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Ministry Wives & Women is a podcast for ministry wives and women seeking encouragement, spiritual depth, and honest conversation for the journey of faith. everyday life, and the challenges of church leadership. Hosted by Andrea Griffith, each episode offers thoughtful wisdom, real stories, and gospel-centered hope to help women live with greater resilience, authenticity, and grace in every season.
[00:00] [Denine Blevins] In order for church planting to be sustainable and healthy, the leaders that are in it need to be sustainable and healthy. And that refers to, for sure, the lead church planter, but also if that planter is married, it refers to his wife. And yet a majority of resilience building resources go to lead church planters and not the spouse.
[00:21] [Andrea Griffith] Welcome to the Ministry Wives and Women podcast. This is a place where we openly address the challenging realities of ministry and point one another to Jesus and the gospel. Whether you're thriving, barely holding on, or somewhere in between, you are not alone. I'm Andrea Griffith, and each episode brings honest conversations, biblical encouragement, and stories from women who understand this calling. This podcast is part of The Church Hub, where we're committed to strengthening ministry leaders and the families who walk with them. We're so glad you're here. Hello and welcome to your Welcome to the Church Hub Podcast for Ministry Women. I'm Andrea Griffith, and I'll be your host. And I'm so excited tonight. Ever since we started this podcast, I've been wanting to have Deneen Blevins on, and finally tonight, it's happening. Welcome, Deneen.
[01:19] [Denine Blevins] Thank you so much, Andrea. I'm really glad to be here.
[01:22] [Andrea Griffith] I'm so glad you're here. Your life has impacted mine, and you don't even know it. And so, I'm just so glad that you're here. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and then a little bit about the ministry that you run?
[01:37] [Denine Blevins] Sure. Well, I live in New York City, which is the city that I was born in, lived for the first part of my life and then moved away after that. But I'm back in the city with my husband, Robert. We've been married for about 9 years and we have an 8-year-old dog named Sydney who feels like she thinks that she's a child. So we're both in ministry. A lot of our work overlaps and so we get to travel together and bring some together and share some of the same ministry friends, which is super fun. Um, serve as executive director of Kara Kaleo, which we'll talk about a little bit, and I'm also part-time executive director at my church.
[02:15] [Andrea Griffith] Okay, so you are a busy woman, and I didn't know that you and your husband got to travel together as well. So when you're traveling together, what are, what are you mostly doing?
[02:25] [Denine Blevins] Yeah, it's everything from, um, being involved in denominational activities, um, to— we've gone to church planning preparation trainings together, um, visiting. One time I was, I was, um, asked to speak at a church, and around the same time he got an email from the same church asking for his help. He worked for, um, helping, helping deacons put together good benevolence practices at churches, like through MercyMeetsGoodness. And so the same church had reached out to him not knowing that we were married. And so we actually got to do the trip together.
[03:00] [Andrea Griffith] That is amazing. And you're like, thank you, Lord. We're just traveling to one place together. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any hobbies? Are there any hobbies, any things you enjoy doing?
[03:10] [Denine Blevins] Oh, I don't know if I have any— ah, do I have any hobbies? I love to dance. I used to take dance classes. I used to be a hip-hop dance missionary in the Dominican Republic. That is my claim to fame. We won third place in a televised dance competition in the Dominican Republic. So that was pretty awesome. So anything involving dance, I'm down for. And I also like podcasts. I just listen to a ton of podcasts and just really enjoy them. Okay.
[03:41] [Andrea Griffith] Okay. So you did not know this, but that was exactly where I was going because I have seen you dance and you are an amazing— Yes.
[03:51] [Denine Blevins] Yes, I have seen you dance. So, and I have no authority to tell anybody else the rest.
[03:59] [Andrea Griffith] Yes, but you are great. You are such a great dancer, Deneen. So, I could see that total claim to fame, a hip-hop dancer in the Dominican Republic. I see it. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, you are amazing. So, tell us a little bit about Parakaleo. Let us know like how you found out about it, how you got involved.
