A monthly spiritual formation membership 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.
Not all at once, but slowly, through a hundred small moments where something rises in you and you feel your throat close before the words even form. You have told your story before, in carefully selected contexts, with carefully selected people, in carefully selected words...
and you have still felt completely alone in it.
The way your body decides before your mind does. The quick internal calculation that happens in the half-second before you speak, and the silent exhale that follows 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, it is measured, it keeps you from ever being truly at risk. Vulnerability says something different. It says, "I am hurting, and I need someone to hold this with me." And you have never had somewhere safe enough to say that.
And so you wait, until you are in the car, or until the house is quiet. Until you are finally 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.
Ministry did not create them. But ministry has a way of magnifying whatever we brought with us... including the ways we learned, long ago, to stay safe, stay needed, or stay unseen.
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 actually means to carry a congregation, a ministry, a calling that is also your whole community, your livelihood, and your identity, all at once.
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 for refuge is miqlat. It appears throughout the Old Testament to describe something very specific: a city set apart, not for the strongest or the most faithful, but for the one who had been running.
In Numbers 35, God commanded Israel to establish cities of refuge along the roads... places where a person who was weary, pursued, and carrying something they could not explain to just anyone 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.
The Psalms return to this language more than forty times across the Psalter, always in the context of the one who has been carrying something alone, who has found no safe place to put it down, who arrives before the Lord not with an offering of strength but simply with themselves.
The refuge was never the place where you become someone different. It was the place where you are received as you are, protected as you are, and held as you are, until something in you is ready to move again, not from striving, but from having been restored.
That is the sanctuary we are cultivating.
Think of it as the one space on your calendar that exists entirely for you... not for what you carry, but for who you are underneath it.
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
Why I cultivated Refuge
Hello, if we haven't met, my name is Paris. Nice to *meet* you. I did not come to this work because I had it figured out. I came to it thinking it would make me better at serving others, and discovered along the way that I desperately needed it myself.
When I stepped into trauma-informed training and spiritual direction, I expected more tools for ministry. What I found instead was that God was not interested in making me more effective. He wanted to care for me. He led me gently into the parts of my own interior life that years of faithful ministry had quietly bypassed. It was Jesus who met me there. Him, present and unhurried, in the places I had learned to move past without stopping.
I realized how much of my faith had lived in my head by consuming truth and agreeing with it, while assuming it would eventually reach the places in me that still felt guarded, overwhelmed, and unseen.
What I needed was not more information. It was not another retreat or another book or another season of trying harder.
What I needed was somewhere I could stop being the one who holds everything, and simply be held.
I created Refuge because that place did not exist for me when I needed it, and because I know I am not the only one who has needed it.
You do not have to keep carrying this alone.
Because I know what it feels like to:
→ suffer silently while trying to “stay strong”
→ be given spiritual answers that do not reach what is actually hurting
→ wonder whether something is wrong with you because you are still struggling after all these years of faithfulness
→ long, privately, for somewhere your story is finally safe to be seen
If you have spent years giving to others what no one was giving to you,
If you have been faithful and still felt the cost of it in places you could not name,
If you have wondered whether you are allowed to need something for yourself,
this space was built for you.
- With you in this, ♡ Paris
If you occupy a position where other people bring you their pain, their questions, and their spiritual needs, and you have very few places to bring your own, Refuge was built for you.
Imagine this.
It is the first Tuesday of the month. 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.
Monthly Group Lectio Divina
Live, online, recorded for replay
Once each month, you gather to meet God in His Word the way the ancient church always did... slowly, prayerfully, and in community. Not to study the text. To be met by it. Three readings. Three silences. Room for the Spirit to speak personally through Scripture. This is the consistent Word-anchored practice that gives your soul something to return to each month.
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, drawn from centuries of Christian formation, not wellness culture. Every practice is rooted in Scripture and grounded in the Person of Jesus Christ, who is not distant from your body or your pain. He took on flesh. He wept. He is not waiting for you to arrive at something better before He meets you.
Community Space
Kajabi community, member-sustained
A small, private community where members connect between sessions... sharing honestly, responding to reflection prompts, and knowing 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.
As a Refuge member, you 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 of noticing where God was present and where He felt distant — the ancient Ignatian practice made accessible for the rhythms of a ministry woman's day.
Everything in Refuge. Every anchor session, every resource, and every element of the Refuge community is included in full.
Refuge: Inner Courts begins where Refuge leaves off, and goes further.
