031 I Jeanette Cochran on Empowering Women in Ministry: Breaking Limiting Beliefs

Posted on October 14, 2026 by | Leave a comment
A woman with long brown hair smiling while sitting, wearing a green button-up shirt, holds a notebook. Text overlay includes her name, Jeannette Cochran, and mentions her as a women's leadership development coach and guest on The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast.

In this episode, Jeanette Cochran shares her journey from conservative Christian upbringing to becoming an executive pastor for twenty years, and now a leadership coach for other women in ministry. In our conversation, she discusses the impact of limiting beliefs on women in faith communities, the nature of leadership, and how spiritual practices can empower women to lead fully in their calling.

You can learn more about Jeannette’s ministry at jeannettecochran.com and also follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin.

I’ve been listening to Jeannette’s excellent podcast, Empowered to Lead, for a few years now and highly recommend you subscribe! You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, as well as other places.

Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more!

TRANSCRIPT:

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:16)
My guest today is Jeanette Cochrane, a leadership coach, former executive pastor and speaker, who has spent decades helping women reclaim their God-given authority and break free from limiting beliefs that have held them back. Her ministry focuses on spiritual formation, leadership development and dismantling the inner narratives that keep women from living fully in their calling. I’ve been listening to Jeanette Cochran’s podcast, Empowered to Lead, for many years myself and learning a lot from her. And I’m just delighted that you would come on my podcast today. Thank you so much, Jeanette.

Jeannette Cochran (00:49)
Well, thank you for having me, Ruth. I’m thrilled to be here and this conversation is something that I’m passionate about and always enjoy talking about.

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:58)
Well, before we dive into talking about the limiting beliefs that women hold coming from Christian upbringing, can you start by telling us more about yourself and your own faith background?

Jeannette Cochran (01:10)
Sure. I am in Maryland. I was a pastor at a local church here, a multicultural church. I was served as the executive pastor there for 20 years. Previous to that, I was the children’s pastor. I am married. I have three adult children and two granddaughters that I adore. And many years ago, I would have said that I kind of stumbled into pastoral leadership. Because it took me several years into my journey to realize that I had always been gifted and called to be a pastor. But I was like many of us, I was raised in a very conservative, very traditional, patriarchal Christian church, and we didn’t have women pastors.

And we didn’t have women deacons or elders or ministry directors, anything. It was all done by the men. And so I loved Jesus very much, but I never saw myself as a pastor because I also am very feminine, right? I love getting dressed up, doing my hair, doing my nails. I love all the female things. So being a pastor was a very male thing to me. And it wasn’t until my young 20s when my husband and I found a local church in our area, and it was fortunately a much healthier church and began to open my eyes to different belief systems in within the Christian faith, very orthodox. They were very committed to scripture. And one of those things was this was a church that had women in what they called their leadership council, many would call elders or trustees.

And women were allowed to preach, and women were allowed to do all of the things. Now, granted, we didn’t have a ton of women leaders, but women were allowed to do that. And so eventually I felt called into ministry and went to seminary and began to study for myself what the scriptures say about women and leadership and came to a completely different understanding and realized that in the gospel, in the redemption of Jesus, that God is trying to right what went wrong at the fall. And this separation and divide and limiting women is a result of sin. And as followers of Christ, we’re called to live into the new creation, into the redemption of all people and all things. And so that means that men and women are called to lead together.

So on this side of my journey, I can look back and I can see who I was as a leader and as a young person and realized this was always my path. I just could not hear God’s voice because it took me a while to realize that this was even an option before I realized that this is what I was created to do.

Rev. Ruth Perry (03:56)
I think it’s so interesting how powerful representation is for young people growing up in the church. If you don’t see someone that looks like you, then you don’t even imagine that path for yourself. What do you think that’s about?

Jeannette Cochran (04:09)
Absolutely. And also having people speak into your life. I was discipled as a teenager in the church, and I know that there were young men that the leaders would look at and say, I see leadership in you. I see that you could be a pastor. I never even had anyone in my church say that I was a leader. I was almost 25 years old before I had another Christian look at me and say, You’re a leader. And so I never saw myself as a leader. Now, those who know me today would say that seems kind of ludicrous. But in fact, much of what was in me oftentimes was seen kind of rebellion or pushing the limits.

And I definitely had that in me, but really if that had been developed, it would have been a leadership skill because I was very inquisitive. I I wasn’t one that wanted to follow the rules just for following the rules. I asked a lot of questions. Even in my friend group, I was influential in what we would do or the activities that we were involved in. I had influence.

But no one developed that and called that leadership. So it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I began being invited into leadership development paired with discipleship and understanding how to live as a Christian leader. And so I had a lot of undoing. And I think that’s why I’m passionate and called to this work today, because over many years, as I stepped into leadership, I began to kind of peel back the layers, right?

I think we first step into becoming a leader and we own who we are, but along the way there are lots of layers that God strips away to help us start to recognize things that we’ve internalized that are not in alignment with who we are in Christ, that are not in alignment with who we are as leaders. And so we have to peel that away so that we can step more fully into who God has called us to be. And to have the kingdom impact that he wants us to have.

Rev. Ruth Perry (06:14)
When you realize that your gifts hadn’t been called out and recognized growing up, what was the emotional feeling of that realization? And then also what was it like to then try to catch up?

Jeannette Cochran (06:26)
Such a good, such a good question. Because I know as I talk to women, a lot of them feel behind, like we’ve missed something. And so honestly, yes, at first when I first started awakening to my call, there were times where I would look back and I would think, I wonder what my life would have been if.

Because I also started college later in my life. I went to seminary later in my life. And so I did sit with that for a while. And I eventually came to the position of letting that go and realizing I not only realizing, but believing. The path that I walked was exactly the path that I was supposed to walk.

Because I am who I am today, and I can do the work that I do today exactly because of those experiences. And so I also know that the scripture says that nothing happens that is completely outside the hand of God. Now that that doesn’t mean God was happy about it or God caused it, but He saw what was happening, and that, you know, all of those things that happened to us, God redeems for his good. And so it’s because I grew up in a very conservative fundamentalist Christian environment that I understand how fundamentalists believe and think. I can have those conversations. I can reach back and I can say, you know, you can love scripture and you can be committed to the authority of the Bible.

And be an egalitarian and realize that men and women are called to live and lead in mutuality. I can have those conversations because I walked that path. And so I believe that all of that learning, though some of it was hard, was a part of bringing me to where I am today.

Rev. Ruth Perry (08:12)
Yeah. Can you tell me more about what is leadership? What are those gifts like and what is your leadership gifting in particular?

Jeannette Cochran (08:20)
I would say leadership is just influence. That’s a definition that many people say, but it it really is. It’s influence. And so what we have to realize is we can lead people astray if we’re influencing them in the wrong direction. We sometimes influence people without even realizing we’re influencing them. So leadership is influence.

And developing that influence so that you are intentional and you are leading and living from your values and moving people and your life in an intentional direction is really important. And we lead from who we are. So this is why I believe pairing leadership development with spiritual formation, with theological education is so important because you’re gonna lead from what you believe, you’re gonna lead from who you are, you’re gonna lead from the practices that you have placed in your life and how you’re leading yourself is how you’re gonna show up. So we’re all called to lead ourselves. When you look at the gospels, I think that’s what we see that Jesus did.

With those who were closest to him with the twelve, which I will say also remember that the disciples of Jesus did include women. They’re the the gospels tell us that there were women that were traveling with them, that Mary sat at the feet of Jesus. And that means that she was a learner, she was a disciple. So Jesus was developing those around him not to just be followers, but to be followers that would then go and become leaders. And so as a follower of Christ, I believe that everyone has some leadership potential that we are called to develop so that we are ushering in the kingdom of God. And sometimes we can mistakenly think that leadership in the church is just for a select few. It’s just for the pastors or maybe the elders.

