Disciples Women's Ministry

Disciples Women’s Ministries is a conduit for diverse connections empowering each woman to find her voice and live out her call

Our DWM group is active in mission, seasonal, and social action work throughout the year. We gather each month to share and learn. Our gatherings are always fun. We strengthen our friendships by sharing our challenges and working together on our mission. For more information, e-mail us through the contact form on the Contact page.
Here are some of our ministries:

The Blessing Box

Living With Gratitude

For 60 years, the women of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have had a special way to express their gratitude to God for the blessings they have received – the Blessing Box. The Blessing Box was created in 1953, the result of a dream of the women who founded Christian Women’s Fellowship. Jessie Trout, who was CWF’s co-founder and first executive secretary, developed the idea as an over – and – above way to help fund the wider mission of the church. Since that time, Blessing Boxes have been kept in the homes and offices of women across the church to enable them to express their gratitude for everyday blessings by giving to others. In 2013, the Blessing Bag was introduced as part of this practice.

Thanks is given for a sunny day, a birth, a reconciling experience, a welcome phone call, a child’s smile, a beautiful snow fall, a flower in full bloom, relief from pain, a good book, a safe journey, and many other things. It is a way of saying “Thank you God, for your world and especially for people.”

For those who participate, it is a spiritual discipline even more than a financial one. It helps keep a focus on gratitude to God and on the responsibility to share blessings with others. The amount put in may be a dime, a quarter or more. The amount is not nearly as important as the discipline of regularly remembering God’s goodness through the acts of dropping in coins and praying prayers of thanksgiving.

The Green Chalice: Care for God’s Creation

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world. Out of our call to “do justice” (Micah 6:8), we strive to demonstrate the fullness of God’s shalom through living out our faith by caring for God’s creation. From Hawaii and Washington to Ontario and Florida, and everywhere in between, Disciples congregations are caring for creation in unique and inspiring ways.

Our mission is to connect Christian faith, spiritual practice and creation consciousness in order to demonstrate the fullness of God’s shalom.

Green Chalice/Blessed Tomorrow from Logos Media on Vimeo.

Human Trafficking

Breaking the links one-by-one

The International Disciple Women’s Ministries Executive Committee struggled, prayed, consulted with you and discussed among ourselves what our next social action would be for 2014 through 2018. We soon realized we have barely touched the tip of the iceberg where human trafficking is concerned.

Women’s groups around the country feel they are just getting started working with this huge social action emphasis. As we traveled around the country conducting workshops, leading retreats, and talking to you, overwhelmingly we heard you saying “we want to continue working with human trafficking”. The Disciples Women’s Leadership Council (formerly Staff Women’s Fellowship) also voted to continue working with human trafficking.

It is with great hope we go into the next quadrennium with Human Trafficking ~ Breaking the Chains: Link by Link as our social action emphasis.

We want to focus on three areas of human trafficking, three links of the chain:

Chain Link 1. Sex trafficking, our focus is on women, men, boys and especially our young girls as young as 9-years of age who are being targeted by traffickers every day.

Chain Link 2. Immigration/Labor trafficking with this our focus is on the labor trafficking that is at epic proportions and is closely tied to the immigration issues in this country.

Chain Link 3. Demand, our focus here is if there were no demand for sex and labor services there would be no trafficking. Decrease demand and we decrease trafficking.

By LaVerne Thorpe, IDWM Vice President 2010-2014