Michelle Myers helps working Christian women do things God’s way

Lessons learned in business as well as from personal struggles led Michelle Myers to the realization that she wanted to help and encourage working Christian women in their walk with the Lord. And she wanted to do things God’s way or not at all.

Myers grew up in Germantown, Tenn., a Memphis suburb, where her dad was the associate minister of music at Germantown Baptist Church.

“I don’t know anything different than full-time ministry as a family,” she said. “I was very much raised in a healthy church where I saw community and church community and church family modeled very well. That was the definition of family to me.”

The church had a children’s ministry that presented the Gospel clearly and often, she said, adding that she came to faith at the age of 4. Myers said she came home from church one Sunday and understood the Gospel. Alone in her room, she understood that she had a choice to make, to live for Jesus.

“And I wanted to live for Jesus. And so, I got really excited and started jumping on my bed, which I wasn’t allowed to do. And so, I always tell people, I’m a pastor’s kid and I got in trouble for accepting Christ, which is half true,” she quipped.

Her parents, though, were concerned that she was too young. Her dad said she should wait until she was 6 to be baptized.

“And so we never talked about it again,” she said.

Her sixth birthday fell on a Saturday. The following day in church, while her dad led the invitation hymn, Myers said, “I marched myself down to the front of the church. … I have vivid memories of his eyes being huge. He hands his microphone to somebody else, and he comes down to me with our pastor. And he was like, ‘You really remember that?’ And I was like, ‘I absolutely remember that. Now, when are we getting baptized?’”

Her dad baptized her that evening.

Her family moved to Knoxville in the middle of her high school years. Adjusting to a new school wasn’t easy, she said.

The approval of others started to become important, and she focused on her weight. Myers said she started developing some unhealthy eating habits and a compulsive need to exercise. By the time she was attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she had developed an eating disorder. She spent almost four years in what she calls sin and rebellion.

“I realize that not everyone looks at an eating disorder as sin and rebellion, but … it was an idol to me,” she said. “Fitness was an idol. Nutrition was an idol. The way that I looked was an idol. I cared about it more than I cared about spiritual things. I spent more time around it. I made decisions based off of it. It impacted my relationships, like it was the driver. And so, again, I am not saying that everyone’s eating disorder is a sin and idolatry, but mine was.”

Myers noted that she felt convicted every day that what she was doing was wrong but kept doing it anyway. She eventually realized she couldn’t go on living that way and got help for her eating disorder. She continues to work in the health and fitness industry—something she’d thought would never happen.

“I thought, ‘I blew this opportunity. That’ll never be able to be a hobby for me, you know, that’s  always going to be a scary place for me,’” she said. “And then God in His goodness and His grace and His mercy, years later, gave health and fitness back.” She later wrote a book about her experience, The Look that Kills: An Anorexic’s Addiction to Control.

After earning a degree in communication studies from UT Knoxville, Myers worked in pharmaceutical sales for a year but said she knew it wasn’t where she was called to be.

Her pastor, Mike Boyd, of Wallace Memorial Baptist Church in Knoxville, was a trustee at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Myers said it felt like a natural place for her to look. She noted other seminaries were closer, but Southwestern felt like a fresh start.

“I really felt like I needed to take an obedient step that was exciting but scary at the same time,” she said. “And then I visited Southwestern, and I think I knew within the first two hours of my tour that that was where I needed to be.”

She began working in the Admissions office and later served as a writer in the Office of Communications.

She met James Myers, a new student who also was from Tennessee, and “pretty much knew on that first date that he was the guy I was going to spend the rest of my life with; that he was the guy that I had been praying for faithfully since I was 11.”

They married in 2008 and have three children: Noah, 14; Cole, 11; and Shea, 8.

Myers earned a Master of Arts in Christian Education (MACE) degree with an emphasis in women’s ministry in 2010 and counts Terri Stovall, current dean of women, among the professors who had the greatest impact on her.

“She was real,” Myers said, adding that Stovall used her church experience to provide a new perspective on the textbook lessons.

Myers wasn’t sure what she was going to do with her degree, though.

“I just knew that I wanted to teach the Bible, and I knew that that was weighty, and I knew that I needed some theological training to help me to be able to do something to step into that responsibility with the appropriate amount of weight,” she said.

The answer came through an online group chat with three friends in 2012.

Myers had met Somer Phoebus while working for Somer’s dad, James Caldwell, in Admissions at Southwestern Seminary. The two quickly became friends and eventually began working together in the online health and fitness field.

Myers, Phoebus, and two other close friends in the business created an “accountability group” to help ensure that career and ambition wouldn’t take over their lives. They started meeting weekly at 5 a.m. on a Google Hangout, and eventually decided that more women needed to be invited into the conversation.

Myers began posting parts of the group’s talks on social media and found that “women were very hungry for that conversation.” She and Phoebus co-founded she works HIS way (SWHW), a discipleship and equipping community for Christian women in the workforce. Topics of discussion range from coping with work situations to parenting issues to a host of other concerns. Scripture and faith are part of every conversation.

The ministry has taken different shapes over the years, going from an online membership to a podcast, a Patreon community, books, an annual conference, and more.

“The content stays the same, but the mode in which it is most helpful to the women at that time tends to change and move with those needs as the women tell us what they need and we try to pivot and change with them,” Myers said.

Both women have other jobs—Myers works as discipleship coordinator at Biltmore Church in western North Carolina, where her husband serves as executive pastor of campuses and CFO. Phoebus works as communications director and women’s discipleship consultant at BCMD (Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware) and also works at her church.

Myers said she and Phoebus are regularly asked when they’re going to stop doing one of their jobs, as if they can’t do it all. She said they both would agree that “hardly anything that we do career-wise looks like it makes sense on paper. So the only way that we can explain it is that the Bible is true and that in Him, all things really do hold together.”

Myers said one of the things she talks about on SWHW and to women at her church is that “life balance is a sham. I think that is one of the biggest lies that culture tries to feed women, and Christian women in particular try to live this dual ‘I want to be everything God asked me to be, everything God calls me to be, but I also want to try to be everything that the world expects me to be,’ and that is like a quick race to exhaustion.”

She said Matthew 6:33 is an anthem both for SWHW and herself, “recognizing that instead of trying to pursue God and all the things, if we will just keep God number one, He really will order everything else.”

Myers said Southwestern played a key role in her being rooted in God’s Word.

“I feel like I developed a really deep love for Scripture [at the seminary],” she said. “I’m very, very grateful for the biblical foundation that I was given from every professor in every class to really understand God’s Word for what it is, and that has continued to be an anchor point for not just my ministry points, but for my own spiritual walk with the Lord, for my own spiritual nourishment, for my parenting, for my friendships. That’s where I go when I need wisdom.”