How Can Women Thrive in the Local Church? | Keri Folmar

Opening Prayer and the Podcast Setup

All right, we are back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean. You are?

Keri Fulmer.

Keri Fulmer. Let's pray. Will you open us in prayer, sister?

I'd be happy to.

Thank you.

Heavenly Father, we do thank you for this time, and we just pray that you would be glorified in our conversation. And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, in light of that good but short prayer, the Room for Nuance podcast usually runs into the several hours. We're not doing that today. This is going to be a little bit of a shorter episode. So why don't we just jump right in?

Keri Folmar's Testimony and Conversion

Can you give us a three to five minute version of your testimony?

I can. Well, I thought that I was a Christian when I asked Jesus into my heart as a child. And then I just kind of lived for myself. My life kind of went back and forth. It was up and down. And really, through college, I was living for myself.

I wasn't living for the Lord at all, but I thought I had my fire insurance, right? And then something happened in between. I graduated from college, and I was going to go to law school after a year. And really, the Lord just intervened.

And I saw people who didn't know the truth of the gospel, that Christ died for sinners, and He rose from the dead, and was victorious, and that what our lives are supposed to be all about is glorifying Him, right?

And I saw these people who were kind of spiritual, and they didn't know the truth. And I realized, I know the truth of what Jesus has done, and I'm not living like I know the.

Truth.

So at that point, I really repented, and I broke with my worldly life. And I started living for the Lord. And so that's, well, that was right before law school. So I was, I guess I was 22, maybe, sadly, just wasted my college years.

Worse than wasted, really. Yeah, and then, but I still, so I started going to a church that had pretty good teaching. But it really wasn't until I started going to a church with expositional preaching, where the point of the message that the pastor was bringing was actually the point of the passage that he was teaching.

My life was just, my Christian life was supercharged. I started growing.

Yeah.

God's Word.

Yeah.

I started loving the scripture, or at least desiring to love the scripture. That takes time, you know, to really love the scripture and grasp it. And then also, something else that happened was I'd been going there for about three months, loved it.

And the pastor met me at the door and said, Carrie, you've been coming here for a while. Why don't you join the church? And I thought, oh, okay. I just didn't realize there was such a thing.

Right?

Even though he was probably preaching it every week, knowing that pastor. And so I joined the church. Then women started discipling me, speaking to me intentionally about the life of someone who believes the gospel.

And so those two things, really the expositional preaching and becoming a member where I was. Really, I mean, there were a lot of older women in the church. I mean, a lot older. And it was just a joy to see their lives and interact with them and really started growing.

Then.

Law School, Pro-Life Work, and Public Service

So you went to law school and then what?

Well, I went to law school and I was very interested in the pro-life movement. So I wasn't interested really in being a lawyer in a law firm or anything like that. So I started doing pro-life work for California Right to Life because I was in California.

And they recommended me for an internship at National Right to Life. And so I went out there, did a summer internship where I would work on the research behind state laws on abortion. And I really loved it.

I loved Washington DC. So when I graduated, they were all looking for a job for me. And I graduated and I moved out there and then eventually wound up working for Congress.

Wow.

And you later got married, raised a few kids. How many?

Three.

Three.

Nice.

Choosing Family and a Home-Centered Life

I think as a pastor, one of the biggest things that I'm running into now with sisters in the church is they've been raised and it's just inescapable in this world of if you're not pursuing a career, like what are you doing?

But you've managed to do both. Did you wrestle with the tension of that at all when you made a transition? Or maybe it wasn't a transition. Maybe you worked full time and then were a mother full time.

What did that look like for you to go from being a lawyer in Washington DC and doing all these really important things to being a mom and I think a homeschooling mom?

Yeah, I homeschooled.

What was that like for you? Was it difficult?

Well, no, it wasn't particularly difficult for me that transition because I was pretty committed to that by the time. So John and I met in church and we got married. I got pregnant pretty quickly because we were older.

I mean, I was 30 when I married John. And so we just let the Lord decide when our children would come, which I highly recommend no matter what your age is, honestly, because you never know. But when I got pregnant, John was working as a lawyer in the Senate and he decided I need to get a real job if we're going to have a family like this.

People in Washington DC will know what that means. But he he went to work. We moved to North Carolina and he went to work for a law firm then. And that's when I quit. So I was actually, I mean, making pretty good money.

I was working for a very pro-life congressman and very fulfilling.

Yeah.

And and I was doing. I wrote the partial birth abortion ban.

