Megan Fate Marshman will be the first to say her path to becoming a sought-after preacher and Bible teacher looks random on paper. In different seasons, she has been a basketball star; coach; adjunct professor; waitress; videographer; Christian camp recreation leader; curriculum writer; and social media advisor for small businesses in Long Beach, California.
Her sister once said to her, “You’ve never arrived. You just are. And it’s thrilling to watch you adventure.” It’s an apt description of the seemingly unscripted, improvisational way her life has unfolded. But upon closer observation, there’s an unbroken thread of God’s sovereignty running through and ordering her life that has led to her current roles as a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois; pastor of women at Arbor Road Church in Long Beach; and director of women’s ministries at Hume Lake Christian Camps.
Marshman is the author of several books and Bible studies, including SelfLess (David C Cook) and Meant for Good (Zondervan). Her most recent book, Relaxed (Zondervan), uses Proverbs 3:5–6 to reflect on letting go of spiritual performance to rest in our relationship with the God who gently, unhurriedly loves and guides us.
In the following conversation, Marshman discusses her unorthodox journey to finding her calling as a preacher and teacher, the best advice she ever got from Francis Chan, how going to jail gave her a deeper understanding of God’s grace, and the surprising things he revealed to her when her husband, Randy, died suddenly of a heart attack.
Tell me a little bit about your early faith journey.
I have known Jesus the majority of my life. I am really grateful that I started to understand really early on that church is not just something you attend; it’s something you contribute to.
I’ve had a few pivotal turns in my Christian walk. One of them, obviously, would be the moment that I said yes to Jesus for the first time. I was in Awana, and I remember them sharing the gospel, and [saying] God loves you and you can respond to his love and be with him forever. And if you want him, he made a way to take anything that would keep you from a relationship with him on the cross. It was the most compelling, best message ever. How could you not respond?
But they had too many responses, and they didn’t have enough one-on-one volunteers to match up with all the kids. So, they pulled a gal out of the back who was doing snacks, and she happened to be this cool neighbor of mine who didn’t feel prepared to lead someone to Christ, but sat there, heard my story, and she told me hers. I don’t remember much, but I remember God using someone who probably didn’t think that she would be prepared to lead someone. But thanks be to God, it was the Spirit that led me, and all I needed was someone that said, “Let’s pray.” And I did.
So, I came to faith, [and after that] I kind of got used to serving, just being Christian, and it had become normal instead of reorienting. Then in middle school, I was at a Christian camp and the speaker asked, “Is it your parents’ faith or is it yours?” And I was like, Well, I want it to be mine. So, I remember reorienting my life back, and wanting my whole life to kind of begin to revolve around this thing.
Then, a few years later, I’m in high school, and sports became pretty important, student council, all the things I was doing on top of following Jesus. And it started pushing out church attendance. My youth pastor caught me on a Sunday morning. “Megan, where have you been?” I’m so nervous [and] full of shame. I’m [sheepishly] like, “Uh … not with you.”
And his response was, “I’ve paid attention to you, and God made you pretty good with people. What do you think about being our youth group’s initiator of first impressions?”
He didn’t shame me. He didn’t make me feel guilty. He invited me. And it was so fun. I owned that front door of that youth group room for the next two years, because I had something to contribute, not just something to receive.
Then I go off to Christian college. Didn’t understand the value of finding good, solid Christian friends. Had lots of friends, and found a lot of joy and energy in that. I was the perfect Christian kid up to this point—I mean just on paper, or at least in my parents’ opinion.
I had some friends that started stealing. They invited me one day, and I was like, “I’m not going to steal. That’s wrong.” But I remember talking to the store workers up front, and my friends stole in the back. On the fourth store, they invited me to come to the back. They pulled off the tags, threw it in my bag, and they’re like, “It’s thrilling. Just walk out.” And I did. And the alarm goes off. What?!
The whole nine yards: arrested, cop car, put in jail. Imagine the kind of perfect Christian kid who made all the right choices is in the back of a police car going, What just happened?