[04:21] [Denine Blevins] Yeah, I'd love to. So back in 2014, I was helping my pastor replant a church in, like, right there, a few blocks away from me. It was a Spanish-speaking, intergenerational, multicultural church in one of the hardest cities in the world to plant a church. And it was the most magical thing that I ever did, and also the hardest thing that I ever did. About killed me. And I remember one Saturday I was so tired, I couldn't even get up out of bed. I was just exhausted. And I would come to church and, you know, do the bulletin, make sure it's in two languages and fill in for the hospitality team coordinator and was the children's ministry director for a season, you know, all the things. And I was like, man, I'm always creating these experiences for other people to encounter Jesus. And I'm watching them having these amazing experiences, not only on Sunday mornings, but in other parts of their lives. And I don't even want to be here. And I just felt myself just like falling through. And so I went to the wife of a person that I worked with who had started Herakaleo. And I was like, hey, I know that this is for wives, but can you please let me in? I'm dying here. And she's like, of course. So that's how I— and I really thought that I was going to encounter a place that was going to help me, that was going to give me better ministry practices so that my life would be this year. And what it actually gave me was a way to see my own heart and the ways that I was actually contributing to the ways that I was processing things. And it just changed everything for me. So it not only changed that season of church planning, but later on after I got married, it changed how I view marriage. It changed how I view myself, my relationship with my parents. It affected everything in the best possible way.
[06:12] [Andrea Griffith] I love that. I get it. I totally understand what you're saying. I like the way you said that. You thought you were joining something that would help you with best ministry practices, but in reality, you were joining something that helped you see your own heart and how maybe we're looking at life through the wrong lens. Like, we're not looking at it through a gospel lens right now. Many times, and even listening to you, I tend to look at it through my lens of, "I am completely exhausted." And when I am looking through it through that lens, everything seems harder. But if I can get that gospel lens on, everything changes.
[06:53] [Denine Blevins] Exactly.
[06:54] [Andrea Griffith] Were you in New York at that time?
[06:56] [Denine Blevins] Yeah, I was. Um, we— when we first met, it was in Huntsville. But before, I moved back to New York, then Huntsville. And I— my— but I started off, um, in the city and was working for a church planting organization and also helping with this plant.
[07:10] [Andrea Griffith] Yeah. And since I've seen you, I don't know if you know, but we're planting in St. Augustine. And we— yes, yes, we just started going to every week, um, 4 weeks ago.
[07:23] [Denine Blevins] Oh wow. And so, Andrea, that's back in it. Okay.
[07:27] [Andrea Griffith] Yeah, we're right back at it. So when you say it's the most magical thing and the hardest thing, I am right there with you.
[07:34] [Denine Blevins] That's right. Yeah.
[07:35] [Andrea Griffith] Yeah, I understand, I understand. So tell me now, you just said you're the executive director of Parakaleo. Do you have a kind of a definition? Can you tell us a little bit about what is Parakaleo?
[07:49] [Denine Blevins] Absolutely. So the way that we like to describe it to people is that church planning is important, church planning is hard, and churches are planted by men and women. So church planning is important, they say that. That according to one organization, church plants are 8 to 10 times more likely to reach an unbeliever than an established church. So in order for the Gospel to go forth and to advance and to capture people's hearts for Jesus, we need church planting. It's really important, but it's also hard. About 1 out of every 3 church plants will close within the first 4 years, according to some other statistics. And there's many reasons for that, the pressure, the lack of resources, uh, the, the, um, ongoing nature of it, the ever-changing ups and downs of it. And it just, it could take a lot of families out of ministry because it's so hard. And so in order for church planting to be sustainable and healthy, the leaders that are in it need to be sustainable and healthy. And that refers to, for sure, the lead church planter, but also If that planner is married, it refers to his wife. And so, and yet a majority of resilience building resources go to lead church planners and not the spouse. We're not—
[09:08] [Andrea Griffith] Or to the husband.
[09:10] [Denine Blevins] That's right. Yeah.