But we are all called to lead. We are all given the Spirit of God. And sometimes God calls you to lead in the marketplace. Sometimes God calls you to lead in education. Wherever you go, you should show up as who you are in Christ with your gifts and leading yourself first so that you are an example of what the kingdom of God is. And then using those gifts in order to further God’s kingdom wherever he’s placed you. So I believe that each of us has leadership that we’re supposed to be developing. And then God calls us to use that in different places within our life.

Rev. Ruth Perry (10:51)
So what what are your particular leadership giftings in pastoral ministry, Jeanette?

Jeannette Cochran (10:57)
Well, I would say my leadership gifts, I am a visionary. I am a high extrovert and I’m creative. And so I do tend to gravitate towards those leadership roles, and I do well where we are envisioning, creating new initiatives and building teams, I’m definitely a people person. So bringing people around and developing them and helping them to find their place on the team and then empowering them to go. And in some respects, that may be why as a young person I didn’t really always fit the mold for what the women were doing. I’m not good at, you know, things like cooking.

I’m not good at the the typical like homemaking roles, although it is important to me. You know, I’m a a wife and a mother and and my home environment is important to me. I’ll just but I’ll just say I’m not great at that. I’m not great at hospitality. I I look to others to help me develop those kinds of gifts. And so my gifts do tend to be more in developing other people, casting vision, teaching and helping the community to figure out where is God calling us to go and move together in the same direction. And because of that, I need people around me who like to implement. So I’ve been known to start ministries and be really excited about it. But then once they get up and they’re running, I want to hand them off to someone else. That’s what I did again and again in my church.

I want to hand them off to somebody that’s really good at creating the systems and keeping things maintained and helping, you know, people to keep moving forward. I want to move on to something new. And so my my gifts oftentimes do show up in areas that are more like entrepreneurship, where you’re creating something new, you’re getting it going, you’re inviting people in, and then you’re developing them so that you can hand that ministry off. To the next leader who’s gonna take it to that next level.

Rev. Ruth Perry (13:03)
Can you describe how you decided to transition from being a pastor to being a coach?

Jeannette Cochran (13:09)
Yeah, that was such a hard decision. And God really was developing this in me for I want to say a decade because early on, I didn’t really have a desire to develop women. I wasn’t really focused on women’s leadership development. In fact, many of the women’s ministry initiatives that I saw happening around me, I wasn’t as interested in. in large part because a lot of oftentimes women’s ministry is not focusing on leadership and growth and impact.

You know, in in many churches and sometimes in our own church for for women, they have women’s teas. And for the men, they are talking about, you know, how to lead your in the marketplace or how to lead in the church. And that’s not not to diminish tea. I love tea. I love conversations with women. But there weren’t a lot of places where women were talking about leadership, where women were talking about goals, where women were talking about having an impact.

And so for a long time I didn’t feel called to that. And then over the years, as I was leading as an executive pastor, and I was in an egalitarian church where women could lead at all levels, but there’s a bit of a twist to that because our church was a part of a denomination, the Evangelical Free Church, that did not welcome women into all levels of leadership, where women were not allowed to be ordained, where they believed that the office of pastor and of elder was only for men. But because it is a denomination where there was freedom for the churches to operate how they wanted to, we had made that distinction. And we did have women pastors and women functioning as elders.

And they were fine with that. They were fine. They knew that, and they were fine with that. But they were clear that they were not going to change their position on ordaining women. And so, in that structure, I really was not welcomed into a lot of the conversations as an executive pastor. So there was an executive pastor network within our denomination. And I actually attended one year.

And there were a few men that welcomed me into the conversation, but most of the men there, although they were kind, I feel like they didn’t know what to do with me. It was almost like, why are you here? And so I never went back. Because frankly, I was busy. I was leading a growing church.

My church was at the time was larger than many of the men in that executive pastor’s network. And so I had a lot of work to do. I had a lot of people to care for. I had staff to develop. And so I realized: why am I gonna spend three days, fly across the country, go sit in settings where I’m not gonna gain anything from it because I had work that God had called me to do and I needed to do it. So I never went back.

And so that was my first kind of awakening where I felt God saying, Jeanette, I’ve called you to this role not just to develop your leadership, but because there are women that are in really difficult situations in churches where I have called them. And they are trying to figure out how to navigate that. They’re trying to figure out how to connect their calling with the scriptures. And so over time I began God saying, I have work for you to do that is beyond your own church and is for the kingdom of God. And so in those years, I started then speaking out. I started a blog. I eventually started my podcast, all with the idea of just sharing to women.

Different ways of understanding the Bible. Then over time I felt God really showing me that I couldn’t hold both. I had to choose one or the other because it was too much. And so I eventually came to the realization that God was calling me to let my church pastoring go. And I loved my church. I loved the people at my church. And so that was really a hard decision. I loved my team.

But I knew that to be faithful to what God was calling me to meant that I had to spend more time on reaching people beyond my congregation. And so I did that in December of 2024 was when I officially resigned. We also had a an outreach center there, the Community Hope Center, that I launched during COVID with a small team there at my church that had.

Taken off. And so I was developing leaders to take that over so I could let that go. And that also was particularly hard because that was a vision that God had given our church and had given me deeply decades before it started. And so when God brought that to fruition and it was developed and serving thousands of people, and I had to kind of hand that baby over.

But if you see kind of a theme here, that’s who God has created me to be, to give me a vision and to start it. And then eventually God has always called me to hand it over. He did that in my children’s ministry. He did that in my executive pastoral role. He did that at the Community Hope Center. And now I’ve got this new vision that quite frankly, Ruth, I don’t know how it’s all gonna play out.

I don’t have a clear pathway. I just knew I needed to trust God and let go of what I was holding on to tightly so that I had open hands to embrace what he had for me in this new season. And God is opening doors and done amazing things. And one of the things that I love along the way is the incredible women that I’ve met with leadership gifts and some of those women that

I just have been humbled and honored to even walk with them because they have incredible, incredible gifts. Gifts of preaching, women who are brilliant, way smarter than me. And as I have been coaching them, coming to find out that they’re some of them have been caught in churches for decades where their gifts have been minimized and sidelined. And that’s not to say.

That God hasn’t used their gifts, but they are recognizing that they have teaching and preaching and leadership gifts that need to be unleashed beyond just the children’s ministry or the women’s ministry. That it needs to go beyond that so that the whole church can benefit from the wisdom and the messages, the influence that God has given them the revelation, quite frankly, from the Spirit of God that lives in them because they have the Holy Spirit and the gifting. And so it’s been such an honor to place such a small role even in their lives because some of those women are doing incredible things and are way more influential than I am today. And I I applaud that. I salute that because that’s what we need in this next generation of women leaders.

Rev. Ruth Perry (20:13)
That’s amazing. And I’m just so thankful just for the little bit of your work that I’ve experienced by listening to your podcast. Your content is always really wonderful and really helpful. And maybe I need to look into some more coaching with you, Jeanette. I would love to be empowered to lead.

Jeannette Cochran (20:31)
I would love that.

Rev. Ruth Perry (20:32)
I’m thinking about what a process it’s been for myself from the time that God called me to become a pastor. And I was in a conservative Christian denomination and family. And so I didn’t have that empowered support in ministry and in that process. And I found a lot of the learning and growing online, like how I found your podcast. But it’s been wild to me, just even in the last few years, the revelations I’ve had about my imposter syndrome and about still feeling like I need to follow my husband in ministry and kind of branching off from that and going into my own path and exploring doors as they open for me without my husband. You know, it’s been really interesting for me. Can you talk to my audience about the limiting beliefs that women inherit in our conservative Christian families and churches?

Jeannette Cochran (21:21)
Yes, that is so common what you have expressed. Because when we internalize things for so much of our life, especially for those of us who grew up in conservative Christianity, our most formative years were spent giving us a description of what a biblical woman is. And in those circles, oftentimes a faithful biblical woman always stands behind another man, whether that man is her husband or a pastor, and when we’re young, our fathers. And so even when we know, when we come to this understanding of what the Bible says, it can take a while before we start to realize that some of the things that are causing us to doubt our voice or to doubt the gifts that God has given us.

