Tirzah Leadership Changes (But This Is Not Good-Bye)
We’ve been quite over here lately. Our Managing Editor, Amelia, is on maternity leave so we’re taking a pause from publishing new content (we’ll be back later this month!), and I also have a bittersweet personal announcement about some upcoming leadership changes happening with Tirzah.
I started this magazine in law school almost eight years ago, and this community has been a constant in my life through so many milestones: graduating law school, my first grown-up job, moving back to my hometown, buying a house, a long single season, getting engaged, and getting married.
But every season comes to an end, and after a lot of prayer, my time leading Tirzah Mag is coming to an end.
All these years, God has given me the ability and opportunity to somehow keep up with school, and then work full-time, while also running Tirzah. I’ve poured out hours and all of myself into this community and website. I’ve stayed up so many late nights, vacations, weekends working on Tirzah - writing, social media, leading video studies, graphic design, managing staff and volunteers, website design, publishing ebooks, editing articles, and replying to thousands of emails.
At times, the stress and pressure of it made me cry, but I’ve still enjoyed every minute of it and I am so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to steward this community. It has become a part of me, and it is honestly hard for me to imagine life without it.
But as my husband and I prepare to welcome our first child this winter, I’m realizing I need to create more margin in my life to become a mom in a few short months. Tirzah has also come to a point where it needs more attention to continue growing. From fundraising to staffing, the demands to lead this ministry into the next chapter are beyond my skill set and capacity at this time.
So, God in His provision, brought a former Tirzah staffer, Alycia, back into the picture. Her day job suddenly became less demanding and opened up her schedule, and she has experience leading and growing non-profit organizations. She also has a similar life mission to Tirzah’s mission and has been a part of the Tirzah community for years (including managing our editorial content and writers, and serving on our Board of Directors).
Alycia has accepted the position as Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief and we’ll be transitioning roles this month. I will step away from the day to day duties and management of Tirzah Ministries, but continue to serve in an advisory role as the President of our Board of Directors. I am so excited to see where God leads this ministry in the coming years as Alycia takes the helm!
How to stay in touch with me going forward
BOOK COMING SOON!
My first print book will be published in October 2021! Make sure to sign up for my newsletter to be the first to know about it!
Many of you have been here from the beginning, and I feel like I know a lot of you personally from our interactions online over the years. I really don’t want this to be good-bye, so please stay in touch with me on social media (Instagram & Facebook).
I also plan to continue writing, and you can find me on my website here. Please also sign up for my personal newsletter on my site, since that’s where I plan to send personal monthly updates and photos.
And, if you’re a woman who works and enjoyed our Tirzah at Work series, sign up for a new newsletter I’m launching soon: the Corporate Manager, a curated weekly newsletter with updates on what I’m working on and learning + resources and tips to help you grow personally and professionally as a Christian woman.
If you’re single and/or have been waiting for my first print book to come out, I am so excited to share that it’s so close to being in your hands soon! I plan to launch the book later this month (October 2021), and if you want a copy, make sure you’re following me on social media and are signed up for my newsletter. The book will be available in print via Amazon and as an ebook.
So, really, this isn’t good-bye. It’s a change in seasons, but I do hope you’ll stay in touch. Thank you for these last eight years. It has been the most humbling and rewarding journey for me.
A trip down memory lane
That being said, for the sake of it, I wanted to go down memory lane and recap our history. If you’ve been here for a while, I hope this is a faithful reminder of God’s goodness to us the last few years.
I started Tirzah Magazine over winter break of my first year of law school. I remember coming home for the holidays and locking myself away in a room for hours at my parent’s house, teaching myself how to build a website on Wordpress. I started blogging in college when I took a journalism class - it started out as a fashion blog, but then slowly changed into sharing what I was learning and reading.
When I started law school in the fall of 2013, I moved away from home for the first time and started one of the most difficult graduate programs. Without my family or church to support me, I found myself on my knees crying out to God often. I felt dumb, inadequate and so out of my league. That’s when I truly started to develop my own personal relationship with God.
As I prayed those first few weeks, I heard God telling me that it was time to listen as well. So, I took out my Bible and decided to read it in full, from beginning to end, for the first time. I grew up in a Christian home and had always considered myself to be a good Christian, but that year, I grew more in my faith and knowledge of God than I had in all my previous years.
So, that’s what I blogged about. The blog at that time was under my name, and that felt weird because it began to feel so much bigger than me. I had dreamed of being an editor-in-chief of a magazine since I was a little girl, and the desire to start my own Christian magazine grew with each passing day during that first semester of law school.
Because I looked around and saw very little content for young women that was Scripturally sound. The little that was out there was either targeted towards older women and moms, or was frilly and superficial substantively. That was before everyone was a Christian Instagram or Youtube influencer, and I felt called to step into the gap and publish content that would be rooted in Scripture and teach young women how to live a set-apart, Godly life in the modern world.
