006 I Rev. Dr. Matthew McNutt on Abuse in New Tribes Mission / Ethnos360

Posted on January 14, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In this conversation, Ruth Perry and her brother Matthew McNutt discuss their experiences as missionary kids in Tambo, a boarding school in Bolivia, South America, focusing on the rampant abuse that occurred and the institutional failures to protect vulnerable children. They explore the long-lasting effects of these experiences, the importance of believing victims, and the need for accountability within church and parachurch organizations. The conversation highlights the challenges faced by survivors and the necessity for change in how abuse is addressed in religious contexts.

Visit ⁠matthewmcnutt.com⁠ to find more detailed information about Matthew’s experiences at Tambo in Bolivia, and his work on a recommendations panel during IHART’s investigation into abuses in New Tribes Missions (now Ethnos360). And visit GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in Christian Environments) at netgrace.org if you need resources regarding abuse prevention and response.

Enjoy these nostalgic pics from our time in Bolivia:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ruth Perry (00:15)
My guest today is my much older brother, Dr. Matthew McNutt. I’m very pleased to have you today, Matthew.

Matthew McNutt (00:23)
I was pleased to come on until the much older, the, see, ⁓ yeah, good, good cover. That’s, we’ll see.

Ruth Perry (00:26)
much older and wiser, I should say. Yes.

And do you prefer to go by Reverend Doctor or can I call you Matthew?

Matthew McNutt (00:35)
Call me Matthew.

Ruth Perry (00:36)
I invited you on today because one of the things that is on my heart for the church is to care for our most vulnerable members. And we had the opportunity as missionary kids, to see how that can go sideways and all the wrong ways if the safety of children and the vulnerable is not prioritized in an organization. And so our topic today is rather heavy. And I just want to mention that before we dive in, because a lot of people have experienced spiritual, physical, sexual abuse in their lifetime. And so this might be an episode that is challenging for you or that you might not even want to listen to.

Particularly, we’re talking about a missionary boarding school in South America, but I think this was across the world in this organization and other organizations as well, that this was a common problem in these missionary boarding schools, that there was rampant abuse.

So Let’s share our experience. We weren’t always missionary children, but in 1989, our family moved to Bolivia and I was going into fourth grade at the time, but you were going into high school, right?

Matthew McNutt (01:46)
I was going into 10th grade. It was actually the fall of 1990. I guess this being much older and wiser helps me remember it. It helps that I kept a detailed journal too.

Ruth Perry (02:00)
I was thinking I was nine. I was born in 1980, so I was thinking I was 89.

Matthew McNutt (02:04)
89 was my freshman year of high school, 89-90. So 90-91 was the school year that we moved to Bolivia with New Tribes Mission, now known as Ethnos360. But yeah, we moved to Bolivia. Our parents were associate mission staff with New Tribes Mission, which means they were short term. They were going down for a two year commitment. It ended up becoming three years working at the boarding school as third and fourth grade teachers as part of that staff for the first year and half. Then they were transferred to Paraguay for a little over a year before coming back to Bolivia in time for my high school graduation. And then we returned to the US where they jumped into training to go full time with the mission before eventually leaving a year or so later and accepting a call to the church in Maine.

Ruth Perry (02:57)
Yeah, so moving to South America was very exciting. My dad had been an associate pastor at a church in Washington state and had been leading short-term mission trips. And he had been to Bolivia and really was blown away by his experience there. So that’s how we ended up moving to be short-term missionaries there. And so I think our expectations were very high that this was going to be extraordinary.

And it was in many, many ways. It was an extraordinary experience. And I’m really excited that we have that as part of our childhood. I heard Gabor Mate recently talk about how different siblings do not have the same childhood. And one of the ways that that’s true between you and I is that while we were in South America, I always lived with my parents. But the school pressured mom and dad to put you and Danny into the dorms. And so you were living in the dorms at Tambo. The school was very remote. We would get there by bus. I think it took 12 hours from Cochabamba or what was it?

Matthew McNutt (03:55)
Yep, from Cochabamba, six hours from Santa Cruz. The mission, when they had built the school decades before, had intentionally landed it in the middle of nowhere because they did not want missionary kids to have access to movie theaters and the other temptations in the cities, which is wild. As a youth pastor now, I’ve been a youth pastor for 25 years, and it is wild to me that it was more important to have kids hours and hours away from the temptations than it was to have them close to hospitals and emergency care. Like students died at that school over the years, but it was more important to be remote and away from temptation than it was to have access to health services.

Ruth Perry (04:42)
They had a typhoid and a hepatitis outbreak while we were there. And then in the surrounding area, there was a cholera outbreak. And we’re talking about a very short time that we were there, three years.

Matthew McNutt (04:49)
Yeah. Yeah. We called it the HEPA-CHOLEROID OUTBREAK because that was crazy year. That was our first year in South America.

Ruth Perry (04:59)
Yeah. I got an intestinal infection. So while everybody else is getting hepatitis and typhoid, I’m dealing with something totally different, but they kept treating me for hepatitis or typhoid. And so I nearly died our first year there.

Matthew McNutt (05:12)
You mentioned Danny and I were put in the dorms. He was in middle school, I was in high school. If I was in 10th grade, he was in sixth grade. And there was enormous pressure from the established staff that kids should be in the dorms. Which is funny because the guy that put the most pressure on our parents, Al Lotz, did not have his kids in the dorms. They were in his home with him. But, whatever. There was enormous pressure. you were close to death. Dad had hepatitis at the same time. And so the two of you were rushed into the city. Both of you had really severe cases and there was enormous pressure on mom that she could not leave the school to be with you guys because the task was so much more important. And these boarding schools were a way to get the kids away from the parents because the mission task was the most important thing.

Trust God with the kids but what people didn’t really talk about is where they tended to get their best teachers was through the associate program short-term staff who were then unable to really make much change because if they made waves, they were asked to go home early. And if they played nice, they could stay longer. But most of the long-term staff at the school were there because they didn’t fit in well in other places in the mission field. When you talked about we showed up with rose-colored glasses, I was not happy about moving to South America. I was 15. I liked my life. I had a best friend.

I had stuff going on. I was not happy to go. In hindsight, I loved that I spent years of my life living abroad. It really changed my perspective on a of things, but that first year was a really rough transition. But one of the things that was a shock for our parents was finding out the number one reason that most of the missionaries would leave the field at least at that time, was because they didn’t get along with other missionaries. Everybody had the same call, but man, just like there’s a lot of conflict in churches in the US, there’s a lot of conflict on the mission field, and it’s a lot harder when there’s only three families out in a remote base. If you don’t get along, it just gets bad quick. And so…

It’s so hard to find missionaries to begin with. It’s even harder to find missionaries who are able to raise their support and get to the country that once you get missionaries down there, if they don’t fit into what they were called to, man, there’s a desperation. We gotta put them somewhere.

Right? Like we can’t waste these bodies. And so we had dorm parents and teachers with no formal training that did not go to the field for that. I remember one couple wildly racist. They hated Bolivians, but they were missionaries to Bolivia.

Where do you put a missionary couple? Like, well, put them with the missionary kids and make them dorm parents. We had other people that had all sorts of conflict in other places, couldn’t fit in anywhere. Well, then they can be dorm parents. They can be teachers. And it was just a weird mix of dysfunctional career missionaries that couldn’t fit in in other places. Very few of them were at the school because that’s what they went to Bolivia to be missionaries for. Which right away creates a really dangerous groundwork for who’s gonna be working with kids.

On top of that, there’s been a handful of psychologists and counselors out there that specialize in boarding school counseling. A lot of it actually comes out of England because there’s a real boarding school culture there, not Christian but just boarding school in general. And one of the interesting things to me is I was in recent years processing some of what we experienced and what could have happened differently is those counselors would say, it is virtually impossible to have a boarding school without physical and sexual abuse. The schools just in general, secular, Christian, whatever, are going to attract predators because they’re gonna have access to kids with a lot less supervision.

Even if you have every perfect adult, there is going to be student on student abuse, sexual and physical and verbal, because it is impossible to provide the kind of supervision that a child would have at home with their family. Even where we know families don’t have as much communication and supervision as they probably should have. If you stick 15 or 20 high school guys in a home together with one set of parents, even if they are the best dorm parents in the world, there’s no way for them to adequately supervise and protect 15 to 20 high school boys even from each other. And so yeah, our boarding school had tons of abuse.

When we first went down, just in the three years that we were there, there were several missionaries kicked out of the school and off the field for sexual abuse of kids and students. And I remember for years thinking to myself, that must have just been a really weird three years in Tambo’s history. Like just bizarre, like how could that possibly be whatever?

And around 15 years ago, 16 years ago, one of my friends from Tambo who had rejoined the mission was stunned to find out that his abuser, who was not kicked out while we were there. She was still there when we were there as students. I think you had her as a teacher, Susan Major. Yeah, I’ll say names. I mean, even as students, she was no longer allowed to spank kids because she had so viciously beat and left scars on kids for the most minor offenses. So it was known, she was a known abuser. He was stunned to find out that she was still in the mission, that she had just been moved to a boarding school in Mexico.

And so he was like, she should not be in the mission. She needs to be gone. Like this is outrageous that she’s been in the mission at that point for decades and decades abusing kids. And they were like, well, you know, the Bible says you can’t have just one person bring an accusation against the leader. There needs to be two or three witnesses. And, you know, he was kind of stunned because it was already a known thing by the time we had shown up in South America. He was my age at that point, but as a fifth and sixth grade student, he had had her and in the years since she wasn’t allowed to beat kids anymore because it was such a known thing.

And so he started a Facebook group and just grabbed every former missionary kid from our boarding school that he could think of and was just like, hey, I need one or two more people that were abused by her to be willing to come forward or she’s gonna keep abusing kids in this mission. And so some people did come forward. They did finally remove her and fire her from the organization.

But what happened in this Facebook group is it exploded with other MKs going, well, I wasn’t abused by her, but I was abused by so-and-so, or I was abused by so-and-so, or I went to the school 30 years before, and so I have no idea who she is, but I was abused by this other person. And so it just became this chorus of voices.

I’m kind of convinced that social media really forced the mission to attempt to acknowledge abuse that they had been covering up for decades and hiding for decades because victims were finally going, if you’re not gonna talk about it, we’re gonna talk about it. We’re gonna put it out there. We’re gonna reach out to news organizations. If you’re gonna refuse to do anything about this, then we’re gonna sue until you acknowledge what happened and name these abusers. And so out of that came some responses by New Tribes Mission.

When he started this Facebook group of Bolivian missionary kids, this was after New Tribes had already contracted with GRACE, organization at the time. He was part of, think he’s retired from it since then. But they had contracted with them to investigate one of their other schools already. So it wasn’t a completely new idea that there could be an investigation that something could happen. But again, that was an investigation that happened because abused missionary kids who had become adults. Studies show most people, isn’t until their 30s or 40s that they really become willing to talk about their childhood abuse and start naming names.

A lot of it has to do with about the time you have kids, the age of when you were abused is when you start to go, wait a minute. I know for me, looking at my oldest son when he turned 15, about a decade ago, was a moment for me that I was like, yeah, no, this is outrageous. The way I was being treated, the abuse that was happening, the things that happened to me that were said to me. And I’m just like, I would never be okay with a fraction of that happening to one of my sons. Like they are children. So it’s just kind of your own memory kind of why it wasn’t as bad to me or it wasn’t.

But yeah, it was the same kind of thing. Missionary kids from this other country one of them had started a website where people could leave comments and leave stories and they had put pressure until New Tribes finally hired Grace to put together a response.

Ruth Perry (14:45)
Well, I’m thinking back about just how widespread corporal punishment, like as one type of abuse, the physical abuse there was widespread because I even had the first year we were there, I had my parents as my teachers in the third and fourth grade classroom. So overall, besides almost dying from an intestinal infection, the first year was pretty positive. And one big striking difference to the positivity of it, though, is that next door to us, was a first and second grade classroom. And in between our classrooms, there was a little closet with access from both classrooms. And so the first and second grade teacher would bring in the little kids and beat them So we could all hear the little six and seven year olds who are separated and so isolated from their parents being regularly beaten by their teacher.