[09:12] [Andrea Griffith] Trent has so many things he's invited to, you know, to help him. And if I didn't have Parakleo, I don't know where I'd be. And so he gets the invitations all the time. And so you're right, but it is a team to plant this church.
[09:27] [Denine Blevins] That's right. That's right. And so Paracletus was started to address the unique challenges that church planters' wives within particular denomination were facing. And over the years, it's expanded to reach many different denominations. And even I would say that our target audience are women who play supportive roles on church planting teams. So that certainly refers to the wives, but it also refers to women like me that that are helping with church plants, but may not have access to the support that our brothers do.
[09:57] [Andrea Griffith] Yeah, I'm so glad you said that, because, um, so right now I'm leading 3 Parakaleo groups, 2 online and 1 in my house. And the one in my house is, um, our, our children's ministry director. It's a lady that we were hoping would eventually be our, our secretary, our, you know, right-hand person. Um, it's a lady that we thought was going to be our worship leader. It, it's now our worship leader's wife who is there. And it's— so I'm so glad that you've said that and just expanded it, because we're all in it together.
[10:35] [Denine Blevins] That's right. And you could only imagine how, how much healthier the church planting team is when we're rooted in the gospel to do the work of the ministry, and how that that just has a ripple effect throughout the congregation.
[10:49] [Andrea Griffith] Yes, yes, I could not agree more. So a lot of times we use like a definition of parakaleo, like it is a relational space that normalizes the hard of ministry. Do you have anything like that? If I was a woman coming in saying, you're describing me, I'm a woman on staff, tell me what Paracaleo is so I know if I want to be in on this.
[11:17] [Denine Blevins] Yeah, yeah. Para— so I would say Paracaleo is a safe and supportive community that builds gospel-based resilience for the challenges, the everyday challenges of church planning. So it's safe, it's confidential. Women can say all the hard things that they need to say that they can't say in their local context. But it also, it's not just a venting, a space for her to vent. It also gives her a framework for processing those hard situations through the lens of the gospel.
[11:50] [Andrea Griffith] Yes, that is so good. I think I'm gonna add that now to my new way of trying to explain it. Because I think a lot of times women do think, oh, this is a safe space for me to vent. But that's not what it is. It's a framework so for you to process what's going on in your heart, and get your heart to the gospel. And once it's there, everything changes, even if nothing out there changes.
[12:18] [Denine Blevins] Absolutely, absolutely.
[12:20] [Andrea Griffith] So, I read on the website that you say that women are essential to church planting and worthy to receive learning and care too. So, how does this foundational message reshape how pastors' wives see their own value?
[12:38] [Denine Blevins] Yeah, well, just a quick story. I was present, I was at a conference and we had a Paracaleo booth and a woman kind of peeked in and came into our area and I just said, "Oh, are you involved in church planting?" And she just kind of looked at me and said, "No." And I said, "Okay, can I tell you a little bit about what we do?" She said, "Sure." And so I shared those statistics about how hard church planting is. I named the four common stress factors that we've identified about the chaos of church planning, about our roles, identity, finding the loneliness of church planning. And the more I spoke, I noticed like tears started coming out. And I said, you know, parapluial phrase, I was like, "Can I ask you about those tears?" And she said, "Well, actually, my husband just went through church planning assessment, and he was approved, and I'm terrified." Wow. And I just said, I know, because it's really hard. And also, there is a community for you. And so I think that when women find out that this exists, that this was built specifically for the issues that they face, especially when they felt so forgotten and so just on their own, just left to figure things out, it really shows them how much they're loved, like not, not just loved by us, but like loved by the Lord, that the Lord thought to create this community specific for them. And so they're actually able to start making decisions about how they move in ministry in ways that protect them. And so they start safeguarding their own well-being, not in a defensive posture, but in a way of saying, hey, you know what, I'm worth it, you know, and I do have limits. And it's okay for me to take time out of this very busy season to connect with other sisters in Christ and process the hard things that I'm feeling. So it really does, just knowing that it exists for them, it adds a lot of value to who they— their sense of self.
