Amanda Anderson
Amanda Anderson is an author (All My Friends Have Issues: Building Remarkable Relationships with Imperfect People (Like Me)), speaker, and blogger. Her message is specifically tailored for women's ministries, conferences, mother's groups, and Twelve Step Recovery programs throughout the country. She has spoken at the MOMCON International Leadership Convention, Mariners Church Women's Retreat, the West Coast Life Recovery Convention, Forest Home, Whitter Area Community Church, and Calvary Community Church, Westlake Village, CA. Additionally, she is a regular guest on New Life Live radio.
In addition to being an author, she has published two video Bible study series with Right Now Media – All My Friends Have Issues and The Bridge: A Biblical Introduction to the Twelve Steps. Her core message focuses on discovering freedom through authentic relationships with God and others, releasing perfectionism, and seeking spiritual self-awareness. Having overcome a decade-long struggle with anxiety and depression and worked a Twelve Step program for relationships, Amanda blends the psychological research that she has gathered as a drug and alcohol counselor. Her personal experience and Biblical truth create challenging, often hilarious, and always culturally relevant topics.
She lives in Southern California with her husband of twenty-five years and her two daughters.
Here's what people are saying about Amanda!
““Amanda is one of those rare and gifted speakers who takes the stage and owns it. She is always a crowd favorite at MOPS and will be a phenomenal addition to any event.”
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““Amanda brings a positive spirit, laughter, and a soul-to-soul message! Her talk at our Life Recovery Conference revealed how recovery has radically changed her life and ministry. Amanda will encourage, inform and provoke your audience.” ”
““Amanda is an absolute JOY and a pleasure to work with! Our Women’s Ministry has repeatedly invited her back over the years, where she has spoken at MOPS meetings, our Women’s Retreat, and most recently, our annual Women’s Christmas Luncheon. Each time, she brings new, engaging content that speaks to many women in different stages of their spiritual walks. Her love for Jesus weaves through her messages and ignites a contagious flame. Amanda shares real-life stories that are relatable, funny, and heartwarming. Each message has something for everyone, whether young in years or young at heart. She speaks truth in love and has blessed our women countless times by bringing Jesus to people and people to Jesus.” ”
““Amanda is funny, real, deep in truth and God’s purposes, relatable and reliable...applying God’s Word in everyday reality, with the utmost care and concern and just the right amount of tears and laughter!””
“In All My Friends Have Issues, Amanda Anderson becomes the friend we’ve always needed and, in the process, helps us become a better friend ...At last! No more nose pressed against the glass, looking in from the outside. The door is open! Come on in, grab a spot on the couch, and dive in.””
““Amanda has a unique gift for becoming “friends” instantaneously with the audience as she shares her heart for the Lord, her journey through motherhood, and things she’s learned through living in relationships with other people.”
Authentic Relationships
Build a loving Christian community by teaching your women to excel at love!
All My Friends Have Issues
Churches always invite women to come and "find their tribe" of friends. The problem is that all the tribe members have issues! In this session, women learn how to address their issues and develop the qualities that cause friendships to thrive: honesty, humility, and self-awareness. Though she will remind us to have grace for our friends' shortcomings, Amanda will also define "deal-breaker" issues: signs that indicate a toxic relationship.
Awaken Encouragement
The New Testament uses the word for encouragement 108 times – and never does it mean simply to act as cheerleaders. Instead, encouragement starts with authentic sharing and intentional listening. Awaken Encouragement invites your women to comfort, console, listen to, and exhort one another. Develop encouraging relationships that make you feel seen, known, and loved.
God Loves Like a Mother
While God revealed himself to patriarchal culture as a Father – one who gives status, inheritance, and authority – God also loves like a mother: with comforting, nurturing, fierce, and protective love. In this session, learn about the scriptural metaphors that reveal this side of God’s heart, and how connecting to God’s mother-love can heal and empower our relationships with female friends, moms, daughters, sisters, and mentors.
Boundary Basics for Moms
When we become moms, there is one thing we can count on - every one of our relationships will change. Amanda helps mothers find healthy boundaries that will steward energy and focus so they can give their best to their family and live a life of greater freedom. Working with the foundational concepts from Boundaries: When to Say Yes and How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Amanda addresses current issues for your women using the guidelines from this timeless classic.
Great Expectations: Healthy Marriage in the Real World
Do you want practical marriage advice that goes beyond male/female stereotypes?
Married 23 years to her college sweetheart, Amanda delivers this humorous, raw, and well-researched approach to building a satisfying marriage. Based in part on her work as editor of the How We Love small group series, Amanda delivers practical ways to understand yourself and your spouse better and how to communicate expectations and increase emotional intimacy.
Meeting Needs and Taking Names
The vision of love that we learn in culture – or even in church – can be weak and watered-down! We need to follow God's example of love, which is tough and tender, comforting and conquering. With this topic, Amanda will point your women to follow God's direction in love by recognizing, understanding, and engaging with others' emotional needs and protecting their own souls by setting limits.
Spiritual Self-Care
Provide hope and healing for women struggling with stress, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion.
A High-Performance Machine: Self Care as a Spiritual Discipline
In an age where we are all stressed out and disconnected, women need to find restoration and comfort, not just escape. You are created to do good works, like Ferrari's, needing high-quality fuel to function and fulfill your purpose! Let Amanda show you how to embrace God's design for meeting your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
Put Away Perfect: Replacing Perfectionism with God's Perfect Will.