Wow.

And that was a joy to see that go through and be passed. It got vetoed three times, but then finally signed into law when a different president came along. But so I was doing this work that I loved, but I also I just knew that, you know, my priority needed to be my family.

So when I got pregnant with Ruth, I just decided, you know, and and John was all for it, that I would stay home with her. And it it happened a little earlier than I expected because John got this job in North Carolina and we moved.

So I was about seven months pregnant when we moved and I I haven't worked outside the home since.

Advice for Women Torn Between Career and Family

What would you say to a young woman? Let's say she's twenty five. She just got married. She is just absolutely torn in half. On the one hand, her whole life, she was like trained to be a career woman.

You got to go to school. You got to get this job. You got to do X, Y and Z. On the other hand, now she's being discipled. She's reading the word. She's in Christian community. She's seeing families like perhaps she's never seen them before and she feels pulled to like do that.

And she just feels like almost manic between those two. What advice would you give her? What would you say to her?

Well, that's interesting because we're at CrossCon right now and I've had this conversation with several women already who have come up and asked me that and and some of them look a little shell shocked when I tell them, you know, that, you know, it's the the most wonderful.

Thing.

I mean, you don't have to be married and you don't have to have children to be a fulfilled.

Christian.

You can stay single and serve the Lord all your life. And that's what we've told our daughters. I have two adult daughters. Neither one is married.

First Corinthians seven. It may be an advantage to you on the mission field, right?

They're both totally plugged into their local churches, serving their churches, and one of them is on the mission field. So I'm I would never put pressure on a woman to feel like she needs this to be fulfilled.

But if that's what the Lord gives you, then lean into it. I mean, we were created for that commission that's in Genesis, right? You know, multiply, fill the earth and take dominion over it. And we partner with our husbands in that.

And so I yeah, it's just it's just the greatest life. You're not missing out on anything. My mother actually said to me, growing up, you know, make sure you do something before you settle down and have children.

Doing something children is doing something. You get to mold this child. You know, the Holy Spirit uses you to teach the gospel to them. It's it's glorious to be a wife and a mother. So what I have told women is my advice is don't go into debt.

So if you can go to law school or business school after you go to college and you can do it debt free, then OK, go ahead and do it. But if you want to be a wife and a mother one day, don't spend the money and suddenly.

Feel that pressure. Like we have to have dual income so we can pay off our debt.

Right.

Work, Purpose, and the Church as a Priority

I've told some young women, you tell me if this is good or if I need to tweak it anyway. Lead me. Lead me, sister. The impulse to want to work really hard and like give your life to something is a totally biblical impulse.

It's just where you're channeling it. And there's not anything necessarily wrong if providentially for a time you channel that to the glory of God in a particular career field. But when you get married, the most normal thing that should happen is that you have a family.

And so when you think about transitioning from a career to family, you shouldn't think, oh, I'm working. I have purpose. And over here, I'm just being a mother. It's like, no, you are working. And now your purpose, instead of giving all of your time to your boss who doesn't care, all he cares is that the numbers are right.

You're giving it to raise spiritual children.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, we, we want to also put so much energy into the church, I think. And you know, you take your kids along with you to do that.

Like you.

My wife, my wife who's sitting here, she literally takes the kids along while she goes and does stuff at the church.

Yeah. Yeah.

You do that.

You meet with other women at the playground.

Yeah.

And you, you bring other women into your home and single women who can watch you parent your children and, and be married and even learn about how you sin against your husband and repent of it. All of those kinds of things.

You can disciple other women in the church while your children are sitting right next.

To you.

Yeah.

And you can share the gospel. So the, one of the greatest things to do is to meet other people out in the neighborhood or go to a neighbor's home or have them over and have your kids playing right there, listening to you, sharing the greatest news on earth with this person who's well in my context overseas, who's never heard it before.

Yeah.

You know, I was, uh, we just interviewed Rosaria Butterfield. That was a wild ride. And she, um, I said something about her ministry and she said, uh, I don't have a ministry. I think I know what she means.

I think she has, she's thinking formally, like she hasn't been ordained. But what I was talking about is exactly what you're talking about. It's the every Christian ministry.

We all have ministries. It's Ephesians four, right?

That's right.

The pastors like you are supposed to train and equip us to do the ministry of the church.

Amen.

Motherhood, Single Life, and Serving the Local Church

Uh, I wanted to bring that up because I think this is not the first time I've heard your story. I think it's, I think it's really powerful that you kind of had it. You had the big successful, really cool, really powerful, uh, in some ways career.