[14:39] [Andrea Griffith] That's so good. I watched that happen today with my ladies online, and it was amazing. Like, I just love those aha moments. And it's so worth what we get to do. So, you're talking about the women moving from, you know, just going, going, going, always being on. How does Pericoleo teach us that that's okay, that we do have our own— that God sees us, and that God values us, and it's okay to take a break, that the whole world doesn't depend on us? What are the ways that Pericoleo gets those messages across? To the women that come?
[15:24] [Denine Blevins] Yeah, well, I mean, I, I would love to mention our, um, our foundational curriculum called Journey to Resilience, and it's a 4-module experience. Every module of, uh, touches on a different question that women in church planting have. And, and while women can take them individually— each one is a 4-week session— they take them individually, they work together to bring her to a greater sense of freedom where she's valuing herself, embracing her limits, etc. So that I think at the core of it, women need to understand the chaos criticism challenges of the church planting season and how she can gain her footing in that really hard season. And so our module called Gaining Perspective, it helped her gain a gospel, like a gospel perspective on the situations that she's facing. And so for example, you know, you show up for church and the children's ministry director just announces that he's not coming back, and he's like, man, this just really isn't the place for me.
[16:25] [Andrea Griffith] Would he—
[16:26] [Denine Blevins] automatically, she's already calculating, oh, OK, now I have to take that position. And she's already feeling— and this is probably the third transition in a couple of months that they've had to go through. So it leads her to a practice of sort of zooming out of the situation and seeing the bigger picture namely that it's God that's holding all things together. It's not her, it's not her husband, it's not even the church planting team. And so that freed her to like wait and get her sense of self. And so, and you know, another foundational one would be about our identity, you know, our identity not being about what people think of us or what people say of us, or even the expectations that we have for ourselves. So our exploring identity module helps us recapture that sense of identity. Navigating Roles is the module that helps us decide what to do when we're faced with all of the overwhelming demands of church planting. And then Finding Community helped us deal with the loneliness and isolation of planting and leads us to develop relational connections outside of our church plant or inside of our church plant so that we can remain sustainable during the season.
[17:40] [Andrea Griffith] Yeah, those all just sound amazing. Remembering who we are in Christ. If we can remember that, we can weather so many storms.
[17:51] [Denine Blevins] That's right.
[17:52] [Andrea Griffith] And even today, as I was on my calls, loneliness just kept coming up. You know, it is a very lonely season. And for us, literally right now, the most we've had come is 126. And each week, it's decreased. And so, we were down to 58 last Sunday night. And I mean, my heart was just in my toes. It's like, "Lord, are you gonna do this?" And it even— you even feel the rejection, even though you know, you know, it's not personal. But yet, you feel it, you know, as you're watching people walk away. And so, having that, that identity and then being able to be in a safe community when you're experiencing the rejection and the loneliness, it's a game changer. It was for me.
[18:53] [Denine Blevins] Right. And what you're naming is— this is, this is why we specifically serve women in the church planting season, because that uncertain, that week after week in, week out uncertainty, um, the, the concern that, oh, like, we're not gonna make it until the next week, you know, that, that's an added pressure that I don't have at the established church that I'm at. I mean, we have 100 members, about 100 people come every Sunday-ish. So for some contexts, that's really small. But this is 10 years of having 100 people come every Sunday. Like, we know we're not going to get much bigger. We're probably not going to get much smaller. So that pressure is taken off. But when you're in a church plant, just trying to survive, sometimes you'll do anything to make it work, including burning yourself out.
[19:36] [Andrea Griffith] Yes, that's so good. I've watched myself, like, We're passing out cards that give the information about New City Church to everything that moves. I went to— I was exhausted. I spoke at a conference in Chicago this weekend. But I got back and there was a garage sale in my neighborhood. Well, I'm like, "Well, I can't miss that opportunity." So, I've got all the cards. I'm passing it out to everyone at the garage sale. And I'm watching myself try harder. Yeah. And I'm like, "At some point, you know, you've got to entrust that back to God, that if he wants this church to go, he will do it." But I live daily with exactly what you just said, with the uncertainty. God, is this church gonna go? I don't know. And I've moved my whole life here. And so, that uncertainty, and being able to process it in a safe space with other women who get it is just gold.
