Bildungsroman

When writing about spiritual growth leads to spiritual growth

I received an email on Friday that had me thinking about my life and vocation over the weekend. It was from the publisher of my book, No Little Women, published in 2016. 2016. That’s also the year that I provoked what is now known as “the Trinity debate” by inviting a male pastor/academic to write a guest post on my blog about the unorthodox doctrine saturating our churches, Christian books, conferences, and parachurch organizations known as Eternal Subordination of the Son/Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son (ESS/EFS). I had more hope back then, even as I was beginning to see behind the curtains. And the more I got behind them, I saw all kinds of low-handed under-workings from the evangelical industrial complex.

But Friday’s email did more than trigger this trip down memory lane. It was sent to inform me that they were running low on copies of No Little Women, the sales now do not justify another printing, and it will soon be officially out of print. They offered me a deep discount for the 8 copies left, should I want them, and thanked me for the 8 years of partnership with the book.

Wow. The surprise of this notification wasn’t so much that No Little Women was going out of print, but all that there was to reflect on from the publication of that book and the 8 years following. Where was I then, and where am I now? My books serve as a sort of bildungsroman of my spiritual life. I began writing because I saw no direction for spiritual formation as a woman in the church and I was desperately looking for conversation and tools to help nurture my theological vigor and thirst to “adult” as a follower of Christ. What does that look like? What do our marriages look like? How do we affect culture? How do we raise our kids? Women’s ministries seemed to be kept at arm’s length from the rest of the church. And I found the books marketed to us to be sentimental, fluffy, and full of error. It all seemed infantilizing, and I was trying to be an adult.

By the time I wrote No Little Women, I decided to be a bit more direct about this—to say it out loud. I wanted to address not only women about our honor and responsibility as believers, but ministers as well. Why were our pastors so content, and maybe relieved, to have us at arm’s length away in our own wing of the church, with our own inferior resources, meagerly invested in theologically, and certainly not considered a valuable resource for men to learn from? Were we not to grow alongside one another, sharpening one another? Instead, there was an unspoken understanding that women are to be managed.

So I wrote No Little Women, examining the problems in women’s ministries, the context of discipleship, women in that context, and the quality of women’s resources. I ended the book looking at examples from bestselling books in women’s ministry, hoping to offer some critique in developing discernment skills in reading, as well as a chapter for pastors on preaching to women. The book was mostly received well and opened the door for many opportunities to get in churches and church governments, talking to both church officers and women’s ministries about these issues.

This was at the same time that I was tackling the ESS/EFS issue as a prevailing component of “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” The Trinity debate led to conferences, changes in seminary teaching, debates, journals, books, and thankfully, experts on the patristic fathers responding, saying that ESS is not in line with Nicene Orthodoxy. While I was being encouraged by leaders in my circles for advocating for robust investment in women in the church and for our responsibility in discernment, I was also causing trouble for the established patriarchy that is disguised as benevolent service. And the many ways to “deal with me” began.

I look back now and think, “Wow, Aimee, you had no idea what you were in for.” Just 8 years ago. What a turning point that book was for me, and not in the ways I thought. I’m glad it’s going out of print. While I’m glad I wrote into that moment, what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned since, and what I’ve unlearned have directed me to go back to my values that spring out of my faith in Christ. And today, I would write a different book than the one I wrote 8 years ago. Back then, I so badly wanted women to be taken seriously that I thought it started by improving the theological content in our bestselling, women-authored books. And I was under the disillusionment that doctrinal precision led to sanctification. I also thought that if we had more rigorous resources, the men would respect us more as collaborators and theological conversation partners. The futility of it all is palpable now—me thinking I could reason with these pastors and church officers using our own church standards. Thinking that their teaching was for the women too.

This futility led me to rehearse my values. I became a writer out of my longing for spiritual growth, and communion with the triune God and his people. I knew spiritual growth was more than knowledge, but I was looking to doctrine to do more work than it could.

Doctrine is important to me because I want to know God truly. I’m not downplaying its value. But my experiences over these years have revealed to me the dangers of thinking of the faith in exclusively cerebral terms. Faith is gloriously more than the “right” things to believe about God.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

While I may have been pointing out some significant error in some of the bestselling books written by women for women at the time (and I hope I did it in a respectful manner), some of these authors may have done a better job at pointing us to Christ than many in the “elitist” masculine Reformed authors who have harmed the church with unorthodox teaching on the Trinity and other significant theological errors, particularly in anthropology. In hindsight, I’m thinking of Beth Moore in particular, and the picture she has given the church of sanctification. What a model of someone who continuously points her readers to Christ while enduring and confronting sexism, misogyny, disillusionment, and harassment, standing up for others in the process, and humbly unlearning and learning even in her sixties. And she is so full of doxology in it all. She’s also modeled how to love our enemies. What an honor and a pleasure to behold, as the quality of her teaching and writing enriched through it.

It's a gloriously complex feeling to be thankful for the chance to write No Little Women in that stage of my life, the opportunity it gave me to begin to wrestle more with how women are viewed in the church and to make an argument for investment in us, and the chances I was given to get into other churches and meet so many likeminded believers, mixed with the agreement that I have in its going out of print. Let it be so. Much of what I wrote in its pages I still believe in, and some of it I no longer align with. I reference No Little Women in my upcoming book (April 2025), Saving Face, without giving the title:

I built and I built: theological precision, service, friendship. And I lived in a world full of invisible fences. Something wasn’t right. In one of my earlier books encouraging women to grow in their knowledge of God, I quoted Donald Macleod, saying, “I hope that while I still have much to learn, I don’t have too much to un-learn.”  That’s a good hope. I didn’t want to be that person. But unlearning is a continuous process in this life. Turns out there is still much for me to unlearn. And I am grateful for that.

Bildungsroman.

The question is, do I buy the 8 remaining copies?