Dannah Gresh
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First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. Take the gender confusion, take temptation, take purpose, take any subject you want where a kid's going to have to figure things out in life. The Word of God is the answer. So I'm on a mission to get them in the Word of God. ♪

Her name is Dana Gresh, and she's on a mission to help young girls overcome the lies taught by culture and replace them with biblical truth. You'll meet Dana next on this edition of First Person. Welcome, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Before we feature this week's interview, just a reminder that anytime you miss one of our programs, you can always go online to firstpersoninterview.com and listen from the website.

But perhaps even more convenient is to subscribe to the First Person Podcast using any popular podcast app. The subscription is free and you'll receive each week's interview automatically. Just use your app and search for First Person with Wayne Shepard. Now let's meet our guest. Dana Gresh is an author and speaker who's founder of True Girl, a popular Christian tween event. She's authored dozens of books and Bible studies, including the classic and The Bride Wore White, and now Lies Girls Believe.

We caught up with Dana at home on her farm recently, and I began by asking her if she had done her morning chores. I have done my morning chores, and everyone was well-behaved today. They were light chores. I love my farm. I have fainting goats, which are real fascinating. They get very excited when they see me, and they freeze. Donkeys, horses, a peacock.

A black sheep. We have one black sheep in the family. Every family has one, I know. Every family has one. Ours is particularly fluffy. But you know what? Romans 1.20 says that God teaches us about his power and his character through creation. And I'm going to tell you something. Those animals teach me about God. It is amazing. Yeah.

And I don't want to bring you down, but I know you lost an important animal recently, didn't you? I did. My sweet Trig of, well, I had him 14 years. He was 21 years. He was injured in an accident on the ice in the winter. He was an escape artist. This is a horse, yeah. He was an escape artist and decided to escape.

And it took me into a pretty deep grief. I spent a lot of time in a pit of grief with Psalm 30. And I know, I want to be clear that some people have lost husbands or wives or children or grandmothers. But this, for me, was a short course in learning the lessons the Lord can whisper to you in the darkness. And I was reading, I was thinking, Jesus, are you teaching me here? Because I feel like you're just quiet here.

And so many times we read the psalmist feel like, are you there, God? Are you talking? Are you still there? And I felt some of that silence. But then I started to feel lessons from the Lord in the sadness. And I was like...

Does the sadness lift? Listen, I want to tell you something. I was reading in Matthew. In the book of Matthew, Jesus actually says, now this is, of course, a different context, but he says, what I whisper to you in the darkness, speak of it when you get into the light. And it was like this promise from the Lord that, yes, I do speak in dark places. I do sit with you in the pit. I am in the grief. I am in the hard days.

But also, I'm going to bring you out into the light. And when you get there, I want you to tell other people what I've taught you. So I'm so sad that I've just walked through this, and I'm still walking through it. But it is true that weeping lasts for the night, but joy comes in the morning. I think most of us understand that.

Well, tell me a little bit about your background. You've written so many great books. Lies Girls Believe is a newer book that you've written, and we'll talk about that. But your ministry of speaking and all this, it comes out of your own pain in early life, doesn't it? Yeah. Well, I wanted to be a writer. When I was in first grade, I wrote a poem.

entered it into a contest. Can I quote it for you? I'd like to. The woodpecker makes his nest in a tree. He pecks all day, no matter what we say. So I'd better go away before he pecks me, little tree. This is called a haiku, in case you don't know.

Won first place, and it ignited in my heart a desire to be a writer. And by the time I was 13 or 14, I was sure I was going to be John Grisham. Sure. Absolutely. 100%. And then a few years after that, I entered into what...

was a great time of sin. I was serving the Lord. I loved the Lord. I was a missionary for Child Evangelism Fellowship, but I was also in a Christian dating relationship that became sexual. And that was a darkness in my life, a sadness, a grief, something I thought was an impossibility for me. Pride does come before a fall, and I live to tell about it. But out of that came

I guess, 10 years of learning that Jesus is big enough. His death was big enough. His sacrifice was enough for every sin in our lives. I had to learn that on the hot pavement of life in a really hard way. And when I finally figured it out when I was 26, it was a revival in my life. And I couldn't help it. When I walked into a room,

I knew which girl in that room was in her own pit of shame. Really? And I was drawn to them. And I didn't always know specifically. It's not like the Holy Spirit whispered to me all the details, but I could see shame. And I knew...

