Good News: Women in Ministry (Tammy Melchien)

A post by Tammy Melchien, another Good News story about women in ministry.

I’ve been on the staff of COMMUNITY Christian Church here in the Chicago area for over 12 years (Dave Ferguson is our Lead Pastor and we have 13 sites in the city and suburbs). While we still have a ways to go in being intentional about developing more women for staff leadership ministry, COMMUNITY has always been a “permission-giving” place in my experience.

In fact, 4 years ago they supported me as I chased the dream of planting our first campus on the north side of the city of Chicago in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. I became our first female church planter and campus pastor and led the site up until this past spring.

The biggest thing I learned about myself through this role is that I absolutely loved teaching on Sunday mornings. I had a few experiences here and there to do that before moving to the city, but now as a Campus Pastor I became a regular  Sunday morning teacher.

When the man who led our church-wide teaching team for the past 17 years unexpectedly resigned this past January, I was honored and excited to be given the opportunity to step into a new role as COMMUNITY’s Teaching Team Pastor. The focus of my job is now on leading the team of pastors (including our founding pastors Dave and Jon Ferguson) who develop the weekly messages given at all of our locations.

I continue to serve as a Teaching Pastor twice a month at the location that I started here in Lincoln Square, and now get to travel to our other campuses once or twice a month to teach at those locations as well. I am loving this role and am grateful that the leadership of our church had no issue with putting a woman in this position.

I am not going to say that there haven’t been times when I’ve felt overlooked as a female leader at COMMUNITY or that I believe we’re doing all we can to intentionally develop female leaders (Dave and I have had many conversations about this and he agrees), but I do feel like my story is a good news story about women in ministry.