Women encouraged

Christine Caine’s campaign launches, promotes female leadership

“And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

Those words, although spoken thousands of years ago to a young Queen Esther by her uncle Mordecai, echoed in 21st century ears around the Liberty University campus during Propel Week, Jan. 26-30.

Propel Women, a campaign founded by husband and wife duo Nick and Christine Caine, launched from Liberty University Monday, Jan. 26, during Convocation.

According to the campaign’s website, propelwomen.org, the mission and vision of Propel Women is “Helping women internalize a leadership identity and fulfill their purpose, passion and potential. … Propel exists to help create an interconnected life in Christ, who affirms and acknowledge every woman’s gifts, passions and leadership potential for the glory of the kingdom.”

Before Christine Caine took to the stage as Monday’s keynote speaker, David Nasser, senior vice president of Spiritual Development, said a few words about the campaign.

“The essence is about equipping the saints to do the work of ministry,” Nasser said. “The focus is obviously on empowering women to really grasp their distinctive ways that God has made them, to be able to co-labor in the fields that are ripe for harvest. And this is really in line with our vision as a school since 1971, where we’ve been raising not (just) men to be champions for Christ, but men and women.”

Following Nasser’s prayer and introduction, Christine Caine stepped onto the stage, eliciting cheers and applause from Convocation attendees.

“I am so grateful to be here,” Christine Caine said. “There’s nowhere I would rather be launching Propel.”

Christine Caine, who is the author of five books, co-founder of the A21 anti-trafficking campaign with her husband and a regular speaker at the Passion conference, encouraged students to remember their mission, their purpose — which is more than just getting a degree.

“What Propel is all about is helping to make Jesus’ last command our first priority,” Christine Caine said. “He still hasn’t come back yet, because we still haven’t done the thing that he’s called us to do. And so Propel is just a part of that.”

Caine also shared some of her own story and how, as a young woman, she was discouraged from pursuing higher education, from departing from the status quo and from being a leader. She decided to do all of these things anyway.

“I also knew there was a call on the inside of me, and I don’t think anyone would deny that, now that I’m almost 49,” Christine Caine said. “Now that dozens of traffickers are in jail, hundreds of girls are rescued, millions of people have come to Christ. I think a lot of people would say, ‘Gee, I’m glad that way back, when she was 18, 19, 20, that she had the courage to step into what God had called her to do.’”

Like a modern-day Queen Esther, Christine Caine urged both women and men to pursue the passions and callings that God has placed on their lives. To do what God has placed them on Earth to do.

“We need to be a generation, in a world that is sick and a world that is dying, in a world that is desperate, we need to be a generation of young people that say, ‘We are obsessed with one thing: the cause of Christ,’” Christine Caine said.

For thousands of years, women did not have the opportunity to enter the marketplace, the public forum, as they do now. Sadly, according to Christine Caine, the church has often failed in its capacity to propel women into leadership roles in society, leaving secular feminists to empower women to be the leaders God created them to be.

With the Propel campaign, Christine Caine has decided to change all of that.

“Because of equal opportunity, affirmative action, like it or love it, there is a world that is full of men and women, and we need the church to stop running away from that world,” Christine Caine said. “To stop condemning that world, to stop judging that world, to begin to love that world and to go into that world and bring the light and the life and the hope and the mercy and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ into that world.”

Such change, Christine Caine affirmed, is not easily won.

“We are not on a Disney cruise ship, people,” Christine Caine said. “We’re on a battleship. …We are at war. The devil has loved to keep all this hidden, so that we can keep resource and talent and gift and ability out of furthering the kingdom. It’s never about us. It’s about the purpose of God and seeing the evangelization of the planet happening.”

As she closed her message, Christine Caine encouraged believers to lay aside their prejudices and sins — to be in the world, but not of it. To be leaders defined by the spirit of God, pursuing godly ambition.

“What we need is a generation of men and women who will bear witness to the truth of the gospel in the marketplace, by our love one for another, by our mutual respect one for another, our honor one for another, our understanding and our submission one to another … in terms of fulfilling, ultimately, the great commission,” Christine Caine said.

The “propel woman,” like Queen Esther, is one who is willing to risk, to lay it all on the line, to stand up and step out for her one true king.

“She is untamable as she goes to conquer the kingdom of darkness with the life and the light and the message and the justice and the truth and the grace and the salvation of our almighty God,” Christine Caine said. “The Propel woman is every woman, and every man that loves every woman. We are gonna do this in our generation for the glory of God. We shall see the evangelization of planet Earth before the second coming of Jesus Christ.”

Graf is a feature reporter.