And then I had Sue Majors in fifth grade. Danny had her his first year when he was in sixth grade and she was a very unstable person having meltdowns in the classroom where she would just start screaming at everybody and then we all had to comfort her and tell her that it was fine. Once they stopped letting her personally beat the children, she would just send them off to Al Lotz who would do it happily for her.

Matthew McNutt (15:52)
Yeah, he was the director of the school and what was supposed to be the solution to her beating kids, was send them to him and then he would evaluate whether or not a spanking was actually justified. Like for reference, one of times Danny and some of his classmates were sent to get a beating because they were taking a test and they were supposed to keep their pencil on the paper the entire time. And he and a couple of the other kids had accidentally lifted the lead off the paper to go to the next question and so they got sent for being defiant and disobedient and to Al. Now any reasonable person would have heard that and been like yeah no this is this is not justify a beating.

The problem was Al Lotz he was my dorm parent my first year student. When I was put in his dorm, just a bully, you know, when they finally did the investigation, he was the person I named for physically abusing me and spiritually and emotionally abusing me and New Tribes said, yeah, no, he did. They sent me a letter saying, you know, agreeing and when I named him on my blog, a bunch of other students reached out to me and said, yeah, he was their abuser too. But he bragged to us. I remember being shocked as a 15 year old sitting down in our first dorm meeting. It was me and 17, 18 other high school guys. So like we’re ninth through 12th grade. I think the last time I had had a spanking, cause we had parents that spanked us. I think by the time I was 10, that was over. I got other disciplinary measures, but I remember sitting there going, I’m 15, this is over at this point.

And he told us all, I believe in spanking. I don’t think any of you are too old. and I do not believe in four or five sissy swats. He pulled out, he had a wooden paddle. It was a big wooden board. And he said, I believe in a minimum of 15 to 20 full force, everything I’ve got, swats. Which our dad, when he found out about that reported that to the executive committee in Bolivia and and they acted shocked and horrified that that was an excessive amount He didn’t believe in spanking on the butt because he was like there’s too much padding it’s got to be on the back of your legs where it’s gonna actually hurt and so guys would compare Who was more black and blue from the back of their knees to their butt. Just from these minimum of 15 to 20 swats, full force, and that was gonna be the punishment for pulling a pencil off of a piece of paper in class. It was just wildly disproportionate.

Our dad reported that and the executive committee acted horrified. They told Al, hey, the maximum you can do is five swats. Five swats is reasonable, whatever. But they didn’t notify parents. They didn’t tell any kids. Nobody was told, hey, here’s the new rule. So that happened my 10th grade year. My junior year, he beat two of the high school guys. That same excessive number of swats, he was still swatting middle school kids, that number of swats, because nobody had been told otherwise. And there was no enforcement. And at that point, our parents had been transferred to Paraguay because they had already been labeled as troublemakers for going and reporting this abuse.

Ruth Perry (19:16)
They were also replacing a missionary who had been molesting the Native children.

Matthew McNutt (19:20)
Yeah, who was molesting native kids in Paraguay. The other thing my dad had done that had labeled him a troublemaker is that first year, Rich Hine the director of the school, who would just beat kids and came out over the Christmas break that he had molested a kid. Originally, Al Lotz’s decision was he can stay, he just can’t be the director anymore, he can’t be a dorm parent anymore. You know, he’s found out molesting a little boy and the answer was, well, let’s move him into a house at the edge of the property by himself and let him stay on as a teacher and a staff member, but he can’t be the director anymore.

And they didn’t notify any of the other staff what it was he had done. They didn’t notify parents. They didn’t notify kids. It eventually got out because the executive committee in Bolivia did find out what he had done. And while they agreed with not notifying parents or kids to see if there were other victims, they did talk to all of their own kids that went to the school to make sure none of them had been abused. Those kids came back, told their friends, who told their parents, some of whom were staff. So it eventually got out.

When it got back to the US, the headquarters, they gave him 24 hours to get off the property and one week to be out of the country. He was sent back to England, because he was a missionary from England. But once he was there, they didn’t notify his church, they didn’t notify anybody there, they didn’t notify authorities, They just fired him from the mission and turned him loose. And I know that because I went to the New Tribes Bible School in England and I inadvertently started attending his home church three years after he was kicked off the field. And the pastor who had been the pastor at the church for 12 years at that point. So he was Rich Hine’s sending church and sending pastor was like, wait a minute, you came from Bolivia? And I was like, yeah.

And he’s like, do you know Rich Hine? And I’m like. Yeah, He was like, you wanna see him? I can, you know, get you guys connected. And I was like, no, no, I I don’t really know. and then the pastor goes, you know, it’s really strange. said he came back about two, three years ago from Bolivia and it’s like nobody at the mission wants anything to do with them.

Because the mission the British headquarters were there in that town and he was like they just he’s just kind of here in the community He doesn’t hardly come to church anymore He’s like I’ve never really known why and I remembered thinking

It’s like, is not my job. Like, this is not, I should not have to be the one to, and I regret now, I didn’t tell the pastor what he had done. In hindsight, I wish 19 year old me had had the courage to tell this pastor exactly what had happened. But I didn’t and at that point, you know, we had been in South America for three years. Our parents had been in the training for a year.

Now I was in the Bible school, so at this point I had been connected to the mission for about five years, and it was really ingrained. We were not allowed to talk about Rich Hine. They literally told us that when they told the kids, hey, he had a sin issue, they weren’t gonna tell us what, but he confessed it, we forgave him, it’s all good, and you are not allowed to talk about it ever again, literally. And so, yeah, five years later, I was like, I’m not allowed to talk about this.

Ruth Perry (22:41)
He also had on his way out that day, he came into the lunch room where the entire school was eating lunch and took the microphone and cried and made himself out to be a victim. so.

Matthew McNutt (22:53)
Al Lotz, yeah, Al Lotz gave him the mic and told him he could say goodbye and he was sobbing and he was like, I don’t understand why this is happening. I was told it was okay. And so, I mean, there is a certain reality. They did a disservice to him by minimizing what he had done by telling him it was okay. So it was a shock to his system. I have no sympathy for him whatsoever, right? I have no, you know, he was an abuser that was judged by other abusers. So of course what he had done did not seem like a big deal to them. yeah, he went on, all these kids in the room are crying, like, oh, the executive committee in Florida is so mean, why would they do this? He couldn’t have ever done anything to deserve this.

And meanwhile, the victim, that had had the courage to tell their parents what had happened, right? The vast majority of victims don’t speak up ever. A very small percentage do. So this victim has the courage to speak up, to say what had happened, to tell their parents. The parents actually say something, the guy gets kicked out and so now this victim is sitting in this room while all of their peers are crying and going like, this is awful. Why are they doing this to him? How could this happen? Poor Mr. Hine. You know, I remember 15 years ago when I met with the investigators telling that story, that’s the part of the report that I broke down talking about because it was just so abhorrent to me to think that there was a middle school child in that room watching everyone feel sorry for Rich Hine because this kid had done the right thing and told and got help. Right? And then people wonder why victims don’t want to come forward because they don’t get protected. They don’t get looked out for.

And New Tribe’s entire response has been to cover up and hide what is done, to drag their feet at naming anyone, to not want to tell people what happened or why.

Ruth Perry (25:10)
What would have been the appropriate response from the executive committee in Florida to the news that they had a pedophile working at a school with a bunch of vulnerable children? Like, tell me step by step what you think they ought to have done and where they failed.

Matthew McNutt (25:27)
Well, they failed on every level. They still continue to fail. In the example of Rich Hine, the moment they knew what he had done, especially since he admitted to it, right? When he was confronted, he admitted that he had done that. The reality is they should have assumed that the odds of his one and only victim coming forward are ridiculously small. There’s no way he didn’t have other.

Especially as a as dorm, like he just had access and he had authority I don’t know this for a fact, but when I named him on my blog, others have reached out to me and told me that he was transferred to Bolivia from Paraguay because he had abused kids in Paraguay and there had been issues there. And this was kind of his second chance.

If that wasn’t part of the story, if all they knew was this one kid, the moment they’ve known that, he should have been immediately fired. I think he should have been reported to Bolivian authorities because he molested a kid in Bolivia. They should have reported him to US authorities, because this was an American citizen. They should have reported him to British authorities because he was a British citizen. His supporting churches should have been notified, hey, he is being removed and this is why.

Now, I was told when I told the mission years ago, you need to notify, well, that opens you up to lawsuits and liability and all that and I was like, well, first off, if somebody is gonna sue because you say this, well then you simply get to pull out, I was like, what lunatic is gonna sue over this because then you get to bring out the evidence to prove why you’ve made this accusation, right? You get to defend yourself and then it becomes public record. But furthermore, sometimes you just need to do the right thing and maybe that comes with risk, but it would be better if they got sued by a couple abusers than all of the victims that have been suing them to try and get them to name names.

The first thing they should have done is notified every single parent that had a kid at the school the entire time Rich Hines was at that school. So that they could have conversations with their kids to be like, hey, did this ever happen to you? Do you know that this happened to anyone? They should have notified the entire student body, right?

Instead of telling us, he did something, he apologized, everyone forgave him. It’s okay, Nobody’s allowed to talk about this ever again, right? Well, now they’ve closed the door on conversations. Talking about Rich Hine is now something that can get you in trouble. They should have had a conversation, age appropriate, right? Because it was a kindergarten through 12th grade school, but they should have had conversations on every level of, hey, this is horrific this happened. And I know some of you are gonna find this very hard to believe because the reality, abusers are so good at creating a great reputation so that when accusations come out, other people find it impossible to believe.

But they should have had conversations across the board and just been like, man, if any of you know of something, have heard something, have experienced something, had something inappropriate or uncomfortable or that you’re not even sure about. Please come tell us, right? To find out the fullness of the story. I mean, this is why, you know, a few years ago, Ethnos360 finally decided to release the names of sexual offenders who were still alive because they said you know, hey, they could still be out there sexually assaulting kids. what was explained to me is we don’t need to do the physical abuse ones because most of those were beatings and they probably can’t beat kids anymore anyways because of laws and whatever. So that isn’t probably happening anymore. Like in their rationale, they only needed to name names of things they thought might still be happening to protect against that happening again. And then they release the names on a buried site, part of their website that you can’t find, it’s in a PDF, you can’t Google.

But again, that’s lacking the concern for other victims out there, right? Because the most empowering thing to a victim is to know that, if there are other victims of Rich Hine out there, having him named, gives them the courage to go, I’m not crazy. I’m not misreading the situation. I didn’t cause this to happen in some way. It wasn’t me leading him into temptation, that it wasn’t on them, it was on him and having other stories released gives validity to them and gives them the courage and strength to come forward and say, hey, actually, this happened to me. They feel like, I might get believed more, but instead, by refusing to name dead perpetrator, honestly, it helps keep the list really small of who did what.

When you give such a tightly controlled, we will only name people that are alive and that sexually assaulted kids. It keeps the list small. And I think New Tribes they don’t want to admit that in their mission organization of thousands of people, there are dozens, if not hundreds of abusers that they know about. And, you know, one of the things that was pushed back on is, well, you have to keep in mind the culture at the time. The culture at the time would have reacted differently.

No, because the culture at the time, was horrified to find out Al Lotz was beating kids more than five swats. People were already being arrested for this kind of stuff. They were already reporting things in practice in the US. So it was very much culturally understood. This is unacceptable. There is a response protocol that should be happening.

Ruth Perry (31:04)
They’ve shown through working with victims that not being believed or having their experience minimized is re-traumatizing, almost to the same or sometimes more traumatic for victims than the initial abuse because it’s so hard to just say this happened to me. And then that’s a critical time where you need to number one, I think the church needs to be educated about abuse. We need to grow our empathy, not be afraid of empathy as many seem to be nowadays, where we can weep with those who weep and hold the pain and sit with the pain of others and witness it.

And so what is your advice to people, how should we respond if someone discloses abuse to us?

Matthew McNutt (31:50)
I think we should believe victims, right? Because the response is always, hey, what if they’re lying? What if they’re making it up? When they’ve done the studies, it’s something like over 90 % of the stories that come out are true, right? So if you err on the side of believing victims, statistically speaking, you’re probably, you’re believing the right thing.

