Jeannie Steger and Martha Fitzgerald have been institutions at Fellowship for the past two decades. Jeannie began on staff on March 3, 2004, serving for 14 of those years as the Café Manager, and Martha started August 1, 2006, as the Events Director. Both retired late this year.
I sat down with them to get their reflections on their respective roles, as well as their faith journeys and lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Q: How did you come to faith in Christ?
Jeannie: “I was not raised in a Christian home. When I was in the ninth grade, a friend invited me to church. The pastor shared the gospel with me, and I prayed to receive Christ. And from that point on, the church was very much a part of my life. I felt like that’s where my family was, because the people there were my brothers and sisters in Christ. God gave me a hunger to know Him for many years before I actually came to know Him. I knew that I was looking for God, and I just didn’t know how to find Him. And I didn’t really know what He offered me, but I was very much aware of my need for God. And so, my heart was just so ready. When someone finally, very plainly shared the gospel with me, there was no hesitation. I was like, ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been looking for.’ God had prepared my heart, and I jumped in with both feet and never looked back.”
Martha: “My mom started going to Immanuel when she was born, so my family went to Immanuel, and so I was raised in a Bible environment, in a Christian environment. …I had biblical knowledge, and I had faith examples all around me. I will say I probably knew more in my head than I did in my heart. I went to college in Virginia, so I went far away, and just didn’t really go to church. Some (not all) of my friends were Christian, but we didn’t go to church or parachurch groups. And I think I was behaving very much on a moralistic level. I was ‘pretty good.’ …But when I went to graduate school, and I don’t even remember if it was just an awareness, I don’t remember even if I know why, but I decided I needed to start going back to church again. So I found a church in Nashville… And I had this book, and it was in the 70s. It was called, ‘How to be a Christian without Being Religious,’ which hit me right where — I had seen all the hypocrisy in the church and had been frustrated by it. So I picked that up, and really, it’s a paraphrase of Romans is what it is. The whole book. And so I think that is when I really got it. …A lot of my priorities changed. Just in terms of, the import of different things, you know, like, relationships were more important than stuff, and it was real important to me that I married somebody who was like-minded about that.”
Q: What is your favorite attribute of God, and why?
Martha: “It would probably change on the day, but right now, I’m just aware of His patience with us, because we just constantly, I constantly mess up. I constantly miss, and He doesn’t get mad, He doesn’t turn His back on [me], He’s just, He is there. So today, it would be His patience with me.”
Jeannie: “I will say today it’s His sovereignty. Because that’s the one thing that pulls me back from the edge when I begin to worry about my life, my family, the world, just everything. My mind can get caught up with ‘what if, what if, what if,’ and I remind myself, ‘Hold on. You know God is sovereign. He is in control of all things. And He will accomplish His will. And even if it’s hard stuff, which a lot of it will be, that’s okay. You don’t have to fear the hard stuff. And you don’t have to fear that somehow God’s going to mess up, because He will accomplish His will.’ And I can have peace in that reality.”
Q: What is your favorite verse, passage, or book of the Bible, and why?
Jeannie: “One verse that has meant a lot to me since I became a Christian is Psalm 16:11, ‘You make known to me the path of life. In Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.’ And I carry that verse in my heart. If I’m stressed, if I’m worried, if I’m unhappy, whatever, I just remind myself that being in His presence brings me joy. I want to seek to always be in His presence. I know that’s where I need to be.”
Martha: “I think right now, John 15, where Jesus is describing, ‘I’m the vine, and you are the branches, abide in Me and you will bear much fruit.’ I think the abiding in Him, like being still and listening, is really, kind of my marching orders right now. I guess because I tend to make plans and ask God to come alongside me instead of me coming alongside Him. And I’m trying to not do that.”
Q: Can you describe what your responsibilities were on staff?
Jeannie: “I have about 90 volunteers that serve in the cafe and, and we’re open every Sunday morning serving cooked-to-order breakfasts. And we serve dinner when there are classes on Wednesday nights. We also help with most of the major events at Fellowship by providing coffee and refreshments. Running the Café involves keeping up with inventory, maintaining and purchasing new equipment, and overseeing and training the volunteers.”
Martha: “I kept the calendar. So every event that happened on site, I was involved with at least knowing what rooms it was in, what the set up was going to be; the larger the event, the more I was involved with different details of that. If there was more to it than ‘you just needed tables and a whiteboard,’ if we needed tablecloths or decorations or things like that. And I helped with planning larger events. And then, as we’ve grown, I kind of oversaw all of the calendars for all of the campuses, and we were watching to make sure we didn’t have conflicts there of, you know, events and things like that.”
Q: Many aspects of your roles required a lot collaboration, and thus you’ve worked closely together and have gotten to know each other well over the years. What’s something you admire about one another?
