Learning from the Lived Experience of Women Leaders of Faith: Introducing the Faith-Anchored Dynamic Resilience Model

This essay introduces the Faith-Anchored Dynamic Resilience (FADR) Model, developed inductively from personal essays written by 73 women leaders across 46 countries and six faith traditions. Rather than fitting their experiences into existing frameworks, the analysis traces recurring patterns across narratives to construct a four-layer model: a Foundation of faith, identity, and community; eight Dynamic Capacities organized around in-the-moment and long-arc resilience; Threshold Moments of high instability; and Emergent Outcomes that transform suffering into purpose. Drawing on chaos theory as a structural lens, the model reconceptualizes resilience not as recovery but as a nonlinear, faith-anchored, communally sustained process of becoming.