You’re taking the right side. There is absolutely a lot of truth to coming out with the abuse and not being believed or the response being poor is very traumatizing. I was 15 when we moved to South America.

Al Lotz physically abused me. I didn’t even get one of the beatings. I think he was too afraid of Dad to ever actually beat me because I think he knew Dad was one of the few guys that would have come beat him up.

There were things I saw, there were things I heard, there were things I saw happen to my friends. Early on in my 20s, I started talking to counselors. I’ve done that off and on over the years. by the time in my 30s, when this conversation really started happening, I was a lot more comfortable talking than a lot of missionary kids were.

And so when New Tribes announced, at the time New Tribes, now Ethnos360, they said they were severing their relationship with GRACE because they didn’t like that Boz when they commissioned them to do this report, he released the report publicly, naming names of abusers. At the same time, he gave the report back to New Tribes, and New Tribes was absolutely caught off guard by that. They were furious that they could not control or filter or have a say in what the report would say.

And so they severed ties with GRACE, and what they announced was that they had contracted with IHART, I-H-A-R-T, an outside investigative service that was led by Pat Hendricks. And they wanted people to come forward with their abuse stories from all of the different boarding schools to reach out to Pat. And so I did. And I was a loud advocate to other missionary kids that, know, hey, we gotta talk to these people. Like, this is the opportunity.

New Tribes is finally listening. They’re going to do the right thing here. They’re going to investigate. And I legitimately thought there is a lot to win for New Tribes in addressing this because it was stuff from decades before. By the time they were launching this investigation, they largely didn’t have boarding schools anymore.

Most missionaries were homeschooling. The stuff that had happened in the past, there were enough people that quietly knew about it that they just weren’t, you know, they had better protection things in place. The people in leadership of the mission were not the ones that had covered up and hidden things decades before. And so I legitimately went into it going like, they’re gonna do the right thing. They can own this. It’s gonna be an awful chapter of their history, but they can name these abusers and make things right. And I advocated hard for people to talk. I was the first missionary kid from Tambo that the investigative team interviewed.

They sent four interviewers. Usually they did it in pairs. They would send two investigators of the same gender of the victim to talk to them. They sent four to me. They asked if that was okay because they were like, you seem like you’re comfortable talking about stuff. Would you be willing to talk to more of us just so we can learn more about the school in general before we talk to people that are gonna have a hard time? I was like, yes, let’s do it. And so they flew in, they met with me in my office here.

They said, you know, where are you gonna feel the most comfortable? was like, my office feels comfortable. And so we had a conversation for just hours and hours. And it was really good. And Pat had hired a lot of retired abuse investigators, law enforcement investigators, and put together this team. And so then over the next couple years, they were interviewing more and more missionary kids. I was telling people, you got to do this. It felt so empowering to me to finally be heard and listened to. I was like, this is such a good thing.

And then I was recruited to be on the first recommendations panel that Pat Hendricks formed for the first report that IHART was going to issue. And I was part of a team of six or seven, eight people that we were all recruited because of different backgrounds. There were a couple counselors, there were some missionary kids, there were missionaries, former missionaries. They wanted pastoral presence. And so part of what they liked about having me on this panel was that I checked off multiple boxes. I’m a youth pastor, so I’m a professional youth worker. I was a missionary kid. I’m a pastor. And so I served on this panel. We met up in St. Louis. And I had gotten hundreds of pages of witness statements and reports ahead of time to read through just sickening stuff that had happened in this mission field. And to children and just horrifying things.

And so we met and we talked about it. And we looked at these reports and came back with recommendations that really caught New Tribes Mission off guard. Because we found a lot of leadership in the country, culpable. We also found a lot of leadership in the Florida headquarters culpable which is one of the things that had shocked them when Boz had done his report that he found leadership in Florida headquarters culpable for abuse that happened because they had covered it up. There’s just document trails showing they knew stuff and they were aware of it and didn’t respond and We made a series of recommendations and I came away from it,

It was painful. It was hard. It was emotionally draining. It was horrifying. Part of why I’d been on that panel is I had no connection to that boarding school or that country. So it wasn’t people I knew, but it was certainly similar to stories I had seen in Bolivia. And at one point I even asked Pat Hendricks because that report I felt like it was a small number of abusers named. And I said to Pat Hendricks, and to the investigators, did not many people come forward from this country?

Or was it just, I was like, as horrifying as this to say, did they just not have that many abusers there? And she goes, well, what do you mean? And I was like, well, I could name off this many abusers from just my three years at Tambo. And that school had existed for decades and decades. Tambo was the first boarding school that New Tribes had started. And she said, no, Tambo is just way worse.

And said, what do you mean? And she Tambo had the most out of all the boarding schools. So much so that at that point she wasn’t sure how she was going to handle doing a report. Did she break it up into multiple recommendations panels and multiple reports to try and deal with all of it adequately because it would be too overwhelming to have one team.

And as shocking as that was, was a part of me that was like, that makes sense because there were so many just in our three-year window there. And so I came away from that hopeful New Tribes had heard all these things and then the report was issued and it was so sanitized what it was that New Tribes released. They released a document that was supposedly the recommendations that our panel had come up with. They wrote up a completely different set of recommendations. They were completely inadequate. Victims were rightfully outraged at this anonymous recommendations panel because they were like, how could they hear the stories and come up with the, well, they weren’t our recommendations. They released a set that was supposedly from us. They were not. I still have our recommendations, right?

And then, I was invited by Pat Hendricks to be a part of a second recommendations panel for a second country. And as we were getting ready to do that, New Tribes lawyer, Teresa Sidbotham got more and more involved. She started being on these calls and telling us what we could and couldn’t do and what we could and couldn’t read. And it was really confusing to me. And I was like, I don’t understand why is there a lawyer on this call? Is this lawyer acting on the behalf of the victims? Is this lawyer acting on behalf of the mission? Because it feels like they’re acting on behalf of the mission. And around that time, New Tribes fired Pat Hendricks from IHART. And I remember going like, how in the world is this mission able to fire the president or the leader of an outside investigative service?

Well, that’s when we found out that IHART was not an outside organization. It was a process started and owned by New Tribes Mission. And they fired Pat. They got rid of her investigators. They hired other teams. They put Teresa in charge of it. She sprinted through the reports, released, again, this second panel that I was a part of what was released did not reflect what we had read or said. And what was released about Bolivia was a joke.

And once they released it all, they rushed it all out. And then they changed the name of the mission organization. Right? So all of the reports were issued in the name of New Tribes Mission, about New Tribes Mission. And then the mission became Ethnos360. And they said it was because they were renaming to reflect to how they had changed over the decades and the mission and reaching the world and changing language. But it really felt like the timing was, oh, you sprinted out all these reports, said you were done, and then changed the mission’s name.

As to your question, I felt tremendously victimized by the betrayal I felt from the leadership, misrepresenting our words as a panel, you know, that I had trusted them when they said they had hired this outside organization only to find out, no, it was their organization and they could fire and screen and filter and change the words however they wanted. That was far more infuriating to me, far more damaging, far more hurtful than what happened, you know, when I was a teenager.

And I think what it is, is there is a part of me that understands, man, Al Lotz is a physical abuser. He enjoys beating kids and he beat a lot of kids. And he wrestled and he said inappropriate things and he did inappropriate things with kids. And there is a part of me that gets like as horrible as that is.

It makes sense that he helped cover up for Rich Hine because they were friends and they were both abusers. And if you’re an abuser, you don’t think another person’s abuse is that bad, right? What is far more horrifying to me in some ways, because again, some of what other people suffered is far more traumatic than what I suffered.

I felt like I betrayed other missionary kids by advocating for them to go through this process. I felt like I set other people up to get hurt by telling them that they could go and share these stories and New Tribes was going to actually do the right thing. It’s crazy to me that, 15 years later. They are still burying names.

dozens, hundreds of names of sexual and physical and spiritual abusers that are still just out there, able to get jobs at schools, to live, you know, Bob Fisher was a sexual predator of kids that they did not name until a couple years ago. It was shortly before his death. They wouldn’t name him now because he’s dead.

He was living across the street from a middle school at one point, if he had ever been named, if he had ever been appropriately investigated at the time, there would have been things put in place to protect him from having this kind of access to kids going forward, but they didn’t. And so for me,

You know, where 15 years ago, I had all this hope and felt like, the leadership of Ethnos360 has an opportunity here to do the right thing, to cause healing, to look out for the least of these countless children that were beaten, that were molested, that were raped, that were they were told they were liars, were told they were going to hell, that they were going to send other people to hell if they said anything. For years I was the one that felt shame and embarrassment and I felt like I couldn’t say anything. Al Lotz should be the one that feels ashamed and embarrassed and afraid.

But because they never said anything, he’s the vice president of another mission that specifically does children and youth ministry. That’s outrageous. They had an opportunity to speak up for all these children that were entrusted in their care, they didn’t. And so that’s why there’s a part of me now that goes, the leadership of Ethnos360 is culpable for the silence, for enabling. I am not one of those victims that feels like burn it all down. It all needs to go away. I think the majority of missionaries with Ethnos360 are probably great people. Great hearts, I’m friends with some of them. I know they care deeply about the Great Commission and about reaching the lost. But man, the leadership? Disqualified, for covering up for being unwilling to name the abuse to take responsibility for it out of fear of getting sued. They got sued anyways. But a lot of those victims that sued would not have sued if that wasn’t what it took to get their abusers named.

To go back to your question, Christians need to believe victims. And this is real. The Bible does call us to forgive. There needs to be a path for forgiveness, restoration, but the Bible also tells us to not be like a dog returning to its vomit and to be as wise as serpents, innocent as doves. Like we need to forgive, but we also need to take steps and do the right thing. And what seems to be happening in the culture at large is that the church, that Christianity, that these missions organizations are the least likely to name and expose abusers, that they’re far more interested in protecting the organization than they are in protecting and advocating for victims.

And what they actually end up doing in that case is advocating for and protecting abusers. Not naming Rich Hine is advocating for Rich Hine. Right? It’s not advocating for his victims. It’s advocating for his reputation and advocating for the people that will feel uncomfortable knowing that the person they supported or liked did this. It’s wanting to protect the reputation that missionaries are up on a pedestal. A lot of missionaries are really great, kind people with incredible hearts for God.

Ruth Perry (46:13)
Yeah.

Matthew McNutt (46:35)
But just like every organization out there, just like every church out there that has dysfunctional people as well or leaders in sin, there are missionaries in sin that need to be named, that need to be brought to light. Because, hey, like you cannot have an organization with thousands of missionaries and 100 % of them are gonna be sinless, perfect. Like, no, we’re all fallen people.

And it says a lot more about us, how we respond. Years ago, a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours actually, was gonna be checking out our church and it was right after one of our pastors, something had come to light.

And it was a really ugly situation and we were going to be addressing it to the church. And I said to my Hey, I got to be honest. This is going to be a really uncomfortable Sunday. I don’t know if this is the one that you want to come check out our church with. Right. And his response was so true because he said, actually, I think I can learn a lot more about your church in seeing how it handles this. And I mean, that was coming from a guy who had worked in ministry where some bad stuff had gone down.

I think some people rationalize defending abusers as, we need to minister to them, and yes, there are steps there, but there’s also things that need to happen if you’re choosing the perpetrator over the victim, which tends to be more comfortable for everyone, right? Because then we get to all pat ourselves on the back of, look, like he did this horrible thing and we are helping him become a good person again. Like we are loving him so well and we’re embracing him and we’re showing the love of Christ. And meanwhile, we’ve chased the victim off and we’ve communicated to any other victims out there, hey, this is not a safe place.

That was a long winded way of saying, yeah, I felt more betrayed by New Tribes and Ethnos360 in the response than I did in what happened 35 years ago.

And, I think that continues to be a black stain on that ministry and a black stain on their leadership that needs to be acknowledged fully and, and finished. And that’s why there are still victims hurt and upset and posting things online and trying to bring awareness. I should not have felt like I needed to be the one to write a blog post about Al Lotz.

New Tribes should have taken care of that. I should not have been the one that felt like I needed to write a post about Rich Hine. That story should have already been told.