Our mission initially was to empower a generation of Esthers for such a time as this. Esther’s story was always my favorite growing up - I loved the bravery of this young woman in a foreign land who, at the risk of losing her own life, spoke up on behalf of God’s people. She was put in a specific position for a God-ordained purpose and although she did not know what that purpose was until the time came, when she was called, she obeyed prayerfully and fully. And I wanted that for my generation of women.
At first, it was just me writing and doing everything, but the website grew quickly, mostly because one of our articles on how to study the Bible went viral on Pinterest and drove a lot of traffic our way. It began to get difficult to keep up with Tirzah and my law school classes, so at the advice of my parents, I asked if anyone would be interested in contributing articles for Tirzah.
I was shocked when people responded. I told them I couldn’t pay them for it, yet these women still said yes, and so we began publishing articles written by women of all ages from all over the world.
In November 2014, we added email devotionals to our editorial lineup, which we sent out every weekday. By January 2015, our email subscriber list grew to over 500 readers and that was incredibly humbling to me.
In August 2015, we released an email version of what eventually became our first digital product: “How to Live a Set-Apart Life in a Modern World: A Devotional Study on Romans 12:9-21.” We sold the study as an ebook on Amazon and in our own shop, starting in 2016.
As our community grew, I asked for more help, this time with administrative and editorial tasks, and a group of girls from all over the world volunteered to help copy edit, schedule articles, fulfill shop orders, and reply to emails. We had no money. No one was paid. But we poured in hours of time into this corner of the internet. Even though this core group all eventually transitioned out of helping with Tirzah as their life seasons changed, we still remain online friends.
In November 2015, we launched a line of prints in line with our mission and then in December 2015, we introduced #TirzahintheWord, which became an integral part of our community for the next few years. In 2016, we read the entire Bible in full as a community. There were daily email devotionals and a Facebook community (remember Tirzah Academy?), as hundreds of young women from all over the world read their Bibles daily with us. At that time, Periscope was a thing, and that’s when I first started doing live videos too! This was also around when Alycia joined our staff - she helped schedule articles and manage our writers.
After graduating law school in May 2016, I took a trip to Europe with my brother. While on the trip, I got to meet up with Tirzah readers in England and Belgium, and that’s when it first truly hit me the impact and reach Tirzah had. I knew we had readers from all over the world, but meeting these Tirzah girls in person and hearing how Tirzah impacted their lives, was a humbling moment for me that I’ll never forget. Technically, our community was small, but it was mighty and we were so close. I still know most of the original readers by name and we remain social media friends all these years later.
In 2017, as I navigated the ropes of starting my first grown-up job after graduating law school, Tirzah moved into a new chapter as well as we introduced our Tirzah in the Word memberships. These were quarterly small groups that we lead through private Facebook groups. Each quarter had a different theme, and we did weekly Facebook lives in the group to discuss that week’s reading. I couldn’t keep up with it all, so that’s around when Chanel Caulfield (now, Chanel Riggle), came on to help co-lead these quarterly studies. She now serves on the board of Tirzah Ministries.
By 2018, my work became more and more demanding. I was working a lot, stressed out, burnt out and it was starting to impact my physical and mental health in undeniable ways. So, after a lot of prayer and advice from my family and friends, I decided to close Tirzah down for a year.
But I grew to miss Tirzah and our community, so in 2019, we re-launched with another round of Tirzah in the Word memberships and began to publish new content daily. We had more amazing young women join as volunteers - from writing articles to copy editing and scheduling articles on our website. The studies we lead through Tirzah in the Word are now all found for free in our shop.
In September 2020, we officially incorporated as a non-profit and received our federal 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, and in 2021, we established a board of directors that now helps lead Tirzah.
All these years, we couldn’t have done what we did without you. Thank you for your support.
Thank you for your generous financial donations that have kept our doors open all this time. It is pretty much unheard of for a publication of this size to run for so long on almost no finances and all volunteer staff!
Thank you for following us and engaging with us on social media.
Thank you for your prayers and kind words of encouragement.
Thank you for contributing and writing articles for our devotionals and our website.
Thank you for reading and sharing our content.
And for those of you who have been here from the beginning, thank you for your loyalty and friendship - it truly means the world to me. We all might have been oceans apart, but somehow, we still have gone through so many life seasons together as you’ve gone on mission trips, graduated college, started full-time jobs, got married, became moms and wholeheartedly went after what God has called you to do.
Here’s to many more years of inspiring and equipping a generation of young women of noble character, rooted in God’s word, fruitful in good work and faithful in all things.
With all my love,
Yelena Sheremeta (Bosovik)