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Holly Wagner is standing on the stage of Oasis Christian Center in Los Angeles waving a baton, the kind relay runners carry, as she addresses the 600 women before her. It's the opening night of her two-day God Chicks conference, and the 43-year-old former television actress who's known for her infectious enthusiasm and love of confetti is standing on a stage decorated with hot-pink boas and big pictures of young, hip-looking women.
"You've been given a baton," she says to the diverse audience of mostly 20- and 30somethings. "What are you doing with it?"
The baton, she explains, symbolizes the legacy these women have been handed from the generation before, and the one they'll pass on to the next generation. "If every decade of women would love the one coming up behind them, this world would be a great place for women," Holly says. She talks about the many cultural pressures modern women face—media messages, premarital sex, domestic abuse, eating disorders, and alcohol and drug abuse—then mentions how the Bible commands older women to instruct younger ones on how to live life well (Titus 2:3-5). "As long as there are younger women on the planet, you're an older woman!" she says.
This is a truth Holly slowly came to grips with five years ago. It started when she was sitting at a women's ministry gathering on a Sunday morning at Oasis, the church she leads with her husband of 19 years, Philip. Holly was surrounded by 50 older women. "Fifty bored older women," she says. Around the same time she began noticing that at the hundreds of women's conferences she spoke at annually, 20somethings were missing.
As she prayed about these troubling trends, Holly felt God challenge her to take a hard look at and , a chapter she claims she'd stapled shut in her Bible because it felt so unrelatable and unattainable. But when she took a fresh look at these passages, a new vision for women's ministry was born.
Soon after, Holly started experimenting with different kinds of women's ministry events at Oasis, drawing partly from her acting background as well as from the talents of many people at her church who work in the entertainment industry. She showed movie clips, fostered discussions about relevant topics, and created a fun, contemporary atmosphere with everything from murals to modern music. The success was so great, she began hosting similar events at other churches across the country. In 2003, she captured her revelations about modern-day "church ladies" and the woman in her book God Chicks, and she followed that with When It Pours, He Reigns (both Nelson) earlier this year.
Her target audience for God Chicks events is postmodern women in their 20s and 30s, a demographic she and Philip serve weekly at Oasis, where the congregation of 2,500 has a median age of 28. This is also a demographic often missing at traditional women's ministry gatherings and conferences.
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