Ruth Perry (48:59)
And I think that what we’ve talked about today is just one case study of many, many organizations. And it’s kind of drilled into us as Christians that we need to make our church seem, we don’t want to make it look bad to people. So we need to just always put the most beautiful picture forward about who we are. And then also attending church, we get that same message of like, you need to put the most beautiful picture of who you are attending church. And so I think the people who get burned and hurt, they don’t feel safe, because they know that everybody’s wearing a mask. And that’s not a safe environment. The truth is what feels safe to people who’ve experienced this kind of abuse.

Matthew McNutt (49:41)
Yeah,

Ruth Perry (49:42)
We’ve covered a lot, Matthew. I’m sorry for what you experienced at Tambo and what you experienced again through the process of trying to bring accountability. None of that was your responsibility. I mean, it just is heartbreaking what’s happened to you and to others. And I just pray that if anyone is listening who has experienced abuse in a Christian environment, I pray for your healing and for your comfort and your peace. And I pray for accountability and justice for you. The GRACE organization, it stands for Godly Response to Abuse in Christian Environments. That’s a great resource to reach out to if you need accountability.

Matthew McNutt (50:18)
Their model, yeah, and their model for handling these kinds of things is probably one of the strongest out there. The Bible talks about how we can use our suffering to be an encouragement to others. And so part of why I have wanted to advocate over the years is I feel like I have had a unique combination of experience and understanding as paired with my vocation as a youth pastor, the training that comes with that, my masters in pastoral counseling. It’s given me some access points to process and talk and be a voice that I want to be for redemption in this area and for transparency and on behalf of victims. But man, we’re not anywhere near where we need to be yet.

And you my specific context or our specific experience in connection to history with New Tribes, now Ethnos360, just paints a picture, I’m still deeply disappointed. Their response is not yet where it needs to be. And I’ve blogged about that. You my blog is MatthewMcNutt.com All you have to do is search New Tribes or Ethnos360 on there and you will find my posts where I’ve documented some of that stuff a lot more thoroughly than what I can say in a podcast format.

Ruth Perry (51:37)
Yeah, check that out, matthewmcnutt.com And thanks for being on The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast with me, Matthew. Do you want to add the last word here before we sign off?

Matthew McNutt (51:44)
Yeah! I mean, that would be a first. Sorry, I went so long without any sibling rivalry. No, I’m excited you’re doing this. I’m excited to be a part of it. I’ve enjoyed watching, I think over the years, this has become an unexpected platform for you. I think it’s been interesting. There were a lot of years where we were separately
processing and navigating a lot of different theological things and coming out of some really conservative and fundamentalist backgrounds that in recent years we were kind of surprised to find that we’ve both ended up on a lot of similar pages theologically but separately.

Like just kind of navigating there through our different experiences and stories. And it is funny that you can grow up in the same house, but have very different experiences there too. And very different experiences in the church and on the mission field and in school and all of that. And so, yeah, I’m excited. I’ve been loving listening to the other episodes that have come out so far and can’t wait to hear who else you’re going to be talking to in the future.

Ruth Perry (52:59)
Thanks for your support, Matthew, I love you.

Matthew McNutt (53:02)
Love you too. Bye.

Ruth Perry (53:03)
All right, bye.

Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Builders! We’re excited about our new podcast and hope to bring light to the darkness through these conversations about gender, abuse, justice and healing in the Christian Faith. Follow along here (you can subscribe by email on the right-hand menu under our page description) or on your favorite podcast platform and social media: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Pinterest, and TikTok!

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oo5 I Dr. Roy Ciampa on Paul’s Household Instructions in Ephesians 5

Posted on January 7, 2026 by | Leave a comment

My guest this week is my former Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary professor, Dr. Roy Ciampa, whose transformative class, Ephesians in Depth, has stayed with me over the years as my faith has grown and changed. In this conversation, we discuss the theological implications of Paul’s writings, the cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, and the significance of mutual submission in relationships. Dr. Ciampa shares insights from his academic background and teaching experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in its historical context. The dialogue highlights the beauty of God’s love and grace, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own faith journeys and the role of women in ministry.

I think my favorite thing Dr. Ciampa said to me, was that Ephesians was “written in the key of worship.”

Dr. Ciampa mentions a document he compiled to help students understand first century Greco-Roman views of women and marriage, beginning with Old Testament and Classical Greek texts up through the time of the New Testament, so that NT texts might be better understood in light of the developing contexts. You can read that insightful document here. And find more of Dr. Ciampa’s scholarly writings on his website, viceregency.com.

You can watch our conversation on YouTube, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more–find all those links on Podlink! Please like, subscribe, rate and share with a friend if you found this interview helpful!

Transcript:

Ruth Perry (00:16)
This is a new thing for me and I appreciate you being one of my very first guests, Dr. Ciampa.

Roy Ciampa (00:22)
Well, I’m honored to be invited and hope this will be helpful to people.

Ruth Perry (00:26)
What I’m hoping to share on my podcast for my first season is I’m going to go back and have conversations with people who helped me as my faith has shifted and changed over the last 20 years. Because my background is very conservative, complementarian, traditional, But it’s changed a lot over the years through crises of faith and through cognitive dissonance that’s happened and different things that have gone on. And I’m just really grateful that my faith has remained strong because I’ve encountered people like you who’ve helped me to reimagine my faith and think about things differently.

Roy Ciampa (01:04)
That’s nice to hear.

Ruth Perry (01:04)
And so at the time that I had you as a professor, I was a complementarian student, pretty committed to that perspective. And I was an educational ministries student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And I think that I took Ephesians as one of my core theology classes. And it’s the only class that I encountered you as a professor. But looking back on my seminary experience, I really loved that class so much and the book of Ephesians has just remained my favorite book of the Bible.

And I’m really grateful that I had that experience because I didn’t have to learn Greek or Hebrew in seminary as an education student. And this was the only class where we really went through word by word and you taught how to parse Paul’s Greek into English and how to make sense of his run on sentences and you taught the importance of understanding the context of the passage. And I just learned so much from you. And so I’m really excited to talk about that with you today. But I thought before we get into that, I would like to know more about you. I don’t really know what your faith formation was like, your background, where you’re coming from. If you’d like to just go back and tell us a little bit about your own spiritual journey.

Roy Ciampa (02:15)
Sure, I’d be happy to. I grew up in an nominal Christian family. We went to church about once a year because my grandmother wanted us to. I was confirmed in a Congregational church when I was, I suppose, a young teenager. But it didn’t really mean much. I never really understood anything about the Bible.

I came to faith when I was in my first year of college, I owe it, a large part of it, I owe, I think, to next door neighbors who moved in when I was in middle school. Wonderful, dedicated Christians, the Monk family, and they had two sons, one a year older than me and one a year younger, Robert and Stuart. And the whole family just modeled for me, a wonderful Christian faith and love. And so they took me to evangelistic events.

But I didn’t think that I thought I was a Christian. I remember sitting during one, in a roller skating rink while somebody was speaking and we had our heads down and I’m saying that this isn’t for me. I’m already Christian. They’re not talking about me. I’m a Christian. Anyway, it was my first year of college. Some guys shared the gospel with me and I realized that this was the message that had transformed their lives and their family and I realized it was true and I was in need of it and so I trusted in the Lord and I was baptized, came to faith, I was discipled.

But I was in a very conservative context. I was listening to the guys that discipled me had me listening to some fundamentalist preachers. John R. Rice wrote a book I Am a Fundamentalist and after a year I felt like God was calling me into ministry and I went to Jerry Falwell’s school at the time was called Liberty Baptist College for a year. And then after a year there I transferred to Gordon College where I did my undergraduate degree.

By the time I graduated from Gordon College, well certainly I was no longer a fundamentalist, was I would say mainstream evangelical and probably still conservative on women’s issues but very open to other ways of understanding that issue.

I don’t really remember at what point, if it was near the end of my college experience or beginning of my seminary experience, I went to Denver Seminary, had some great mentors there. And I know while I was at Denver Seminary, I became a convinced egalitarian.

And that came out of various kinds of experiences. Part of it was coming to have a much better understanding of the world in which the New Testament was written, and especially Paul, in the context of his letters and the things that he says about women, among other things. And part of it was just understanding more broadly what theology would say about how I should relate to my own wife and other women as well.

But maybe we’ll get around to that later. After seminary, my wife and I were appointed to go overseas and we had two kids by then and we took our kids and we went to Portugal where I trained pastors. And overall, our time in Portugal span about 12 years, and in the middle of that, I spent a couple of years in Scotland doing my PhD.

I had wonderful time training pastors and Christian leaders in Portugal, worked with the Bible Society there to help with their contemporary Portuguese translation of the Bible. And then I was invited to go teach at Gordon-Conwell in 2001. So I taught the New Testament studies at Gordon-Conwell from 2001 to 2014. At a certain point became the Chair of the Division of Biblical Studies there.

And then after or 13 years there, I went and worked for four years for American Bible Society, training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants around the world. I still taught for Gordon Conwell on weekends while I was doing that, but my main gig was training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants. So that was a great experience, but I missed the full-time academic community.

So in 2018 I accepted the invitation to take on the role of Chair of the Religion Department which soon became the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. But.

In 2024, I retired and moved back to New Hampshire, which is where my wife and I had had a place for a while, and it’s our happy place. And so I’m now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and I teach a course a semester for Gordon Conwell. I’m teaching Interpreting the New Testament for Gordon Conwell on Thursdays right now. So I mean, that’s that’s more than you wanted, probably, but that’s kind of the overview.

Ruth Perry (06:38)
No, that’s great. Congratulations on retiring and then continuing your work.

Roy Ciampa (06:44)
Thank you. Well, there’s lots of what I’ve done that I love. I’m still writing books and articles and teaching one day a week scratches that itch. so it’s fun.

Ruth Perry (06:53)
I’m a Gordon College graduate myself. I was a music major there and the reason why I decided to study music was because I loved the church and I wanted to be in ministry and that’s where I saw women serving in the church. So I studied music and then I decided to go to Gordon Conwell in 2003 when I graduated from Gordon College because I still loved learning so much and I wanted to continue learning and in my conception of my ministry life, I always conceived myself as just being in volunteer ministry in the church. And that I would be a pastor’s wife, likely, or a missionary’s wife. I really wanted to live overseas. I went backpacking through Europe while I was in college, and Portugal was my favorite. I loved Portugal.

Roy Ciampa (07:41)
It’s a great country.

Ruth Perry (07:41)
And so I would have liked to have been a missionary or a musician, but those were really the only two ideas that I had in my brain that a woman could do in the church. I knew that I loved the church more than anything and I really wanted to serve the church. So that’s what brought me to Gordon-Conwell and brought me to your classroom. And it sounds like it was early on in your teaching there.

Roy Ciampa (08:00)
Yeah, it was early on at Gordon-Conwell. I taught for a number of years in Portugal, but that was in my early years at Gordon-Conwell, yes. And I remember that course called Ephesians in Depth, as I recall.

Ruth Perry (08:09)
It was in depth for sure. Yes. I remember we went word by word and we would, I can’t even remember how to explain what you did with us in the class. I was trying to find my class notes because I know that they’re in my basement somewhere. But I remember we parsed every sentence and figured out what the structure was. And you really brought it.

Roy Ciampa (08:29)
Ha

Ruth Perry (08:37)
It was hard work and it brought the book to life for me.

Roy Ciampa (08:41)
That’s so kind of you to say. I’m grateful to hear that.

Ruth Perry (08:43)
And it’s such a beautiful book. Ephesians, it just, the words that come to mind when I think about Ephesians is, Paul keeps talking about peace and love and unity and the power of the Holy Spirit and all the blessings that we’ve received from God. And it’s just such a beautiful theological grounding of then why we should follow Christ and live in a way worthy of the calling we’ve received.

And so I don’t know how much you want to talk about Ephesians itself before we get to the household codes in Ephesians 5. But what I really want to talk with you too for my Beautiful Kingdom Builders audience is the context of the book of Ephesians and what was going on in the cultural world at that time that would have helped the people who are hearing Paul’s message in that day understand it maybe differently than we understand it today.

