Faith, fun and misfits

The Women of Faith Conference rolls into town Friday.

If you picture docile church ladies knitting sweaters while quietly listening to pious talks by pious people, change the picture.

“There are great parts that are over-the-top fun,” says singer and author Sandi Patty, one of the Women of Faith presenters.

“There are very poignant moments as well. You leave there gleefully exhausted. You’ve laughed, cried, you’ve danced. 

“Mandisa (the Grammy-nominated ‘American Idol’ finalist) gets us up there and we just dance!”

In a recent interview from her Oklahoma City home, Patty also talked about some other surprises awaiting those who venture to their first Women of Faith Conference.

Big names will be there

Mandisa, for starters. Plus Amy Grant, who has sold more than 30 million albums and won six Grammys and, as her publicity points out, “put contemporary Christian music on the map.”

But that’s not the biggest surprise, Patty says. The nearly dozen presenters, all accomplished in their own ways, share the stage, the spotlight and equal billing.

“The Three Musketeers coined it, but we are all for one and one for all,” Patty says.

“We really are a team.  It’s about the women sitting in the seats, and what we can share from our own journey, from our experiences.

“We each have something different to share. At the end of the weekend, hopefully, each of the women (in the audience) has found something that warms their heart.”

Darn honest presenters

Patty, for instance, shares stories from a dark time more than a decade ago.

In her book “Layers: Uncovering and Celebrating God’s Original Idea of Me” (Thomas Nelson, 2008), she writes that she had to abandon her “façade as a smiling wife, a devoted mother of four kids, and a successful Christian recording artist.”

Patty, a Gospel Music Hall of Fame inductee, had separated from her husband, fallen in love with another man and struggled with lifelong weight issues and depression.

She writes: “I took a headlong plunge off the pedestal of Christian celebrity and eventually ended up at the front door of a mental health facility. I needed help, and I needed it badly.”

At 55, Patty is into truth-telling, as are the other conference presenters.

“The biggest way to get a message across is by example,” she says. “I share my story. Then I say, ‘Now, did the world end?’ What is it we think will happen if we tell our stories? We can see firsthand the world didn’t come to an end.”

Misfits welcome

When Patty attended her first Women of Faith Conference eight years ago, she was nervous.

“I thought I would come to Women of Faith, and I would be so out of place, and I would be looking for the other misfits, because I don’t have it all together in my life. I’ve made some mistakes,” she says.

“Life is not always tidy. I didn’t want to be in a roomful of women whose lives were tidy.”

Instead, she discovered just the opposite. And she’s urging Inland Northwest women to come see for themselves. 

“It is a room full of misfits,” Patty says. “A room full of very real women who don’t have it tidy all the time. That was just so refreshing for me.”