I get to the station, and I can’t get ahold of my parents. They were on a bike ride (they didn’t go on a bike ride for 10 years after that). Once we do [get ahold of them], my parents go to the local Vons grocery store and try to get $10,000 cash back to bail me out—they didn’t know what to do; it was nighttime.
All this to say, they did get to the jail. “OK, your parents are here. You’ve been bailed out.” And I walk out to my mom who has her arms [spread wide]. She could not wait to hug me. I start crying. “Mom, I know I don’t deserve that.”
And my dad beautifully responds, “My girl, you never did, but you have it.”
My parents have everyone I’ve ever known write letters to the court on my behalf, like “This is out of character.” “This is not who she is.” And I stood before a judge who said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. You’re obviously guilty of this, and your consequence is going to be speaking publicly to every local high school on decision-making.”
I had no idea I knew how to communicate. I had no idea I knew how to engage an audience. I didn’t know that I had words that could be powerful to help other people.
What age were you at this point?
Eighteen years old. [Years later] at David C Cook in Colorado Springs, Colorado, I was in a room with a bunch of people who wanted me to write my first book. They were trying to brainstorm, and they went around to make introductions of who was in the room. The person to my right was saying, “I worked for so-and-so company, and now I work for bigger so-and-so company, and I’m important.” They didn’t say that directly, but [it was implied]. And it went around the room and everyone proved their credentials to be there.
I was [praying to] the Lord, This meeting is here for me to write a book, and I don’t feel like I belong. I sat there with the Lord, and I’m like, What should I share about me? What part of my résumé do I share that makes me worthy to even be in the room, let alone be the one they’re here for?
God brought to mind the jail piece, and I’m like, What? So it gets to be my turn, and my response was, “I went to jail once.”
The whole room was like [gasp]—the breath was taken out of the room—and I talked about how it was through going to jail that I finally recognized what grace actually is.
And the best part is here I am now, and I’ve been humbled enough to know how little I actually know about grace and its power. I saw it when I was little. I saw it from my youth pastor who invited me to serve the church instead of just ditch it. I now see God’s grace in everything.
I could continue through all these pivotal moments, but I feel like the through line of all of it is just God’s grace landing me in my mom’s arms, because I didn’t deserve it in the same way that I never deserved my faith. Then to discover my greatest gift being God’s grace and that he gifted me to communicate it. I’ve basically been doing so ever since.
Do you feel like there was anything in your faith that you had to unlearn along the way?
Instead of “unlearn,” I would say becoming more aware of my pride that convinces me that I already know. So not unlearning grace, but humbling myself to receive it.
I was on a stage teaching a room full of hundreds of women to bless each other with their words. One looks at the other and says something true. And if it’s from Scripture, it’s kind of cool that God would use his body to actually have him speak these words into their life. I said, “Some of you feel intimidated to have to share something, and look someone in the eyes and encourage them. But I think for a majority of you the harder part is genuinely receiving it, because your pride convinces you that you know it already.”
It’s God’s love that changes us whether we’re 15, 36, 40, 85 years old. And it’s our pride in our knowledge that limits us from receiving it fully. I know God is love. I’ve known that since I was 5 years old. When I look at myself and I see my sin … here’s the beauty of confessing our sin: Suddenly the knowledge I’ve known of God’s love goes deeper, because it goes into the places I don’t deserve it. Now his love expands. So, my knowledge of God grows and expands with my greater knowledge of self.
What God’s been doing this entire time is wanting us to open up our heart to engage in relationship so that our lifestyle can change. And change only happens in the heart.
Basketball was a big part of your life. You were a star at Westmont. How do you feel that shaped the trajectory of your life and your faith?
Probably a detail you may not even know is I coached college for a few years in there as well, as an assistant coach [at Azusa Pacific University].
It was a big part of my life, which makes me laugh, because it’s hardly much of it anymore, except that I coach my kids. I coach a lot of my sons’ teams—all sorts of sports—and we have three rules: Have fun, work hard and be a good teammate. Obviously, there’s no rule for winning, but winning is fun, so that does fit into rule No. 1. It doesn’t mean we don’t compete. It just means our goals are different. We name who stood out in those three categories at the end of the game.