Perfectionism doesn't always manifest itself in the way we expect: in a high-achieving "perfect" body and a Pinterest-worthy home. Perfectionism often causes procrastination and destroys our ability to take risks. While the world gives us all kinds of "should's" and "must's" to follow, God's pleasing and perfect will allows us to be a beautiful, beloved work in progress. (Romans 12:2)
What Can Depression Do for You?
One in four women will struggle with depression in their life. Amanda educates women about risk factors and symptoms of depression and anxiety and shares her testimony -- leading you to the gifts of hope, resilience, humility, and surrender. This is a talk filled with laughter and tears – it's not depressing! Ideal for mothers' groups.
Holiday Talks
Focus the heart on Christ and manage expectations!
Oh Come Emanuel: The Cry of Our Hearts at Christmas
Do you ever find yourself distracted -- or even dismayed -- by the expectations of Christmas? Christmas is not only for the "joyful and triumphant" but for the discouraged, doubtful, and downtrodden. Christmas is not the end of the story, but a promise that God is with us in the messy middle, pointing us to a more significant promise at the end: That He will one day wipe every tear from our eye and give us joy eternal.
Boundaries and the Holidays: How to Be a Cheerful Giver
The Bible says that giving should lead to cheer, not bitterness and resentment. God-directed boundaries are the key to cheer during the holidays. In this session, your women will learn how to be responsible for their own expectations, emotions, limits, and desires to be the loving parent, daughter, wife, sibling, and daughter-in-law during the holiday season.
Sobriety and Christian Recovery
Connect to the God of all Comfort!
Mothers -- Strong and Sober
In a culture of “it’s happy hour somewhere,” Amanda encourages women that there is a better way. Drawing on her personal Twelve-Step Recovery experience and a decade of teaching on boundaries, Amanda explores the practical ways mothers can replace the downward cycle of numbing their pain with daily habits that build strength and resilience. Ideal for mothers' groups, this topic can also be modified to address other women's groups about avoiding addiction.
The God of The Twelve Steps
Surrender is the essence of the Christian life and guiding principles for the time-honored Twelve Steps. In each step, the listener is invited to ask: Is God good? Is God powerful? Does God want to restore me to sanity? In this talk, Amanda examines God's character through the lens of Psalm 103 and directs the listener to a God we can trust to forgive our sins, heal our diseases, crown us with love and compassion, redeem our life, and restore our hope and strength.
Retreat Topics:
The Wholehearted Retreat
"Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!" ~Luke 1:45
We are all wired for connection with God and others, but no matter what our personal stories are, we have all struggled to love with whole hearts -- both God and others. In this generation of the church, God intends to make our hearts whole by inviting us to engage with him and other women in healthier ways, and his desire is for His family to be the most loving, healthy family the world has ever seen.
Session One: The Love We Need
Blessed are we when we have the courage to believe that God will give us the love we need if we seek it. Learning to go where the love is, not where it's "supposed to be" is key to receiving the love He wants to give us. A message about forgiveness and acceptance.
Session Two: The History of Our Hearts
How our earthly families and past experiences shape our hearts and our ability to connect with others, and how what Satan intended for evil in our lives God intended for our good.
Session Three: Wholehearted Sisters
What are the ways we use "Christianese" to hurt others? How can we learn to restore gently rather than rebuke harshly? What does it mean to mourn with those who mourn? This session focuses on how to avoid typical missteps in community through creating healthy spiritual and emotional boundaries in the church.
Session Four: Hearts in Training
Action steps to strengthening our hearts and relationships.
God Loves Like a Mother Retreat
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” 1 Peter 4:8
Session One: God Loves Like a Mother
In Scripture, is not only Heavenly Father but also a God that offers the tender, comforting, protective love of a mother. And though not all of us are mothers, all of us had one, and she was a defining force in our life whether she was present or absent. This session looks at this first relationship as a root of our issues and examines how God offers us the mother-like love we need, the power to forgive the shortcomings of our earthly caregivers, and the wisdom to mother and mentor well.
Session Two: A Ministry of Reconciliation
What is God’s will for us as women as we mature into the image of Christ? How do we honor our parents and also break the strongholds of sin that are passed from generations? How do we love and guide the next generation, and also leave room for the new work that God is doing through them? With compassion and humility, Amanda will teach you how to bridge the gap between generations within the church.
Session Three: A Friend Who Loves at All Times
The Bible calls us to offer one another encouragement and accountability? How do we offer these Biblically prescribed acts of love without judgment, enmeshment, or control? How do we navigate conflict in a healthy way? How do we heal our own issues before focusing on those of others? Let Amanda help you build a healthy community by teaching you Spirit-led friendship skills.
The Put Away Perfect Retreat
At this retreat, you’ll learn how to stop striving for perfection by the world’s distorted standards, and take your place as a beloved, powerful daughter of God.
Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world, but instead be transformed into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will be able to know what God’s will is for you: His good, pleasing and perfect will. ~Romans 12:2
Session One: Perfectionist Thinking vs. Godly Thinking
While God’s perfect will for us is based on His perfect law that brings freedom (James 1:25), Perfectionism, especially “should/must" thinking, is built on the shifting sands of culture and other people’s expectations.
Session Two: “Put Away Perfect” in Your Faith
Nowhere is perfectionism more dangerous than in our relationship with God. Revelation 12:10 calls our spiritual enemy “the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night.” In this session, we’ll take a look at God’s heart toward us, and examine the difference between humility and shame, conviction and condemnation.
Session Three: “Put Away Perfect” in Relationships
Perfectionism kills our relationships in two ways: It makes us hide our flaws from others, and it makes us reject people who expose their flaws to us. In this final session, we’ll talk about God’s will for us in relationships, finding the freedom to love one another without having to “fix” one another, but still learning how to guard ourselves against unsafe situations.
