A monthly spiritual formation membership community for women in ministry who spend their lives caring for others and long to finally be spiritually cared for themselves.
And the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
1 Peter 5:10
You have learned, without anyone having to teach you, that vulnerable honesty is expensive in ministry.
Slowly, through a hundred small moments, something rises in you and your throat closes before the words even form. You have told your story in carefully selected contexts, with carefully selected people, using carefully selected words...
and you have still felt completely alone in it.
The way your body decides before your mind does. The calculation before you speak, and the silent exhale when you choose, again, to say something smaller than what is true.
Not because you were being dishonest. But because...
There is a difference between transparency and vulnerability that most ministry women have never had a safe enough space to discover.
Transparency says, “Here is information about me.” It is controlled and measured. Vulnerability says, “I am hurting, and I need someone to hold this with me.”
So you wait until you are alone enough to feel what you actually feel.
You have become so practiced at protecting everyone else from the reality of your own soul that you can barely find it yourself anymore.
The problem is not that you love serving too much.
The problem is that you have been carrying it without anyone carrying you.
✞ You are surrounded by people who need you, and you love them, genuinely, but you have not had somewhere to simply stop being needed.
✞ Faithfulness became over-functioning. Compassion became carrying everyone else's pain. Humility became disappearing. Servanthood became never receiving care. Wisdom became silence. Strength became isolation.
These did not begin as wounds. They began as gifts.
I want to be tended to
You have tried to tend to yourself.
You took the sabbatical.
You went on the retreat.
You read the books.
You started the journal.
You saw the counselor...
the one who was kind, but did not understand what it means to carry a ministry that is also your community, livelihood, and identity.
Most of it helped for a season.
None of it addressed what was actually missing.
Because what is missing is not more rest.
It is somewhere you can tell the truth. One place where you are not anyone's pastor, director, missionary, teacher, or safe person. One place where someone tends to you.
Refuge (מִקְלָט)
The Hebrew word miqlat describes a place set apart for the one who had been running.
In Numbers 35, God commanded Israel to establish cities of refuge, places where the weary and pursued could find protection, rest, and a community that would not turn them away.
The city of refuge was not a reward. It was a provision.
Throughout the Psalms, refuge becomes the language of those who have carried too much alone and finally come before God with nothing left to prove.
Refuge is not where you become someone different. It is where you are received and held until you are ready to move again, not from striving, but from restoration.
That is the sanctuary we are cultivating.
One space on your calendar that exists entirely for you, not for what you carry, but for who you are underneath it.
Refuge is for women in ministry leadership who carry the pain and spiritual needs of others, but have few places to bring their own.
This is where you finally:
✞ Feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of the care you have spent your ministry life learning to give
✞ Exhale for the first time in a long time, because you are not the only one in the room who has needed this
✞ Sit in a room where you do not have to manage how your honesty lands on everyone else
Imagine this.
It’s one of your Refuge mornings, and you open your laptop not to prepare something, not to lead something, not to hold something together for someone else.
You open it because this hour belongs to you.
There is a small group of women on the other side of the screen who know your name, who have heard what you are actually carrying, and who are not there because they need something from you. You do not have to manage how your honesty lands. You do not have to be the strong one. You do not have to perform spiritual health in order to belong.
You simply bring what is true.
And someone holds it with you.
That is what every month in Refuge feels like.
You were meant to have a place like that. Not a place of performance or productivity, nor another program where you are required to lead and facilitate and hold the space for everyone else. But a place that holds the space for you. Where you enter not as the minister, but simply as a woman who is also being formed, being tended to, and also being seen by God and by a small community of others who understand the weight of what you carry because they are carrying it too.
Refuge exists because God has always made provision.
Monthly Group Lectio Divina
Live, online, recorded for replay
Once each month, you gather to meet God in His Word slowly, prayerfully, and in community. Not to study the text, but to be met by it. Three readings. Three silences. Room for the Spirit to speak personally through Scripture.
Monthly Group Spiritual Direction
Live, online, confidential, not recorded
Two women per session bring what they are actually carrying, and the group becomes a community of holy listeners around each one.
This is not advice. Not counsel. Not a conversation you have to manage.
It is the ancient practice of attending together to the movements of God in a person's life—and being spiritually directed, rather than directing.
What is shared in the room stays in the room. Always.
.
Somatic & Spiritual Practice Audio Library
30 guided Christ-centered audio practices, lifetime access
On the days when your body is carrying what your spirit cannot yet articulate, these practices meet you there. Breath prayer, Psalm-based lament, spoken liturgy, and Scripture-anchored stillness—rooted in Scripture and in the Person of Jesus Christ, who meets you.