I knew the pathway out of that dark forest of shame. And I would just first befriend the girl and be like, hey, how are you? And invite her to do what I call be with time with me. I had young children at the time. I was a leader in my youth group. And I would be like, hey, I could use some help. We're having a party at my house Friday night, but I need help with the kids while I get ready for it. And you just be friending these girls. And then eventually,

They would confide in me, and they would share with me what had taken them into the shame pit. And the Lord would give me the gracious words to say, you don't have to stay here. Let me show you the way out. And that's really how it all started. And then that collided with my love of writing, that passion of writing. I wasn't supposed to be a John Grisham, it turns out, or a poet. Pete And

But writing these God help books, you know, so much better than self-help, but directing them to the help of God through the word of God and the testimony of God in my life. I love it. What a joy. How did the partnership with Nancy DeMoss Walkenworth come about?

Oh, what a friend. What a friend. Well, so in 2007, well, I got to tell you this. Let me back up because I think the Lord prepared me. When I met Nancy, I met her in the year 2000 when I wrote And the Bride Wore White. I was releasing it. She was releasing, I think it was A Place of Quiet Rest, her first book.

And I met her at the Christian Booksellers Convention, which now is called something different. And I heard she was going to take the place of Elizabeth Elliot. Well, I loved Elizabeth Elliot. How could anyone replace Elizabeth Elliot? How dare you? This is impossible. How dare you? And I really had – the closest emotion I could say would be jealousy, except it wasn't jealousy. It was something different. And my mom was with me on the trip to help me with my children. I said, I'm feeling this about that woman, that short woman that I met. And –

She said, Dana, I think you've been given a prayer assignment. And I was like, what? I don't want to pray for her. So for six months, I prayed for Nancy DeMoss.

And asked the Lord to bless her ministry. And then I just forgot about her completely. Like the work, I didn't feel that, oh, she couldn't possibly replace Elizabeth. I don't even think her program was out yet. But I had a desire for her not to replace Elizabeth, but to fill a much needed gap in the Christian world, which is women teaching the word of God to women. And I loved her. I desired that for her. And then I forgot about her.

In 2007, Bob Lepine contacted me and said, Nancy has written a book called Lies Women Believe. I had heard about it. I had read it. It's rescued the hearts of a million women.

And they all say, many of them say, my problem started when I was a teenager. So Nancy has been called of the Lord to develop this book into a book for teens, but she's visited some universities and visited with that age group, and she just doesn't feel like she understands that age group. Well, I was living with high school kids. I was a youth leader. I was still, at that point, I had an almost teenage boy, and I

I met with Nancy. I wrote Lies Young Women Believe with her and a dear friendship formed. And fast forward to about 2018, 2019, my ministry for tween girls, true girl was called secret keeper girl at the time. And it,

Hashtag Me Too was happening, and so the word secret was taking on a different connotation. And I felt, ugh, there's never been one case where a girl has kept a secret she couldn't keep. The whole idea was, you know, we keep the secrets of girlhood alive, the biblical secrets of girlhood alive, the way that grandma keeps, you know, the family recipes alive, right? Well, that didn't mean the same thing on the backdrop of Hashtag Me Too. And I...

It was a terrible crisis in my ministry because I was like, I have to change the name of this ministry that's been so fruitful for well over a decade because I don't want girls to keep secrets. Quite the opposite. I want them to tell them to their moms. So at the time, True Woman, the True Woman movement Nancy had started was maybe 10 years old. And I said, I think I want to name this True Girl.

What do you think about that? And we started talking and our hearts were so alike. She's like, yes, by all means, yes, do it. And let's formalize a partnership and be my co-host. And we have this document that our two ministries have signed that we've declared that we are partners in the gospel. And we love working together. I adore her.

The Lord has done things through her ministry that only He could do. Not just here in the United States. People don't understand how impactful she has been internationally. There are women sharing her podcast on WhatsApp in other languages that we don't even know about and we hear about, and then we encourage it. I love her. The Lord is doing great things through her. Agreed. We'll continue this conversation about the life and ministry of Dana Gresh coming up on First Person.

Here's Ed Cannon on a vision for FEBC's weekly podcast. The primary purpose of Until All Have Heard, of course, is to share the experience that FEBC has because we have staff on the ground in so many oppressive places. But in addition to that, we're trying to speak to you in a way that only the kind of testimonies you'll hear from around the globe can do.