Are because we’re just so used to being the the person that’s second in line. We’re so used to softening our voice or hedging the way we speak instead of showing up and now it I’m not suggesting that we show up arrogant, but to just show up confident in who we are, that we have gifts.

And those gifts have been given by God. And therefore we can trust that the spirit that is developing those gifts is going to use those gifts. And sometimes it shows up just in the way we carry ourselves. It can show up in the way that we hesitate to say what we think.

It can show up in the way that we maybe give more weight to someone else’s opinion, even though at first we had a really strong opinion, and then we get someone else’s opinion and we think, well, maybe I should defer to them. And a lot of times that really is just coming to this place of learning to trust that the wisdom that I have and the gifts that I have are enough. They’re enough to go forward and to do the work that God has called me to do.

And, you know, fortunately for me, my husband has never felt called to ministry. So I didn’t have to worry about that. In fact, most of the time, or I should say, full-time ministry, he was clear that my wife is called to pastoral ministry, I am not. And he was always very encouraging and was very supportive. He saw my gifts. And he believed that I had something to offer. And so we didn’t really have that tension at home. In fact, our marriage really operated very egalitarian. And now we used a lot of the complementarian language early in our marriage, but we operated egalitarian.

So when I came into that understanding and when my husband came into that understanding, we really didn’t have to change the way that we operated. And so I didn’t really have that. But I do think that for many women, it can be years of conversations with their spouse. I think, just over time, just starting to understand where are the the places that we aren’t feeling as confident and then exploring why is that. And sometimes it’s just because it’s new. We’ve never done it before. And you know, for women.

I do think it’s important to say that we have to actually learn to recognize what happens in our body and in our nervous system when we start to step out in new directions. Because for so much of history, women who stepped out of line, who stepped out of what was socially acceptable, it was dangerous in some situations, right? When you look at the scriptures, you see that that women could be ostracized from the community and then they economically could not take care of themselves, or physically, we physically could not did not have the might and the power to protect ourselves. And so in much of human history and in culture, it was dangerous.

And for those of us who grew up in very traditional fundamentalist Christianity, it might have been a different kind of dangerous, but it also was dangerous sometimes to speak up, to say what you thought, or to just even take leadership. Am I stepping in a direction that I’m I’m not supposed to is this out of God’s will? And you might have been criticized or you might have been marginalized. Or for some women, you know, we’re still hearing the stories today in some Christian communities, there is abuse taking place. So I share that to say sometimes when we say, Well, I’ve got something in me that I need to fix, you know, I’ve got imposter syndrome. What I want us to understand, some of the way that we respond, that our nervous system responds and our thoughts play out, is completely normal.

Because we are now, we’re in a place where many of us were like, it is safe. It is safe to use our gifts. We’ve even been invited to use our gifts, but we have to recognize this is a departure from the past. And so we have to start to recognize where we may be holding back and start to dismantle some of those beliefs, learn to regulate our nervous system and step more fully and confidently in that peace into those areas that God is calling us to lead.

Rev. Ruth Perry (26:29)
A few years ago I read a biography of Eugene Peterson and I read Phillip Yancey’s autobiography the same winter. And I just remember being blown away because I thought they were both so ambitious. And I had never really thought about ambition within Christian ministry. I just felt like you were called and gifted and you serve. Service is the driving force, is what I would think.

And I would try to explain as I was talking about these books with people, and I just could never remember the word ambition. It was like I was allergic to it. And I think that I was allergic to ambition. And I did look down on it a little bit growing up Christian, where I don’t think it was positively reinforced unless I was ambitious to serve others. And so how do we undo that kind of formation from our childhood where we peel back the onion layers and we recognize that there’s something about the way that we are that isn’t authentic to who God made me to be. It’s something I’ve picked up because of my cultural conditioning.

Jeannette Cochran (27:31)
I think ambition is such a big issue, particularly for women. And the Bible does not say that ambition is bad. It says that selfish ambition is bad. And so we do need to ask ourselves: where is that ambition coming from? Like what is it that we want to do? Is it that we want to make a name for ourselves? Is it is it that we want to hoard resources and live in a a big mansion and you know have jets and planes? And you know, we see that happening in some Christian circles. And I think that needs to be questioned.

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:08)
Yeah.

Jeannette Cochran (28:09)
And and so both men and women have ambition and probably at different levels. And I think it comes back to what has God gifted us for and what has God called us to. And but I think the unfortunate thing is in so much of the theology and teaching for women is we have been taught and conditioned to question our motives all the time.

Always question our motives more than the the men and the boys. And I’ll and I’ll say give an example. So just this was just recently. I heard a podcast of a man and a woman speaking, and it was a complementarian church that believed that women should not be pastors, and the woman was making the statement.

That women can lead, but they shouldn’t be pastors. And she said if a woman wants to be a pastor, she really needs to ask herself why? What are her motives? Why does she want that platform? Which, you know, I could say, okay, that’s a great question. But why do we not say that to the men when they want to be pastors? Right? Well, we don’t. We go, wow, God must be calling you. You want to give your life to Jesus. That’s fantastic.

But in many situations, if women want that, the question is, you must have ulterior motives. And so we’re constantly given this teaching and this feedback that causes us to question our motives. And so whenever we want something that seems big or that’s gonna put us out in the limelight, like we’re gonna be seen by others. They may criticize us.

The first thing that’s gonna happen is we are gonna question ourselves. And I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is: okay, is God calling me to this? Do I feel a stirring that these are gifts that I have that I wanna use? And what is it for? Is it because I want to advance God’s kingdom? Is it because I want people to know Jesus? Is it because I want to love and serve and give to people? If so, go for it. Be ambitious.

Who can look at the Apostle Paul and say the Apostle Paul was not ambitious? In fact, you could look at Jesus and say, Jesus was ambitious. Jesus had a plan. He knew what he was called to. He knew how long he needed to stay somewhere. And he was like, hey, to his to his followers, no, we can’t stay here because I got other places to go and preach the gospel. He had an ambition for God.

And so instead of squelching that and stifling that in our women and our young girls, we need to develop that. We just need to help them make sure that they have the tools to explore that with the spirit. Make sure that they are learning scripture, make sure that they’re learning how to pray, how to listen to God. Develop those spiritual formation tools so that that ambition can be directed by the Holy Spirit.

But I think what we do is as soon as we see ambition in women, we start to question it and assume that it’s coming from ego, that it’s coming from a bad place. Instead of saying, hey, you’ve got ambition, that’s fantastic. Let’s talk about that. Let’s develop that for Jesus because the kingdom of God has a lot of work to do. We have a big world and we’re called to go. So let’s use that ambition in the right direction.

Rev. Ruth Perry (31:23)
I think what you said about the nervous system is really important too. Can you talk more about how our nervous system is connected to our calling and our ability to serve God?

Jeannette Cochran (31:33)
Absolutely. So it is so interesting if you look at neuroscience and how the brain works and what science is really affirming is really very similar to many of the ancient spiritual practices and what earlier Christians engaged in order to really find their centering in God and find peace and to really grow as a person. And so I really have connected much of what neuroscience has said to some of the ancient spiritual practices. So some of those practices would be centering prayer, lectio divina, even just sitting quietly and

Breathing deeply and resting, like that resting in the spirit of God, trying to be aware of God’s presence and connecting through our breath. And you know, when I was growing up, those kinds of practices were considered evil, like they were gonna lead you astray. And what I know today is that’s actually not true because we are whole beings.

God created us not just with a spirit, but with a body and a mind. And so much of what science is showing is doing very similar practices. They’re just pulling the God part out. And so I say, no, let’s engage those practices and let’s actually integrate our faith. Let’s realize that when we sit in silence and we notice our breath, what we’re doing is we’re sitting quietly in the presence of God. Right? Even when you think about the word breath, pneuma is in scripture, Spirit. There is also the word Yahweh, right, in the Hebrew. It was the name that God told Moses was his name. When when Moses is sent to Pharaoh.

