PHYLLIS JENKINS AND A POWERFUL JOURNEY OF FAITH, LOVE, AND STORIES

by Shanon Weaver

At a Powerful Journey conference, the room often grows quiet just before someone steps onto the stage. The woman standing there may have rehearsed her words, written and rewritten them, or carried them privately for years. Still, there is always a pause. A breath. Then the story begins.

Some women speak about grief. Others talk about faith that was shaken and rebuilt, or about surviving something they never imagined they would have to face. Many are telling their stories aloud for the first time. What happens next is rarely dramatic, but it is unmistakable. The room listens. Heads nod. A few people cry. And afterward, someone almost always says, “I thought I was the only one.”

This is the heart of Powerful Journey, a faith-rooted storytelling organization founded by Phyllis Jenkins to help women uncover, write, and share their personal stories of struggle, healing, and hope. Over the last fifteen years, it has grown into conferences, writing academies, books, and scholarships, all built on a single belief: stories matter, and when they are told honestly, they can change lives.

Phyllis did not set out to build a movement. She followed a calling instead.

She was born on July 4 in Shreveport, Louisiana, after a labor that turned suddenly dangerous. Her parents had been preparing to attend a holiday picnic when her mother’s water broke. By the time they reached the hospital, doctors told her mother there was no amniotic fluid left, and the delivery had become an emergency. The doctor asked a question no parent expects to hear, asking whether the mother or the baby should be saved.

“This courageous 20-year-old first-time mom says, ‘Save my baby,’” Phyllis says, “and God saves us both.”

Phyllis grew up in a pastor’s household, surrounded by strong Christian values and clear expectations. At the time, the rules felt strict. Looking back, she sees them as grounding.

“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” she says. “As I look back, it helps inform who I am today.”

Even as a child, Phyllis noticed people. She listened closely. She wrote constantly, filling journals with thoughts and reflections.

“I’m always journaling,” she says. “Stories, thoughts, what’s happening around me.”

After college, she married her sweetheart, Dave. They built a life together and eventually settled in Plano, Texas, where they raised two daughters and later became grandparents. Their partnership is warm and playful, with Dave often serving as the comic relief. “He introduces me as the sugar in his Kool-Aid,” she jokes, “although these days it’s more like the sugar in his Mountain Dew.”

Years later, a health crisis sharpened something that had been quietly forming for a long time. Phyllis was hospitalized with blood clots in both lungs. The doctor told her she was lucky to be alive. Another patient with the same condition did not survive. “I leave the hospital with urgency under my feet,” she says.

She went home carrying a question that would not let her go. God had spared her life. What, she wondered, was she meant to do with it?

At first, she looked outward for answers. It took time to realize that what she was searching for had been with her all along.

“I’m a writer,” she says simply. “I’ve always been a writer.”

The idea for Powerful Journey took shape in 2010 during a business boot camp in Atlanta led by family friend Marshawn Evans Daniels. Over long days of sessions and late nights spent journaling in her hotel room, clarity began to settle in. “I knew what I wanted to do,” she says. “I just didn’t know what to call it.”

She wrote words and phrases across a page, working through possibilities until one stood out. She had circled her initials: P and J.

“That’s when Powerful Journey comes,” she says. “I knew that was it.”

In the early years, the focus was on speaking. Women were coached to take their stories to the stage at Powerful Journey conferences. Over time, something else began to surface. Phyllis realized many of these women wanted to preserve their stories, not just perform them.

“I tell them, ‘You’re going to become published authors,’” she says. “The room goes silent.” That silence, she says, is usually followed by something else: belief.

Powerful Journey expanded to include writing and publishing, helping women turn lived experience into books that could reach far beyond a single room. The work deepened, but the mission remained unchanged: to help women understand that their stories were not meant to stay hidden.

In December 2019, Phyllis was reminded again how fragile and precious life could be. After leaving an early-morning prayer meeting and heading to her job as a librarian, she became dizzy. The room began to spin. She was taken to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed severe vertigo and discovered a brain aneurysm. The vertigo lasted eighty-one days, leaving her dependent on her husband for even basic care. The aneurysm itself was small enough that doctors advised monitoring rather than surgery.

For someone whose life had always been rooted in movement and service, the forced stillness was disorienting. Phyllis found herself asking the same kind of questions she had asked years earlier after surviving blood clots in her lungs: what now, and what does this mean?

“The one thing I never stopped doing was journaling,” she says. “So, I had to ask, what did this come to teach me?” she says.

Writing became her way of processing fear, faith, and uncertainty, a place where she could be honest without needing answers right away. Over time, those journal pages became something more than private reflection. She turned them into a book titled Brain Aneurysm: What Did You Come to Teach Me?

Powerful Journey did not pause during her recovery. Instead, it held her, just as she had held others. When she was able, Phyllis returned to the work with renewed clarity and eventually stepped away from her librarian position to lead the organization full-time.

Over the years, she has seen again and again how stories become lifelines. At one conference, a woman named Fran shared her experience of raising young children after her husband’s death. During the lunch break, another attendee approached her, shaken and tearful.

“If you didn’t come to tell your story for anybody else,” the woman says, “you told it for me.”

Her husband had died two years earlier. She was still struggling. People around her were telling her it was time to move on. She admitted she had contemplated suicide. Fran stayed with her through that moment. Later, Phyllis learned the woman had stepped back from the edge.

“That story wasn’t just a hug,” Phyllis says. “It was a lifeline.”

Another story stays with her for different reasons. Mala Rainey Azeez came to Phyllis after receiving a terminal diagnosis. Phyllis put all other projects on hold to help Mala publish her book. It was completed shortly before Mala passed away.

“She left her story,” Phyllis says. “And people around the world are benefiting from it.”

Today, Powerful Journey continues to grow. Its programs include writing academies, anthologies for women not ready to write a full book, and scholarships that give back to the community. Phyllis envisions facilitators in every state, expanding the reach while preserving the heart of the work.

Outside of Powerful Journey, Phyllis continues to live by the same philosophy. At age sixty-eight, she fulfilled a childhood dream by walking in two fashion shows during New York Fashion Week after being named a national Holiday Angel through Crowns magazine. She was the oldest model on every stage she walked.

“Dreams don’t have expiration dates,” she says. Whether she is speaking from a stage or standing in a grocery store line, she looks for ways to make people feel seen.

For Phyllis Jenkins, Powerful Journey is not about platforms or programs. It is about making space. Space for truth. Space for healing. Space for stories that deserve to be told.

“Don’t take your story to the grave,” she says. “It does no one any good there.” And so she continues the work, listening closely, inviting courage, and reminding women that their stories matter, because they always have.