[20:34] [Denine Blevins] That's right, that's right. Naming it and normalizing it.
[20:38] [Andrea Griffith] So if you were inviting a woman in church planting, or even on a church staff, a woman in ministry, to come to Pericoleo, what would you want to say to them?
[20:53] [Denine Blevins] I would tell them, and I will, I do want to clarify again that although Like, I've gone through the Paraclete modules recently, as someone who hasn't been in church planting in 5, 10 years, and it still did wonders for my heart.
[21:09] [Andrea Griffith] Yes.
[21:10] [Denine Blevins] And yet we do, like, from our core missional statement, our target audience are women who are in that church planting season. So I think I would tell her, you matter to God more than the institution. That, like, your heart with the Lord, you know, your capacity to feel loved by him, it's everything. And it's not worth sacrificing yourself on behalf of this project if you lose your connection with him. And so— is when women are feeling— and I mean, it's not that in every season we need a group like Parakaleo, but like when women are feeling like they need that connection, I just tell them to prioritize it, make the time for it. Actually going to bring back a return of investment that's far greater than they can imagine. And it's going to be to the detriment of your ministry if we don't prioritize that. And this is Phineas Kwon, who just recently went through that myself as an organizational leader and saying, I need this community for me. Like, I need safe spaces for me as well so that the ministry thrives and myself as well.
[22:28] [Andrea Griffith] That's so good. Um, I have a friend that I'm trying to get to a local group in Tampa, Florida, and I know she's busy. She's a pastor's wife, you know, busy pastor's wife. Um, she's got a million things going on, but one of the things I said to her is, this will give you more time. Because you will be healthy and you will see things in a different perspective. This actually creates space. It creates emotional health and gives you more time. But I think until you've experienced it, you just don't fully know what it is.
[23:07] [Denine Blevins] That's the hard part about recruitment, because women really don't know what's with SPAC. Like, they're like, I don't want to go to another women's ministry, you know, and I love women's ministry. Yeah. It's just not that.
[23:21] [Andrea Griffith] No, it's not Bible study. It's not a content group. It's a process group. And it's a safe place that gets you to your heart, and then gets your heart to the gospel, where everything changes. So, we, in our show notes, we will have a link to the Pericoleo website. As Deneen said, Pericleo offers these modules. Is it 4 times a year that the modules come around?
[23:50] [Denine Blevins] So we, we have modules that are running throughout the year and they're offered at different times. There's 4 modules, but they're often offered multiple times throughout the year. So there's always a module going on, in other words. And then we offer groups that women can plug into. So they have these Journey to Resilience, which are 4-week learning experiences. And then we have monthly groups, bimonthly groups where women can connect with other women on a more personal level.
[24:20] [Andrea Griffith] And one of the things, like my groups, I close them, like they're 9 months out of the year. And then after a certain point, I don't let more people in. But what I love about the way you do it is there's always new openings. So if I miss this, then maybe next month, I can jump in. I don't have to wait a whole year. It's ongoing. And so, I'm able to jump in when it works for my schedule.
[24:48] [Denine Blevins] That's right, yeah.
[24:49] [Andrea Griffith] Well, thank you so much for being on the Church Hub Podcast, Deneen. You are a special, wise woman that I want to lean into. And just what you do has helped me for the better, and I just cannot promote Parrakeleo enough. So we'll have every link on our website. And I just encourage all the women who listen to this to please avail yourself of what Parrakeleo and Deneen are offering.
[25:18] [Denine Blevins] Thank you so much, Andrea. I really appreciate this opportunity and so thankful for the work that you and Trent are doing.
[25:26] [Andrea Griffith] Thanks for joining us today. If you'd like to learn more about The Church Hub and how we're strengthening ministry leaders and the families who walk with them, you can visit thechurchhub.org. Until we meet again, I'll be praying that you experience the nearness of Jesus.