Getting higher and higher in sports, or even excelling in it, became a pressure, and the more pressure, the less fun. And sports—but also God, and even life—is meant to be enjoyed. There is always a party popper in a random drawer in my kitchen to make sure that we always are ready to celebrate if someone needs it, or someone has something that’s worth celebrating.
[If you] can reorient [your] brain away from just win-lose, then you can actually look at life not as win-lose, but as win-learn. The big surprise [is that] makes even losses wins for us, because everything is an opportunity to learn, everything is an opportunity to grow, everything is an opportunity to become a better version of myself—not just for myself, but for the betterment of a team.
The Holy Spirit is more creative than wins and losses. As he promises in Romans 8:28, he’s using everything for good. But the problem is we define it by good in our own standards, which is comfortable and easy. And that’s not God’s goal for us. Rather he redefines it in [verse] 29 when he’s like, “For those whom God foreknew he also predestined—here it is—to be conformed to the image of his Son.” I’ve come to realize everything is an opportunity to learn and, with God, an opportunity to grow more into his likeness.
So, you talked a little bit about having to give speeches after you got out of jail. I was listening to your interview on the Craft & Character podcast, and you talked about your journey toward preaching and teaching. Could you share some of that story?
My first message I ever gave was at Hume Lake [Christian Camps], and it was a seminar. I remember going to my lead pastor and asking him, “How do you write a message for people?” And he says, “Just tell them one thing that God’s told you, and it’s pretty simple.”
I remember in that Craft & Character interview I shared something I very rarely do, which was that Francis Chan was in the audience. I’m sensitive to being a name-dropper, so that’s even my hesitancy now—but I looked up to him. He used to speak at my high school, and he was the perfect blend of funny, passionate and Spirit-led. He was, I think, writing the book Forgotten God at the time.
I gave a message, he and I grabbed coffee afterward, and he [said], “Do you know how to tell a story that makes people cry?”
And I was like, “Yes.” I had worked at this summer camp, so I knew how to move people and motivate people. That was my job on the recreation field. But I started using those gifts in cabin-time discussions or leading a Bible study. And then I did this seminar and he’s like, “You’ve got something. It will either be all about you, and you’ll feel the pressure to motivate and try to change [people]. You don’t have that power. You can motivate people, but then that would be the end of it. They’ll be relying upon motivation until it’s not there anymore. Or, you yourself can rely on the Spirit, teach them how to do that, and use your words to do it because God’s gifted you.”
That moment started me off richly knowing what my job is and what my job isn’t. Unfortunately, having been a speaker now for a couple decades, I forget that from time to time. I still feel the pressure to be clever or to motivate or to say something that they’ll like—and then underneath that is probably that they like me. I get tripped up on that all the time. But I’ll continue to come back—because the Spirit keeps bringing me back—to that original thought [that] what God does is eternal, and partnering with him is far more effective.
Then I started doing a bunch of high school youth group chapels, then Christian school chapels, then it just kind of kept snowballing to where I’m at today.
Another big pivotal moment [was] meeting a gal by the name of Michelle Anthony. She’s the one that hired me at David C Cook, and she asked me what my philosophy of ministry is. My response was, “That sounds boring. I just love Jesus, and I’m passionate about Jesus.”
She goes, “I can tell, and I love that about you, but how do you do it strategically or biblically even?”
She ended up taking me under her wing, and as we were creating Spirit-led, family-empowered, gospel-centered—God-centered, not people-centered—ministry curriculum, she intentionally discipled me into a way of doing ministry that was grounded in the foundational truths instead of relying upon my passion. She taught me not just how to get them to make a decision about Jesus, but to reorient their lives around him.
The most pivotal step in the entire thing, for me, is letting God change me. And even the word “let” is intentional. “Be filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18). It’s a passive present imperative. It’s a command to let something happen to me. I need to let God transform my life. And then when he does, then I get to boast about it.
I feel like that’s all I do in speaking—tell [people] what I have found. And that’s what God asks us to do. [One of] the ways I continue to grow is to rely less on myself and more on the Spirit. And what a great start for me: The first message I ever give, someone tells me just that.
