Intro Interview with Jill Browne
Hi, everyone. Welcome to 40 Minutes of Faith- not just another Bible study. My name is Barbara Cox, and I will host each episode.
I pray that this podcast can offer encouragement to people who need it. So that we can feel strengthened in our daily lives. Resources will be provided about additional supports at www.40minutesoffaith.com Another prayer of mine is that people feel welcome here. You might go to church every week or you might never have set foot in an official church building.
God is way bigger than a brick or wood building. You might want to attend a worship service, but your work schedule or family situation prevents you from going. You might have experienced rejection by a faith group. I don't have all the answers about God and religion, but I look forward to exploring the Bible together.
God has called me to love my neighbor. And as far as I'm concerned, you're my neighbor. We'll be talking more about that in other episodes. Jill Browne interviewed me about this podcast
Jill: so tell me a bit about your podcast
Barbara: I am going to have guests talk with me about a particular topic. I decided to name it 40 Minutes of Faith. And the tagline is not just another Bible study, so it's not always going to be about a book of the Bible or a particular verse of the Bible. I'm not going to be giving lectures or a history lesson. Real life application. There are documents that have been prepared and published that are called social statements from my Lutheran church body. The one about the environment talks about how we can be stewards of the environment with an eye on the Bible. So it is kind of a combination.
Jill: is it limited to Lutheran?
Barbara: that's a great question. I would welcome whatever the guest speaker has as their area of expertise. So I have friends who are Catholic and very happy to have them on. one of my friends at school who I was thinking about having be the guest speaker did an internship in a church and they really focused on how can they be good stewards of creation in their everyday lives. How are we taking care of what we have been given?
There's going to be a prayer time also. I would like the scope to be broad and inclusive and welcoming.
Jill: And what do you want the listener journey to be?
Barbara: I want to acknowledge that some people have had complicated journeys and some people have had painful journeys. And I don't expect everyone to have Mary Poppins kind of journeys, and everything be all, sunshine and butterflies, as much as that would be nice. So to feel a sense of belonging and welcome, because I know people who have had experiences of feeling rejected from a church group for various different reasons.
So that's part of my thinking. It's not always going to be easy. It's not necessarily supposed to be easy. We're not promised ease, but that, it hurts me to think that people are rejected for different reasons. You know, maybe they have tattoos of the clothes they wear or their family situation or whatever, that maybe somebody can hear that not everybody is like that.
Jill: So when the listener is listening to. An episode or a season, even within an episode, you're taking them on a bit of a journey.
Barbara: I was just polishing up one of the studies that I had previously written about fear and most people experience fear in their lives and fear is normal, but it's just fear sometimes hold us back or keep us small. I was looking at what are different ways that we can release fear and how can we feel safe from fear and are there any behaviors or thoughts?
And prayer is part of it, but there's also physical ways and ways we can encourage others. Do you sometimes look back at a stressful time in your life when you may have felt afraid? And when you look back, you can see, okay, I'm in a different place now because of that. And it wasn't fun while I went through it, but things are relatively okay now, but I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't gone through what I had gone through.
That came from a particular Bible verse that was in a class that I was taking about fear and about consolation. And then I've been a licensed social worker for 20 years. This is not going to be a counseling podcast. But is there a way to sort of combine the basic tenets of social work and my positive experiences with Bible study with peer support, with peer encouragement, with prayer, to sort of in 30 minutes wrap all of that together and then say, you know what? We just barely scratched the surface of fear. We'll get to fear another time. But next I've got Stuart in creation. And then after that I have one in our relationship with God.
Jill: what I'm hearing is like a pattern. Making sense of something. That's the journey I see you describing, whether it's about environment or fear or whatever you introduce this quite complicated topics that arouses a lot of emotions and it's fairly universal, right? Everybody has fear. Here's a thing that we can't hide our heads in the sand about. Here's a way of dealing with it that works. Then in your case, it'd be like a way that is grounded in faith that works. And here's an elaboration of the faith. Their journey is to go from concerned to aware and confident that they've got more things they can use to deal with it.
