I Started an Anabaptist Magazine — Rachel Schrock — Ep. 013

Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Rachel Schrock, which happens to be my sister. And most, if you've heard of her, you probably know her more as Ray, and she started this magazine called Daughters of Promise. And we'll talk a little bit about that, but could you give us like the two-sentence overview about yourself? Like just a short little introduction: who you are, where you live, what you do. Sure. So I grew up in Tennessee for 17 years of my life, lived there. And while I was living there in Tennessee, got my RN license and practiced nursing there for a couple of years, and then felt God leading me on to another community, which is Virginia.

I now live in South Boston, Virginia. So I have continued to do some nursing over the years, and currently I'm taking a little break from that and spend a lot of my time working on Daughters of Promise. But in my spare time, I love to travel and do freelance graphic design work. Really enjoy that. So tell us a little bit about Daughters of Promise. So for those of you who don't know, this is the Daughters of Promise magazine. This is basically a book. That's the part that surprised me the most. I don't know what this—this is one of the current issues, about 100, 100 and a couple pages. 112 pages. Yeah, 112 pages. So it's really massive.

Excellent design work. I mean, the aesthetic is great. Tell us about the vision. How did this get started? How did you get to this? I mean, this is a lot of work. What's the journey? Yeah. So it really starts way back in 2010. Oh wow. And it's kind of a long story, but I can give the condensed version. So basically, starting off 2010 was a really tough time of my life. I was just going through a lot of personal upheaval and had gone to SMBI, Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute, for a term and was really finding some help and healing there for some things I was struggling with. And it was a time of tremendous loss in my life.

Experienced the death of a close friend and some other personal losses in my life. And so it was a time of a lot of breaking, but also healing in deeper ways with God. And during that time, I spent a lot of time talking to other women and hearing their stories and realizing that we shared common struggles, that we have all been touched by pain. And a lot of times our pain is focused around similar things: relationships, identity, these questions women have about who they are and where we fit into the world. And so I began to really just understand that there are things that women want to talk about, but don't always maybe know how or have a place to.

So over the spring and summer of 2010, I just began to really pray about how God wanted to use my story and the things I was learning to encourage other women. And this idea just slowly began to form to send out an email, like a newsletter. Wow. But it was a place where I just wanted to share some of my experience and just try to encourage other women. That was really just the heart behind it. So I rolled around. Names have always been a really big deal to me. I choose even my email address, you know, very carefully.

And somehow the name Daughters of Promise came to me. I don't really remember the process of that. So I called this little newsletter Daughters of Promise and started emailing it to some of my SMBI girlfriends. And over the next year, especially, the list of subscribers grew tremendously. I was very surprised. So over a long series of events, we decided to make it more of a magazine-type format and began publishing that online as a digital magazine. A couple of women joined the team, and then we began printing in 2014. So it's gone through a lot of changes, and today it's now produced quarterly. And each issue is, like you said, more like a book. It's around 112 pages.

So a lot of changes, but the vision has stayed the same of wanting to encourage other women in finding freedom and wholeness through an understanding of who we are in Christ. And that outside of that, we are broken and lost and really destitute. And it's pretty much full-time for you. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. How many staff, regular staff, do you have right now? Right now we have, including all of the writers and artists and editors, I believe it's 26. Oh wow. Yeah. That's a lot. That is quite the team. So you described a little bit of the vision and how it started, but go into a little bit more of the need. Like why is this magazine actually important?

You know, I hear what you're saying, but tell us what impact is it having? Yeah, it's a good question. I think that women of the conservative Anabaptist community in particular have sometimes struggled to know how to find their voice and to share with others. And one thing that I think DOP does is it does provide a platform for women to share sometimes very personal things from their lives that God has led them through. And through that, to encourage other women who have been through similar things. Like there's been so many stories I've heard from readers who just said, "I really connected with that." You're not alone. Right. Yes. It's almost like you're building a community around this.

Like yes, it's a magazine, but it's a lot bigger than that, really. Like it's a community. That's really cool. And like I said, there are common struggles that I would say conservative Anabaptist women face that would be unique to our denomination in this culture. And we do try really hard to feature content that is relevant and that is relatable to a broad range of women, not just single women or married women or moms. We do want to spark conversations among women, not just provide answers necessarily, but really encourage women to think and to process with the goal of experiencing that freedom and wholeness and the abundant life that Jesus came to offer. Yeah. And a lot of times that comes through really wrestling through the things we've experienced and gone through.

And rather than just being shoveled, you know, answers or solutions. Yeah. So this kind of segues into the next one. We already hit some of this, but what has the response been to this? Like you've been doing it for eight years now. Yes. You know, so it must be pretty good you keep doing it. Yeah.

The response has been growing as it catches on more. Sure. Something like this is even with internet, you know, social media, which expands your reach tremendously. It's still finding its way into communities as a reliable resource. But the response, especially since we moved to a quarterly production schedule, has been phenomenal. People have really had very positive reactions to it. And I think filling a void. Like, yeah, I think because there's more stories, there's more testimonies, there's more content in here. And we even try to provide like some interactive elements, like Bible studies, you can fill in the blanks or a journaling page, you know, things that that make it a bit more interactive than just picking up a magazine and reading it.

Yeah. In the last six months, especially, it has really been growing exponentially. We've had the privilege of featuring some wonderful writers, men and women. We have at least one man share an article in each issue. So I mean, we'll just totally throw a free advertising space for you, but where can people find more information about this if they want to get it? Where do they go? Daughters of Promise is available online. Our website is, which maybe you can link to it. Sure. Yeah. We'll put it in the subtitles or something. It's daughters-of-promise.org. That's our website. We're on Facebook and Instagram, just Daughters of Promise. Obviously, producing a magazine is expensive, and so we have to charge enough to cover our costs.

But we do our best to provide free content that can bless women who maybe can't afford a subscription or even those who do, just some extra encouragement for their lives. And if you do subscribe to this, everybody who's watching, maybe mention it to Rachel that you found it through this video. That would be interesting to see. Yeah, it would. How many actually come from that? That'd be great. Most of all, you know, this is a ministry. It is the desire, our desire to share this message with women that they can live in freedom through Jesus. That's really cool. That's really cool. Well, thank you for taking the time to share it and maybe spread the vision to some other people that might be watching.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So thank you everyone for watching. And yeah, if you like what you saw here, come back. We have new videos each week. And if you have questions or comments, make sure and leave those down below in the comment section. We'll do our best to answer those, and maybe we'll forward them on to you if someone wants to learn more. So yes, thanks again for watching, and we will see you in the next video.