Community Space
Kajabi community, member-sustained
A small, private community where members connect between sessions, share honestly, respond to reflection prompts, and remember they are not the only one carrying what they carry. This is not a place to perform. It is a place to belong.
Event Discounts
Priority access discounted pricing.
Receive priority registration and discounted access to every Between Grief & Glory virtual event, intensive, workshop, and cohort.
Bonus Suite | $70 value:
Included as a bonus when you commit to six months. Everything in Refuge, plus:
What Are You Really Feeling?
A guided framework for identifying what is actually happening inside you when you can only feel the surface.
When You Don't Have the Words
Audio prayers for the moments when your own words have run out.
Daily Examen
A simple daily practice for noticing where God was present and where He felt distant throughout your day.
Everything in Refuge. Every anchor session, every resource, and every element of the Refuge community is included in full.
✞ Monthly Small Group Processing Circle Live, online, confidential, not recorded.
A small, covenanted circle of four to six women who meet monthly for the duration of your six-month membership.
You bring what you are actually living through. The group receives it without fixing it.
Over six months, this circle becomes one of the most trustworthy spaces most ministry women have ever experienced because it is consistently safe, consistently present, and consistently yours
✞ Quarterly Discernment Workshops | The DISCERN Framework Live, online, 2 hours each.
Four times a year, you move through a structured two-hour formation experience built on the seven-movement DISCERN arc and grounded in the rhythm of the season: fall honors what has been gathered, winter tends what lies dormant, spring asks what you are being called to plant, and summer invites you to receive who God says you are.
You leave each session with clarity about where you are, where God is leading, and what the next faithful step looks like.
✞ Annual Rule of Life Planning Session Live, online, half-day, 4 hours.
Once a year, you spend a half-day building something the church has practiced for two thousand years: a personal Rule of Life, not a performance standard, but a trellis that gives the vine of your life something to grow along.
Across four hours of teaching and implementation, you build your Rule across soul, story, relationships, and stewardship, leaving with a living document that orders the coming year around what is actually true about you before God.
✞ Priority Access to Storyline: Seen, Known & Restored Limited seating, Inner Courts members receive priority registration and discounted access to Storyline: Seen, Known & Restored, the nine-week deep-dive cohort where narrative, lament, embodied practice, and meaning-making come together in a structured, community-held experience.
✞ Exclusive Quarterly Virtual Retreats 90 minutes each, live online. Four times a year, you are invited into a guided retreat using simple creative practices, music, and silence to hold what words cannot...no performance expected, only presence.
✞ Tending Hour with Paris Live, online, monthly.
Once a month, you have direct access to bring your real questions: ministry questions, formation questions, and the things you are working out in real time.
This is not a webinar; it is an honest conversation with someone who understands what it costs to carry a calling and is genuinely available to sit with you in it.
✞ The Witnessed Leader Library | $450 value Included as a bonus when you commit to six months. Includes the Ministry Leader Burnout Assessment, the Unseen Leader Rule of Life Builder, Boundary Scripts for Women in Ministry, the Difficult Conversations Guide, the Lectio Divina Audio Experience, the Emergency Prayer Audio Collection, and the Who Holds Me? Reflection Guide.
Why I cultivated Refuge
Hello, if we haven't met, my name is Paris. Nice to *meet* you. I came to trauma-informed formation and spiritual direction expecting tools that would make me better at serving others. Instead, I discovered how deeply I needed to be cared for, too.
God began tending the places in me that years of faithful ministry had quietly bypassed. I realized I did not need more information or another season of trying harder.
I needed somewhere I could stop holding everything and simply be held.
I cultivated Refuge because that place did not exist for me when I needed it, and I know I am not the only woman in ministry who has needed it.
If you have spent years giving others what no one was giving to you, wondering whether you are allowed to need something for yourself
this space was built for you.
- With you in this, ♡ Paris
What women experience in spaces like Refuge:
✔ They have stopped editing themselves before they speak, at least in one room, and that one room has begun to change the others.
✔ They feel less alone in their calling than they have in years, not because their circumstances changed, but because they stopped carrying it in secret.
✔ They have somewhere to bring what is true about them, and for the first time in a long time, they leave a space feeling tended to rather than depleted.
Which community is right for you?
Choose Refuge if: you need a consistent place to receive spiritual care, practice presence, and stop carrying ministry alone.