And when you stepped away from it to have a family, you didn't feel in any way cheated. You felt like this is actually like a really good thing.

Yeah, I did. And, um, but I must say, you know, the world out there, like I remember, uh, one of the partners in John's firm who was a woman said to me, Oh, you're John's wife in a bit of a condescending way, or at least that's the way I perceived it.

And I still had my business card in my wallet and I very much wanted to pull out my business card and say, look what I used to do. So it's not, it's not an easy thing. I mean, the transition for me was a joy and it was easy.

Um, that actual transition, it wasn't super easy having a baby at home. I don't mean that. No, that was hard for me because you know what, as a lawyer, I could find all of the answers to my questions.

I just needed to do some research. But as a parent, I mean, that's hard work and there aren't easy answers and you don't always, you can't always find them when that baby's crying. What is she crying about?

I've tried everything.

What am I supposed to do here? You know?

Um, so it's not, I don't mean that life was easy. It was hard and it's, it's monotonous when you read the same book to a toddler for the 10th time that day. Um, you know, it's really fun the first five times and then it gets tiring.

And so it's, it's not easy raising little ones. Um, but there's also joy and it's much of it is the attitude you come to with it.

Yeah.

And you're probably not going to look back on your life and be like, man, I wish I spent more time in the law library.

Yeah.

You're going to be like, oh man, I wish I would have spent even more time with my kids.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I wish that, and I wish that, you know, at times of my life I would have been more intentional with the church. Like as a single woman, I was single all these years, right? I was single until I was, I think we actually got married at 31 and I was not as intentional as I could have been with those single years.

And contrast my daughter, both of my daughters, my daughter, Chloe lives with a family from.

Church.

She disciples these teenagers that live in the home with her. She meets with other women all the time. Her priority is the local church. Mine was work. Mine was very much work.

Yeah.

And, and I think that, you know, that has to be high on your list if you had, you know, a job like I did, but I wish I would have put more of a priority on the church when I was single.

Yeah.

Quit trying to make your boss happy, right? Serve the church, serve your family. And Hey, listen, the Lord may, the calling that the Lord has for your life may be to work in a secular field and be single and bear witness to the gospel there.

Really well until you retire and never get married and never have children, but that won't change the church factor.

Right. Right.

How Women Can Thrive in the Local Church

Okay. Speaking of the church, which by the way, it's, uh, I just love your heart for the church. You wrote a little booklet that I, I don't remember. I think I told you yesterday, 200. You think Luke, it would be unfair to say that we've given away 200 copies of how women can thrive in the local church.

Yeah.

We have a little, you know, a little booklet giveaway with all the nine marks, church questions and answers, uh, booklets and yours, right. How women can thrive in the local church.

How can women thrive in the local church?

Yeah.

Um, we just can't keep them stocked. It's so good. Uh, this was a last minute interview. I don't have the copy in front of me. You don't have your copy.

And I don't either.

And I have no memory.

I'm 57 years old now and like, but it's okay. You can just tell us how can women thrive in the local church? I think step one is what you already said. Make it a priority.

Yeah.

Right.

Jesus loves the church. He cares about the church. He gave his life for the church. That should factor very heavy into our priorities. What else?

Well, um, I guess I would say a few things. Um, I think women are different than men in that we tend to have different seasons in our lives. So we have, you know, this season as single women and that, that season could last your whole life.

Um, but then we may have a season, uh, you know, we may be college students and then we may have a season of married with no children. We may have a season of having younger children and these are all different seasons.

I'm now, I don't have children in the home anymore. I'm an empty nester. So I do a lot more now in the church and even writing books like how can women thrive in the local church, um, that I didn't do when my kids were in the home.

Um, so there are these different seasons, but I think the, the first thing that we as women need to remember that, um, I remember one of my points was sit more than you serve.

Okay. The whole Mary Martha thing.

Yeah.

Well, um, but, but even more than that in the church, make sure you're sitting under the preaching of the word. I think women can get caught up in serving so much that they can forget that they need that word preached to them so that they can serve.

And um, so I think it's important for women to make sure they're in the gathering and not in the nursery every week or in children's programs every week to protect sisters in.

The church from that.

See, that's so good that you as a pastor do that. Pastors need to protect, uh, women and, and men for that matter. But particularly the women who are geared towards serving all the time from doing hospitality that keeps her.

Like, I've even known women staying home because they were going to have people over for church after church. We need to like make that a simple meal and turn on a crock pot.

