Bag Ladies & Mr. Bojangles: Spiritual Vagabonds in the Church

What are you carrying-and who told you it was yours?Bag Ladies & Mr. Bojangles: Spiritual Vagabonds in the Church is a piercing examination of the unseen weight believers carry while faithfully serving, smiling, and appearing spiritually whole. Behind the performance, many are overloaded with burdens formed in church culture-misplaced responsibility, unhealed wounds, generational patterns, and spiritual expectations God never assigned.
In this revelatory work, Apostle Paula Ferguson introduces two familiar archetypes found within the Church: The Bag Lady - carrying everyone else's responsibilities, guilt, and emotional weight while slowly burning out. Mr. Bojangles - performing through pain, masking brokenness with service, gifting, or charisma. Both are spiritual vagabonds-wandering within the faith, outwardly functional but inwardly burdened.
Through scripture, prophetic insight, and sobering reflection, this book confronts the systems, mindsets, and spiritual agreements that keep believers carrying what does not belong to them. Readers are guided to examine what is in their bag, who packed it, and why continuing to carry it is costing them peace, clarity, and spiritual wholeness. This is not a critique of the Church-it is a call to maturity within it.
Not a rejection of service-but a demand for discernment. Not permission to abandon responsibility-but an invitation to stop enabling dysfunction in the name of faithfulness. Bag Ladies & Mr. Bojangles challenges readers to lay down false coverings, confront church-formed identity wounds, forgive where necessary, establish boundaries, and return to the lighter load Christ promised. It is a call to stop surviving spiritually and start walking in alignment, healing, and freedom.
This book is for those who have been strong for too long. For those tired of carrying what God never assigned. For those ready to stop performing-and start healing. It's time to put the bag down. It's time to come home whole.