Choose Inner Courts if: you want everything in Refuge plus the continuity of the same small circle and deeper ongoing formation.
Pay monthly or choose to pay for a 6 month membership and receive bonuses for your extended care.
FOUNDING MEMBER PRICE SUMMER 2026
REFUGE: INNER COURTS
$97
plus a committed formation community designed for the woman who is ready to be genuinely known.
Join Refuge: Inner Courts
"This was the first time I felt safe telling the truth about my story."
"I came in feeling ashamed, stuck, and spiritually numb. Through Paris’ gentle, trauma-informed guidance, I began to understand parts of my story I had avoided for years.
I’ve experienced more healing in these months than in years of trying to “fix myself” alone. Now, I move through life with a deeper sense of hope, honesty, and connection with God."
— M., age 38
"I didn’t realize how much pain I had never acknowledged."
I’ve been in ministry for decades, yet had never slowed down enough to face the harm in my own story.
Paris created a space where I felt seen, respected, and understood... something I didn’t realize I needed so desperately. For the first time in years, I feel hopeful and reconnected to my own heart and to God in a way that feels real again."
— L., age 60
It is honest to ask. Your calendar is already full and your budget is already stretched.
So let's be direct about both.
“I don’t have time for something like this.”
Refuge asks for approximately three hours a month for the anchor sessions. The community space is there when you have a moment and can be muted when you do not. There is no curriculum to keep up with, no homework to complete, no pressure to show up daily. This is not one more thing on your plate. It is the one place on your calendar that exists entirely for you.
“I don’t know if I can justify the cost.”
At $37 a month, Refuge costs less than a single counseling session with someone who does not understand what it means to carry a calling. You are not paying for more information. You are investing in one place where honesty does not cost you anything, where someone is tending to you for a change, and where you are not carrying this alone.
I have seen the same belief in countless women in ministry: care for yourself later.
She would never say that to another woman. She would tell her that her formation matters and that those who tend others also need tending.
Then she returns to her own life as though none of it applies to her.
I know, because I did the same thing for years.
But the Lord does not want to use you; He wants to tend to you.
The difference between those two things is not semantic. It is the difference between a ministry that consumes you and a ministry that flows from a place of genuine restoration.
I Want to Be Tended To
It is not another program or a leadership cohort, nor is it a community where everyone performs spiritual health for each other.
This is for you if:
✔ You are a pastor, pastor's wife, ministry director, missionary, chaplain, worship leader, Bible teacher, non-profit leader, or woman carrying significant spiritual responsibility.
✔ You love your calling. You have not lost your faith. You are not looking for a way out.
✔ You are looking for somewhere you can stop performing it for couple of hours a month.
Refuge is that place.
This is not for you if:
✘ You are looking for a leadership development program or a business strategy community.
✘ You are not yet ready to receive care—only to give it.
✘ You are looking for answers more than you are looking for accompaniment.
These spaces require presence, honesty, and a willingness to be known. If you are not ready for that, this is not the right season.
When it is, we will be here.
Paris Byrum is a trauma-informed spiritual director in training through Soul Shepherding, trauma-informed coach and Storyline facilitator through Freedom Movement, and certified trauma-informed mentor with over 200 hours of biblical, narrative, and formation-focused training through the Allender Center, ACBC, and IBCD. She also brings more than five years of chaplaincy experience and specialized training in vocation and calling discernment.
Refuge is for women who regularly receive the pain, questions, and spiritual needs of others but have few places to bring their own.
What is Refuge, exactly?
What is spiritual direction, and is it biblical?
I already know the Bible.
What is Lectio Divina? Is it new age 'woo woo'?
What does a typical month actually look like?
Who is Refuge for?
I'm already in counseling or therapy.
Is what I share kept confidential?
Will sessions be recorded?
What if the live session time doesn't work for my schedule?
What is the time commitment?
What is the difference between Refuge and Refuge Inner Courts?
How does Refuge relate to Storyline: Seen, Known and Restored?
I don't need another Zoom meeting.
What if I am not sure I am ready?
Can I cancel my membership?
How far in advance will I know the quarterly dates?
The shepherd who cares for the flock still needs to be led beside still waters. And the one who leads there is not a principle or a practice. It is Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who tends the ones who have spent their lives tending others.
That is not weakness. That is how the work sustains.
Join RefugeRefuge and Refuge: Inner Courts are monthly memberships. Cancel anytime with 15 days notice before your next billing date. Six-month commitments are required to access the bonus suites. All six-month payments are non-refundable after access is granted.
