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Around 9 p.m., I stepped outside to enjoy the cooler evening air. Right on my heels was our dog Belle, her mouth holding a bright rubber ball.

After tossing Belle’s ball down our dead-end street a few times, I struck up a conversation with a guy from several houses down who was also enjoying the evening breeze. We had never met, but chatting about my well-behaved dog was an easy way in.

“There are three main reasons families leave LCC International University,” said the guy interviewing us.

“One: They get tired of fundraising. If they don’t maintain a clear vision of the value of LCC’s mission and the importance of a support network to their ministry in this spiritually difficult place, they lose the motivation to play the double role of full-time professor and full-time fundraiser.

Fundraising doesn’t always have a stellar reputation. At best, some view it as an unpleasant means to get to the “real” spiritual work. At worst, it’s a “necessary evil.”

But Henri Nouwen writes in A Spirituality of Fundraising that “fundraising is, first and foremost, a form of ministry.”

“I think there’s a lot of pressure to be really good as a female pastor—not just an OK pastor,” said Sam DeJong McCarron, who works as a ministry vocational consultant for the CRC’s Pastor Church Resources. “You have to be the best of the best because you’re a woman and a female pastor in a denomination that holds two views on it.”

Sam and her husband, Nate, are ordained ministers of the Word in the CRC. They were recruited to plant a church in Denver, Colorado, in 2009—but they could not find a CRC church right away that would ordain both of them.