A Journey of Faith: Michelle Hicks helps women learn to be in God’s Word as they walk with the Lord

Editor’s note: this article appears in the Fall 2022 issue of Southwestern News.

At the start of the winding, gravel road that leads into Mt. Lebanon Baptist Encampment in Cedar Hill, Texas, is a weathered wooden sign that reads, “Where People Meet Jesus.” As a rising eighth-grader attending her first-ever church-related event, the sign proved prophetic for Michelle Hicks (’89). When her classmate invited her to take part in a youth camp at Mt. Lebanon the summer following seventh grade, Hicks said, “yes.” The native Texan who was living in Garland, just outside of Dallas, “didn’t grow up in a Christian home” and her family did not go to church, but that summer at camp she heard the Gospel and accepted Christ as her Lord and Savior.

Hicks, who has served since 2020 as the managing editor of Journey, Lifeway’s devotional magazine for women, and is a trainer with Lifeway Women’s ministry training team, did not know at the time how the Lord was ordering her footsteps for a lifetime of ministry. The friend who invited Hicks to the camp was the daughter of the then-pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Garland. He followed up with Hicks to ensure she understood the decision she made, and she followed the Lord in baptism, but as Hicks explains, it wasn’t until she began as a college student at the University of North Texas that she began to grow in her walk with the Lord as He “put me in the right place at the right time with the right people that were believers that loved Him.”

While in college, she began driving herself to Arapaho Road Baptist Church in the Dallas suburb of Richardson and getting actively involved in the church’s ministries. As she was serving, she says she was “learning” and “being discipled” alongside other people. However, it was during her junior year of college that her “life really took a turning point” as she “sensed” the Lord wanted her to serve Him in a different way. Hicks graduated from UNT with a Bachelor of Business Administration in computer information systems and “felt called to ministry.” The ministerial staff at her church, including her pastor, were all Southwestern students and encouraged her to apply for admission to the seminary. She explains in her application essay she wrote, “I have no idea what the Lord wants me to do,” simply because she “did not know what opportunities there might even be for women.”

Once Hicks began as a Southwestern student in the fall of 1986, “the Lord really used” her years on Seminary Hill as she took education classes with Jack D. Terry Jr. (’62, ’67), evangelism classes with the late Roy J. Fish, and New Testament with the late Jack MacGorman. Along with the late Phil Briggs and retired Professor of Student Ministry Wes Black (’78, ’85), Hicks said they were among a “number of professors” who “really poured” into her as she “was so eager to learn.” She also served as the only female student ministry intern at Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth while she was a student.

Among the many skills Hicks learned at Southwestern was event planning – skills she still uses today as she serves women across the United States through Lifeway. In 1989, she was the co-director of Youth Lab, a nationwide youth ministry conference that was organized and planned by Southwestern Seminary students. Hicks said during her time of seminary study her “heart for Jesus and love for the church grew” and she realized what she “may have missed out on the first 20 years” of her life, the “Lord provided [it] all” in His timing through churches that discipled her and what she was learning through her seminary studies.

At Southwestern, Hicks met her husband, Joe (’90), and following her graduation with a Master of Arts in Religious Education degree and his with a Master of Divinity degree, the couple married and moved to Nashville so he could complete an internship with the then-Baptist Sunday School Board. Over the course of the next several years, Hicks would serve as a campus minister at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, until the Lord called her husband to serve with the California Baptist Convention as the program director of one of the convention’s encampments.

While the couple was serving in Florida, Hicks was contacted by Richard A. Ross (’74, ’80), senior professor of student ministry who was serving as the youth ministry consultant at Lifeway Christian Resources at the time. Hicks was serving in student ministry and helping with Lifeway’s Fuge Camps for youth. Ross asked Hicks to write an article for student ministers. What began as one writing assignment soon multiplied as Hicks began to receive more opportunities to edit, finesse, and, at times, rewrite another contributor’s curriculum if it was “too academic” or if the curriculum lacked the necessary learning elements for the student – things she acquired during her study at Southwestern. When she was living and serving in California, Hicks wrote for West Coast publishers, including Group Publishing, David C Cook, and Gospel Light. After Joe was called to serve as the manager of Lifeway’s Fuge Camps, the couple returned to Nashville.

Upon resettling in Tennessee, Hicks began serving with Marketplace Ministries, now Marketplace Chaplains USA, ministering to women in the workplace in the Nashville-area. At the time, Lifeway Women was a young ministry that was just beginning to publish women’s Bible study curriculum and host women’s enrichment events across the country. In 2005, when the need arose for decision counselors for one of the events, Hicks volunteered to help. However, what began as helping with altar calls and connecting women with local churches “on a weekend here or there with events,” became a part-time, then full-time role with Lifeway.

