Amy Jackson worked for four years to create and direct small groups within a church. The denomination of the church supports ordination of women, and the people she reported to were very helpful and supportive. But, she says, from others she experienced push back to her direction simply because she is a woman.

The combination of her past experience and her Masters in Christian Formation and Ministry helps her as she plans article topics, selects writers, and edits articles for Christianity Today's GiftedForLeadership.com (GFL). She also is the editor of SmallGroups.com and ChristianBibleStudies.com. She continues to talk to and be around women church leaders as much as she can to learn about how best to encourage and help women in ministry.

Why is Gifted for Leadership important to the church?

Regardless of whether your church is a complementarian church or an egalitarian church, we all need to get better at raising up women leaders. Because there have been so many men in leadership for so long, it's not an intentional thing; it's just that it's overlooked. Part of getting better at it is helping women do that for other women. And part of that is just encouraging other women because they aren't getting that from their superiors or their pastors in their church.

Even the presence of something like GFL, under Christianity Today, is constantly calling attention to the fact that we all need to do a better job of raising up women and empowering them to do what God calls them to do.

Another reason GFL is important to the church is that a large segment of our audience is women that are senior or lead pastors, and they feel incredibly alone because there are very few of them in the country, and so they feel really alone in that. GFL is a great place for them to feel encouraged to stand strong in their calling from God and just to hear each other's stories.

How did GFL start, and what was the initial vision of GFL?

In 2006, Christianity Today board member Jill Briscoe, Christianity Today executive Carol Thompson, and the executive vice president's wife, Karen Miller, were reading Leadership Journal and Christianity Today and felt like the publications had helpful information but weren't fully speaking directly to women in ministry. They realized that there wasn't anything out there that was doing anything like that, and their conversations on this sparked the idea for starting GFL. So Amy Simpson and Kevin Miller partnered to create GFL, a safe space for women who are leading in the church.

GFL has always been a place for women who already see themselves as leaders, already have very important roles in the church, whether that is a pastor or ministry leader or point person or elder, but they feel very invested in the church. So it is a safe place for women to say to women things that you might not get away with in other places. That was the original vision.

Do you have a specific vision or hope for GFL? You mentioned the original vision, but is there anything you want to add to that?

The original vision really resonates with me because a lot of women's resources and articles tend to be either very non-controversial, by steering clear of every possible topic, or very angry and bitter toward the church. GFL is in the middle, in a Beautiful Orthodoxy way, in that it sees women as called to be in the church and serve in the church in all sorts of ways. We want to call out what we see we can do better but also encourage the women that are in those roles to be able to live out their calling to the best of their ability.

We're also trying to focus on women who are working in the local church. For topics that apply more widely, we make sure we're definitely speaking to the women who are working in the church. So we've covered topics like the state of the female pastorate, which was one of our top posts in 2015, and that article looked at the Compensation Handbook for Church Staff to see the pay gap but also looked at some studies that were recently done about how many women are in pastor roles. That really spoke to our audience.

We also published the article "Sister You Are Not a Mistake" that basically says, "It's good you're a woman, and it's good you're here. The church needs you." And it just builds women up in that way. Sometimes it's easy for women to think, My gifts or my perspective aren't all that important, and it's nice that I'm here, but the church doesn't really need me. And that's not true. And so we wanted to really just build up women in that way. These are women that are on the front lines of ministry every day, and it's easy to be bogged down.

And likewise we recently published a post, "The Cost of Caring," that has done very well in terms of traffic. It's about how to avoid compassion fatigue—a term the author uses—and it's an issue that both men and women face in leadership as they're caring for people, especially in pastoral ways. But I think specifically women really struggle with it. The author talks about it as dealing with people's pain, where you actually take that pain on yourself. Part of that is healthy and part of that is empathy, but part of that is very unhealthy because when you are staying up all night, when you can't sleep because you're thinking about the people you're trying to care for, that's not necessarily healthy in the long run. That article has taken off in terms of traffic, and I think that's because it's something that really resonates with women who are leading in the ministry of their church.

All that to say, I'd love GFL to be a place where we can get away with saying things that people might not be able to in another context because we're women talking to women. For example, in "The Cost of Caring" article, the author is talking about compassion fatigue. If it were posted in, say, Leadership Journal, it might be taken as—because the publication is for both men and women—it might be taken as more like "Okay, women, get over your problems. Don't take that on. You need to get over that. And here's some tips for you to get better at that." But when it comes from a woman to an audience of women it feels much more like, "Okay, women, what can we do? Let's be better at this. Let's empower each other. Let's support each other in this." It has a totally different tone just because of the audience and where it's posted.

So I'm hoping to have GFL be a safe place like that, where we can have women talking to women in a way that can only be done in that kind of context. My hope is that the effect of GFL will be that women who are leading in the church will feel comradery, support, and empowerment.

Michelle Dowell is editorial coordinator for the Church Law and Tax Team at Christianity Today.