My Dis-Ease with Ambition
By Bonnie Fearer & Heather Shackelford

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Editor’s Note:  When our Cultivare Team began to discuss the topic of “Ambition” together, it became readily apparent that the women on our team had very different experiences and perspectives on the topic than the men on our team.  To honor our women colleagues’ experiences and perspectives we made the decision to focus the entire issue on “Ambition and Women,” and invited two of the women on our team to reflect on their experiences in our Essay section.  What follows are their wonderfully honest reflections. (DG)

Bonnie Fearer:

Like many women, the word “ambition,” for me, carries some weighty cargo. Social conditioning has resulted in a double standard where ambition is admired and praised in men; while for women, ambition is either suspect, criticized, or even squelched – and not just by men. The more painful reality is that women are often wary of ambition in other women. Look at the portrayals of ambitious women we see in film or on TV. Virtually all of them exhibit manipulative behavior and questionable character. For all these reasons, I have never “owned” my own ambition. Instead of claiming it, I have given it other, more socially acceptable, names. I don’t have “ambitions”, I have “dreams,” “big ideas,” “goals,” etc. But if ambition is a dream, driven by will towards a goal, then I have ambition. And I always have. Why am I, like so many women, afraid to just say it, and project it with confidence? Maybe we feel that we won’t succeed without being liked. And so, our ambition gets gently released into the world in the form of other, softer, words (dreams, ideas, goals) – like a fragile soap bubble hoping not to be popped.

I didn’t start out this way. I grew up with a dad who told me I could do whatever I set my mind to, and I believed him. Then I stepped out into the world. In my naivete, I charged forth ready to stake my claims personally and professionally, just like my male counterparts, but found that I was often dismissed, ignored or patronized in my work settings. When I did give voice to my ambition, it made the subsequent dismissal so much more painful. Thus, experience says to give ambition a different vocabulary, which I did. The problem with that approach, however, is the professional world often doesn’t recognize ambition by its other synonyms.

I’m older now. As I enter my mid-60’s, I have fewer and fewer people I feel I need to impress. I have experienced a degree of professional satisfaction in my life, and it was hard-won. Now, I feel emboldened to name my ambitions for what they are: My dreams, driven by will, towards a goal.  There. I said it.

Heather Shackelford:

I grew up in the evangelical church tradition. In the specific stream I grew up in I didn’t hear overt messages that said women shouldn’t be ambitious or that it was “wrong” for women to work outside the home or lead within the church, but I didn’t know many women in my church doing any of those things. Eventually I went to college and felt the space and freedom to imagine how things could be different.  Though I personally chose to take a homemaker path, I still planned to push into other endeavors. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I had plenty of women friends that I was glad to support going into graduate programs and forging career paths. I was curious and excited for where they would land and where my future path would take me.

During my time of early child raising something happened to me. Or rather, God did something to me.  He broke my heart for the church.  For various reasons He needed to, but the result was that I spent the next twenty years reading and interceding for the sake of the Church. Over the years, I have had many experiences of being frustrated and foiled by the brokenness within myself and the Body of Christ—that Body that I love and in which I experience so much grace. But this recent season has given way to seeing more clearly what is required for women to function in that space.

For starters, freedom in the mind doesn’t always override nurture in the heart. My upbringing and subculture still have intrinsic messages deep within their cultural DNA.  I felt confident in choosing to have kids early and mostly stay at home because I believed that cultivating and continuing to explore my gifts and ability to contribute outside the home was not off limits. But I began to see how doing so was problematic, particularly in my evangelical setting. Many men in the church who have also grown up in the Christian subculture have never had the opportunity or ease of working with women as peers or leaders in church ministry. That has a cost and creates a specific dynamic. As I have come to navigate more and more the ways that ambition looks in myself, I am seeing how it has been hidden and disguised—in ways that took a long time to be recognized and named, and how it didn’t get the refining and discipleship it needed. 

Once ambition is named, its shadow side must be acknowledged. A lot of discernment needs to happen around how it is acted upon, and that discernment usually happens best in community. Because I felt shame around what was actually ambition, that discernment process was skipped. I was regularly called out by the older women I was trying to look up to for having poor boundaries and for being discontent. No doubt there was, and still is, some truth to that, but looking back, I believe a potential quality or gift wasn’t being named or called out for shaping and redeeming. I felt frustrated and confused between what I felt God was calling me into and the warnings I was hearing from those around me. 

Second, there’s been opportunity cost. It took me over a decade to finally admit to myself that I was indeed ambitious. Within my family and community context, there was a complete lack of imagination being cultivated for anything other than a traditional path. I have come to realize that I/we really need the generation before us supporting us and serving as cheerleaders for pushing into harder career choices and places of influence, support that would allow for the extra schooling or hours of study. Nobody in my community would have said it was wrong for me to pursue these things, but I knew without asking that I wasn’t going to be supported by most of the women-older-than-me in my family and community.  Not supported in time or resources, much less encouragement, if I struggled with my own self-doubt. 

I am also recognizing how I budget for and use extra energy to prove that I am not trying to jockey for a position in leadership in some inappropriate way while navigating church politics and culture. I and many other women I know simply want to see our gifts used while serving the church. We realize that culture, both church and secular, reinforces this idea that women do have to do more to flourish in that space. How much talent and gifting has been lost to the church because of this? How much energy expended has been lost?

When women feel the need to hide their ambition or deny it, then there is an array of gifts left shelved, to the detriment to the Body of Christ. When I or others feel the temptation to downplay leadership skills for fear of seeming ambitious, what is lost? How can we cultivate discipleship around ambition, rather than feel shame about it and pretend like it's not there? There is a good chance that some of this applies to men also. Could it be that untapped ambition could be as costly for the church as unbridled ambition?  These are some of the fruits of the omission around recognizing and cultivating ambition or desire to lead with women in the church. It is true today that attitudes are changing, but it might be helpful to recognize that while there is a lot more openness and invitation for women to pursue much more than in past generations, there still might be some unrealized hurdles and unrecognized consequences from older ways of thinking.

May the Holy Spirit expose more of these good gifts the Father has been giving us so that they might be covered and be made safe by the good work of Jesus did on the cross. May this be so for both men and women, for the sake of the Body of Christ, and for the sake of the Kingdom in the world today.