✞ 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. Each workshop is 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. 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. A trellis, a structure that gives the vine of your life something to grow along. Across four hours of teaching and implementation, you build your Rule across the domains that sustain a whole person: soul, story, relationships, and stewardship. You leave 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 first. Storyline is the nine-week deep-dive cohort... the place where narrative, lament, embodied practice, and meaning-making come together in a structured, community-held experience that changes how you understand everything you have lived. Inner Courts members receive priority registration before doors open to the public, and at a discounted rate that honors their membership.
✞ Exclusive Quarterly Virtual Retreats 90 minutes each, live online. Four times a year you are invited into a 90-minute guided retreat. Art retreats in summer and winter use simple creative practices as prayer, giving grief form without requiring interpretation or artistic skill. Music retreats in spring and fall invite you to listen prayerfully, allowing sound 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, 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 who 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. Seven practical resources for the woman who ministers to everyone else, and has never had anything built specifically for her. 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.
This is a peculiar moment to be a woman in ministry...
You did not enter this calling to take a position. You entered it because the Lord called you, gave you gifts, and placed people in front of you who needed what you could offer. You wanted to serve Him with gladness and love your neighbors well.
And yet here you are, navigating a climate that requires you to justify your presence before you are ever allowed to simply be faithful in it.
The research confirms what you have long felt in your body but had no language for.
These are not women who have lost their faith. These are women who are still showing up.
A sabbatical will rest your physical frame; it cannot heal the heavy stories you have swallowed to keep everyone else safe.
What you need is not a break from the work. You need somewhere to be seen in what the work has cost you.
That place is Refuge.
After six months in Refuge, women say:
✔ They can finally name what they are carrying without immediately managing how it lands on everyone else.
✔ 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 words for things they could not name before, and naming them has begun to loosen their hold.
✔ 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.
✔ They keep coming back. Not out of obligation. Because it is the one place on their calendar that belongs entirely to them.
There is a difference between being cared for and being known
Refuge is the sanctuary.
Refuge: Inner Courts is the long table you pull a chair to and do not leave.
Many women begin in Refuge. Some begin in Refuge: Inner Courts. Both are the right place, depending on what this season is asking of you.
Which community is right for you?
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 walked alongside enough women in ministry to recognize a belief that runs insidiously beneath the surface of their lives. It goes something like this:
investing in herself is something she will do eventually—when things settle, when the budget allows, when she has served long enough to have earned the right to receive something for herself.
She would challenge that belief immediately in a woman she was mentoring. She would tell her, gently and with full conviction, that her formation matters and that the Lord tends to those who tend others. She would mean every word of it. Then, she would return to her own life and continue to function as though it did not apply to her.
I know this 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.
And you have discovered that none of it addressed the actual problem:
There is nowhere you can simply be a woman instead of the woman everyone depends on.
Refuge is that place.
This is not for you if:
✘ You are looking for a leadership development program or a business strategy community.
✘ You want to be challenged to do more, produce more, or lead better.
✘ You are not yet ready to receive care—only to give it.
✘ You are hoping someone will tell you how to be a better leader without asking what leading has cost you.
✘ 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.
Refuge is not a program with a graduation date. It is a place you return to, and it will be here when you are ready.
In the ancient Near East, the role of the priest was not simply to perform sacrificial duties on behalf of the people. The priest was also the one who entered the inner sanctuary, the place set apart from the ordinary business of the temple, where the presence of God dwelled in a particular and concentrated way. The priest did not enter that space in order to offer more.
The priest entered that space in order to be in the presence of the One from whom all offering ultimately flows.
That One has a name. He is Jesus Christ, who entered our suffering in the flesh, bore what we could not carry, and rose so that the sanctuary is no longer a room we approach with fear, but a Person we are invited to draw near to.The inner sanctuary was not a reward for faithful service. It was the condition of it.
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.
I Am Allowed to Need This
Paris Byrum is a trauma-informed spiritual director in training through Soul Shepherding, a trauma-informed coach and Storyline facilitator through Freedom Movement, and a certified trauma-informed mentor with over two hundred hours of biblical, narrative, and formation-focused training through the Allender Center, ACBC, and IBCD. She brings over five years of chaplaincy experience and specialized training in vocation and calling discernment.
She did not come to this work because she had it all figured out. She came because she needed it herself. What she discovered in her own formation is what she now holds space for in others: that the Lord does not want to use you. He wants to tend to you. Refuge exists because that is true, and because most women in ministry have never had a place where they were allowed to receive it.
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.
I'm already in ministry.
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.
