August 2008 – Little Pam was a Barbie girl living in a Barbie world. She and her girlfriends spent hours in her pink shag carpeted bedroom getting lost in a dream world.

Pamela, now known as Pam Davis, is the founder of Girls ’n Grace, a book and doll company for girls who choose to live in an embrace of God’s grace. 

Playing Barbies with a Bible is her earliest childhood memory. 

 “I can remember … sitting down with my Barbies [and Bible] and telling my little girlfriends, ‘Oh, look. This is when Daniel was in the lion’s den, and look at those lions. They didn’t eat him,’” Pam recalled. “I vividly remember one of my friends saying, ‘Pam, would you just play Barbies,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ 

“So I picked up my Barbie and used her voice to say, ‘OK, well then, David took a sling shot. … “[Then] my friend said, ‘Stop that!’ Barbie would never say that!’

“And she was right, …” Pam admitted. “I put that Barbie down, and there were two things beside me in that room. There was that Bible and that Barbie, and I realized those could not co-exist.” 

Every Sunday Pam was fascinated with Bible characters, but the other six days Barbie was the object of her affection. 

“She made such a bigger impact on me because I spent so much more time with her,” Pam said. Thus began Pam’s trek down Barbie lane to pursue a career as an actress and a model. 

Barbie or Bible?
She was in her 20s, the prime of her profession, when her brother – a pastor – asked her where she saw her life going. 

“At that point I realized I needed to find out if God could be known the way I had imagined Him as a child, or were those just stories?” Pam said. “For me what that meant was a very decided point to leave Dallas and the whole realm [of my profession] and go to Liberty University and study apologetics.”   

She spent several years studying apologetics and cross-cultural ministries. The grace of God became her newfound affection, and Barbie was history. 

Pam spent the next several years ministering in a variety of ways from traveling with Campus Crusade for Christ to the Soviet Union to meeting and marrying Steve Davis, major league baseball pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, at the time. Together, the couple began ministering to athletes through Bible study. 

“So that took me from the mission field behind the Iron Curtain to the mission field of professional sports,” Pam said. 

But, Pam still had a passion to communicate a rational belief in God, so she decided to do it by writing fiction. 

For four years, she worked on a series titled South of the Sun, a parody on the book of Ecclesiastes from a woman’s perspective. The series focused on several female characters trying to find meaning south of the sun. 

Just as she was about to have it published, she sensed the Lord redirecting her. So she wrapped up the series and put it in the garage under Christmas ornaments where it stayed for the next 10 years … until 2005 when God began revealing His plan in ways Pam had never fathomed.

Blessing or curse?
As a wife, mother of three and spiritual life coordinator for a Christian school, Pam was also coordinator for Historic Fort Worth’s annual American Girl Fashion Show. American Girl is a popular line of historical dolls and books for girls 

While Pam was working on the show, Christian conservatives, AFA among them, threatened to boycott American Girl because of its support of Girls, Inc., an organization for girls that supports lesbianism and abortion.  

As coordinator of the fashion show, Pam was interviewed about the controversy on a local news station. Her response was not what the media expected from someone who represented American Girl.

Pam’s on-camera response: “We’re praying for American Girl that they will support the American spirit, and the American spirit is based on family values, and it does have a Christian root.” 

Thus began a media onslaught. American Girl refused to change its ways, so Pam ended her work as fashion show coordinator. (American Girl has since cut its ties with Girls, Inc.) 

Once again, she knew the Lord had something else for her to do in response to the whole situation, so she got online and Googled the word “doll.” Providentially, she found and contacted a doll company that had a heritage of producing doll-sized Bibles. 

She had no idea that a simple Internet search would be the beginning of Girls ’n Grace. The following months became a mighty whirlwind of God’s grace.

Faith or fiction?
Pam learned that to produce a new doll with the company she contacted, it had to be a character doll with an accompanying story.

“Pam, do you have a way to put your hands on any completed fiction stories that have never been published that are for girls? I need them now,” said Mark, a representative from the company. 

Pam had no idea where she would find these stories until she remembered what was tucked away in her garage – a completed series of fiction stories for girls.

