We had an amazing line-up of guest speakers for Virtue’s Girl Talk 2019.

DATES and GUEST SPEAKERS:

Week One Demo: Summer activities for the family

Food trucks for purchase before and after event (starting at 5:30pm).

Download a copy of Jill’s poem, All the Way Home here ›.

July 17 & 18 | Lacey Sturm | The Return: Loving God Back

Week Two Demo: Summer Braids

(Bring the young women in your life!)

Handcrafted ice cream and gourmet pizza truck for purchase before and after event (starting at 5:30pm).

Free Create Stations: Temporary tattoos and friendship bracelets.

July 24 & 25 | Rosaria Butterfield | The Gospel Comes With a House Key

Week Three: Live Q&A with Rosaria Butterfield

Food Trucks for purchase before and after event (starting at 5:30pm).

Speaker Bios

Jill Briscoe

Jill Briscoe, born in 1935, is a British American author, editor, and speaker. She has written or co-authored over 40 books and serves as Founder and Executive Editor of Just Between Us magazine. She is a former member of the board of directors for World Relief and Christianity Today magazine.

Jill will be speaking on “Prayer that Works.”

Here are a couple of our favorite quotes from Jill herself:

“The secret to ‘doing it all’ is not necessarily doing it all, but rather discovering which part of the ‘all’ He has given us to do and doing all of THAT.” —Jill Briscoe

“Don’t think our prayers are powerful, it’s not our prayers that are powerful— it’s Who we pray to! Don’t get this idea that, ‘If I could figure it out and pray this marvelous prayer and claim God’s whatever…’ No it’s nothing to do with that, it’s WHO we pray to!” —Jill Briscoe

Lacey Sturm

Lacey Sturm is the voice behind the platinum-selling, international rock band Flyleaf. She’s a mother, a wife, a hard rock princess, a writer, a speaker, and now a solo artist. But most of all, she’s a child of God who desires for others to know and understand how special, how beautiful, how kaleidoscopically wonderful we are made. Lacey has been a regular speaker for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and its Rock the River events. She co-founded the Whosoever Movement and is a featured artist with RESET.

In February 2016, she became the first solo female to top the Billboard Hard Rock Albums chart!

In her bestselling story-driven style, Christian rocker Lacey Sturm shares with readers from her book (The Return) the beautiful struggle of learning what one’s unique gifts are and pursuing them wholeheartedly. She helps them to see each day as a gift from God, find balance in their busy lives, and discover the joy of giving God’s gifts back to Him by using them to bring Him glory.

She says,

“It’s easy to go through days, weeks, even years on autopilot, moving from one activity to another, rarely taking the time to consider what it’s all for anyway. Why did God make us? What does He want us to do with the time He has given us? And how can we find out?”—Lacey Sturm

Rosaria Butterfield

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, a former tenured professor of English and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University, converted to Christ in 1999 in what she describes as a train wreck. Her memoir, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert chronicles that difficult journey. Rosaria is married to Kent, a Reformed Presbyterian Pastor in North Carolina, and is a homeschool mother, author, and speaker.

Raised and educated in liberal Catholic settings, Rosaria fell in love with the world of words. In her late twenties, allured by feminist philosophy and LGBT advocacy, she adopted a lesbian identity.

Rosaria earned her PhD from Ohio State University, then served in the English department and Women’s Studies Program at Syracuse University from 1992 to 2002. Her primary academic field was critical theory, specializing in queer theory. Her historical focus was 19th-century literature, informed by Freud, Marx, and Darwin. She advised the LGBT student group, wrote Syracuse University’s policy for same-sex couples, and actively lobbied for LGBT aims alongside her lesbian partner.

In 1997, while researching the Religious Right “and their politics of hatred against people like me,” Rosaria wrote an article against Promise Keepers. A response to that article triggered a meeting with Ken Smith, who became a resource on the Religious Right and their Bible, a confidant, and a friend. In 1999, after repeatedly reading the Bible in large chunks for her research, Rosaria converted to Christianity. In her first book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Rosaria details her conversion and the cataclysmic fallout—in which she lost “everything but the dog,” yet gained eternal life in Christ.

Rosaria’s second book, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ, addresses questions of sin, identity, and repentance that she often encounters during speaking engagements. She discourages usage of the term “gay Christian” and she disputes “conversion therapy” in part, because heterosexual sin is no more sanctified than homosexual sin. Her heart’s desire is for people to put the hands of the hurting into the hands of the Savior who equips us to walk and grow in humility.

In her third book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World, Rosaria explores how God used a humble couple’s simple invitation to dinner to draw her—a radical, committed unbeliever—to Himself. With this story of her conversion as a backdrop, she invites us into her home to show us how God can use this same “radical, ordinary hospitality” to bring the gospel to our lost friends and neighbors. Such hospitality sees our homes as not our own, but as God’s tools for the furtherance of His kingdom as we welcome those who look, think, believe, and act differently from us into our everyday, sometimes messy lives—helping them see what true Christian faith really looks like.

Rosaria is zealous for hospitality, loves her family, cherishes dogs, and enjoys coffee.

I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed. Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair. And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.

Take a look at some of our favorite quotes from Rosaria herself:

“Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame.”—Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

“I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin.”—Rosaria Champagne Butterfield