Roy Ciampa (09:35)
Well, yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. So many different aspects of it. And I think one of the things, actually in our church, we’re in a small group right now that’s going through Ephesians. And so it’s been kind of fun to do that in a church Bible study again. But one of the things I think that’s key to Ephesians, you just have this joyful, kind of, I would say worshipful kind of tone to the whole thing.

Many people have pointed out that the letter has a different style than most of Paul’s letters. It has these kind of run-on sentences and these kind of complicated sentences. There’s lots of what we call pleonasms where you could say something simply, but in a pleonasm you could put up two or three different ways of saying it within the same sentence. So over and over again Paul will say we have kind of this blessing of redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. And it’s like, well, those are two different ways of talking about the same thing, or he’ll talk about within one line, he does this a couple of times in the opening part of Ephesians, that everything’s happened according to God’s purpose and his will and his choice. It’s like, well, those are just three different ways of saying God did what he wanted to do.

And I’m reminded that, We find examples of this in various contexts. We find it in poetry and we find it in worship music. An example I typically use is the song Majesty, Worship His Majesty. And if you go through that song over and over again, it finds different ways to say the same thing in new words. Kingdom authority, majesty, kingdom authority, so exalt, lift up on high. Those are two different things, they’re not. Exalt, lift up on high, the name of Jesus. Magnify, come glorify. What’s the difference between magnifying, it’s all the same thing.

Singing this is just a worshipful, excited, rich, different way of expressing yourself. And Paul begins the letter with what’s called a Jewish Baruchah, which in Hebrew would be blessed, be like Baruch HaTah, Adonai Eloheinu, blessed as the Lord our God. he starts out, blessed is the…

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every blessing in Christ. And so I think the style is different and I think it’s different for a purpose because Paul’s wanting to express his theology in a very worshipful almost liturgical kind of way.

And it’s remarkable that he’s doing that while he’s under arrest. He says he’s in chains, which reminds us of Acts of course, when they’re imprisoned in Philippi and they end up singing songs and praising God in prison. And here Paul is, he’s in prison and he writes a letter and he writes it in the key of worship. And partly that’s because just who Paul is and partly because he’s writing to readers who are Gentiles, who are so far away from where Christianity began in Jerusalem and Judea. And they’ve got to be thinking as Gentiles, like their spiritual leader is now in prison and could lose his life.

What does this mean? Have they gotten themselves messed up with something they shouldn’t have? Has a train gone off the rails and they’ve got to be concerned about Paul. They’ve got to be concerned about what all this means. And here’s Paul, he writes from prison, he’s like, God’s plan is working itself out in this wonderful way and it’s such a blessing to me to be a part of this. let’s praise God for all the blessings that we have. And let me just list off some of these blessings for you.

And it really is, I think, meant to reassure the readers that… the train hasn’t gone off the rails, that God is in charge, that everything that they’ve experienced is part of God’s plan of redemption and of reconciling Jews and Gentiles together and to God, and that Paul is not at all, know, fretting or depressed or himself concerned that something’s gone wrong because he’s in prison, but he sees God’s hand in all of this. So I think that’s a, for me, that’s a very important part of the background.

And then you have to be careful because I’m tempted to try and lecture my way through a whole semester’s worth of stuff on Ephesians in one little conversation. But I do think, you know, that most people recognize that two halves of the letter have different tones and sometimes they describe the first half as doctrine and the second as practical teaching.

But an important key is that it’s not just that Paul decided to talk and discuss theology for a while and then look at his watch and said, well, that’s maybe enough theology for them. Maybe I should give them some practical stuff. And so let me talk practical stuff for a while. But the theology underwrites the practical part. That is, the theology, the first part is there to support everything he’s going to tell the church that they ought to be doing.

And the second part, they are organized organically related to each other. And the whole first part is about God’s grace, his mercy, his love, how he hasn’t treated us the way we deserve when we were, you know, children of wrath by nature. He hasn’t treated us that way, but he’s shown us love and mercy and grace and blessing upon blessing upon blessing. And then we get in the second half of the letter. And in my understanding, the second half of letter is primarily all about imitating God.

And so we get that theme early on how we should be imitators of God. We shouldn’t live like the Gentiles live. That’s one of the themes. But we should be imitators of God. And then he talks about how God has shown his love to us in Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and his love for us. And so we have sections that talk about how we should be one, united together as one body.

And then we have material talking about how we should and love and we should walk in the light and then later how we should walk in wisdom and then finally the last part is where we should put on the full armor of God and we look at those things they come what do these things have in common being one walking in love and light and wisdom well love and light are two main attributes of God God is love God is light

And then wisdom is another very well-known attribute of God, the all-wise one. And there’s large sections of scripture dedicated to wisdom and Proverbs 8 and elsewhere. And that’s understood to be an attribute of God. And then you think,

When we walk in love, we’re imitating God. When we walk in light, we’re imitating God. When we walk in wisdom, we’re imitating God and His wisdom. And then you realize that the full armor of God we’re supposed to put on is not just armor that God gives us, but the Old Testament background tells us this is the armor that God puts on. He puts on a helmet of salvation. He puts on a breastplate of righteousness. When he goes and he fights spiritual battles for his people. So even when we put on our spiritual armor, we’re still imitating God.

That earlier part about being one, it’s like, that’s right, God is one. So when we’re one, you there’s one God, one Lord, one baptism, and when we act as one, we’re also imitating God. So one of the greatest ways we imitate God then, when you understand the relationship between the first half of the letter and the second half, is by treating other people the way he’s treated us.

He hasn’t treated us as he could have, but he treated us with love, with mercy, with grace, over and over again. And this ends up becoming very important for, as you referred to, the household codes, because they’re a main theme is about how people in charge with authority treat people that in that culture were under them, wives were under their husbands and children under the parents and slaves under their masters. And so one of the main themes that comes out there is, again, the emphasis tends to be on the person with power, treating the one with less power with grace and mercy and not being harsh with them. But I mean, that raises all kinds of other questions about why do we have household codes and what’s this about?

We’re talking about household codes, we’re talking about slaves and masters. And we don’t have slaves and masters in our household. We think of those as something outside the family. You get your family, and then you get your employees or other people. But of course, that was part of the family. But hey, I’ve been going on for a while now, Ruth, so maybe feel free.

Ruth Perry (18:02)
No, you’re cooking. I’m enjoying it immensely. I was thinking about back to your class, I remember that before we got into the household codes, you started that passage in Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, making music in your heart to the Lord and always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ. That all of those things were under that same heading of be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Roy Ciampa (18:42)
Yes, it is. And being filled with the Holy Spirit is under the heading of walking in wisdom. So, because it’s one of the things is if you look for the term walking, which is often translated as live, like live in love or live according to light. The metaphor is walking in the light and walking in love and walking in children of light or walk wisely. And then the wisdom part underneath that is all the stuff about being filled with the spirit and submitting to one another.

And then so all that stuff about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves comes under the submitting to one another part, which comes under the being filled with the Holy Spirit part, which comes under the walking in wisdom part.

And it’s Paul providing his readers with wisdom about how to live in family in the first century Ephesian or, you know, Greco-Roman context. And of course, it’s important that context is radically different from ours.

Ruth Perry (19:44)
Can you describe that context for us.

Roy Ciampa (19:47)
Sure. Well, in a few different ways. Maybe one way to start is by, just as we were already kind of hinting at…

that when we talk about a household code, we do talk about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves because the household was very differently structured than we think of it today. That many households, they had slaves within the household and they’d have also freed men and free women in some cases in the household as well. And so we think of a household typically as, you know, parents and their children and nuclear family.

And sometimes we think of the extended family as well. Maybe there are grandparents around or something. But we don’t think of parents and children and slaves and freed men and women as part of a household. But that is a part of what a fairly well-to-do or a somewhat well-to-do household would have all those components. And then, you know, we realize

When people preach through Ephesians, when they get to the stuff about slaves and masters, they realize what we don’t approve of masters and slaves today. And so if they’re to preach on that, they kind of adapt it and say, well, this might apply to like employees and employers and that sort of thing. And so here we can get some wisdom for how we can relate to each other as employees and employers. And maybe there’s it’s OK. But it’s really important to point out that employees are not slaves and employers are not masters. And so you have to make adaptations.

You can’t just say all the employers shouldn’t treat the employees the way Paul thought, you know, masters should treat slaves. And we have to be reminded that Paul’s not endorsing slavery, but early Christians were living in a world where this is just part of the social fabric. They weren’t put in charge. They weren’t asked to take over the social fabric and restructure it. They had to learn how can they live as Christians within that social fabric and within these institutions. And so Paul provides wisdom for those who are in these situations.

But as I was saying, when we get to that stuff about masters and slaves, people say, we have to make adjustments. We can’t just apply that to employees and employers because that’s not the same thing. But when we preach about husbands and wives, people look around and say, I know husbands and wives, and many of us will say, well, I’m a husband or I’m a wife and I have a wife or a husband. And so they’re all around us. So when he starts talking about husbands and wives, we’re like, okay, we know what he’s talking about.

This is something very familiar to all of us, except that it isn’t because marriage has evolved in many ways. And so to go back and realize that in the Greco-Roman world, Men didn’t typically marry until they were 28 to 30 years old. And partly because there was no expectation with the double standard that’s typical in all of history, the double standard with regard to sex is that men weren’t expected to remain pure or virgins until marriage. They had access to prostitutes and household slaves and other sexual outlets and that wasn’t considered a problem by most people in the Greco-Roman world. Whereas women were expected to be married shortly after going through puberty.

When I was in class, I have like a 40 page document, you may or may not recall of this kind of material from the Old Testament and quotes from the Greco-Roman world and different sources where people are talking about husbands and wives and it talks about age at marriage and it talks about, you know, the understanding that it’s good if a woman or girl can know how to carry on a conversation and maybe do a little bit of sewing, a little bit of cooking, but that’s about it because she’s supposed to learn everything she learns from her husband that she’s supposed to be like a tabla rasa, she’s supposed to be like a blank slate on whom the husband can leave his impressions.

I was just reading, reviewing again because something came up on social media. I don’t remember what it was anymore, but it was about, that’s what it was, this woman’s book recently. A woman wrote a book on misogyny in America and the publisher accidentally put out an ad or an email inviting people to submit for exam copies. whoever prepared the text for that forgot to replace the name of the author from a previous book they must have worked on. And so they had the title of the book in the book cover, but the author’s name was a man who hadn’t written anything like this, who writes in very different subjects.

So here’s a book on misogyny in the church, and the publisher puts out something that attributes it to a man instead of the woman who wrote it, and reminded me of this ancient… thing about somebody who’s talking about some man’s wife who’s a man who’s great at poetry and he’s presented some poetry from his wife and he claims that his wife wrote this wonderful poetry and this person’s saying it’s great poetry but you know I’m not sure if his wife really wrote it but either way the husband deserves the credit because either he’s the one who really wrote it or He’s the one that taught her.

So whatever the woman produces, it’s always back to the man. Because again, she’s expected to have learned whatever she knows through her husband, a woman getting married right after puberty and a man not marrying until he’s 28 or 30 years old. There’s a huge difference, not only in age, but maturity, knowledge of the world and in the Greco-Roman world, the extent to which women were expected to be more or less confined to the home, whereas men could go anywhere and could have a greater education so their knowledge of the world is different. Their human development at marriage and then throughout marriage. You might say, 10 years later it’ll be different. Well, 10 years later they still, they would have already formed a kind of relationship where he’s practically like a parent.

The husband’s practically a parent or Ben Witherington describes it as almost an uncle-niece relationship between a husband and wife at that time. And that changes a lot. I mean, that helps you understand all kinds of things in the New Testament when people are talking about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. It’s a significant thing in terms of submission if the wife has always only been kind of tutored by her husband and taught by him and mentored by him.

You know, three stages of human development behind him, then it’s natural that the man’s going to be treated as though he’s more knowledgeable, wiser, more experienced, better able to provide any kind of leadership needed, and that that’s the role that he should have. Which brings us back to that whole thing about love and mercy.