So, we’ve talked about a few of your roles. The path God took you on to become a pastor or a preacher wasn’t linear.
Yeah, random.
Why do you think he shaped you in the way that he did if the goal was to make you a preacher?
I’d probably add in my little résumé being a waitress for seven years. I wish every pastor had to do some sort of waitress/waiter type ministry to learn to serve people, not just at their best, but graciously at their worst. Man!
Nice.
So, I was a waitress for seven years. Then I started teaching and coaching at Azusa Pacific. They couldn’t pay me a lot, but they could give me free education. So, I got my master’s degree. Then I worked for the city of Long Beach helping small businesses. It seemed super random, but here’s where it gets interesting. What you don’t know is in college I wanted to be a videographer, so I knew how to do all the video editing. So then I go to work for the city of Long Beach, and because at the time social media was brand new, they paid me to go get trained by Google—no one had any training in this—to help small businesses and manage people’s social media structure.
I’m working at a summer camp all the while, giving random messages throughout the year, just trying to say yes to the next thing. No plan, agenda—maybe be a videographer, but we’ll see. And then I end up meeting Michelle Anthony during my final summer camp, and she says, “I want to hire you, but this is so random, the only job we have open right now full-time is a social media manager, and the person to run all of our video teams.”
And I’m like, “Little do you know, I have a credential for both.”
I end up working on campus at a church in California [Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa]. That church finds out that I’ve done a bunch of speeches at Hume Lake, so they ask, “Do you want to run our night services at our church?”
I’m like, “Sounds great.”
And I worked with a guy named Steve Carter [teaching pastor of Willow Creek from 2012–2018]. He and I had crossed paths at Hume Lake, but also because he had [been teaching pastor at] Rockharbor.
How did I get the job working for Rockharbor? Because I worked for a publishing house. How did I get the publishing house? Because I had a master’s degree, and I got trained through the city of Long Beach for social media marketing. How did I get [that] job? I got the job because I had to get my master’s degree because Azusa Pacific couldn’t pay me crap.
It made no sense. But understanding God’s sovereignty, you have to look backward. That is a thrill. When everyone looks linearly [at the timeline of their life], they’re looking forward. But in order for us to build a résumé of faith [in] God’s sovereignty, you have to look backward. And when I looked backward, I saw that everything that felt so random at the time, but was Spirit-led, at just the right time every single thing aligned up. One of the pastors in my church [Arbor Road Church], Alan Kim, said, “We have to read God’s sovereignty like we read Hebrew: backward.”
One of those looking-back things was the loss of your husband to a heart attack four years ago. That’s taught you a lot of lessons, many of them you share very poignantly in your new book. What was one of the lessons that surprised you?
I’ll give you what comes to mind first. And it [goes] back to our self-awareness conversation. So, I know God’s love, and it’s in looking at my mistakes that his love expands. What surprised me most was that exact visual, I believe, is what’s true in joy and trials. I’ve always been optimistic, pretty fun-loving, see the glass half full, very positive, described as joyful my whole life. I think the thing that surprises me is that joy has expanded in the places of trial. I didn’t think that that would be the case. I thought that those two things would grow, maybe in unison, but I didn’t know that joy could be deposited there, this deep-rooted sense of OK-ness.
[Another thing] that surprised me [was] God gave me a gift of faith that I did not know before. If you would have told me that I had the spiritual gift of faith before Randy went to heaven, I would have been … bored. What? I already have faith. Don’t we all have a spiritual gift of faith? Because, we don’t choose him. We choose him because he first chose us. But it surprises me because this isn’t everybody’s story within grief. He uncovered in me a deep-seated faith and trust in him. That was a gift. A lot of people when trial happens what gets uncovered is that they had faith in a God who is just there to make their life easier and more comfortable and purposeful and successful. When they depart from that faith, my surprising response is, “Good. Because that wasn’t faith in the one, true God.” It will always get uncovered.