Hicks began as a part-time event project coordinator with Lifeway Women in 2007. In the role, she worked from the home office in downtown Nashville planning and coordinating the details of the ministry’s nationwide training events, while also continuing to help with altar calls at on-site events. In 2012, she began serving in a full-time role for the ministry’s Bible study curriculum, first as the team leader and then as the manager. For the next eight years, Hicks spearheaded the team that published Bible studies for women. Simultaneously, though, Hicks’s father passed away, her mother relocated from Texas to Nashville, and she was helping care for her in-laws.

In February 2020, six weeks before COVID-19 shuttered everything worldwide, Hicks made the transition to managing editor of Journey devotional magazine and to serving with the Lifeway Women training event team. The change in roles allowed her to work from home – before it became the “norm” – while she provided care and assistance to her family members. Hicks explains the transition has been “so fun because it combines” her “love for writing and publishing with the event side” as she serves through Lifeway Women.

As a trainer with the Lifeway Women’s team, Hicks travels to locations throughout the United States to teach local church women’s ministry leaders through “You Lead.” Through the one-day event designed to equip women in leadership, Hicks leads breakout sessions that enable a woman to grow in her walk with Christ, learn and enhance her leadership skills, and help move the women’s ministry forward with an emphasis on impacting and reaching the woman in the pew. Simultaneously, Hicks leads the team that publishes Journey devotional magazine.

Journey, which will celebrate its 30th year of publication in 2023, was started in 1993 by a group of women with “the dream” to provide “a daily devotional for women, written by women” so that they could help other women be in God’s Word daily, Hicks explains. Almost three decades later, she says, “it’s stayed true to that” original goal. The magazine, which has a readership of over 105,000 women worldwide, is written by a variety of female contributors, some who have theological education and some who do not, but who range in age from their early 20s to their 70s, Hicks says. The devotional writers include married women, single women, moms, grandmothers, and women who work outside of the home as nurses, teachers, and professors, she adds.

The contributors are “women who love Jesus and want to be in God’s Word every day” and who want to help other women do the same, Hicks says. The content is “new content every day, every month” since its beginning, she adds. The format of the daily devotional includes a key verse of Scripture, a short devotional that makes application of the Scripture, a one-sentence prayer, and a reference to a longer passage of Scripture.

For Hicks, the opportunity to help impact the lives of women with the Word of God is an “honor,” as she recognizes there are women who read the devotional magazine who did not grow up in a Christian home.

“I’ve loved it so much and I think because I come from that background of not having a solid church background growing up,” Hicks explains. While she knows there are women who read the devotional magazine who were raised in a Christian home and have been believers for a long period of time, she knows there are women who are “kind of like” her. In providing leadership for the magazine, she says she has the “huge responsibility” for making certain the readers are “getting solid, sound theology” in what they are reading coupled with a “correct interpretation of God’s Word.”

Hicks says she is mindful of answering to the Lord for the magazine’s content and impact while simultaneously appreciating the “faithfulness of the Journey readers.” The testimonies readers send to Hicks remind her of how God is using the devotional in the lives of women. One reader sent Hicks a picture of 24 years’ worth of the magazine with the issues bundled by month. Another reader and her mother received copies of Journey at their church. When the mother passed away, her daughter found the names of people her mother was praying for written in the margins of her saved copies of the magazine.

The devotional magazine has also been used on a number of mission trips including one trip where the team members “basically tore out the pages so that every woman in the group could have a devotional page and then they would trade them around,” Hicks adds.

Since its inception, Journey has been published as a monthly magazine, however, due to ongoing postal problems and delays, Hicks led the team to transition the magazine to a quarterly publication beginning in fall 2022. Changes in technology have also allowed for a change in distribution as readers can subscribe to a digital version of the devotional magazine and in the future will be able to access the material on the Lifeway Women app for smartphones.

Hicks says the devotional magazine is important because it helps “women be in God’s Word every day” and is “something that speaks to their heart.” She says the material allows her, personally, to reset her “focus for the day” in a “shorter period of time” as it is a daily “reminder” as she says to the Lord, “I’m Your’s.”

The same perspective is what she sees in readers who “don’t have a lot of background in knowing Scripture” as Journeyprovides a “very non-threatening” way to read a devotional while also helping a woman grow in her walk with Christ.

“I think it does help develop that personal relationship with Jesus,” she says. “I love that even a brand-new believer can pick up a small, one-page little devotional” and read one verse or passage and see “how God is working in someone else’s life or how He’s working in a situation or … how He was working in Scripture.”

Reflecting on how her own personal journey with Christ began as a seventh-grader at Mt. Lebanon, Hicks recognizes the importance of God’s Word in her life.

“God’s Word is just air to me,” she concludes. “It really is because I don’t know what I would do without the Lord and to know that He has spoken and He speaks to us through His Word” has given her “the boundaries and the foundation of everything” she has needed in life.

Ashley Allen (’03, ’09) is managing editor of Southwestern News.

Some photos for this article were provided by Lifeway Christian Resources.