And Moses says, but before I go, they’re gonna ask me who sent me, so who are you? And the name that God gives is Yahweh. And if you say that in the Hebrew, it’s actually pronounced with just the consonants. It’s actually the sound of breathing. That is the name of God. That’s the name that God gave to Moses. And so if you think about that, when we say the name of God in Hebrew, we’re just breathing. And so it’s almost the sense that to breathe is to say the name of God. To be alive is to acknowledge God, whether we know we’re acknowledging God or not. If we have breath in our lungs, we are acknowledging God. And so that’s where I say some of these modern practices that people are engaging in and finding peace and finding stillness, finding stress relief, I would argue they may not know that they’re sitting in the presence of God, but that’s what they’re doing.

And so I teach women and Christians to engage these practices with their heart and mind open, that they are engaging in the presence of God, that they are opening their whole self up to the Spirit of God to be calmed, to let the Spirit have more reign within them than the flesh. That’s what Paul says. He says we’re called to intentionally to put off the flesh and put on the spirit.

To not be led by our flesh, but to be more and more led by the Spirit of God. And so many of these ancient practices that in much of our Christian communities, especially I think in much of evangelicalism, have been lost, are practices that do that. They help us to rest our whole body, our nervous system in the presence of God, allow the Spirit of God to connect our mind and our heart, and open us up to be able to receive, I believe, more of God’s peace, more of God’s freedom, and more of revelation of God so that we can then move in our day with the spirit directing us more than the flesh directing us.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:36)
That’s so powerful. Thank you so much for talking about that with us. So people can follow you. Your podcast is Empowered to Lead. Your website is Jeanette Cochrane with two N’s and two Ts dot com. And I’ll link these in the show notes. And how else can people engage with your ministry now?

Jeannette Cochran (35:54)
Well, thank you for asking. I would love if people would find me on Instagram. I’m on Instagram at Jeanette.cochran and send me a direct message, say hello, check out my podcast. I love to engage and get to know people who are listening and have these conversations and just really help more and more women and men find the truth of scripture and find ways that we can more fully utilize our gifts and lead together in mutuality for the good of God’s kingdom. And I’m grateful for this conversation. I’m grateful for the opportunity to meet incredible women like yourself, Reverend Ruth, doing the work that you’re doing. So thank you for what you do as well.

Rev. Ruth Perry (36:38)
Well, I’m incredibly grateful to you and to the many lessons you’ve taught me. I think good theology is so important and everything I’ve ever heard on your podcast is so grounded in scripture and in good theology and is helpful and I just highly recommend your work. And you can also come and speak and do trainings in person as well. So if you’re a ministry leader with a congregation that would benefit from having Jeanette. Then do reach out and thank you so much for being here today. Let me give you the last word before we sign off.

Jeannette Cochran (37:10)
Well, thank you again, Ruth, and thank you for your ministry. And just for those who are listening, I just wanna encourage men and women that we should all be developing our gifts to the fullest. Because we don’t want to end our life without having developed every ounce of potential that God has given us for the kingdom of God. And so that’s what I’m passionate about helping to empower everyone to lead, but especially to empower women to lead. So thanks for this opportunity.

Rev. Ruth Perry (37:41)
Thank you, God bless.

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030 I Sarah McDugal: Why Your Divorce Became High-Conflict: A Protective Parent’s Guide

Posted on October 7, 2026 by | Leave a comment
A smiling woman with curly hair sitting against a neutral background, promoting her role as a guest on the Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast, which focuses on high-conflict parenting and custody coaching.

This week, I spoke with Sarah McDugal, a Master Certified Professional Coach specializing high-conflict communication coaching for protective parents in divorce and custody court. Sarah shares her powerful journey from a conservative Christian upbringing to becoming an advocate for protective parents facing family harm. This episode explores the dynamics of abuse, faith, and the legal system, offering vital insights for anyone navigating these challenges.

We talked about Sarah’s personal story of escaping an abusive marriage, and how church culture and theology set her up for that and perpetuated the abuse by trapping her in the marriage. Sarah shares the four tools of abuse: isolation, deflection, manipulation, intimidation and the problem of moral injury in family harm cases. She shares the legal challenges faced by protective parents, resources for recognizing and responding to abuse, and the importance of language in understanding abuse.

Money quote: “Jesus wants you to be safe and loved.” This is the heart of Jesus for you.

Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more!


TRANSCRIPT:

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:17)
My guest today is Sarah McDugal. Sarah is a master certified professional coach specializing in high conflict communication coaching for protective parents in divorce and custody court. And Sarah is trained in the Deceptive Sexual Trauma Model, the Association of Partners of Sex Addicts Trauma Specialist. She is a certified assessor for the Johns Hopkins Danger and Lethality Assessment.

And she’s co founder of Wilderness to Wild, Trauma Mamas, and Freedom Navigator. And so I’m very excited to have you on, even though the subject matter is heavy because it’s a necessary conversation. Thank you so much for being here today, Sarah.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (00:58)
Thank you, Ruth. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this all summer since we talked about it. And also I’m gonna apologize to everyone in advance. I had this epic summer. We did this lifetime dream of visiting a bunch of national parks and everything this summer. I was fantastic at twelve thousand and fourteen thousand feet. I felt great and I have POTS and all kinds of funky autoimmune stuff. So I don’t always feel great.

While traveling or anytime. But I felt great at all those high elevations. And then now I get home, I got slammed with this upper respiratory infection, and I am still my voice is wonky. So I apologize in advance. If I just spin out vocally, you’ve been warned.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:41)
Right now I’m feeling like your voice is perfect for radio. It sounds really good.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (01:45)
Well, thank you. I can drop it into a lower register if I need to, but I it may also stop and cough like a maniac. So there’s that.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:53)
Well, please do.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (01:54)
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:56)
So my podcast, I like to have conversations about gender, justice, abuse, and healing in the Christian faith specifically, because I think these are important conversations that the church tries to avoid generally and is uncomfortable with. And your work intersects in all four of those areas. And so I’m really hopeful that people will follow Sarah McDugal, your website is Wilderness to Wild. I just wanna say that right now. Wilderness to wild dot com. Like look this up, follow Sarah. Okay.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (02:25)
I have two. I have two. If you’re trying to figure out if what you’re dealing with is normal or is more than just difficult, then wilderness to wild.com is your spot if you’re dealing with betrayal trauma. If your marriage is so difficult and it’s just not getting better and you’ve done everything you can to think of how to fix it, and maybe you’re thinking marriage is just meant to be difficult. Wilderness to wild is your spot.

And we start there with just helping you recognize red flags. Is this an abusive behavior pattern or is this someone being human and flawed? Now, if you have fled family harm and now you are forced to co-parent by the court system with the person who harmed your family, you need my other website.

And that is www.myfreedomnavigator.com. So those are the two. And they they speak to people in very different stages of life experience. Sometimes the people who start out at Wilderness to Wild end up needing my Freedom Navigator. And sometimes they don’t. But yeah, so those are the two that we can start with right straight off the bat.

Rev. Ruth Perry (03:31)
And I will put those links in the show notes. So be sure that you visit those places. Can we start with your story, Sarah? And just introducing you as a person of faith that I admire that has an important expertise and message for the church today. Where does Sarah start? Where do you…how much do you want to share about your own life?

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (03:53)
My well, like we were joking before we came online. Are we doing a one off or are we doing a series? Cause you know, we could be here a while. But I just a little bit of background.

I grew up in a very what we would now kind of refer to as fundy, conservative Christian home. A few caveats. My parents are loving, caring, wonderful people. Flawed humans and all of that, just normal humans, but deeply love Jesus and deeply loved us as kids. I was a missionary kid. And before and after being a missionary kid, I was also an army brat. And we did a lot of humanitarian aid work. We traveled a lot. We moved a lot. And we kind of joked that we were on a mission movement all the time.