Barbara: This is why I really prefer a group conversation if at all possible, because we all have seasons in our lives. I went through a season of fear when I had a bump on my wrist and I didn't know what it was. And I had to get some doctors to take a look at it and I had to have surgery and now it's over and it's okay.
So now I'm not afraid anymore about the bump that used to be on my wrist and someone else might have just had a doctor's appointment recently. So we kind of take turns,
Jill: especially those people who are waiting.
Barbara: there's actually a different one where waiting is the subject. because a lot of us spent a lot of time waiting and I don't like to wait, but it's waiting. It's a
Jill: bad thing. So, is that going to be an episode?
Barbara: Yes. My favorite quote, that's going to be in that one I heard in a church sermon one time: “most of us want a microwave God.”
Jill: We want everything right now.
Barbara: Yes. And sometimes that's not good for us. And sometimes other things need to happen first.
Jill: True enough. So tell me a bit about your master's thesis. Congratulations. You've just handing in the last piece.
Barbara: I did. I started off at a women's university for my bachelor's degree, which I absolutely loved in Boston. I graduated from Simmons. The premise really was, there are only women in the classroom. So only female students will be answering the questions. Only female students will be leaders. And not everybody is always brave and confident, but you have room to grow and if you're shy, that's okay too. But there's plenty of opportunities for socializing in Boston anyway, with anybody you want.
My faith experiences had always been coed. So Bible studies and church services were always mixed and that was fine. I didn't have any problem with it. We moved to Germany for my husband's military job. And they had separate women's Bible studies and men's Bible studies. And I absolutely loved the women's Bible studies that I attended.
And I kind of wondered too. Women's faith development journeys differ when they are in a single gender study? I completely acknowledge and welcom that not all women want to date or marry men. I get that. But for many people, a coed experience could include different communication styles. So I researched a little bit of that.
Did a literature review. Men tend to interrupt more of the conversation and be more analytical and impersonal where women tend to encourage each other more and, sort of nurture the relationships more in single gender groups. I spoke with some subject matter experts on this, that women's faith development groups are really appropriate for lots of women.
And that's not to say that there can never be coed groups. Of course, there can be coed groups. People don’t always have to be separated out, but that there's really room for some amazing faith development in single gender groups. And there's not a lot of scientific research to support that. To do a study like that would be massive and hard to really quantify, all the different factors that are involved.
Jill: so you took that, ran with it.
Barbara: It's really fun.
Jill: Yeah. So what comes next? And now that that's over,
Barbara: I have one more semester of classes in the fall.
Jill: do you combine social work in the podcast?
Barbara: It's really part of me. You're absolutely right. I just need to be cautious because I don't want to serve poorly by not serving thoroughly. So it's not a counseling show, but I can't leave it at the door either.
So kind of that message of welcome and support, and I always want to have resources available. One of the social statements that I had mentioned is about gender based violence.
And one of my friends from social work school has run a domestic violence program for a long time. So I want to talk with her about faith because some people of faith believe that you need to stay, you can't get divorced. And I really disagree that someone needs to stay in a physically or other type of abusive relationship for the sake of, you know, there there's passages in the Bible that can be used to support your beliefs in either direction.
Jill: Yeah, that's tricky. Isn't it? That's the kind of discussion you don't want to get into because it's fruitless usually.
Barbara: I feel grateful that on the website I can put the whole social statement, which might be 30 pages long- we're not going to talk about a 30 page statement in a 30 minute podcast, but it's about how can we support people who are in abusive relationships.
And there are resources - I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I want to make sure you know about them.
Jill: And if they're abuser is bringing up what sounded like good faith based arguments.
To be given permission to think differently would be quite a gift.
Barbara: And even if the person who is abusive is not using faith based arguments, they're at documented cycles of abuse where someone maybe brings flowers or a gift again. [dog barking over the end of the sentence].
Jill: was your life in Germany life altering for you
Barbara: I had a job in our first location, but we moved within Germany and I wasn't allowed to telecommute. This was before the days of the pandemic. So I unfortunately was not able to find a new job in our second location. And then my husband gave me his GI bill. So in that sense, going back to school. I had a lot of different travel experiences.