Yeah.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So sit under the preaching of God's word.

Yes.

Um, and then, you know, make sure, making sure that we're members of the local church. That's vitally important. And then I'd say all of the others kind of fit under being the church, being your family.

So you are a sister to others. Sometimes you're a mother to others. Like I speak into the lives of younger women and I speak into the lives of younger men. So young men will come to me and say, what should I look for in a, a potential wife?

And is that because they kind of view you as like a spiritual mother?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, so as women, we go through these different stages of our lives and we, we can be sisters. We can be mothers of either children, spiritual mothers of children, or when you get to my age, look, we have a very young church because of the way Dubai's set up.

Yeah.

People come there and they're in their thirties, twenties or thirties. And so everybody's younger than me. And John.

Does that feel weird? Like, did you wake up one day and go, Oh, I'm the, I'm, I'm a spiritual mother now. Cause you for, for such a long time, you're like, yeah, brother, sister, but then you've moved into the spiritual mother role.

Is that weird for you?

It is a little bit weird when you start noticing, okay, my friends are leaving the country. So my, my peers are, are leaving and going back to their home countries. And there are all these younger women and men.

And one day I just had to say to myself, like, I got to be the mom here now. Not that I'm the mom of the church. That's not the role of a pastor's wife.

You're not the first lady, right? Although they do, don't they play special music for you when you walk in on, yeah, so,.

So it was weird when I, when I realized I need to stop kind of pining away for women my age or women a little bit older who can kind of give me more advice and just press into this role of discipling younger women.

Discipling Younger Women in a Young Church

Yeah.

So you and I have talked about this a little bit offline, but you were actually very kind to help me with some stuff at my church six Avenue. But let's talk about it on camera because I think it'll be fruitful in churches like ours where there are a lot of young people, a lot of those young people, not only are they young, but they haven't been discipled well.

They come from very superficial, shallow, watered down gospel church, you know, gospel light churches. And so they'll show up at a reform church, for example, and ah, expositional preaching and meaningful membership and discipline and, you know, but then when it's, when we're like, Hey, now it's your turn, you get in there and you disciple they're petrified.

They, you know, like, Oh, it can't be me. There's, it seems like with women, there's a lot more insecurity than with men. Some of the men, they'll just be big, dumb idiots. But if I say, Hey, I need you to disciple him and he'd be like, yeah, I can do that.

Even, even if he can't with the women, I think maybe even it has something to do with an emotional intelligence factor too, but it's just a lot harder for us in our church to get younger women to step up to the plate and do this discipleship ministry.

I'm rambling now, but I think you get the gist of what I'm trying to ask you. What would you say to that?

Well, sometimes older women are real reluctant, even true as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, I mean, what I would say to it is that we just, you know, you don't have to think of it like a discipling relationship. You can think of it as accountability. You can think of it as more of a two way street.

If you're intimidated.

Yeah.

I mean, that's really what discipling is speaking the truth. We disciple one another. So even when I meet with, like, there's a younger woman in our church, she's, she's one of the, well, her husband's now an elder and she'll just say to me things that are like mic drops and I'll say, wait, can you say that again?

Cause I want to write that down. So that's discipling me as much as I'm discipling her.

Right.

Yeah.

So I do think that, that if, if the word discipling or mentoring is intimidating, we can just think of it as we're getting together, speaking the word to one another. That's what the Bible tells us to do.

Right.

Overcoming Barriers to Women Meeting and Discipling

Okay. So let's, let's think about another challenge. I've noticed that with men in the church, it seems easier to get them to, to get together. Some of that may have to do with certain social dynamics, differences between men and women and their personalities, but some of it's also just like life circumstance, right?

Like a guy can be like, Hey, I'll meet you at lunch on the, with the work hour, mom's at home with the kids. Can't get a babysitter in the middle of the day.

Right.

Any thoughts on how women can yeah, overcome some of those barriers?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, that is a great question because I mean, I, I remember talking to one of my friends at Capitol Hill Baptist and she was saying, you know, I'm just not discipling that many.

Women.

And I was like, are you kidding me? You meet with women all the time and you're discipling all the time. And she said, yeah, but I'm not like sitting down reading a book with them. And this was a woman who I felt like she was discipling me.

Yeah.

Um, and so it just looks different for us. So you're right. We can't go to lunch. Well, I can now cause I'm an empty nest stages, right? But um, generally if we have kids in the home, we can't go to lunch with each other and read a book together, but we can go to one of our homes, let our kids play.

