Female disciples were not bystanders on the margins of Jesus’ ministry but partners with male apostles who followed the Savior as he preached from village to village, said Tracy Browning, the first Black woman to join a churchwide presidency in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Women “chose to walk with him,” Browning told a packed crowd of women at the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Times Square on Saturday. “He noticed women … healed women … trusted women … and welcomed women among his followers.”

Browning was a keynote speaker at the weekend’s “Onward, Ever Onward” meeting of the church’s Northeast Area Women’s Conference. About 2,000 attendees squeezed into the New York City hotel, while the proceedings were broadcast to 97 locations in the region.

The one-day gathering included dozens of speakers, panel discussions and breakout sessions, largely focused on how to follow Christ in homes, at church, in workplaces and in the community.

Jesus Christ “magnifies what we offer him,” said Browning, who is set to step down in August as second counselor in the Primary General Presidency for the faith’s children. The New Testament “tells us that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna and many other [women] ministered unto him of their substance.”

It is unclear “what their substance was or how much of it they offered, but we do know … Jesus Christ can do extraordinary things with whatever we offer him, even miracles, and miracles are rarely determined by the size of the offering.”

Browning considers her experience at leading the faith’s worldwide organization for children one of those “miraculous” things Jesus can do.

She told the audience how it felt four years ago to get the call.

“It was obviously a shock,” she said. “At this point, I had served for many years on the [women’s] Relief Society General Advisory Board so I had Relief Society on my brain, honestly.”

While waiting to be interviewed by then-President Russell M. Nelson, she sat with her husband, Brady, opened her scriptures and came to some verses about how Jesus loved little children.

“I felt like I was reading these verses in a new way, and I was super grateful for that learning,” Browning told the audience. “And then I said [in my mind], ‘I don’t know what any of this has to do with Relief Society.’ Then we closed the scriptures, and I walked over to President Nelson’s office, and [he] extended the opportunity for me to serve as second counselor in the Primary General Presidency.”

Her next thought, she said, was, “I have never served in Primary before. Don’t think about that too much, because the other thing that I learned about the Lord’s work is it doesn’t matter if you didn’t serve in the thing, you might be asked to lead it — at the global level.”

During her years in Primary, Browning told The Salt Lake Tribune, the presidency emphasized that “children have the capacity for discipleship, and that children who make covenants at the age of 8, [will make] the same promises that I made at 16, and others may make at 60. … They don’t change.”

This church “should feel like their church,” she said, so her presidency tried to “find ways to invite them into the community of believers in very visible ways, and having them be more prominent in offering prayers, giving talks, being quietly invited to serve, and to use that power that is within them as their covenant makers and keepers.”

What’s next for Browning after her Primary position ends Aug. 1?

“I don’t have any special plans,” she said. “We will just move on to the next thing that the Lord has in store as we wait for some things to be revealed.”