[Roxanne Murphy]

This journey of change began about 2 years ago. My dear husband had completed his MBA and had started a course for our church to help folks live more on purpose to thus better reach a lost and dying world with the gospel. He and our pastor felt that one of the key issues that God was dealing with our church was about transparency. At the same time, our church was growing and our pastor and his wife had started a midweek Bible study in their home that soon grew into a daughter work.
My pastor, his wife, my husband, myself, our youth pastor and his wife were all finding ourselves asking: how do we truly and effectively communicate the gospel to our area? How do we reach people? Evangelizing ourselves is not fulfilling the Great Commission!
Then, people from the daughter work who came to visit our main Sunday services began to ask our pastor: why do the ladies in your church only wear dressed? Why do they not wear jewelry or use make up? Why do they not cut their hair? So my pastor set out to prepare good, sound, scriptural reasons to explain why our ladies looked as they did. He realized that he would be presenting these teachings to honest, well educated people who were seeing the Word of God through eyes and hearts not previously influenced by the 'holiness' culture that our church had, compliments of the denomination to which we belonged. He soon realized that he could not honestly make the scriptures say that these things were sinful.
Now, at the same time, my dear husband was taking another look at these very same things and very exuberantly discussing them with me. I was not interested, in fact was afraid of what I was hearing, and actually one day told him, "I don't wish to discuss this please stop!" I was very distressed and found myself asking God to please restore my husband's sanity. But as I continued to pray about these things, God began to take me for a spiritual stroll through the gospels and pointed out how the Pharisees were so entrenched in their traditions that they missed what God was doing, in fact, fought against Him! This was a painful realization for me because I had been quite a zealous holiness Pharisee; this was all that I knew and I had become accustomed to judging everything by those man made 'holiness standards' that I had been taught from my childhood. (To be continued)