We're going to be interrupted multiple times, right? They're going to fight over a toy or somebody needs their diaper changed men. We're going to be interrupted, but we can sit and talk at a time like that.

Or husbands can just make time every other week for us to get together.

Right.

If there are kids in the home, yeah. Daddy babysits, you know, every other Tuesday and let's not even call it babysitting.

Yeah.

She hits your child.

Yeah.

Good point.

You're just being the dad.

Yeah.

Daddy's daddy.

Yeah.

By himself. On Tuesday night.

I'll give you $40 if you watch them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, um, yeah, it, it just looks different and that's, that's great. And also like, let's say I have children in the home and there's a single woman who wants to be discipled. I can just say, okay, come over while I'm cooking dinner on, you know, Wednesday night and we'll talk and maybe you can go referee the kids when they get in a fight and then come back and I'll answer whatever questions you have.

So it just looks very different to women. And that's kind of how we need to present it rather than, okay, be like the men, they, these two men work in the same area, so they have lunch together and they're reading this book together.

Yeah.

And, you know, I gotta be honest with you, even as a pastor and I'm very free to meet with people, that's a lot of what it is for me. I will sit down and we'll talk and I'll be like, so how's your marriage?

And then we talk and it's, it's not like, um, okay, now let's memorize the next Bible verse together. It's just, let's talk about your life and hopefully the Lord will give both of us wisdom to apply the gospel to whatever's going on.

Right, right.

It's Never Too Late to Grow as a Titus 2 Woman

Okay. So you're in a church, there's a, there are some older ladies in the church, they've not been super well discipled. Maybe they didn't even disciple their daughters as well as they should have. There's a little bit of lingering guilt there, especially if the gospel really comes to their church and they're like, oh, I kind of dropped the ball.

What do you say to an older sister who, who likes the idea of really growing into that Titus II mold, but kind of feels like it's just a little too late in the game? What would you say to her?

Oh, why would it ever be too late in the game? I mean, it's not. And I think what we need to do as women is be in the scriptures all the time. And again, that looks different in different seasons of our lives.

Right?

So if I have just had a baby, I can open my Bible while I'm nursing the baby and get a few verses in. I'm not going to spend an hour in my Bible.

Right.

Right.

But I'm an empty nester now. I can spend an hour, an hour and a half, two hours in my Bible in the morning. And it's a joy, but we just want to continue kind of that pattern. And that's what prepares us.

So when I, when John was in seminary, our pastor's wife was Diane Schreiner. So Tom Schreiner was the pastor of our church. And I said, Diane, will you disciple me? And she was homeschooling her daughter.

And she said, I really don't have time to do any more than just get together and talk about what we read in the Bible for our quiet times. I was like, great. So that's what we did. We would get together.

I don't know how often it was. I can't remember now, but once a week. And I would watch her with her daughter. And we would just talk about what we were reading in the Bible. And that, of course, kept me accountable to be reading my Bible.

And I learned, I mean, the Schreiners are, they just are all about the gospel. They see things through a gospel lens. And so I learned so much from Diane through those times. And the way she, you know, she would talk to me about a book, a secular book that her family enjoyed, you know, like, I won't even mention the books, but a fantasy book or something like that.

And she would tell me where the gospel was in it and how they brought out the gospel from that book for their family.

And I love that.

All I'm taking away from this is that the Schreiners are secular. That's good, sister. Luke just gave us the five minute warning, which I think now means we're at like three minutes because we have to get you out of here to a panel.

What is one final thing? No pressure, but make it good. One final thing you would want to say to any sisters who may be watching this about anything related to what we've talked about. Anything you want to finally, any final point of emphasis?

Well, what I want to emphasize is really delight in the Lord through the scriptures. The Bible is not given to us as a rule book or even primarily the way to live the Christian life. Although it does have both of those, particularly the way to live the Christian life.

The Bible is given to us so that we know the God of the universe personally. And that's how we should use it. Like you mentioned earlier, the Mary Martha thing. What that's all about was Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus, knowing her savior better.

And so Martha's doing this stuff that wasn't wrong in and of itself, but she wasn't sitting at Jesus's feet. She had other concerns and anxieties. Jesus wants us to sit at his feet. He wants us to open the word every day and know him better every day.

So that's what I would tell my sisters is that's what we need to do.

Amen, sister. Luke, how long do we have? Favorite candy bar.

Go.

Okay. You're not going to like this, but I don't eat sugar.