According to Sister Laura Swan, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa learned the Christian way of life from Macrina, the oldest child of Basil’s household. If that is new to you, it shows how church history usually gets handed down: as a list of men. Over the next seven days you will learn a handful of the women who belong in that history. You will build small memory cards and test them against Scripture and the sources. Then you will practice saying, in a sentence or two, who is missing from a story and how we know she was there.
Alone, plan on about twenty minutes a day. A group can meet twice, once after Day 3 and once after Day 7. The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Sister Laura Swan, a Benedictine sister who collected these women’s stories in her book The Forgotten Desert Mothers.
Day 1: Take an honest inventory first
Before you learn anything new, record what you already carry. On a blank page, list every person from the first five centuries of Christianity you can name without looking anything up. Leave out the people in the Bible for now. Give yourself three minutes. Then count the men and count the women.
Keep this page for Day 7. It records what you were taught, so there is nothing to grade. Swan’s own search began from the same kind of list. When she entered monastic life in her mid-thirties, her teacher kept telling the stories of the desert fathers. Swan says the women in the sources outnumbered the men, yet the lessons kept returning to the men. She went looking and found the women “in footnotes and notes, side comments.” A patristic scholar told her, she says, that the specialists know these women but had no idea anyone would be interested. Her reply is the reason for this week: “women would like to know about our own contribution to Christianity, which is quite significant.”
Write one observation under your list: Where did I learn the names I wrote down? A class, a sermon, a book, a documentary? By the end of the week you will listen to that source differently.
Day 2: Start with the women already in the text
The Gospels and Paul’s letters name women doing serious work. Memorize four short anchors today. Read each passage in full. Then write one sentence about what the woman does, using plain verbs.
- Luke 8:1-3. Luke 8:3 names “Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.” In the KJV, “of their substance” means out of their own resources. These women paid for the work.
- John 20:11-18. John 20:18 reads: “Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.” Notice who carries the first report of the risen Christ, and who receives it.
- Romans 16:1-2. Romans 16:1 reads: “I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea.” The word rendered “servant” here is the one rendered “deacon” elsewhere, and other translations render it “deacon” in this verse.
- Acts 18:24-26. Priscilla and her husband Aquila take Apollos aside, and Acts 18:26 says they “expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly.” A gifted preacher received teaching from a woman and her husband.
Now check your sentences. Did any of them move from what the text describes to a conclusion about church offices today? Faithful Christians disagree about what roles women should hold in church leadership, and these passages sit at the center of that discussion. You can set that question aside this week and still do the work in front of you with confidence: remember what these women did, as the text reports it.
For groups: if the conversation turns to women preaching or holding office, name it as a real question that deserves its own setting. Then bring the group back to the verbs on the page.
Days 3 and 4: Build two memory cards that include the evidence
Most people remember history as names attached to achievements. Your cards will add a line that changes what you notice later: how the story reached us. Swan’s examples show women dropping out of the record through the route their stories traveled. Remember the route, and you can explain the gap.
On an index card or a phone note, make four lines for each woman: Name. Where and when. What she did. How we know. Use only what Swan reports, and remember her details as her account.
Day 3: Macrina the Younger
Fill in the first three lines from what Swan says. Macrina was the oldest child of a large household in Asia Minor. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, whom Swan counts among the leading church fathers of the Orthodox tradition, came from that family circle. Swan says Macrina taught them the Christian way of life and pressed them to be baptized and to get serious about serving the gospel.
For the fourth line, Swan explains that in that world, “frequently women never wrote their own biographies. Someone else wrote it for her.” Macrina’s teaching survived through her brothers’ memories, gathered into a long deathbed sermon. Swan’s description: “they put it metaphorically in her mouth as she’s dying.” Write Survives through her brothers. That line holds two facts. Her teaching was valued enough to preserve, and the men who wrote it down shaped what we have.
Day 4: Olympias
Swan places Olympias in the 300s, a member of the imperial family who served as an ordained deaconess in Constantinople. She fed prisoners, paid their debts, cared for widows and orphans, and funded hospitals and churches. When her friend John, the bishop remembered as the golden-tongued preacher, was driven out of the city for condemning the imperial family’s corruption, she backed him with money and political support. Swan says “he considered her to be his foundation and his backbone.”
