Adé & Grace Women of God | September 2026
She Builds With Both Hands
This is what it looks like when a woman stops separating her calling from her craft and lets everything she builds, a marriage, a body, a brand, a household, carry the weight of her faith.
September has its own kind of momentum. Summer's looseness tightens back into routine, and with it comes a quiet pressure to have something to show for the season, a project, a habit, a body of work.
The women who stopped us this month aren't reacting to that pressure. They were already building. Not for an audience, not on a deadline, but because faith, for each of them, has always looked like construction: something you get up and add to, brick by brick, one ordinary day after another.
This September, we found five of them.
Vanessa Mdee
There is a difference between having a platform and covenanting it to something larger than yourself.
Vanessa Mdee did the covenanting.
The Tanzanian singer and former MTV VJ has spent the last several years quietly reorienting her very public life around her faith. Married to Nigerian-American actor and singer Rotimi since 2021, the couple refer to their union as a "kingdom marriage." Together they co-lead For The Better, a faith-based wellness app and community where Vanessa mentors women across the globe through Bible studies, prayer circles, and now an annual women's conference. She also founded the Udada Foundation, extending her platform into tangible community impact. "We're not perfect. But we know who's at the center of it all: God."
Watching her career shift, from chart-topping pop singer to a woman leading Bible studies for strangers on the internet, is watching someone choose substance over spotlight without ever fully stepping out of either. She hasn't disappeared from public life. She's redirected it.
The takeaway: A platform isn't disqualified from being holy ground just because it started out as something else. What matters is what you choose to build on it now.
"Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain." Psalm 127:1
Betina Gozo Shimonek
There is a kind of strength training that has nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with endurance of spirit.
Betina Gozo Shimonek has built over a decade of career on the first kind, but her life carries plenty of the second. A Nike Global Trainer since 2013 and author of Women's Muscle and Strength: Get Lean, Strong, and Confident, Betina has coached thousands of women through Nike Training Club, Apple Fitness+, and her own platform, co-founded with her husband Nic Shimonek, a former NFL quarterback turned performance coach. Together they co-host the podcast Beyond the Routine, and at home in Dallas she's raising three kids alongside a career that runs on discipline. Her bio carries a small cross, easy to miss, impossible to separate from everything else she's built.
There's something instructive in how quietly her faith sits inside her work. She isn't preaching from a platform built for strength coaching. She's just letting conviction shape how she shows up, in the gym, in the marriage, in the podcast booth, without needing it to be the headline.
The takeaway: Discipline in the body and discipline in the spirit were never meant to compete for the same hour. They were meant to train each other.
"Physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things." 1 Timothy 4:8
Dr. Oluwabukola "Bukky" Ogunyemi
There is a difference between achieving something and correctly naming who it belongs to.
Bukky does the second, out loud, on purpose.
A physician by training, holding an MD, MPH, and MHA, Bukky has built a second, very public life as a content creator covering beauty, fashion, travel, and lifestyle from her home base between Connecticut and New York City. When she completed her graduate studies with highest honors, all As, she didn't lead with the accolade. She led with, "To God be the glory."
It's a small phrase, easy to scroll past, but it says something about how she holds her achievements: as things received rather than things earned alone. In a content space built almost entirely on personal branding, that posture is quietly countercultural.
The takeaway: Excellence doesn't have to compete with humility. The two were always meant to be worn together.
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord." Colossians 3:23
Angela Holm
Some women build a brand and let a life happen around it. Angela Holm built a household, and let the brand grow out of that instead.
Wife and mother of five, Angela leads with "Jesus," ahead of family, lifestyle, motherhood, before any of the rest of it. She's the owner and designer of Angel Baby Carriers, and across Instagram and TikTok she documents the actual texture of raising five kids, unfiltered mornings, craft projects, the small chaos of a full house, to a combined following in the millions.
The order matters here. It would have been easy to build the brand first and let faith be a footnote in the bio. Angela did it the other way around, and it shows in how unbothered her content feels by the pressure to perform a curated version of motherhood.
The takeaway: What you put first in your bio is usually what you've put first in your life. Both are worth checking.
"But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Matthew 6:33
Courtney N. Williams
Some households are built the easy way, one foundation, one story from the start. Others are built the way Courtney Williams built hers: two families, formed separately, choosing on purpose to become one.
Courtney, a Wife. Mom of 6, documents life in Houston with her husband Bryan, blending two families into one after they each came out of previous relationships as single parents. What began as a love story between two people rebuilding has grown into one of the most recognizable blended-family platforms online, six kids, one home, and a marriage that didn't wait for a clean slate to be worth building.
There's an honesty to how she frames it. She doesn't present the blend as effortless. She presents it as chosen, again and again, on the ordinary days as much as the photogenic ones. That distinction, between a family that simply happened and one that is continually decided on, is where her faith actually lives.
The takeaway: A household built from two broken pieces isn't a lesser foundation. Sometimes it's the sturdier one, because everyone in it knows exactly what it cost to build.
"And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity." Colossians 3:14
Scripture of the Month
"The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down." Proverbs 14:1 (NIV)
This verse isn't about carpentry. It's about the daily, unglamorous decisions that either add to a life or quietly erode it, decisions made mostly out of sight, in kitchens and comment sections and quiet mornings before anyone else is awake.
Every woman featured this September is building something with her hands, a mentorship, a podcast, a coaching platform, a career, a home. None of them are waiting for the house to be finished before they start living faithfully inside it.
A Word for the Road
The women in this edition remind us that a calling rarely arrives as a finished structure. It arrives as a foundation, and then a lifetime of choosing, day after day, to keep building on it rather than around it.
You don't need your whole life to be sorted to start. You just need to be willing to add one more true thing to what you've already built.
Adé & Grace holds this truth at the center of everything we create: that beauty and purpose were never separate things. They are worn, lived, and built, brick by ordinary brick.
Adé & Grace celebrates Christian women influencers, faith creators, and women of God using their platforms to inspire spiritual growth, modest fashion, and Christ-centered living.
You are not waiting to become a Woman of God.
You already are.
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