Jill: Even choosing to go to Malta. You chose that for a reason. Might've just been a cheap flight, but I bet you, there was more to it than that. So why did you choose to go to Malta?
Barbara: That was one of three pilgrimages that a faith based group organized because Paul was shipwrecked on Malta. And you know, on the one hand you might say for all of them, well, was it just a junket?
Jill: everything is a junket.
Barbara: It was a legitimate church group going to a legitimate location where legitimate faith based things happens.
Jill: when you went to Malta, did you visit some shrines and particular points? Were those, the highlight of the trip?
Barbara: I have mixed opinions. One of the cathedrals was so covered with gold. I just thought, there's people starving in the world or we're building wells. And the tour guide said, the people who put the gold there were wealthy to start. They had chosen to not live with their families of origin in all of that wealth, but that they donated that money to the church for the glory of God. And I just thought, well then who am I to say, these people did something bad.
I just would rather not see so much gold dripping on the inside of a cathedral and help people who are in real need these days. I preferred the clump of rocks at the edge of the ocean, where we just stood for a few minutes in the wind. No gold.
Jill: So how hard is it for you to bring yourself to an understanding of the gold.
Barbara: I would like to think that I can be openminded and have a generous heart to give people the benefit of the doubt. There might be another way to alleviate world hunger without tearing all the gold out of this particular cathedral.
It breaks my heart that the inequitable distribution of wealth means people are literally dying of starvation and preventable diseases when there's so much wealth in other locations.
Jill: I sympathize with your feeling entirely and I've wrestled with the same question.
Barbara: I don't claim to have all the answers either. I mean, people who were sincerely glorifying God, who am I to say, don't do this. I need to own my guilt. I need to own my white privilege. And to say, I have benefited from policies that I don't even know exists on other people's backs,
Jill: Like the fact that you see this and it's off putting to you is a really powerful observation. A lot of people would have the same feeling. But that doesn't take away from the core problem of inequity.
Barbara: I also fear that there can be interpretations of hypocrisy from within the church. I think it's hypocritical to have so much gold, but yet isn't the church supposed to care about the poor. Now, does that mean that this church should be torn down?
Well, I don't know. I'm kind of saying that, but is there another way that we can care for our neighbors are our siblings on the planet?
Jill: of course we can do that. I guess part of it is, is this glorification or is it vanity?
Barbara: my impression from the tour guide anyway was that they meant it very sincerely. I give money for the upkeep of the church, and I'm also grateful that I'm able to give to organizations that support people in need and not everybody's in a position to do that.
Jill: you were in a setting and it really provoked some deep questions on your end about something that means something important to you.
I'm curious since you mentioned Finland, did you go to the church, carved out of the rock?
Barbara: We did. I like simple things and believe me, I honor, the majestic organ music that you can feel it in your feet and some of their cathedrals and, in different countries.
Jill: I thought Helsinki was lovely.
How long were you in Germany?
Barbara: Just under five years.
Barbara: One of my friends is going to play flute. she's going to record the intro music
And then another one of my friends from the Bible study in Germany is going to be writing the prayers for us. She wrote the prayers every week. And when she sent out that email every single time I would cry, they were so amazing.
Jill: Wow. That's powerful. So you have a great network, don't you?
Barbara: One of the benefits of moving often, although there are some other effects
Barbara: thank you for your time.
Jill: Thank you.
We're not using a Bible study curriculum. So as you listen, you're welcome to have a Bible nearby or on your electronic device. If you'd like to take notes or do something creative while you listen, you're welcome to do so. Some of you might be walking or doing the dishes.
The title of this podcast is credited to Maria Gallo. Her website is
Thanks to Jill Brown for interviewing me. Jill's website is www.JillBrownecoach.com
Thanks to Paula Jenkins for teaching a fabulous class on how to start a podcast. Her website is www.jumpstartyourpodcast.com
Bible verse:
Jeremiah 29:11-13 NRSV
11 For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. 12 Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. 13 When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart,
Barbara prayerfully seeks to encourage faith journeys.