Our family nucleus was the constant because we homeschooled, which meant we could pick up and move anywhere, and nothing got disrupted from our academic and educational point of view. so I grew up with this kind of looking back on it now, in kind of a bizarre mix, from the outside circles around us, I got a ton of influence from Gothard, extreme right evangelical influences. Even though we weren’t in ATI or the Gothards, you know, group necessarily, we were very much adjacent to that. The long denim skirts, the long hair, no makeup, no adornment, longer sleeves a lot of the time. My dad had a big old beard. Back then, when he wasn’t in the military, it was kind of weird. It was like either dress greens, clean shaven, or big ol’beard and suspenders is two completely different looks. And I’ve been to like 45 countries and territories. So I mean we traveled, we had this global mindset, this very much an awareness that, and and I think this is very, very healthy awareness that there are a thousand ways of doing things well.

Because people have culture and language and differences and distinctions and all of those things can be equally good. They’re just different from each other. and at the same time, I grew up in a theological and conservative fundy social environment where purity culture was strong. I mean, if you held hands with a boy, you were damaged goods. Nobody might ever want you for life. You know, kissing, that’s probably how you got pregnant. Not quite, but you know, just that whole environment.

Rev. Ruth Perry (06:20)
Yeah.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (06:21)
I grew up reading the covers off of Passion and Purity by Elizabeth Elliott, and I kissed dating goodbye, and all of the things. Just all of those things. homeschooled through 10th grade. I played piano and guitar and violin and sang. The picture of the perfect conservative homeschool family, lived way out in the country, did gardens, we ate really healthy.

And now looking back, there’s so many things I’m so grateful for. I am a late diagnosed autistic adult woman. And I look back and realize that the calm, slow pace of living out in the country and having a lot of quiet time and a lot of time for reading and slow hobbies and low entertainment that was sensory overload, those were saving graces for my childhood. If I had had a fast-paced, hard-run, heavy sensory childhood, I would not be the same person and it would not be in a good way.

So it’s a mixed bag as I look back at it. I never doubted that my parents loved each other. I never doubted that my parents loved us, or that we were a secure, safe, connected, caring Christian home family unit. I genuinely thought that when people got married, they just talked about stuff and worked it out. I didn’t know divorced people. I didn’t know volatile family home life. I didn’t know what it would be like to have parents yell or fight or disagree or be physically reactive or violent. None of that was part of my worldview at all, except for maybe news stories. And most of my childhood we didn’t have a TV. So I didn’t watch a lot of news either.

So I had this very trusting and innocent and almost cozy idea of how marriage and home life was supposed to be. I thought you just talked, you worked it out, you both wanted the same things. Why how can this be so difficult? And then I got married.

I went to Bible college and did not date much at all. I I mean I didn’t have significant dating relationships, did not get physical with anyone. I did the whole purity culture, everything. And then I married a theology student who said he wanted to be a missionary and to be a pastor.

That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to have four kids by the time I was thirty and be a missionary and go live like Marilyn Laszlo and I don’t know if you know who that is from from the Tyndale translation. She had gone off to Papua New Guinea and I’d grown up on everything from David Livingston to George Mueller to Amy Carmichael and you know, all of the greats.

And I just thought it was going to be very simple and straightforward. I married someone who had not come from that kind of home. And I did not know that I married a sex and porn addict who had a lifetime of compulsive deception and who was not the person that they presented themselves to be.

By one year in I knew in my bones that bringing children into this would be devastating to my children. And at the risk of being labeled a career woman instead of a family woman, I decided I wanted to wait on children. And it was because I was terrified to bring children into the home. I thought, hey, I chose this, right? So I’m stuck with it for life. I have to live with this, but I don’t have to choose to bring someone innocent into it. And I was not brave enough to state my reasons why that I felt like raising children with this person would be unsafe. And just bad all the way around.

I also didn’t have anyone talking to me. The ministries now that exist unraveling the harm from purity culture, the harm from pornified worldview, the harm of all of the traditional marriage books like Love and Respect and His Needs, Her Needs, that were considered the Bible in our home. And I I was one of the pastor’s wives that handed those out. God forgive me now and a thousand apologies to anyone who ever received one from me twenty five years ago or whatever.

So I was operating in this vacuum of knowing in my bones that things were not okay, but not having language, not understanding coercive control, not understanding betrayal trauma, not understanding deceptive sexual trauma, not understanding the escalating nature of sex and pornography addictions, especially when it’s operating in secret, in the dark and unchecked.

And so I pursued ministry work. I got a master’s degree, and I dealt with a lot of allegations from my then spouse that I just hated family and I just didn’t want to be a parent and I just didn’t have a motherly bone and whatever because I was scared to say I can’t raise kids with you. I think it will be harmful to children.

And then there came a time where the reproductive coercion was so strong that he told me straight up, if you don’t give me kids, I will divorce you and tell everyone that you were an unsubmissive wife. And I couldn’t think of anything worse at the time. So I felt that I had to go off birth control, and I had to try to get pregnant. And then it took a year and a half.

And I want to pause right now and state unequivocally that I would not trade my amazing and incredible children for anything in the world. They are the best part of my life. And I am so proud of them and everything that they have overcome and their incredible passion for life and for people and for caring for others and for learning. They’re amazing humans. And I’m so glad that I didn’t end up living my life without them. I mean, I’m so glad that I had them. But at the time it was very overwhelming because of the nature of the environment and the relational dynamics that made me feel so trapped.

And I don’t know if you’ve talked about moral injury much on the podcast, but a simplified description definition of moral injury is the injury to your soul when for example, if you’re a soldier and you’re following orders, so you’re doing the right thing, but the orders are to kill a child. So you’re doing the wrong thing. You’re doing the right thing, but you’re doing the wrong thing. And by doing the right thing, you do a wrong thing. And if you refuse to do the right thing, following orders, in order to avoid doing a wrong thing, killing a child, you’re stuck with the consequences of refusing to follow orders. You might be court-martialed, right? So you’re caught between doing a wrong thing to do a right thing and doing the right thing to do a wrong thing. And that is what they call moral injury.

Well, I find, so this is a little caveat because there’s this whole journey, obviously, that led me to what I do now, working with protective parents who have fled family harm, family violence, family betrayal. And then they’re now forced to share children with a person who is actively harming them and their children. There is a sense of moral injury that very often goes unnamed and unarticulated and unidentified when you are court-ordered to hand your children over to a person that you know is neglecting them, psychologically terrorizing them, sexually molesting them, physically harming them. You can’t prove it enough to override parental rights to their time. But if you don’t follow the court orders, you will lose your kids and the courts will flip custody to the other parent who is causing them harm. They’ll be there full-time instead of part-time. That causes moral injury to parents.

Back up to reproductive coercion. Feeling that in order to be a good wife, you must follow your husband’s directives to bring children into an already known abusive environment is a seed for moral injury because you’re being told that you’re doing the right thing by being submissive to his leadership, but in essence, you’re also by obeying, you’re doing the wrong thing by bringing a child into harm.

So these are heavy things to wrestle with, and it took me years to wrestle through. and so many parents don’t have someone to wrestle through these things with.

Just a quick caveat as well. I work primarily with women who are protective mothers, but there are times when the genders are flipped in these scenarios. And there are protective fathers who are up against the same dynamics in the system where they are fighting to keep their children safe and protected and not continue exposing their children to neglect and even overt harm. And the mom is the harming parent on the other side of it. And those dads need help and support and strategies to navigate toward freedom, just like protective moms do. So just throwing that out there, I recognize that there are both. And I do work with both when those cases are on the flip side.

But anyway, back to that, I ended up having two children, almost back to back. They’re 17 months apart. A son and then a daughter and for a while I believed that I must stay for the children. And then it came to a point where things came to a head and it was very clear that I must leave for the children.

And as those things, some simply harmful and others straight up criminal, came to light. it shattered our world as the pastor’s family. And my kids were not even in pre-K at that point. they were very little. And we started life over in went through four months of homelessness and joblessness for a a while, and Medicaid and food stamps and absolute uncertainty and CPS investigations because of things that had been done to my children and happened to them. And police investigations and legal processes and it took nearly a decade of custody litigation as a protective parent to finally stabilize an ongoing environment of safety for my children.