For the fourth line, Swan says, “We have his letters to her.” Then: “Unfortunately, somewhere over the centuries, her letters to him got lost, which is tragic.” Write One side of the letters survives. We hear Olympias only through the replies of the man she supported.
On the back of the card, add Phebe from Romans 16. Paul commends a woman servant of the church by name, and centuries later Olympias serves in that same capacity.
Day 5: Learn the movement as well as the individuals
Today’s card covers the desert mothers as a group. Swan’s account gives you three things to remember.
Where the faith traveled. Swan traces the early home churches along the trade routes, east toward modern Afghanistan and China and south along the Nile into what we now call Ethiopia. She mentions monasteries now being uncovered under the sand in Ethiopia, their artwork read for what those communities believed. Record one honest detail too: Macrina and Olympias lived in Asia Minor and Constantinople. The faith’s early African roots stand on their own evidence and gain nothing from a misremembered map.
What they defended. Swan says the desert mothers generally sided with Athanasius against his detractors in the dispute over whether Jesus is fully human and fully divine. They also defended bishops and monks whom Roman troops were driving out for refusing an emperor’s theological position.
How they lived. Swan says they sold what they made in the village and gave ten percent to the local deacon, “who might be a man or a woman,” before buying supplies, then gave away what remained. Strangers came to their caves unbidden, and “they received all as Christ.”
One line needs careful handling. Swan says the mothers reminded the church “that the relationship with the divine is more important than theology.” Write it on the same card as the Athanasius detail, so you remember both together. Then decide for yourself how the two fit.
Day 6: Test the cards against the hardest objection
A skeptic could fairly say: Most of what you know about these women comes from men’s writings and one modern author. Isn’t that thin?
Work through it in two columns. On the left, write what the objection gets right. Swan says she is not a formally trained patristic scholar and does not read Syriac or the ancient Ethiopian church language, so she relies on language specialists. Macrina reaches us through her brothers, and Olympias through John’s letters. Some of Swan’s broader claims rest on other scholars, such as her statement that “patristic scholars tell us that Christianity was actually originally a woman’s movement.” Mark that one on your card as a claim to check.
On the right, write what the objection misses. A record filtered through men tells us who held the pen. The men who preserved Macrina and Olympias wrote about women they knew and relied on. Swan also says the evidence keeps growing, as scholars send her stories she did not know and new translations come from the original languages.
Then say your answer aloud in under thirty seconds. In a group, pair up. One person raises the objection and the other answers using only the cards. Switch. Afterward, the questioner says whether the answer claimed more than the cards support.
Day 7: Revisit your inventory and rehearse the fill-in
Return to your Day 1 list. Without your cards, add every woman you can now name, with one action and one evidence line for each. Compare the two versions. Which detail came back most easily, the achievement or the way the story survived?
Now rehearse the habit this week was built for. Swan says church historians have kept retelling the same story “rather than stopping and asking, who am I not seeing? Who am I not hearing?” Pick a real setting where you will hear church history taught: a Bible class, a sermon series, a podcast or a course. Write a two-sentence addition you could offer there, for example after a lesson on Basil or John Chrysostom. Name the woman, say what she did, and say how we know. Practice it until it sounds like your own speech. As Lisa Fields put it at the close of the episode, “this is a part of our history that we need to know.”
Questions for discussion
- Compare your Day 1 and Day 7 lists. What does the difference suggest about how history gets taught, and what does it leave unproven?
- Macrina’s teaching survives in a sermon her brothers composed. How much confidence should we place in a teaching preserved that way, and what would raise or lower that confidence?
- Swan describes women serving as deacons from Phebe to Olympias. What can be said about these women from the historical record alone, and where does the separate question of church office today begin?
- Swan says the mothers put relationship with God ahead of theology, and she also says they defended Athanasius. How would you put those two claims together, and could a fair reader put them together differently?
- Olympias’s letters are lost while John’s survive. If her side of the correspondence were found, what would you most want to learn from it, and what might it change on your card?
- When you picture offering your two-sentence addition in a real setting, what makes it hard? Is it a lack of knowledge, a fear of seeming combative, or something else?
Personal answers are optional. A group can answer from the history alone and still have a full discussion.
A question to carry
The next time a lesson names only men, ask Swan’s question quietly before you say anything: who am I not seeing? Then decide whether you know enough, from the evidence on your cards, to answer it out loud.