A movement started last Friday night in New York City that has been described as “a cry rippling across the Earth to shift an eternal balance.” The ripple was not meant to be contained in the walls of Scholastic Theater, because it did not really begin there either.
Find out more about She is Free at sheisfreenyc.com.
In February the church staff was gathered at Paul and Andi’s for a community group. Andi had just returned from speaking at a conference in Hawaii where God had entrusted her with some bold visions for her ministry and the women of Liberty Church. With discussions scattered across their living room, Andi sat at the table across from two or three other women who were prodding her with questions, suddenly aware that she had a secret she was holding back.
“She is free.”
The moment she spoke the words aloud, the women in the room instinctively stepped away from their conversations and took positions around the table, like birds gathering on a wire. What was in all of our hearts at the time was a dream—not a specific idea for an event but a vision of the change that could happen if individual women were set free to what God was calling them to do.
Matthew Arnold, the Bible commentator, said, “If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.”
Imagine if that force were released in New York City, a city that influences the world.
Personally, I had already begun to struggle with what a free woman is. Being more reserved, I had always wondered if what other people pictured as freedom did not really fit the ticket for me. Being a modern woman who tries to see myself through my relationship with God and not through the broken cultural lenses of church history, I had also bee
n challenged by what Biblical womanhood actually speaks to “shifting the balance, restoring femininity, and freeing the enslaved: body, soul, and spirit.”
Read Andi’s response to the launch of She is Free on her blog.
For me, what began in February was an ongoing dialogue about what it means to be free for every woman, without creating further barriers by trying to paint diverse women with the same brush. At the same time, if what the Bible had to say about women had universal significance, it had to be true across cultures: in New York as it is in Zimb
abwe as it is in heaven.
I began reading books about churches that God had called to release women, and the spectacular result of women running in their lane. I began telling my own story as a story of freedom for the benefit of the community around me, giving permission to other women to step into their freedom by paving a way. I began to pray with the women of our church for specific plans to come into place so that we could gather women in New York City next Spring. And I began writing several versions of a script that the women of Liberty Sisterhood would film to spread the call of She is Free.
“When she awakes to that dream, when she hears the invitation, she is empowered to administer deliverance, healing, justice, and freedom in Jesus’ name and to claim them for herself. She is above her circumstances, ahead of her past, aware of her purpose, attuned to her destiny.”
The words of this video are very personal to me, but I believe God wants to connect with each woman in the same way to show them how to walk in the freedom he gives them.
Perhaps there is a woman to whom you know this video would speak directly. We encourage you to share this and the invitation it brings. But perhaps also your story is a story of freedom to be shared, to ignite something in the woman sitting next to you, to release a song of freedom in your city, to allow the cry of freedom to ripple out across the Earth.