Discover how the gospel is making a difference around the world. Search for Until All Have Heard on your favorite podcast platform or hear it online at febc.org. ♪

My guest is Dana Gresh. Dana is an author, speaker, very involved in ministry to young girls, teen girls, and now preteen girls. Her latest is called Lies Girls Believe, and we'll put information about the book and about Dana's ministry in our program notes at FirstPersonInterview.com.

But you started out with teenagers, and then you realize it goes much younger now, unfortunately, in many ways. Talk about this transition, Dana. Well, you know, it's interesting. In 2003, I wrote the first Secret Keeper Girl resource, which, again, is now True Girl. Eight great dates for moms and daughters. And it was just these – my heart beats for parents to be in the driver's seat of

of their children's formal spiritual development, spiritual formation. God's word assigns that to mom and dad, not to youth pastors, not to children's ministry directors, not to Christian authors, but to mom and to dad. And so I wrote this first book, Eight Great Days for Moms and Daughters. At the end of the year, it sold 50,000 copies, which was unthinkable. I was still very barely out of the gate as an author or minister at

And I realized I had touched a nerve that there wasn't a lot of tools for those 8- to 12-year-olds. This was before middle school children's ministry. This was before 5th and 6th grade children's ministry. You were either in elementary school or high school, and there wasn't anything in the middle yet. And so it was unfathomable to me that there would be, for lack of a better word, crass word,

a market to minister to this age group, but the Lord was calling me. So we started ministering to the 8- to 12-year-old girls out of books, and then we're like, well, let's make a tour. We'll go out and teach this. Get moms and daughters together and tell my desire at all of my True Girl events. I tell moms at the beginning, I said, I am the lead teacher here tonight, but the most important teacher is you. So after we opened the Bible, we

I'm going to turn to your daughter and say, turn to your mom or the adult you came with and unpack this. Talk about this. It's girl gab time. You've got to figure out how this applies to your life. My mission has been to put mom in the driver's seat. And so that has exploded. We are in 130 countries now.

Our podcast reached 770,000 people last year through the ministry of True Girl and podcasts in 130 countries and

16,000 girls have made first-time decisions to follow Jesus. I get videos. They send me videos of their baptisms because I tell them, you've got to follow through on what God's Word says. And we send them emails that say, you've got to be in the Word. You've got to grow in grace. You've got to be baptized. You've got to read the Word. And I love it when they send me those baptism videos. What did you observe –

that drove you to wanting to speak to tweens now, not just teenagers? What's going on culturally? Well, what's going on now? So what was going on then is that girls were being pressured to grow up too fast. 2003, I saw, you know, why does my 7-year-old need to dress like she's 17? That doesn't make sense to me. But we weren't seeing the impact of it yet. What we do see now is the impact. Anxiety and depression is through the roof.

Gender confusion. Very significant problem. The age of 12-year-olds really are the guinea pigs in this gender experiment. Like, why are we putting 12-year-olds on hormone replacement because they don't like their bodies? Did you like your body when you were 12 years old? Did you like that your body was changing when you were 12 years old?

So those kinds of things are frontline issues. I just commissioned a song out of Nashville called It's Great to Be a Girl. It's like a pop song. Sounds like something on Radio Disney, but it's to infuse them with the theology. God chose for you to be a girl, and it's great to be a girl. Wrote a book, It's Great to Be a Girl.

This is what I like to do. I like to watch what's happening in the culture and say, okay, now how do we take them into an experience in God's word and put mom in the driver's seat with that experience so that they can be flooded with the truth so that when the counterfeits show up, it smells like a counterfeit, it looks like a counterfeit, and they know it.

Yeah. I appreciate your commitment to getting moms involved with their daughters, but what if there isn't a mom that's stepping up? How do you deal with these young ladies? Well, we are often, like in our audiences, we'll say the mom or the adult that came with you. We're always encouraging dads or grandmas or aunts or even small group leaders. But Christianity is not a solo sport, and maturing in the faith is

It's not a solo sport. You need someone mentoring you. I believe that while you're still in the home, that's supposed to be first and foremost mom and dad. I just refuse to not fight the battle of reminding mom and dad, this is your job.

especially at a time when the culture is trying to say, hey, listen, there are these gender issues happening. And oh, by the way, the last person that should know is mom and dad. So if you want help in your public school transitioning, you want to change your pronouns, just come to us. There's a form you can fill out. We don't have to tell your mom and dad about it. Baloney. That's not at all. It flies against everything we know, first and foremost, about child development.

