been sheltered from grief. 

Linda's mother, Irene, was part of the group. They even held several sessions in the meeting room of Irene's assisted living home. When she passed away, Bev organized a tribute for her. 

"The ladies were very, very supportive to me," Linda says. "I felt very supported." 

Other women in the group have walked through the sudden loss of a husband, the slow accumulation of sorrow, the hard seasons that arrive without warning. "We've walked hard journeys of grief together," Bev says. "Jesus promises comfort, and it's good comfort. He does bring good comfort to the group."  

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. (2 Corinthians 1:3–4) 

These women are walking through every season together.  Linda shares, “We've had deaths, we've had a wedding, we have showers, we've had baby showers. There are so many things to celebrate.”
 
For women in other FEBC churches who wonder if something like this is possible in their congregation, Linda and Bev offer counsel that is characteristically uncluttered. 

Start with prayer, Bev says. "God gives a little seed. And that seed — it just looks like an idea, like this is where it seems to be going. But the seed holds the blueprint of the plant. You just can't see it yet. And then it just slowly starts to grow." Stay in a posture of listening: "You have to be expecting that God is going to tell you something." 

Linda adds desire. "You have to want it. Pray about it, talk about it. If the idea resonates with both of you or the three of you, you kind of just go with it and see what happens." 

And love, they both insist, cannot be manufactured. "We lead by example," Bev says. "If we're not loving, we're sabotaging the group. It really has to burst out of love." That love, she is quick to add, is not theirs to produce. "Love is something that is from the Lord. We can't drum it up on our own. It has to come from God." 

It is not complicated, Linda says. It just takes someone willing to do it. 

Two women in Winnipeg decided to be those people. They started with prayer, nine or ten women around a table, and a painting of a vine. 

Almost three years later, the tables have multiplied. The women keep coming back. 
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Remain in Me, as I also remain in you. (John 15:4) ​