One of things that I realized when I started looking through these texts and thinking about it more was if one of the main themes of the letter is that we should treat each other as Christ and God has treated us, if my wife is my peer, which is something that just was not normally ever the case in the Greco-Roman world, right? We were just talking about that. But my wife is more or less my age. She has the same experience of the world. She hasn’t been cooped up at home. She’s got college education. She has, a master’s degree. She’s wiser than I am on many things and just as intelligent as I am. If she’s my peer in every way, does Jesus, does God really want us to pretend as though I’m much wiser and more knowledgeable than she is and better able to lead in every situation than she is?

Because that was the traditional slot of a wife in first century Ephesus and the slot of a husband in first century Ephesus or should I actually treat her for who she really is? And to recognize her strengths and her knowledge and her wisdom and her abilities. And this relates to something I’ve sometimes referred to as the mapping of identities. That is, we look at women today and we map onto them the identity we find of a wife in the first century Ephesus. We look at a husband today and we map onto them the identity of a husband in first century Ephesus. And we do that in other ways as well. I have an whole article about ways in which this mapping of identities can create real problems.

But I don’t think I should ask my wife to try and fill a slot from a different culture and time, asks her to treat me and asks me to treat her as though we are so different, as though we are as different as the first century Greco-Roman husband and wife, when in fact we’re actually peers. And then I’d go back and realize that if this whole second part is about learning how to treat other people…as God has treated us, and I realize, well, even if you look at the household code, the instructions to husbands and wives aren’t exactly the same as the husbands to parents and children, and neither of those are the same as the instructions to slaves and masters. So Paul recognized that although we’re all supposed to be Christ-like and treat others in Christ-like ways, the nature of the relationship is going to impact what that looks like.

And so the first century Greco-Roman husband-wife relationship is different from the parent-child relationship is different from the slave-master relationship. So Paul provides different instructions. So then I begin to think and realize, well, then we can treat this as a case study.

We have at least three case studies and what it means to apply Christ-like, God-like love and mercy and grace to other people. And it’s one thing in the marriage, one thing with the children, another thing with masters and slaves. Maybe it would be something else if it was with a spouse who is my peer and who is as intelligent and wise and able to lead and do other things as I am, as my same age, same experience of the world, what would it then mean for me to treat her in a Christ-like way and for her to treat me in a Christ-like way and not try to fit them into some…

You know, I’m reminded we have a two and a half year old granddaughter, you know, those cubes you get that have the different shapes, there’s the triangle and there’s the square and the rectangle and the star and you have the blocks, you’re trying to fit them through the right shapes, you know, and I feel like lots of times they’re taking, you know, modern men and women who are very different shapes and we’re trying to fit them into the shapes of the first century husband and wife, male and female.

And those pieces just don’t fit. And the key question still comes back to, if I’m looking at the second half of Ephesians, I’m learning how to walk wisely in acting in Christ-like ways towards people around me.

And so there lots of different relationships. There’s the student athlete relationship. There’s the police officer citizen relationship. There’s the teacher student relationship. There’s the husband wife relationship. There’s the employee employee employee relationship. And all of these we learn how to treat each other in loving ways. But we don’t have to find some first century Greco-Roman slot to fit people into to make that relationship match the one we have.

Ruth Perry (31:02)
I feel like the way my brain works is that I have a sieve inside my brain and when I go to class I learn the information and it all goes away. But for some reason I really latched on to all of that that you taught 20 years ago and then I went off and I got married the next year and it just fell completely into traditional rules because that’s what I grown up with and that’s what had been modeled to me and same for my husband. And so it was just natural to not even think about how we’re going to relate to each other. We just fell into the traditional rules that we had been taught through example and direct teaching. And almost immediately for me as the woman, I could recognize that my voice was diminished, my importance was diminished, and it created some cognitive dissonance for me. But I didn’t, I just tolerated it. I didn’t really rock the boat any.

And then we had another experience early on in our marriage. I’m thinking maybe three or four years after we got married, our church had a really terrible conflict and split. My dad was a pastor and so it was deeply personal. And you’re teaching again on the book of Ephesians. I looked at that experience and it was a traditional church structure with men in leadership. And it was clear as day to me that if the women had a voice and a place at the table in that conflict, things wouldn’t have been as ugly as they were and as destructive and terrible. And so those two things, like my early marriage years and walking through that church conflict,

The importance of your teaching on the book of Ephesians really snapped into place for me crystal clear that if we are walking in a manner worthy of the calling we’ve received, we’re going to submit to one another, male, female, slave, free, Gentile. Like there’s no distinctions that if we’re truly living in the way that God has called us to live, that we’re going to love each other. And that means we’re going to listen to each other’s voices, that every voice has a place and has value.

And we’re going to submit the mutual submission piece that we often gloss straight over and go into, OK, but wives, you’re submitting, and then the husband is the head.

Roy Ciampa (33:12)
Mm-hmm. Right, yes. No, it really, it ends up being, and I hate to say it, but in many cases, not a loving sort of thing, but a very obedience, command-centered sort of thing, which kind of is pushing them back against the grain of the letter as a whole, and the way I understand the theology of the letter as a whole.

By the way, one of the key texts that I think is helpful for thinking about this is in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, where Paul has that part that says, and some people think that this doesn’t belong in the Bible, and I don’t know what you think, but I think verses 34 and 35 are supposed to be there. But it’s the part that says women should remain silent in the churches, they’re not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.

They want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Now Paul had already taught that both men and women could pray and prophesy, right, back in chapter 11. And that’s remarkable in itself because a lot of people look at 1 Corinthians 11, they think, because it starts off about who’s the head of who, who’s the head you know, God is the head of Christ, who’s the head of the man, who’s head of the woman. it sounds like, okay, yeah, very much what sort of subordination here and all this sort of thing.

But when he actually gets into it, he talks about ministry in just two terms, prayer and prophecy. Gordon Fee has suggested, and I think he’s probably right, that those are like big terms for discourse directed to God. That’s prayer and discourse directed at the congregation, which is prophecy. But in any case, those are the only two things he talks about. And he says both men and women can do it. They just have to dress appropriately when they’re doing it. So there’s nothing in there about any kinds of ministries that men can do that women can’t.

But anyway, so he’s already said that they can pray and prophesy. So what’s this all about? They should remain silent. And so obviously he’s not speaking about speaking in general. He has certain kinds of speaking. And in that very passage, he says, if they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. Well, that may be the hint that what he’s talking about is women who don’t understand something that’s going on.

Again, remember the women would have less education, less experience of the world, less knowledge of what’s going on around them. And if they don’t know what’s going on and they’re asking questions that are interrupting them in the church, and in that culture, for a woman to ask another man, somebody else’s husband their question, would be really offensive and would raise all kinds of concerns. Anyway, so.

If that’s what’s going on, Paul says if they have things they should inquire of their own husbands at home. Now, you know, I may have said this when I taught you in class, but I mean, I’ve been teaching since, you know, a full-time teacher since I suppose I started in 1991. And I don’t know how many times I could have said, having both a husband and a wife in my class, I could have said to the husband, if you’re not getting all this, you might ask your wife to explain it to you when you get home.

I’ve very often had husbands and wives in the class and it’s not unusual for the wife to understand things better than to be more academically strong than the husband is. I could never say, you know, if any of the women here don’t understand what I’m talking about, why don’t you ask your own husband at home? not that I couldn’t just say it because it wouldn’t be politically correct, but it would just be stupid.

And I’m not saying Paul’s stupid, The expression assumes a culture and a context where the husband can be virtually guaranteed to know more and understand things better than their wife, which is perfectly reasonable for the Greco-Roman context of Corinth that Paul’s speaking to, not Corinth and Ephesus and the whole world in which Paul’s speaking because of this age and education and experience gap that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. So a verse like that makes perfectly good sense in that context, but would make absolutely no sense in a world where men and women can both be educated and experienced And so again, I think it really is a problem of, I think, very harmful biblical interpretation when

We end up trying to act as though we are living in roles that were filled by first century people. And we’re gonna figure out how to treat each other in those roles as opposed to treating people for who they actually are. And that’s at the core of love, isn’t it? To know someone, to respect them for who they are, for what they bring to the table, and to learn from each other and to submit to each other.

And that’s really a large part of what effusions is about.

Ruth Perry (38:10)
I think from my background being very conservative, there was a lot of warning against listening to people who didn’t share traditional values because they were being influenced by the culture around them or they were playing fast and loose with scripture and they weren’t taking the word of God seriously or this or that. Like there were so many warnings against listening to someone who might suggest mutual submission or sharing authority between men and women in ministry and in the home.

And in my experience, just with my encounter of you, Dr. Ciampa and since you, many other egalitarian scholars and pastors, they’ve all taken the word of God seriously, and their life has shown the fruit of the Spirit in ways that isn’t always readily witnessed in other people’s lives who are really clinging to the authority structures and having power over others. And so I’m really grateful that I took this Ephesians class with you 20 something years ago and that I remembered all the information even though I compartmentalized it at the time and filed it away and went on with my traditional ways. I’m grateful that it was accessible when I needed it and when things started falling apart. And so then I didn’t just say Well, if this is what Christianity is, I don’t want it. But I could imagine a more beautiful Christianity because of what you had taught me.

Roy Ciampa (39:42)
That’s very kind, but I think that it is very sad to see people turning away from Christianity because the presentation they’ve received is not wholesome, it’s not healthy, it’s not edifying. And too often it is, as you said, very much about power and who can have power. And so it’s very sad to see large parts of a whole generation are more that are turning away from the church because of the way the church in Christianity has been presented, which is sad. And we do think it’s such a beautiful thing. The truth of God’s grace and the grace that he teaches us to live by ought to be something that ought to attract people from all over the globe to this great God of love and grace and mercy who’s worthy of all our praise.

Ruth Perry (40:30)
the message of Ephesians is speaking to us today. And I pray we all have ears to hear.

Where can we find your papers and your writing? Dr. Ciampa, do you have a website or do you have the online presence?

Roy Ciampa (40:43)
I have a website. Yeah, actually, but it’s not it’s just a purely pedagogical sort of thing. And I, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours, if not thousands, thousands in the heyday of my career. So I have a I have a website called viceregency.com And the.com is a joke, because I’ve never done any commercial stuff with it. should be a.org. But I have vice regency.com. And then it’s it’s all links to different things you can learn from and

Maybe I’ll go there and add a link to this paper. I’ll tell you what, I’ll send it to you in case there’s some place you want to post it on, on anything you’re doing.

Ruth Perry (41:20)
I have a Facebook page called the Beautiful Kingdom Builders. I will put it there and I want to give you the last word before we sign off.

Roy Ciampa (41:31)
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a blessing to be with you and it is anything I can do to help people see how great and marvelous, as Paul was trying to say in Ephesians, how beyond anything we can imagine is the love of God, how deep and high and wide, and in every dimension you can imagine this love of God that we find in Jesus Christ and the mercy and love that it teaches us to express towards others.

May God advance that through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. So thanks for having me.

Ruth Perry (42:02)
Thank you so much. Amen. Have a great time in your retirement and as you continue to teach. Thank you so much. Bye.

Roy Ciampa (42:08)
Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Builders and listening to this podcast episode. You can subscribe by email here up on the far right of this blog, and find TBKB on all your favorite podcasting and social media platforms. God bless!

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004 I Scott Harris on the Good News and Reflections on the Church

Posted on December 31, 2025 by | Leave a comment

In this conversation, my friend Scott Harris shares his journey of faith, discussing his upbringing in a mainline Protestant church, his college experiences, and his perspective on the challenges faced by the church today after 42 years in parachurch ministry. He emphasizes the importance of following Jesus and articulating the gospel in a way that resonates with contemporary issues. The discussion also touches on the need for the church to adapt and address the concerns of those leaving it, while promoting a message of love for God and neighbor.

Scott mentions reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as he was making his faith his own as a young man, we talk about our Clifton StrengthsFinder results and Enneagram numbers. and Scott recommends the book Kingdom Come: How Jesus Wants to Change the World by Allen M. Wakabayashi (available here). I’ve purchased a copy and look forward to reading it in the new year!

You can watch this episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, and more!