And just as a side note, they are now on the tail end of high school, touring colleges, planning careers, and thriving. And I couldn’t be prouder of them. But it’s been a long road. And the result of that was that I decided I didn’t want to see other protective parents going through what I went through.

And getting upside down in the court system and sh coming in hot as an activated mama bear protective parent, and not realizing that sometimes what makes the most sense to us as a protective parent, based on our parenting instincts, is actually what’s going to work heavily against us in a legal system where the person who tells the calmest and best story wins.

So now I work with those parents.

Rev. Ruth Perry (16:58)
Wow. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Sarah. That’s really it’s astounding what you have survived. And there’s just hearing it, I’m hearing two big aspects where you would think these institutions would be places that protect you and that

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (17:15)
Ha ha ha.

Rev. Ruth Perry (17:16)
are purveyors of justice and healing. So first the church where we learn our theology and we are formed in a culture. And then second, the court system where you would think they’re gonna look out for the most vulnerable and the victim. Can we start

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (17:30)
Right. Right.

Rev. Ruth Perry (17:32)
with talking about how your faith and your theology and your church trapped you in a painful and abusive marriage instead of liberated you from that.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (17:43)
Sure. I mean, let me see if I can distill that down into a couple of main points because we could have a lot of wandering conversation on that, I’m sure. As as could many of our listeners, I’m sure. First of all, I was raised not so much in my home where my parents very much worked together on things and were Teammates, but in the church environment and youth groups and programs and books, I was raised very much in the mindset that the endowment of male genitalia empowered a human to make wiser, better, and more credible decisions than someone without male genitalia.

And I absorbed the idea that I needed to be compliant even with bad ideas for the sake of A submission or B good image. So that other people would not think that we are not something that we are.

Now I know that those who teach this concept intentionally often say, of course, any woman should obey Jesus rather than her husband, but those waters get very easily muddied when you’ve been taught to gaslight yourself out of all of your strong instincts. As an autistic woman, I have some pretty terrific superpower in pattern recognition.

But I was told for years that I was just being suspicious, that I was being prejudicial, that I was being judgmental, that I was not giving people the benefit of the doubt, that I was just catastrophizing, although not using that psych word, but just making things worse. And even though each of those times would come in the end where the pattern recognition had been accurate.

Anytime there was a new opportunity to anticipate what was likely coming, it was brushed off. And I was told to basically butt out and mind my own business. I also remember being told by a youth leader that had extreme prominence in my circles that I needed to make sure that I married someone essentially whose umbrella was bigger than mine. Because it was going to be very important that I be smaller than my husband. Theologically, psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, personality, et cetera.

And so I was I was overtly, bluntly, straight-forwardly instructed that I should not marry someone like my father. Now, in my childhood home, my dad is the quiet one, and my mom is the bubbly social one. My dad’s, I’m certain, on the autism spectrum. My mom got her formal ADHD diagnosis at the ripe old age of 73. And yes, you know, I was used to a home where it worked. Mom was socially engaging, dad was a quiet thinker.

I tend to be actually a lot like my dad, but also enjoy people. And I was told you can’t marry a shy or quiet person. You must marry someone bigger and louder than you. I was not taught to look at character.

Like so many girls in the 70s, 80s and 90s, I was taught to look for strong public leadership. Essentially, I was taught to imbibe the halo effect, where if someone is really good at a microphone, you assume that they must also have great integrity and great compassion and great follow-through and great service and work ethic because they’re very good at this one public thing.

And I believe that that did an entire generation of young people a disservice. So recap your question for me because I have rabbit trailed myself into forgetting your question.

Rev. Ruth Perry (21:19)
Well, you’re answering it beautifully. I asked about what was the theology and the church culture. Yeah.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (21:24)
Yes. Okay. Okay. So that, pre-marriage and then post marriage, power of a praying wife. Shut up, say nothing, and pray. Don’t confront, don’t bring up issues, don’t have conversations about things, just get new lingerie, cook a great dinner, get naked, and be quiet. Along with love and respect. Emerson Eggrich’s stuff. Where he says, you know, don’t bring up anything negative to your husband. Don’t criticize. He gives the illustration of him leaving wet towels on the bed and is disrespectful for his wife to ask him to stop leaving molded towels on the bed. You know, don’t let the linens mold. She’s being a disrespectful wife.

The fact that his dad was in his sermons, you know, that his dad was physically violent to his mother and he blamed his mom instead of placing responsibility on his dad for attempted strangulation of his mom as he describes things. Things like Gary Thomas’s book, where he talks about making your no sound like a yes. And so all of these, I don’t know that we would have defined them as theologies, but they were relational maxims that were taught with such fervor that I think they would qualify as relational theologies. The theology of marriage was very much one of inequality and one that silenced half of the partnership in a systematic way.

I remember my little sister lived with us when we were newly wed, and having to mediate a massive argument between her and my husband. And it finally came out that the problem he had with her was that when she asked him a question that disagreed with him, she looked him in the eyes, and that was disrespectful. She should have looked down at the…

And I look back at stuff like that and I am just appalled at the impact, the negative impact that would have had on her.

I look back at the time that he was in seminary doing his grad degree, and I realized there was a massive tuition subsidy for seminary spouses. And I was like, hey, we’re here for another year. Can I get my master’s degree too? Like no one in my family’s gotten a master’s degree. I just, and I was down on the floor, sitting on the floor beside him at his desk, begging permission. To make the decision for myself as a twenty four year old adult to go back to school. And he made me promise that it would only be used for self fulfillment and never take me out of the home.

So all of those theologies of hard and rigid, gender-assigned roles, regardless of who is good at what, of recognizing or failing to recognize that the Holy Spirit speaks to both adults and honestly to children as well, that we should each have our own thriving, direct, connected relationship to God.

That we should each answer to our own consciences first and foremost before any other human. And that when Jesus said to call no man Lord but Him, that also includes the marriage relationship. Neither one is to Lord it over the other, and that goes in both directions.

I look back at those theological roots and I think that for me, the one thing I’m so grateful for is that my own childhood home lived out none of that crap. It gave me a glimpse of what could be, even though we were immersed and just swirling around us, was all of this other stuff that definitely gave me a negative impact. That I saw what mutually supportive, loving teamwork could actually look like.

And now what I teach my kids is it doesn’t matter who makes a decision. What matters is if both people are living with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. If that isn’t there, there’s something very wrong, and you both need to get yourselves to some help. Focus on that. And like 99.9999% of everything else is going to work itself out if you are living each for the other with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. The fruits of the spirit are what we should all be striving for. Be a good human.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:28)
Amen.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (25:29)
Vows don’t make a jerk human into a good partner. And vows aren’t, I’m not saying this against marriage. I’m just saying vows aren’t required to make a good human into a good person to live with. Whether that’s a roommate or a family member or a sibling or whatever. If you are working to allow Jesus to be central in your life in a way that does not lord it over anyone else, that controls yourself based on your conscience, and where all the power you have, in whatever way you have, is being lent to others to empower them wherever they are weak.

We’re gonna be okay. And our homes will be safe places for Jesus to be hanging out right there with us instead of hanging his head and crying at how we misuse his name.

Rev. Ruth Perry (26:15)
Amen. When you were sharing your story, you said that part of the reason why you didn’t recognize how dire your situation was is you didn’t have language for abuse. Can you share some of that language that is helpful to recognize

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (26:27)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (26:28)
that you’re not living in a healthy relationship?

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (26:31)
Absolutely. So I’m going to, there are plenty of terms. Coercive control, betrayal trauma, infidelity, financial infidelity. There’s a lot of these catchphrases. But instead of just dwelling on those catchphrases, which could be interpreted many different ways, I would love to give you four tools.

So in an unhealthy relationship, you will see these four things. And this could be a church parishioner relationship, a parent adult child relationship, a sibling or friendship or a boss employee, or in a marriage. They span the options.

