Deborah Needed in the Church Today: Empowering Women for All Levels of Leadership

By Dessa Figueroa

Why would God call a woman into leadership when He has plenty of capable men to choose from? What if a woman has a continual galling dream to minister the gospel? Would God put that burden on a woman?

It is time we see women for what God made them to be—not sexual icons but powerful leaders and spiritual mothers of the church body. God fully intends to use the leadership qualities He gave women.

In this book, you will discover what the Bible says about women in lead positions; why women are needed and necessary in ministry for the building up of the body of Christ; and why and how God calls, equips, and ordains women leaders to lead alongside the men of God.

This book will equip you to encourage women leaders around you. You will learn how to empower women into God’s perfect will and plan. Be open to what God may want you to do. Allow yourself to be used in the way God chooses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685260439

Book preview

Chapter 1

Can It Be True?

The question you must ask yourself is, can I learn how to be a godly woman leader from someone who is divorced? My first husband and I were married for seventeen years. He is whom all my ministry stories come from. With this marriage came great opportunities to serve God in His church. When my marriage was over, so was my ministry. I’m not saying you have to be married and do ministry. I’m saying that I was able to do more ministry in marriage because we were the best team. Our friendship encouraged me to do ministry, even when he did not serve and lead groups with me. I was a youth pastor and a worship leader, and I ministered to the people of God in the house of God. In these years, I learned a lot, and I have a lot to share even in my brokenness.

I am thankful for my ex-husband, and I’m thankful for the time I had with him in marriage. I learned so much from him, and I don’t have any regrets about being married for seventeen years. They were some of the best years of my life. The events that took place have made it so that the covenant of marriage was broken and we both tried our best to fix our marriage, but it was unsuccessful. We can’t go backward; we can only go forward. My ex and I have forgiven each other and to this day remain friends.

I don’t know what the future holds, but this is the story of my past. If this disqualifies me from telling my story, then I’m sorry you feel that way and thank you for taking a look. I hope you read it anyway. I’m still going to share biblical truth. Truth is still the truth, even when it comes from a divorced woman. My marriage might have ended in divorce, but we did many things right while it lasted, and that’s what I want to share. My marriage worked, and it was a good one until it wasn’t. I hope you can learn from my marriage. I know I did.

I grew up in a typical Christian home with good morals and godly principles. My dad became a Baptist pastor, and biblical teachings were always a focus in our home. They were a big part of our lives growing up—for me and my brother.

As I got older, the women of the church would encourage me less and less in spiritual matters. I would be encouraged to pride myself on knowing all about homemaking. They focused on things like quilting, cooking, sewing, and raising children instead of empowering me spiritually. Don’t get me wrong; making a house a home is necessary and good, but it’s not the height of a woman’s pride and joy, not for a woman of God.

I tried cooking—Lord knows I tried—and I’ll continue to do so. My friends will tell you that I have many successes, but cooking is not one of them. The only thing I know how to cook is fish; we eat a lot of fish at our house. I could never get into quilting, although my loving mother tried her best to get me to learn. Our mother-daughter quilt turned into her doing all the work and me barely finishing one square. If you ask me to make you something crafty from my own hands, I will not get very far. I’m just not wired that way. Learning a craft like beads or scrapbooking was extremely hard for me. I could never finish and would always get distracted. On the other hand, if you ask me to pray, I will spend hours on my knees for the ones I love, praying all through the night if need be.

As a young adult, I had no one in my life challenging me to pursue greater knowledge of God. Instead, I got invites to craft night. The ladies from my church would talk about everything except spiritual matters with me. The impression it gave was that spiritual matters were left to the men. Indirectly, I was being told by other women at church that if I wanted to be in ministry, my only hope was to marry a man who was in it. If I wanted to fight for the Lord, I had to find a man to accomplish this. My dreams could be fulfilled only through someone else.

I wanted to learn about the spiritual realm and discuss how it operates. I wanted to learn how to pray. If you had a story of how God gave you a miracle, then I was all ears. I have never left spiritual matters in the hands of a hero unless it was Jesus Himself. I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to slay dragons for Jesus, like Joan of Arc—she was my kind of woman. You could say I did not fit in with the women I was surrounded by.

When I married my husband at age twenty-three, I attacked his reluctance toward ministry. I turned the pressure on, like a good wife. I tried to guilt him into going so that I could live my dreams through him.

Only, a couple problems presented themselves. He did not want to. The other problem was that there was not a call from God for him to go into the ministry. Every attempt that I made to make my husband a youth pastor or any kind of ministry leader failed. In fact, the Lord strongly let him know that he had the supportive role to give others at every turn in life.

He had a Jonathan anointing to support others in their ministry. The character that Jonathan had in the story of David, in many ways, helped David became king. Jonathan loved David like a brother and encouraged him. A person with this anointing is to encourage his family and friends to be the best they can be. The Jonathan anointing is as important as any ministry. All great leaders need someone behind them encouraging them. All leaders need someone to push them forward.

People will judge a leader by who supports them. If a leader has a supporter behind them who has great credibility (accepted socially, confident, or important in society), this gives people more reason to also follow. If Jonathan was a supporter of David, then many followers of Jonathan will support David too. Jonathan was popular in society because he was King Saul’s son. He was next in line to be king. If Jonathan recommends the social media of his time to follow David and recommends that David should be the next king, people would have listened even if they did not know who David was. They would have supported David because Johnathan (the king’s son) was supporting him.

Several pastors tried to make my husband a leader; you can’t make someone something they are not. If you try, you will always come to an end with unreached expectations. Other leaders throughout the years would put my husband to the test. They would give him leadership roles in the church. They saw the potential I had, as a woman of God, for leadership and thought this meant my husband must have the same calling. They say, You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip, but boy did we try. My poor husband. He tried to meet their requests, fell short of it, and felt guilty. I was left feeling I had missed the chance of my dreams, then he’d feel even worse for letting me down.

My husband was quite capable of leading in areas at work and at home. There are areas of leadership that he loved and thrived in. He did well as a head usher. He would choose others to be trained to watch over the church. He enjoyed leading in protective roles. Other roles in the church left him stressed and unsure. He liked to keep to himself, often escaping crowds. He was not a fan of public speaking. We realized that at any time, this could change. God is very capable of changing him into something else, but pressuring him to be something he is not because that’s what we wanted was not okay. The truth is, you cannot live your dreams through another person. Finally, it became very apparent that I was not going to live my dream through him.

The only alternative I felt I had was to stop trying altogether. I stopped asking for ministry. I tried to keep busy with other things. To keep my mind off feeling unfulfilled in life, although I would dream of preaching to crowds during the night. I’d come up with sermons in the shower and lose track of where I was in the shampooing process. I tried very hard to distract myself from a very real yearning and call of God. God called me to be in ministry; it overpowered me and kept me up