She emailed Mark the first chapter, and he thought it was phenomenal. Pam’s Christian doll company was becoming a reality. Then, Mark called back a week later and told Pam it would cost $30,000 to make the dolls.

“We’re tapped to the absolute penny,” Pam said. “We don’t have $30,000.” 

Disappointed, she told him she would pray about it, hung up the phone and went to pick up her children at school where she was waved down by a lady who Pam assumed just wanted to talk.

“Pam, I hear God’s asked you to do a Christian doll company,” the lady said.

 “Yeah, but I just got major bad news. I need $30,000 to go forward,” Pam said.

The lady grabbed Pam’s hand and said, “I have $30,000 for you right now. This morning, my husband gave me a check for $30,000 to do anything I want with. Can I sign it over to you?”

Amazed, Pam called Mark and said, “I’ve got $30,000. I know I didn’t have it an hour ago, but I have it right now!” 

So Girls ’n Grace took shape, but not without additional evidence of God at work in the whole process. 

With a team of praying moms at her side, one mom suggested that Pam contact the famous doll sculptor Dianna Effner. Pam’s friend had already tried contacting Effner on Pam’s behalf several times but could not get through to her.

Her friend pleaded, “You try, there is a strange grace on you to do this.”

Skeptical, Pam picked up the phone and dialed the number. Effner answered. The conversation was short and sounded ridiculous, “I need the prettiest doll made right now,” Pam said. “And I don’t have the money to pay your normal fee.” 

After a long pause Pam heard, “OK, I will do it now for the money you have.” 

Thanks to Effner, the Girls ’n Grace dolls are a reflection of sheer beauty – not just outer beauty, but inner beauty, which is what Pam’s company is all about.

Beauty or the bank?
“Our culture is creating a materialistic generation with these kids by offering toys that don’t have a heart component; they only have a bank component,” Pam said. “So the whole idea is to get a new role model in girls’ hands. …”

“Girls ’n Grace are girls who discover and grow in a relationship with God based on the new covenant of God’s grace,” Pam explained. 

Based on findings from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, Pam explained “for a girl to embrace a new role model, there must be an element of pretend play. And when there is pretend play, the girl will become that character,” Pam said. “I can see that played out in my own life.”

The age at which girls play with dolls is a critical time. Girls need a moral foundation that will carry them through their teenage years. A key element of Girls ’n Grace is the interaction it encourages between mothers and daughters. Each book contains a discipleship section, and the interactive Web site (www.girlsngrace.com) appeals to both mothers and daughters. 

“The idea is to go from showing to telling with mothers and daughters,” Pam explained. “But you’re not going to get girls to this place of hearing and you having the right to tell them if you haven’t been in a relationship with them early.”

Pam’s ministry allows for a girl to mature without outgrowing Girls ’n Grace. For example, a really young girl may latch onto the characters and stories as Mom reads them to her and she interacts with the games and activities on the Web. As the girl gets older, she may leave the dolls behind and begin discipleship with the mother/daughter materials. 

“You connect them with the stuff they love, which is their dolls, books, and the Web,” Pam said. “I know. I’ve lived it.”  

The dolls, books and the Web site  
By Cherry Sims, AFA media placement director

Pam Davis captures the essence of young girls’ struggles with everyday issues in Sydney Clair’s Season of Change and Mesi, A Girl ’n Grace in Africa – two books from the Girls ’n Grace library.

In the stories, Pam richly describes the setting and life of each character. These books deal with real issues to which girls of today will relate and to which the message of God’s grace is applied.

The characters come to life through three lines of beautifully sculpted dolls with faces that reflect the inner light God’s grace brings to redeemed hearts. 

Sydney Clair and Patrice are the first of the Contemporary History series of dolls; Mesi is the first of an International line of dolls and a third line, Girls ’n Grace Like Me, allows girls to choose a doll that resembles them.

Each doll is dressed in the appropriate costume of her day and comes with a special code for girls to enter on the Girls ’n Grace Place Web site to open a virtual world of their doll’s era or country where they can play games, answer questions, send e-cards, and make a magazine. 

A percentage of the purchase price of each doll goes toward providing a doll and doll-sized Bible to girls all over the world who need to hear the message of grace. 

For more information: www.girlsngrace.com or 888-537-8781