And it flies against everything we know in scripture to be valid and true. So I refuse to not fight that battle myself.

and remind moms and equip moms, even though we do have some outliers. And we have a lot of outliers, but a lot of times the outlier is a mom who just doesn't feel the confidence. Or when I was 26 years old, I felt very unworthy to talk to my children about sexual integrity because I didn't have that when I was a teenager. So I had to take that to the Lord, let Him heal it

Let him speak truth over the lies in my heart and pony up and say, all right, here's the deal. God gave you to me. I'm your mom. I'm supposed to be in the driver's seat on this topic. So we're going to have to talk turkey about what my testimonies look like and what that looked like for me with, for example, Robbie Gresh, my oldest, taking him out when he was in eighth grade for a killer cookie at the local deli.

And with his hot ice cream being melted by his hot chocolate chip cookie, telling him, I want to tell you why I love Jesus so much. And telling him that, you know how I teach girls to live with sexual purity? Yeah, Mom, I know. It's because I didn't. Oh. And it's because it hurt so much, and I felt so far away from Jesus that

And sin is like static interference or bad Wi-Fi. You can't hear the connection of God when you're sinning. And I never want girls to feel that. And if they do feel that, I want to tell them how to recharge and reconnect. And it's repentance. And when I repented, I figured out how much Jesus loved me.

And it was such a sweet moment in my life with my son. That's so good. Yeah. What's the most difficult lesson to get across to young girls today? I think, I don't know if this is the most difficult, but it might be the most important. The most important lesson is the power of the Word of God. It has the power to

to change them. I woke up this morning discouraged. Some hard things still happening in my life, still coming off the herd of the horse. My husband has long COVID. It's been a very difficult year.

A lot of changes in my ministry, and I just woke up discouraged. I spent an hour in the Word of God, and I'm dynamite now. I'm ready to go. It's the living Word, yeah. Let me at it. It cleansed me. It purified me. It empowered me. And I want girls in the Word of God.

It is what will cure their anxiety and depression. Now, I'm not saying that sometimes we don't need doctor intervention or medical enrichment or counseling. I'm not saying that. I'm saying...

In most cases, we don't need those things. But even in the cases that we do need those things, we always need the Word of God. And LifeWay did a survey a few years ago that kids that are in God's Word once a week, there's not much of a difference in anxiety or depression. Kids that are in the Word two times a week, not much of a difference. Kids that are in Word three times a week, not much of a difference. Get in the Word four times a week or more, depression and anxiety drops 30%. Wow.

It is medicine to our hearts. And that's just one example. But take the gender confusion. Take temptation. Take purpose. Take any subject you want where a kid's going to have to figure things out in life. The Word of God is the answer. So I'm on a mission to get them in the Word of God.

You mentioned your conversation with your son when he was a teen. Is there anything like My True Girl for guys these days? Yeah, yeah. My husband starts this much younger ministry, much smaller, but born to be brave. He likes to say it's biblical man stuff. You know, isn't that...

100% awesome, 0% awkward. He likes to, they have a wheel of destruction they travel the country with. They smash stuff with an 18-wheeler tire hung from, I don't know. But they get in the Word. They get men and boys excited about the Word of God. That's what our heart beats to do. Our guest has been Dana Gresh, whose new book is titled Lies Girls Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free.

If you'd like to learn more about the events for young girls and boys, for that matter, that Dana mentioned, please visit FirstPersonInterview.com for links to her ministry. We'll also have a link there to her newest book. Thanks for listening to this week's edition of First Person. The people you meet and the stories they tell of God at work in their life are always encouraging.

And you'll be encouraged by the ministry of the Far East Broadcasting Company when you go to febc.org. With millions of people responding to the gospel messages of FEBC each year, we've documented just a few of the stories of changed lives on that website. It's amazing to know that God is reaching many, some for the first time, with a message of God's love and care.

Take a few moments to visit febc.org and see if your heart isn't moved in praise to God. Once again, visit febc.org. Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Join us next time for First Person.