The first tool that an abusive person will use is isolation. This can be seen in triangulation, pitting people against each other, or pulling you away from the mainstream outside world, telling you that everyone else is dangerous except them, or telling you not to read books unless they’ve approved of them, don’t get knowledge from anywhere else, or dating relationship. Maybe it’s you and me against the world.

Baby, when I am angry like the Hulk, you are the only person that can calm me down. I can’t live without you. That isolation also often shows up in families that bounce from church to church. As soon as the isolated partner and the children start to make friends, the controlling partner will decide it’s time for a new church. They don’t like this pastor. There’s something wrong. We’re gonna move, we’re gonna go somewhere else or packing everyone up and moving them to the opposite side of the country away from support community, relatives, friends, people who would see through the rest of the relationship. So isolation comes first.

Second is deflection. And deflection is, don’t know if you’re if if your kids liked Star Wars or sci-fi,

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:12)
Yes, I do.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (28:13)
but mine, big, big deal in our house. so deflection is like a shield that has a force field where everything slides off of it. It just bounces everything off. So all the bad stuff, when I have my when I have my deflection shield up, all the bad stuff slides off me and onto you.

Or anyone else. It’s quintessentially, you know, go back to the 1950s, the devil made me do it. But it can be if the child would have stopped crying when I told them to, I never would have hit them. Or if you hadn’t talked to me that way, I wouldn’t have shoved you into the wall. Or if my parents hadn’t beaten me as a child, I would be able to have conflict resolution conversations with you. But I can’t because childhood trauma. Because you whatever you did. Because I had a bad day at work. Because my mom is mad at me and I took it out on you. Because whatever.

The refusal to operate with self-control and then the deflection. That my reason for acting wrongfully is not because I chose to do the wrong thing. It is because you or someone else created an environment. So that was my only choice was to take it out on the vulnerable person or persons around me. So we have isolation, we have deflection.

The third one is manipulation. And it’s the exact opposite of that. You have a force field shield on deflection. Manipulation is all the good stuff comes to me. Everything comes to me. If we did a great job, I did it. If the family looks good at church today, I’m great. If you got a raise, I’m spending the money. If you know whatever it is, it creates this sense that no matter what negative thing happens, they’re the ones that come out smelling like roses.

So we have isolation, deflection, manipulation, and the fourth one is where we assume that abuse starts, and that’s intimidation. That’s the my way or else. And generally, there’s a fear-based operation under this. If we don’t do things the way the controlling person wants, there will be a price to be paid. Now, a lot of times you think of intimidation as, my goodness, you know, up in your face, physical violence, and it can include that.

But intimidation can also be I know that if I don’t clean up all of the children’s toys from the living room floor, there will be silent treatment through dinner and everyone will suffer. So I scramble to make sure the house doesn’t look lived in before my partner comes home, just so that they will talk to us between now and the kids’ bedtime. It can be the withholding of interaction. It can be refusing to cover bills. It can be whatever the fear-based punishment or cost is, even if it’s not violent or aggressive. That’s intimidation. And we usually think intimidation starts, I mean abuse starts down here where we start to see the intimidation, or it’s been going on so long privately that it’s now becoming public. But the abuse actually starts back here at isolation and then it’s not my fault. And then I’m the best. And now do it or else.

So those four tools are used in, you will see some mix of them, all or some, employed in any abusive relational dynamic. And when we look at abuse, I want to make sure that we point out that abuse is not an incident or an event. You may have a physical violence episode. And that may be someone you’ve never seen before and you will never see again. That’s not an abuse. That is an assault. It’s a crime. It may be a felony. It may need criminal prosecution. They should go to jail. Harm was done, but that’s not abuse. Abuse is the overarching pattern of one person using the power they have to coerce or control another person to their harm.

So it kind of shifts how we look at that. And when we are dealing with parents, especially godly, conscientious Christian parents who have decided that the only possible option that lies ahead of them is to file for divorce, to separate, to try to build a home that is safer and that is.

Free ideally of all of these things, we see those behaviors follow them into the court system. And the parent who has been so good at the public image presenting a glossy public presentation is also the one who is most skilled at presenting that continued glossy public presentation to the court system.

Then you have the protective parent who is exhausted, terrified, emotionally fragmented, trying to remember all the stuff that they have just put away in their minds in order to survive, in the process of losing support because their church doesn’t understand, their family may not understand, their friends are telling them they’re being crazy or they shouldn’t be doing this. They’re losing their community or what they thought was community.

Their kids are traumatized, and now, especially if they were a stay-at-home parent, they’re working one, two, three jobs trying to apply for state subsidies and supports and interventions. Their kids are now going back and forth, and they recognize that there are problems that are continuing, and they’re being painted as the problem parent because they fled for safety. And that creates so much, not only an insane level of legal expense on just the price ticket side of things, but also exhaustion, fatigue, anxiety, overwhelm for the protective parent.

Because these behaviors do not stop just because you exited the home. They will continue, they may morph and shape shift. But they continue. And it is so important to know if you are that kind of protective parent, especially if you’re the conscientious one. You’re showing up and you’re telling the truth and you’re just seeking safety and you’re thinking, why isn’t this justice system here to give me justice? And you don’t know what the system expects of you.

You don’t what they’re looking for. So you keep giving them what you think makes you look like a good parent because you are trying to do the right things by your children. And then it backfires against you. And we have countless conscientious, loving, exhausted, overwhelmed, protective Christian parents who waited longer to leave than any secular person might have because of their theology of the seriousness or permanence of marriage. And so when they finally decided that leaving is the better, safer, wiser option, they are going against everything they have ever been

Rev. Ruth Perry (34:39)
And then they’re faced with a justice system that’s more concerned about making you go away than caring for the vulnerable and caring for the victims of these abuses.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (34:50)
Yes, exactly. Very much so.

Rev. Ruth Perry (34:52)
Well, I feel like we could keep talking forever that we’ve just scratched the surface on this. But what I really

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (34:57)
We have truly. It’s just a just a tiny little sliver.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:00)
Yeah. And I hope that if anybody resonates with our conversation today, I do hope that they look you up, Sarah. And if they need coaching from you, please seek out Sarah. She’s a good person with a good heart. And

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (35:13)
You’re so sweet. Thank you.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:15)
I am just really grateful that you would share your time today. I want to give you the last word and I also want you to express again where people can follow you and find your work. And make sure that they do that.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (35:26)
So I guess I just want to say, whether you’re a mom or a protective dad, if you are facing this kind of journey, an unwanted divorce, an unwanted fracture in your family that you never wanted, but you have realized is necessary for safety and in order to be able to thrive with your children.

First of all, you’re not alone. And second, you can do this. It’s gonna be hard. It will be the hardest thing, it will be the second hardest thing that you’ve ever done. You’ve already done the hardest thing, and that is surviving in an abusive marriage in the first place. If you can survive living in one, you can survive leaving one. But you have to remind yourself of that quite a bit.

And if you are going through this and you are just twisted in knots with the expectations of the court system, wondering what to do next, how to protect your children, how to find a lawyer who genuinely fights for your kids, how to recognize the steps in the playbook that your co-parent keeps using so that you’re not blindsided and flattened by things that happen over and over again every single time. That is what Freedom Navigator is here for.

And I would be, I I will give Ruth a link for a free 15-minute consult. Anybody who’s dealing with this, I will give you a free 15-minute consult, hear a little bit about your case, and let you know whether you belong in our support group, our strategic support group that has weekly sessions and templates and tools and tactical guides for the court system, the whole works. Or if you need more one-to-one support because you’ve got a really gnarly case. Both of those options are available. And I’ll be happy to meet with you and no charge because I know that this kind of journey is also financially very, very stressful. So I will give Ruth that you can hop on my calendar and I will talk to you and help you figure out what is the best fit for what you need.

