Callie Trombley remembers the first time she considered the spiritual significance of her body. Her mom brought it up. As a chaplain in the Air Force, her mom was used to having conversations about birth control, cramps, and family planning with young airmen seeking pastoral care. So when Callie was deciding whether to take birth control for painful periods as a young adult, her mom wanted her to recognize that it was not only a medical decision but a whole-person one.
Years later, when she stumbled upon the topic of contraception while reading a book about the imago Dei, the conversation with her mom rushed back to her. “It felt like a pricking of my spirit, and I knew I needed to dig deeper,” she shared with me. So Callie and her husband, Josiah, did what many Christians would—they scheduled a meeting with their pastor.
It’s not hard to imagine how uncertain a pastor or church leader may feel about discussing women’s health issues. Envision going to pray for a congregant who is about to have surgery and finding out the surgery is for the woman’s health condition, endometriosis. Should you mention the endometriosis? Stick with generic prayers for a quick recovery?
Addressing women’s health issues as a spiritual leader can be uncomfortable—especially if you’re not female yourself. You want to minister to women, but reproductive health comes with so many mysteries and gray areas that it feels easier to ignore or brush it aside for as long as you can. Every time this happens, though, you’ve missed out on an ideal moment to reveal the love of God.
Unfortunately, many women are used to having their concerns ignored. For a woman with endometriosis, it takes an average of seven to ten years after the first symptoms just to receive the diagnosis. Her primary symptom during those years is pain—sometimes excruciating and debilitating pain that’s overlooked and disregarded by gym coaches, medical professionals, employers, and more. The response of her faith leaders ought to be strikingly different, just as Jesus reacted in a countercultural way toward women and their health problems.
The ancient philosopher Celsus described Christianity as a religion attractive to “slaves, women and little children.” It’s true that Christianity drew women and other marginalized people in large numbers—and for good reason. Here was a faith that said men and women were both image bearers of God (Gen. 1:27) and all equally united in Christ (Gal. 3:28; Rom. 10:12–13), a Savior who welcomed women into his ministry (Luke 8:3), supported and defended them (Matt. 26:10–13; Luke 13:10–17), and healed reproductive issues specific to the female body (Luke 8:43–48).Our God does not overlook women or their health issues. So why should the local church?
Katie McMahon, cofounder of Shiloh IVF Ministry, an organization that provides spiritual support to men and women who have gone through in vitro fertilization (IVF), emphasized to me that the local church is the perfect avenue for showing Christ to women in their need.
“I think there’s a huge nonmedical component in the pastoral support of men and women and couples [with reproductive health questions],” she told me. “People aren’t necessarily looking for treatment options. They’re looking for a space to be and an acknowledgement that they exist and they’re good and they can be fruitful.”
This is what McMahon wanted for herself and her husband as they walked through years of infertility. She wanted to know that her faith could handle her questions and strengthen them as a couple, regardless of how their fertility journey ended. Instead, what she got was a printout of teachings on IVF and embryo adoption. “We really felt like our pastor wasn’t equipped to accompany us,” she said. “It was disappointing.”
Now, as she serves other women through Shiloh, she’s discovered they haven’t felt spiritually ministered to during their reproductive struggles either.
The local church has a monumental opportunity. Through my own work as a certified FertilityCare practitioner, I see firsthand that women’s health is a much-needed area of ministry not only for those facing infertility or considering IVF but for every woman.
At the end of college, I worked alongside others as a chaplain-in-training at an underserved hospital. The primary chaplain, a man mature in both faith and age, taught his mentees the value of exploring the sacred beneath the secular.
When a woman works with me to learn an effective fertility awareness method, she does so because she’s eager to make more informed decisions about birth control or fertility treatments or health diagnoses. But it’s not long before other questions bubble up from a deep well of long-held fears: Am I good enough? Am I capable? Am I broken? Am I alone?
These are not medical questions, but spiritual questions stirred by medical issues. I encounter them week after week: a woman with irregular cycles and heavy periods who has slowly come to distrust and despise her female body; a woman in her late 40s who is approaching menopause and is grieved over the transition; the married couple who is struggling with physical intimacy because of their fear of getting pregnant before they’re ready. Rarely, if ever, do they consider their faith as a resource while they struggle with their bodies, health, or reproductive design. But where else would be a better place to start?
In our increasingly virtual world, the connection between body and soul—the physical and spiritual—can get so buried that we forget the bond between them is unbreakable. In women’s health, it’s easy to focus so exclusively on the medical that we forget there’s something else significant to consider: God designed menstruation and ovulation and everything in between to proclaim his glory.
The local church may be the only place a woman ever hears that God designed all of her—even this part of her—to bear the image of God. It’s critical, then, that we say it—intentionally, frequently, and wholeheartedly.
For male leaders, though, this can feel like dangerous territory. Shouldn’t men defer to women in regard to women’s issues? Certainly. But this doesn’t relieve male leaders of significant responsibility either.
For a woman, her body and potential to conceive are not rare considerations but daily realities. For half the world’s population—for half the people sitting in your church’s pews—these realities affect how they see the world and how it sees them.
In a time when artificial intelligence strips women of their clothing and those with power traffic women like possessions, the local church has the opportunity to proclaim women’s inherent dignity as image bearers of God—dignity that’s not only for married women wondering about contraception or struggling to grow their families but for all women. Going out of our way as Christians to declare this dignity is a powerful witness to the world that women and their health issues matter.
Ministry leaders don’t need to pretend to be experts on women’s issues in order to do this. As for Callie and Josiah’s pastor, he committed to meet with them regularly to discuss, pray, and provide educational resources about family planning.
Because their pastor believed there was a sacramental nature to the human design for reproduction, he had previously wrestled with similar questions and gathered theological resources. When Callie and Josiah met with him, he could share from his own experience and empathy, which was validating for Callie: “We realized this is just as much a part of our family, our marriage, as going out on a date,” Callie said. “It’s a God-given gift. The [reproductive] cycle is actually a beautiful thing.”
At the same time, it’s bigger than that. Callie shared, “As Christians, we can see the connection between our physical bodies and our spiritual nature. And when we’re resurrected someday, we’ll be resurrected with a physical body. So it matters. It’s all connected. Reproductive issues are in fact a discipleship issue.”
Discipleship around the body doesn’t have to be complicated. Normalizing human reproductive design as a gift from God is an excellent first step. Acknowledging the care and respect women’s health issues deserve is another. Some local churches offer support groups, prayer time, or readily available resources related to family planning, chronic illness, or infertility.
Churches can lead the way by celebrating the connection between body and soul, prayerfully exploring reproductive questions and concerns, offering pastoral counseling about matters of the body, or simply risking an honest prayer over a female church member’s endometriosis surgery.
Each act is a reminder that our bodies and their concerns matter to God—and God’s people—and they won’t go unnoticed.
Caitlin Estes is a certified FertilityCare practitioner and owner of Woven Natural Fertility Care. Her book, Woven Well: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Reproductive Health, Fertility, and Wholeness, comes out in July.