Martha: “Jeannie truly, truly cares so much about people. She says she has 90 volunteers. She has 90 volunteers that she watches over and she knows what’s going on with their families. She visits them in the hospital. She takes them food. They aren’t just people that she sees on Sunday morning. And her heart for people and her sensitivity and compassion to people is, it’s my example. And just through the years, we’ve done Bible studies together, and she’s always got great insight. That’s what I love about you the most is just your heart. It’s huge!”
Jeannie: “Well, I was going to say one of the biggest things I admire about Martha is her insight, her biblical insight. She has gone deeper in her study of the Bible than I have. She took Greek in college, and she studies from a Greek Bible. She will dig down deep into a word or a verse, and I’m just amazed. We have been in Bible study together for many years. As full-time church staff, we haven’t been able to attend the women’s day-time Bible studies, so we started our own Bible study. Through the years, we’ve had other staff women join with us for a while, but it’s always been me and Martha. That has been a big part of my personal spiritual growth during my years on staff. Another quality I admire in Martha is she always has such a helpful, can-do attitude. Whatever the issue is, I feel like she has such a positive attitude about it and comes up with good solutions. She has been a collaborator with me and a problem solver. And so, even though we were not linked together on the org chart, I’ve always felt like she was a partner with me in my job.”
Q: Through your respective roles, what have you learned about hospitality?
Jeannie: “I think I’m amazed at the impact that hospitality has on people. You know, we can take it for granted and think that it’s not a big deal, to make somebody feel welcome and make them feel like we are glad that they’re here. But it really does meet a need that people have. And coming into such a big place like Fellowship — most of the people you see when you walk in this building, you’re not going to know. And anything we can do to make it feel warmer and more welcoming and inviting; I feel like that makes a huge impact on people. …I feel like it really meets a need that they have that they may not even be aware of. I think of Jesus and how many meals He had with people in the Bible, and with people who were totally different from each other… to me, I feel like that’s hospitality. Welcoming someone, showing love and concern for someone. And just making them feel like they’re important and like they belong somewhere. ‘We’re glad you’re here. You’re important to us. You matter.’ That’s really my heart in hospitality.”
Martha: “Where I saw hospitality matter wasn’t so much on the large events or on Sunday morning. Mine was more when someone needed to have their D-Group meet here because they’d had a flood at their house, and we found them a room, and we made sure it was comfortable and the lighting was good. …the thank-you notes I would get from people for something that we would just kind of take for granted, because the building’s here, it was just the — it’s just what I did all the time. It wasn’t anything special. But to them, somebody taking the time to say, ‘hey, you might want to use this room because you’re serving coffee and that room’s next door,’ I mean, you would have thought you were doing something extraordinary just because you were listening — I guess it was listening to what they wanted to try to do and finding the right space that helped them do that the best. And that was just my job. But it seemed to really, really make a difference with a lot of people.”
Q: What was an aspect of your job, or working at a church, that you found challenging?
Jeannie: “I am exhausted on Sundays, because I get to work at 5:30 a.m., and I’m on my feet for hours. I usually get to go to the 11:00 worship service, and it is sometimes hard for me to mentally move from my Café responsibilities to be fully engaged in worship. Because we work where we worship, that is just the reality of working on a church staff.”
Martha: “There were some times where we had staff changes that really impacted our teams, and that was always a little bit of a challenge to get used to, you know, if you get a new boss, they have a new way of doing things and you have to kind of adjust to that and learn each other. But that’s not just here, that’s anywhere. That’s life.”
Q: What was the most rewarding part of your role?
Martha: “I was able to work with every ministry and everyone on staff. And it was such a holistic picture… It was like, I didn’t have a piece of the puzzle, I got the view of the whole thing. … I liked being involved in knowing what ministry was going on everywhere.”
Jeannie: “It’s hard to it’s hard to pick one thing, but I know something that has been very rewarding to me is getting to know my volunteers. I’m just amazed at the people who serve in the cafe. They have such servant hearts, and they’re so faithful. I mean, I ask them to do extra stuff all the time. And they’re like, ‘sure!’ …I just feel like, ‘wow, how did I get such amazing volunteers? I would never have gotten to know these people if they weren’t serving in the cafe. And I just count myself so blessed to have worked alongside them.”
Q: Through each of your unique lenses, what has been something you’ve seen from the body of Christ that has been an encouragement to you?
Jeannie: “Well, one thing that kind of blows me away is when we do a big event, like the prison packing or the gift wrapping, and you walk in the church and you see thousands of people who just jump in and are so happy to be there. And just to see that many people respond, that quickly, that’s amazing to me that people are that willing to serve and to do something extra; that’s another thing in their schedule, but they’re willing to do it. You know, we’ve seen that happen every year in all the big things, big projects that we’ve done.”
Martha: “What’s amazed me is what people in the body quietly do. For instance: there’s a group of people that pray every Sunday morning for the church and for the services that are going on. …it’s been going on for decades. And they are fastidious, they have a room every Sunday morning, and they pray for the church… To me, it’s just the people in the body that are encouraging and serving and praying for other people in the body. And we get to see that because they use the building.”
Thank you, Jeannie and Martha, for your faithful years of service to our church body and staff!