Transcript:

Ruth Perry (00:15)
I would love to just know more about my friend Scott that I’ve been in Bible studies with online and I’ve met online, but we’ve never met in person. And I know little things about your life, but I don’t know the Scott Harris story and what your testimony is.

Scott Harris (00:23)
I’ve been around a long time. I guess you had mentioned, knowing a little bit about my background, I think I’ll summarize and say that I grew up in Northern Illinois in a family attending a mainline Protestant church, a believing mother, a non-believing father, both of whom were from Texas. So I have heritage in more than one part of the country.

To go further ahead, when I was in high school, my family moved to Indiana where the state that I currently live in, and we began attending a mainline Presbyterian church, but not just any mainline Presbyterian church, a church where there was a desire to help people, younger and older to make personal decisions to belong to Jesus. That wasn’t the terminology they used, but it was a call for me and all kinds of others. So high school age, it was a call for me and lots of others to make specific decisions. I found that very difficult. of the difficulties I had was understanding evangelical jargon because I was told, all you have to, in fact I think I’m quoting my brother, all you have to do is accept Jesus into your heart. For people with some kinds of church backgrounds that make sense, for others it doesn’t mean very much, it’s just an odd collection of words together. I struggled for some time to figure out what that meant.

A pastor recommended, since I was asking questions, to read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I kind of read through that during my senior year in high school. That wasn’t the only factor, but a number of factors came together that I found myself coming to some kind of faith about the time I entered high school. I entered college as a heartfelt Christian and sought to grow as a Christian from there. Am I telling you information you want to know, Ruth?

Ruth Perry (02:38)
Yes, this is, I personally want to know. Now I’m thinking, I grew up more conservative and I’m kind of curious to know the way that mainline Protestants were spoken of or thought of in my experience is that you don’t even believe in Jesus Christ as a supernatural God being. And so in your experience, was your mainline faith orthodox? I think there’s so many biases among the more conservative minded that I’ve had to undo myself, but that’s like an initial question that I have.

Scott Harris (03:14)
First of all, to be fair, I’m not a master of mainline Protestantism, but of course we need to recognize that it is very diverse. in any individual mainline Protestant church of any size, you have a diverse congregation of people with differing levels, maybe of orthodoxy, if we want to use that word. It’s nonetheless unfair to just…

gather a little bit of data together to judge people’s orthodoxy. You can’t judge orthodoxy by litmus tests. I think also leadership of mainline Protestant churches come from variety of backgrounds and they study at a variety of seminaries and so you can’t put all of them in one category. And then there are the different denominations.

Okay, the church I grew up in childhood, which I’m calling a mainline Protestant church in northern Illinois, I was of an age that I don’t remember many things by which I can determine just how orthodox they were or not. I’m sure it was a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds. It was when my family moved to Indiana that I would say the mainline Presbyterian Church staff was quite orthodox. They believed in God. They believed in Jesus. If you wanted to use the jargon as Lord and Savior. And it was clear over and over again and it was a priority of their youth program not to give altar calls, not to put pressure on, but to make it clear again and again that it was a personal decision that we needed to make. So it was evangelistic in that sense. So I can neither confirm nor deny conservative churches’ of mainline Protestantism. There is a diversity in it.

Ruth Perry (04:59)
I think that’s very true because I’ve just been working in the United Methodist Church now for a couple years. And I think it’s been a little surprising for me just to see how conservative the people, like they’re so evangelical. And so that’s been surprising. It’s also been surprising to me how many people have moved to the United Methodist Church from other denominations that are serving in ministry, as you said. And so culturally it’s interesting to me how strong evangelicalism’s influence has been in the mainline church.

Scott Harris (05:23)
Yeah. Yeah, and for moving to Indiana and beginning to do full-time ministry in Indiana, it became very clear, at least in my part of the state, that the United Methodist Church was highly evangelical in its leadership and in its membership. I worked at a university that had a lot of people coming from rural areas, and those rural Methodist churches were rather conservative in a number of ways. Other places in the state it might be different and other parts of Methodism of course are different.

Ruth Perry (06:04)
That sounds really wonderful that you were encouraged to make your faith your own and that you went to college as a strong believer because I know in your work I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of students haven’t had that kind of formation. So that’s wonderful.

Scott Harris (06:19)
Yes. So I entered a small liberal arts college. lived in a fraternity only because it was an all-male college and listeners of this podcast will be able to figure out what college it was. I’m very glad to have attended it. I found myself really valuing what I would call Christian fellowship at the time. Interdenominational connections with people from a variety of church backgrounds that wanted to encourage each other in knowing God, knowing the Bible, and following the ways that God directs us through the Bible.

I don’t think I would have used those terms at the time, but that was a very rich experience for me, and because I desired it so much, I created a lot of it, or I catalyzed a lot of it. I was somebody who found Christians around campus in my fraternity and other fraternities that were interested in meeting together. And I was not the first person to do this, but under some of my leadership, we got an actual campus organization functioning that functioned as an ongoing organization my third and fourth years in college.

Ruth Perry (07:33)
Fantastic. What would you call that gift? I know you have it. I mean, is it hospitality?

Scott Harris (07:38)
I would not say I’m gifted in hospitality. I would call it networking. Some people who are like me who have done the Clifton Strengths Finder test rate high in Connectedness, if anybody is aware of that. So you and I are similar in that sense. That has driven me in a lot of ways before I had a label on it, but I’ve always called myself a networker.

Ruth Perry (07:52)
I rated high on Connectedness. What are your other Clifton strengths?

Scott Harris (08:05)
My goodness, what an excellent question. I don’t remember the specifics of the top five or whatever. I took the test twice and Connectedness rated first both times. That’s why I labeled as number one. Four out of the five were exactly the same in each one. And the other three of the top four, even though I don’t remember their names, if you put them all together, it means I have a very easy tendency to be a smart aleck. I have a very easy tendency to want to learn things and tell other people things that I learned. It’s, I guess Communication is one of them, which is basically oral communication in the StrengthsFinder. Another one has to do with Learning. So I like to learn and I like to communicate what I learn and I’m talkative and I’m long-winded and I’m an external processor. It all measures up in my top strengths of the StrengthsFinder.

Ruth Perry (09:04)
Did you ever look into the Enneagram and what your number is there?

Scott Harris (09:08)
Yes, my wife has been helped a lot by the Enneagram. Lots of colleagues of mine are. I don’t know many things about it, but I do recognize that I align as a nine. I don’t know whether I’m a eight wing or a one wing, but I recognize nine-ness.

Ruth Perry (09:28)
Cool. Well that’s beautiful. Now I’m thinking about what are the other things? There’s the DISC. Have you done that? What else?

Scott Harris (09:34)
I don’t remember DISC and Myers-Briggs, if you want to go back in time, my Myers-Briggs has changed over time. I think it’s changed in part because I’ve done the same kind of work for 42 years and my personality has adapted to it. I don’t think Myers-Briggs is supposed to be like that, but when I first took it, I was kind of close
to the border between introvert and extrovert, but now I’m a massive extrovert in various ways because it’s been, it’s useful for my work to function as an extrovert. Has that rewired my brain? I don’t know, but unfortunately for this conversation, I don’t remember where I rate them the three other categories.

Ruth Perry (10:19)
Does your social battery ever dry up?

Scott Harris (10:22)
I’m of a certain age and I admit that the older I get, less capacity my social battery has. And maybe that’s just physical fatigue. I get energized by people, but I also get tired out by people things and I do have a desire to retreat. Maybe that’s made me a more healthy, balanced person. I don’t know.

Ruth Perry (10:33)
Yeah. So as a college person, you had made your faith your own. You were already exercising your gifts and bringing others into a community with you to have fellowship and grow and learn together. That’s all very cool. How would you describe your faith at that time, like with theological terms, like were you Arminian or Calvinist or?

Scott Harris (11:05)
Okay, these are very good questions and I can kind of say none of the above to that kind of thing. Let me give a more satisfying answer by saying the non-denominationality or the inter-denominationality of the organization I was with and still am and the influences I came under and the reading, the little bit of reading I did did not focus me or cornering me into very many specific categories. So I was neither trained to be Calvinist nor Armenian. If you want to talk about categories, you know, decades into the work, you can throw the category of Anabaptism as something that kind of slowly has grown and it’s influence over me.

In the evangelical world that I was in, dispensationalism is something that is kind of a default setting for lots of people in some areas of theology. I have grown, I never was particularly dispensationalist and now I’m very non-dispensationalist with time. And I think in my work I have chosen to not align myself in very many specific ways with doctrinal movements.

I do have a little master’s degree in biblical and theological studies and a master of arts degree, but it was at an institution that did not try to train me in any doctrinal settings. So I still am quite non-denominational.

Ruth Perry (12:39)
That’s great.

Scott Harris (12:39)
Although that’s in my thinking and in my theology, I do value belonging to denominations, but working with Christians from a variety of backgrounds, I love working in a non-denominational organization.

Ruth Perry (12:54)
How would you describe…Do you feel like, I think a lot of people are drawn out of denominations right now because of our, like we’re distrustful of institutions. We recognize that one institution hasn’t figured it all out. And so we want to be more open. How do you feel about denominations that kind of plant seemingly non-denominational churches, but they’re rooted in a deep, point of view.

Scott Harris (13:20)
Yeah, I don’t have a lot of opinions on this, but it is a very good question. I will briefly say that I value not getting too specific in what you require of members of an organization. I also value very specific theological education and thought and study for leaders. Those might be kind of paradoxical, but

It’s what I think. One of the things I value most about denominations is what I guess I would call accountability. In a denominator, even though there are different structures of polity in denominations, ultimately you are responsible to some kind of leadership within your denomination and you can be held accountable. And I guess a few years ago, I may not have recognized that value of denominations, but because of so much harm, and I guess I would say leadership abuse coming from the non-denominational world, it gives me a rising value of denominational accountability, even though I’ve never been a part of it. I’ve thought about getting licensed, I’ve never really thought about getting ordained, different denominations do it in different ways. It might be something I would do in the future, but I’ve never been a regular preacher or teacher or overseer of theological discourse. So at this point in time I haven’t sought to align myself with a denomination. I do go to a denominational church.

Ruth Perry (14:52)
So how did you and your wife meet?

Scott Harris (14:53)
What a good question. I was a few years into my doing college ministry and she was actually one of the students who became a leader student in the student group. And as is really good conventional wisdom, staff members working with college ministry should not date or fraternize or whatever you want to call it with members of the group, age difference.

Power Differential, I actually went to work overseas and after a few years of overseas work with her being one of the people I kept in contact with, I found, I guess you’d call it romantic feelings growing. And so after I was overseas for a while and after she had finished college for a while, we brought up the topic of maybe starting today.

It was interesting because this took place overseas. This conversation took place in the suburbs of Paris, France. And we began, she was just visiting there and we got together because she knew me. She was visiting with a friend. And we began a long distance relationship kind of knowing the advantages and disadvantages of them to some degree and this is so far back in time That long distance phone calls were quite expensive We did write some letters, but the most satisfying communication we had as a long distance dating couple was to record and send audio cassette tapes in the mail to each other

Ruth Perry (16:23)
Yeah. How cute is that?

Scott Harris (16:36)
We, very cute, I confirm. We actually have some of the cassettes recorded over. We have a handful of those cassettes in a Ziploc bag and some stuff we’ve stored away. And our adult daughter, young adult daughter, has actually listened to some of them and takes great joy in listening to us. We don’t just say gooey romantic things to each other. We’re giving updates on what’s going on in our lives.

Ruth Perry (16:46)
Yeah. Yeah!

Scott Harris (17:03)
And so she gets a glimpse into the past of her parents.

Ruth Perry (17:07)
That’s beautiful. So you’ve been in ministry for 42 years.

Scott Harris (17:11)
Correct.

Ruth Perry (17:12)
And I, one of my, I think one of the driving forces behind me wanting to podcast is just the sheer number of people who’ve left the church in the last several decades. And so this is what I want to address with my podcast is how can we address the issues that are driving people out of the church.

And what can we do to build a more beautiful kingdom in the United States, particularly as my location, but in the world, obviously. I feel like it’s not just the issues that we’re having here in America are in some ways very unique to our situation, but they’re also leaking out into the world in harmful ways. And that…

Scott Harris (17:52)
Hmm.