When I think about losing Randy … there are two [things] I’ll tell you that I wrote about in my book. One was a life map where I had to write basically my whole story out using sticky notes, and I had eight hours to do it: all the positive moments in my life, all the negative moments, and then all the learnings I’ve had: rational, irrational, Spirit-led, chapter titles, movements, what God was doing. I went on this big old retreat, and then landed at the very end with this: that success is limited in its ability to grow you. That was a surprise.
Another surprise [is] if you’ve lost people in your life—especially a spouse or a kid—if a part of you is in heaven, then go with it. For me, when I didn’t know how to reconcile that two had become one in marriage, but then one loses one, and I didn’t understand the math of that, I had a very dear friend watch my life and then say, “Oh, Megan, it’s like half of you is in heaven.”
I imagine that moment of my husband standing before God. That “one day we will all stand before God” phrase is more textured than ever, because my husband did, knowing full well on that day that everything will be exposed. Yet we can approach [God] confidently, and that type of loving acceptance that we’ll receive on that day, being fully known, fully loved—which is what everyone I know is longing for, to be really, really, really known. Not just the best of me, but the worst of me.
I thought that Randy just went to heaven, and I’m hopefully one day going to join him. But no. One day I will join him, but in the meantime, I’m bringing it down, because that’s what Jesus taught me to pray. That my life has significance and purpose, and that grief and anger and some of those negative emotions aren’t just something to ignore. It might be one of the ways that God’s moving us to have his heart. God hates death, so if I hate death I’m actually getting on the same page as God. And if I’m angry about the unfairness of this world, I’m getting on the same page as God.
I wrote that entire book [so] that people would not do anything alone, because Jesus made a way for that to be possible. And all the good stuff is not just reserved for heaven. All the best parts are possible here and now. And it’s wanting to break forth, which gives me a whole lot of purpose and passion for what to do in the meantime between here and that day I stand before God.
I care a whole lot about things that matter and care a whole lot less about things that don’t matter. And it is so freeing. It’s a freedom I’ve never known. And it’s a freedom that I delight in letting others know.
That’s beautiful. You’re one of the teaching pastors at Willow, and Willow [went] through a difficult season of having a platformed leader [Bill Hybels] fall off that platform. So, how do you help other leaders think through building and using influence in the right way?
Totally. We even studied that in school. Why do big leaders fall, and why is it a big surprise? And we kept coming back to full knowledge, full love. The thing that will change [you], whether it’s a leader on a platform or the homeless person who walks in the back, is God’s love.
Leaders can know God’s love and be unbelievably talented in communicating it, but the more we know ourselves and how unworthy we are of it, boom, the more we experience it, the greater it grows. I feel like every leader probably has said this, and I just say good, I’ll echo all the echoes of the echoes, that you can’t give away what you don’t have.
The way that we grow as a Christian is the exact same way we were saved. The way that I first came to faith and the way I turned my life at multiple significant moments I’ve told you about, always was humility. It was walking out of the jail cell toward my mom. It was being a little bit nervous of being exposed by my youth pastor, and then graciously invited in to receive. God’s. grace. It is un. merited. favor. The problem is a lot of our talents have merited favor, which then makes us [feel like we do] not need grace.
While influence tends to want to go upward and grow to the right, I am fighting to go down to the left, and it takes a lot of intentionality. I’ll be with my spiritual director in a conversation, wrestling through influence, wrestling through the fact that I don’t want to love having influence, and I know myself enough to know that there are parts of me that love it for the wrong reasons. That awareness is a gift, because it’s humbling, and it’s through humility that God has a chance at getting at that part of my heart.
My model for it is going to be Philippians 2: Have the same mindset of Christ who did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, and instead made himself nothing, even to the point of death, even death on a cross.
And then here’s the fun part—and this is probably the visual that I would give for every leader who desires to have influence—Philippians 2 ends with God raising him up. We live in a culture where people are trying to raise you up, and you’re on this thing where you’re trying to get low, humble, humble. Have the same mindset of Christ Jesus: low, low, low, low. And as God raises you up, tell him what he’s done.
Jonathan Sprowl is co-editor of Outreach magazine.