Ruth Perry (17:53)
I think that’s something that I really appreciated about our friendship. I’m not sure exactly how we got connected, but I’ve made all these little connections on the internet. And with someone with your giftings, I could see how I know that you invited me into a book study that you were doing with some of your Facebook friends. But I’m assuming that we became Facebook friends because of the Beautiful Kingdom Builders page, that maybe that’s our initial connection was.

Scott Harris (18:20)
a networker, as a networker, undoubtedly a friend of mine had posted something from it I wouldn’t be able to say and I began to follow and like what I found there. That’s undoubtedly the beginning of

Ruth Perry (18:20)
I comment, what’s that? As a networker.

Well now I have really appreciated your friendship Scott because what is the thing that you say when you post things? You always share things and you say, this challenges me to follow Jesus Christ. ⁓ Let me see, do you know it off the top of your head what you say?

Scott Harris (18:49)
Yes. I have lengthened it recently, but the older version is this challenges me to follow Jesus and his ways fully above all else, including many things many Christians consider important.

Ruth Perry (19:09)
And then you’ll share a quote or an article or something newsworthy that’s happening. ⁓

Scott Harris (19:17)
or something from

the beautiful Kingdom Builders.

Ruth Perry (19:20)
Well, actually half of the things that I post on my page now come from your posts because I’m just I’m very by the things that challenge you Scott

Scott Harris (19:25)
I have noticed that. Gives me great joy.

Ruth Perry (19:30)
So I’m very grateful for your friendship and for your work that you share online and that you connect and serve and fellowship online as well as in person. And I feel like you’re someone, your heart is seeking after the Lord in beautiful ways and impactful ways. And that’s the kind of person that I want to learn from and I want to be in relationship with and grow with.

And so thank you for all you’ve done. You’ve connected me in Bible studies and book studies too that have helped me get off the internet but stay on the internet in relationship with others and hear from others. And I’m really grateful for you, Scott.

What do you think it is that the church, how has the church gotten off track in a way that is distancing young people from the church?

Scott Harris (20:19)
of course, so many things to say about that. First of all, thank you for your very kind words. likewise for so much that I learned from you as well. Let me answer your question. Let me answer it first by how I feel like I’ve gotten off track a little bit. You were interested in my story and it’s just the story that serious Christian faith during my time in high school became attractive to me because I felt like it was a true understanding of the world.

The word worldview is used by variety of groups to mean a variety of things, but at that time I felt like a properly understood whole Bible worldview helped explain things and help explain what God calls people to. Although I’m using that term whole Bible at this point because at that time I think it was basically Paul’s writings and the logic and the priorities and the emphases and it was kind of the traditional evangelical gospel outline of we are sinners, Jesus died for us, we must respond to Jesus dying for us, etc. that… For much of my Christian life, I have thought that the main thing that a Christian is, is somebody who believes in what…

has done for them. And that is definitely part of it. I wasn’t particularly off track to think that way. I was following the movement I was in. I affirm all of that. However, I think the basic thing that it means to be a Christian at this point in time is to follow Jesus and his ways fully above all else.

Following Jesus includes believing in who Jesus is. Following Jesus includes believing in what Jesus has done. But believing becomes a much bigger whole life kind of thing that it involves. Following Jesus as my example, following Jesus as my master, becoming an apprentice of Jesus. I haven’t…

been regularly using these terms for too many years and when I use these terms I realize just what a high calling it is and how much further I have to go and how it is a challenging life of constantly calling oneself into question and revising and asking for God’s help and the help of the Holy Spirit to step forward in ways that more more followed Jesus.

To answer the question you asked. I think a number of people are leaving the church in part, I’m not speaking for all people or all churches, in part because they have been taught to add a whole lot of baggage to following Jesus. The baggage is different in different situations. In recent years in the United States, a lot of the baggage is political baggage or culture wars baggage. Of course, there’s a big overlap between politics and culture wars or the baggage of narrow approaches to how children are raised or how people should be educated or how people should think.

When so much of the New Testament emphasis of following Jesus in the Gospels and in the New Testament writers is really about freedom, is about joy, is about following a person who announces and enacts and acts out the Kingdom of God. And so more and more in the future I’m gonna want to emphasize following Jesus as a living in the Kingdom of God kind of thing. I am not saying that if people just say things and think things the way I do that they would remain in churches.

But whatever going into and out of churches are, whatever the patterns are, whatever individuals or groups or demographic categories are going in and out of churches, I think part of the turmoil that’s going on should be a call to those of us who are leaders and those of us who are regular Christians to call people to Jesus, not to a tradition.

Not to a certain political ideology, not to a framework structure of how to raise children, but call people to Jesus above all else. And that’s a dynamic, ever-changing, challenging life that nonetheless is a life of joy.

Ruth Perry (25:03)
Absolutely. Well said, Scott.

Scott Harris (25:05)
Yeah, that just hopefully I’ve just fixed everybody who’s listening. So they can just think like me.

Ruth Perry (25:09)
Yeah. You fixed me.

Scott Harris (25:11)
I think a lot of people leaving the church are rejecting baggage that is accompanied being followers of Jesus. They may be back, they may be in the future, they may change churches, but what do we do with such people? Winsomely invite them to follow Jesus and encourage them to take thoughtful steps that they decide on with their lives, living up to the expectations of Jesus, not trying to live up to the expectations of other people.

Ruth Perry (25:39)
How do you articulate the gospel, Scott?

Scott Harris (25:42)
Such a good question. At this point, let me say my thinking about how I articulate the Gospel is changing and I’ll give a book plug. There’s a book written over 20 years ago. You’ve probably seen me post about it, Ruth. It is the book Kingdom Come by Alan Wakabayashi.

I had heard about it years ago, I was living overseas, I wasn’t necessarily reading what everybody was reading. I had repeatedly decided that I need to read that book someday. And what happened is I noticed that it was for sale for cheap on Kindle. And so even though some people avoid Kindle, Kindle gets me reading stuff because it keeps my place and it’s right there.

I have read it on Kindle and Alan Wakabayashi does, in the middle of the book, give kind of a gospel outline in terms of kingdom thinking. I have copied and pasted. I intend to work on it. I wonder if any friends of mine who do graphics might want to put some graphics to it. So here is an unpolished summary of some of it. It is more detailed than a lot of gospel outlines are. But Jesus came to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. He calls people to walk with Him in it. He brings them deliverance from evil and from the powers that keep people from walking in it. He brings them deliverance from their own sin and condemnation.

And he calls them to be partners of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, himself and the Father and the Holy Spirit, in living according to the values of the Kingdom, anticipating the full coming of the Kingdom, and inviting others to do the same.

Ruth Perry (27:39)
Amen.

Scott Harris (27:40)
That’s just off the top of my head.

Ruth Perry (27:42)
Wow, that’s beautiful. I did add that book to my wish list when you posted about it, and I got some birthday money this week, so I’ll be sure to order that and read that. That’s beautiful.

Scott Harris (27:52)
And in case it’s worth it for your listeners, it’s been out for a while and at least on that one really main merchant that sells things online that you can get almost anything from, it’s at a really low price. I think they must have had a stock build up in the lowest price. The price is low. You can also get it really inexpensively as a used book. And Ruth, let me give you some advice. If you ever want to go public with communicating with others, I invite you to use the word kingdom in what, you know, if you blog or do some Facebooking or if you do a podcast, I recommend the word kingdom to you because God’s kingdom is beautiful. You know, free of charge. I’ll give that to you.

Ruth Perry (28:40)
Thank you, Scott. Thank you. I love that. Yeah, I wonder about the people who are opposed to the word kingdom.

Scott Harris (28:47)
There’s more than one reason, yeah.

Ruth Perry (28:49)
Yeah, I mean I recognize the reason, but I think personally I am okay using it.

Scott Harris (28:55)
Yeah. and we could just… Yes. Yes. And if you want, can use an actually much somewhat more provocative term. In Scott McKnight’s really literal New Testament translation called the Second Testament, he calls it Empire. So if you don’t like Kingdom of God, you can talk about God’s Empire if you want.

Ruth Perry (28:55)
It’s straight from the mouth of Jesus, so…

Scott Harris (29:22)
The idea is it’s a big deal and it is the one true empire, it’s the one true kingdom. There are plenty of other things. I understand if people have issues and I understand that this part of the world doesn’t have much value for kings and queens, but it’s a useful term if it points to the king. If the king is the lamb who was slain, the lamb of revelation, that’s…the kind of kingdom I want to be in.

Ruth Perry (29:51)
Praise God. That was my next question for you, Scott. What do you feel like your dream for the church would be? How would the church be like the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven if we were really following the way of Jesus?

Scott Harris (30:06)
What an excellent question. I don’t have a recipe, I just have bits and pieces. One, to say more briefly what I said at length earlier, the church needs to be about helping individuals and communities together to follow Jesus.

I want to qualify that in so many ways and use terms like inappropriate ways in their particular context, but may the church and may the churches be about the business of helping people in communities to follow Jesus. Second, my dream for the church or the churches is that they would be global churches. They would have an ongoing, interacting relationship.

and conversation and knowledge of other Christians, other churches around the world and other traditions of Christianity in their own context or around the world. I think my dream for the church is that the church or the churches would keep the top priorities the top priorities and by the top priorities I just go straight to this guy who said the first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And in the Gospel of Matthew, the second commandment is very similar to the first commandment, Jesus says, and it is to love your neighbor as yourself. So here is an abbreviation that I might throw out there. It’s an intentionally provocative abbreviation.

Maybe I’ll use it more, maybe I’ll never use it again, but I want to promote, and I want churches to promote, LBGAN Christianity. LBGAN Christianity is Christianity that emphasizes loving both God and neighbor. Some Christian traditions emphasize the love of neighbor to in a way that kind of keeps God eclipsed a little bit. Some church traditions emphasize the love of God and the love of neighbor is this optional add-on that you can choose to do or not choose to do. My dream for the church is to emphasize both loving God and loving neighbor.

Ruth Perry (32:20)
I love that Scott, that’s perfect. And thank you for your example of loving your neighbors. You’re not someone who just gives thoughts and prayers, you’re someone who always follows up with action and care and intentionality. And you’ve just been a really inspiring ⁓ example to me and countless others, I’m sure. And so I appreciate that about you and keep on keeping on because you are making a difference. And you’re really wonderful at articulating good news about Jesus Christ, Scott.

Scott Harris (32:44)
You’re so kind. Same Ruth, same. Thank you for your partnership in articulating the good news about Jesus. I am challenged and encouraged by you even though I can’t keep up with all of the content you put out. Now that you’re doing podcasting, it’ll make it even harder for me to keep up with the content you put out, but I really appreciate it.

Ruth Perry (33:11)
I appreciate, anytime you have any advice or correction or you think I’ve gone too far and I’m not loving my neighbors well, I trust your voice and I would welcome you as a friend to please let me know because I know, I mean, it’s, get, what I find my weakness is that I get caught up in the reaction, like the need to react.

And what I want to do is I want to continue to grow and be challenged to follow the ways of Jesus Christ fully. And I know he was not reactionary person. And then that’s a temptation of social media and being online. think for me, this podcast endeavor is kind of, I feel a lot of imposter syndrome and inadequacy about doing it, but that’s one of the things I’m trying to overcome as a Christian woman is the need to be perfect.

Like I know I’m going to mess up and over speak and I’m going to over share at times and I’m going to react. And so what I want to have is a willingness to learn and receive correction and be humble and apologize when that happens, but to continue to just learn in public. Cause that’s what I can’t remember when I started my page, but that’s the best thing that’s happened is that I’ve continued to learn and grow and change my mind about things. And it’s overall, I’d say it’s been a neat experience for me because I’ve met people like you.

Scott Harris (34:29)
It is a total joy to see you doing what you do and now doing a podcast. May God give you wisdom and energy.

Ruth Perry (34:38)
Thank you.

Scott Harris (34:39)
in the days, weeks, months and years ahead.

Ruth Perry (34:43)
Thank you, Scott. God bless you. All right. Thank you. Bye.

Scott Harris (34:45)
Talk to you soon, Ruth. Keep up the good work. Bye.

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