And also, if you are not at that spot, but something’s just not right, and you’re just not sure what it is, something’s not right. I want to invite you to go over to Wilderness to Wild and take our free explainer course. It’s a series of free videos that goes through 18 different areas of life. It talks about and it shows those the red flags of when something’s really unhealthy versus when it’s healthy.

In those different 18 areas of life. And I talk a lot more in depth about those four tools and another four relational dynamics that are present in any abusive relational system. So you can kind of dig into that. There’s the transcripts, all of it is free. It’s there for you at no charge. And you can dig in and see if you recognize yourself and what steps you may need to take.

In order to get good Christ-centered, faith-familiar, and evidence-based, data-driven help. If you’re a helper, a clergy member, a teacher, a counselor, or therapist, I’ll give you a link to that too.

I have a provider toolkit for those who are helpers to help you know how to support clients who are facing these kinds of situations. Because very often those are outside the scope of traditional counseling or traditional pastoral therapy. So I’ll give Ruth those.

And really, though, it just boils down to Jesus wants you to be safe. He wants you to be loving and to be loved. And he wants you to not have to live in fear in your own home. So whatever you need to do to reach that. Jesus is walking by you on the way.

Rev. Ruth Perry (38:57)
Amen. Thank you so much, Sarah. God bless you.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (39:00)
Thank you.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please subscribe, rate or review us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more! Your support means the world. God bless!

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029 I Lisa Sharon Harper on The Very Good Gospel and Fortune

Posted on September 30, 2026 by | Leave a comment
Portrait of Lisa Sharon Harper, a speaker, writer, activist, and artist. She is featured as a guest on The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast. Books by Harper, 'The Very Good Gospel' and 'Fortune,' are displayed in the image.
Buy Lisa Sharon Harper’s books! The Very Good Gospel and Fortune and find more resources at lisasharonharper.com

Several years ago, I read Lisa Sharon Harper’s book, The Very Good Gospel, and it rocked my world. She asked the simple question: was the evangelical gospel presentation good news to her enslaved great-great-great grandmother, who had lived a life of subjection and oppression, who had been repeatedly raped and whose children had been stolen from her, time and time again? Would hearing that she was a sinner and that God had to punish her for her sins, but Jesus took that punishment for her and if she believed that, she could go to heaven when she dies sound like good news to someone who had suffered so much in this life? And then Lisa Sharon Harper fleshed out very good news, of God’s plan of redemption and healing for all that was broken by the Fall, a vision of shalom and wholeness and peace for all of God’s creation. I highly recommend you read The Very Good Gospel!

So when Harper’s book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World–and How to Repair It All came out, I bought it immediately. But it sat on my nightstand for over a year as I worked up the nerve to be heartbroken for her family, and for all of the families that have been wrenched apart by racism in our country. It was another powerful read. Lisa Sharon Harper is a prophet of reconciliation and healing and I pray that those who have “ears to hear” will recognize that in our conversation.

In this episode, we talked about Harper’s faith background and journey to understanding justice. We talked about the biblical concept of shalom and its relevance today; about the historical roots of systemic racism in Christian theology, and how Plato and Aristotle have influenced Western theologians, leading to justification for colonization and slavery. And we talked about the biblical view of equality and justice in Paul’s writings, and the our future hope of reconciliation and new creation as Christians.

I hope you enjoy our conversation, and then be sure to follow Lisa Sharon Harper’s work and continue to learn from her.

Buy The Very Good Gospel and Fortune. Find more resources at https://lisasharonharper.com

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Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more!

TRANSCRIPT:

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:17)
My guest today is Lisa Sharon Harper, who has maybe more than anyone else, impacted my own faith as someone who I’ve read and followed for a long time. And so I’m just brimming with gratitude today that you would come on my podcast. And I just want to say right out from the gate that this is something that I know about you, is that you love people.

And that your ministry is coming from a good place. You’re a good person with a massive heart. And you coming here today is just another sign of the goodness of Lisa Sharon Harper. And so I’m thrilled that you would come on today so I can introduce you to my audience.

Lisa Sharon Harper (00:53)
O my goodness. Thank you so much, Reverend Perry. I mean, it’s actually a real honor to be with you and your community today. And I am honored to be a part of your story, any part of your story. Thank you so much for reaching out and I’m excited to be in conversation with you.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:09)
Well, I had you on to tell your story, but let me just say why you’re such a big part of my story before we start. I’m probably the evangelical church’s golden child. I couldn’t have been a better evangelical. That was how I was raised. Not in the Bible belt, but very influenced by the evangelical culture in my formation years.

I went to a Christian college, Gordon College, to study music so I could do music ministry in the church because I didn’t think women could have this kind of ministry that I have today.

Lisa Sharon Harper (01:40)
Come on.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:41)
And while I was at Gordon College, they advertised a spring mission trip to go build a house for Habitat for Humanity. And I signed up because I thought the student leader was really cute and maybe I’d get to know him. But they had too many people sign up, so they put half of us into a mission trip to Washington, DC to learn about racial reconciliation. And I did not know that I didn’t know so many things. And I’m continuing to learn. That was 24 years ago. White evangelicals do not know a lot. And one of the

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:12)
biggest lessons that I learned that week was to listen better. And I learned that most white evangelicals are only listening, of the people that they are friends with and following, one percent is non-white. And so the first

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:24)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:24)
thing I did 24 years ago is I tried to diversify my algorithm. And I was just listening to all male pastors and book writers. And I started, I don’t remember exactly when I found your ministry, but I followed you and I devoured

The very good gospel in twenty sixteen. I just read Fortune this this summer.

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:48)
Good.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:48)
But The Very Good Gospel really changed my theology in profound ways.

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:52)
Mm-hmm.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:53)
And so welcome. Can you tell us, Lisa, a little bit about your faith background and I’m especially interested in hearing about where you came from and how you came to your first pilgrimage, because pilgrimage is a big part of what you do. So could we start there today?

Lisa Sharon Harper (03:07)
Well, that’s really great. First of all, I wanna say I see your Ruby Woo lipstick. Hello. Speaking of pilgrimages, we did this for those who don’t know. We used to do a pilgrimage called the Ruby Woo pilgrimage. It was a women’s empowerment pilgrimage for evangelical women. And we did three of them and they were amazing. And actually we were gonna keep it going, but then COVID happened and you know.

So but my story, I can’t start my story at myself. It has to begin with my ancestors. And the reason for that is because there’s a larger story than just my decision to follow Jesus at the altar in 1983, August 21st, around 9 30 PM at a Sunday evening camp church meeting. That’s where, white evangelicals will begin the story, right? Because that’s the date that I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.

Or what I like to call the date I jumped the broom with Jesus. But if I’m honest, and also for us to appreciate that moment and what came after, we have to go back because my family is a black family in America. And we actually have a deep and long history with the Episcopal Church in America, the black Episcopal Church in America.

If you’ve read Fortune, Fortune Game McGee was born and raised in 1687 on the eastern shore of Maryland. And her family line goes in a few different directions, and one of those directions goes to two historians have traced her progeny to James Fourten, who changed his name to Fortin, we believe, when he went up north, in order to avoid slave catchers who were looking for Fortunes because they were usually escaped enslaved people. But he became one of the richest people in Philadelphia, regardless of race. He was one of the richest people in Philadelphia, and he helped to fund the abolitionist movement.

He also helped to start the black stream of the Episcopal Church, when Absalom Jones founded St. Thomas’s Episcopal African Episcopal Church here in Philadelphia, the church I now go to. And so he helped to put the seed money up for that. He was one of the founders of that church. And so our history in the Black Episcopal Church goes way back. So my mom, when she grew up, she grew up going to the Black Episcopal Church, to St. Simon’s Church, which is really just a few blocks down from where I live now, in in South Philadelphia. and that was one of the five major black Episcopal churches here in Philadelphia.

My great-grandmother went to St. Simon’s and then other black Episcopal churches. but my mom actually stopped going to church in the 1960s because she was so disillusioned. It was her job in the 60s, with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to organize churches, to get churches in Philadelphia to host Stokely Carmichael when he came into town. He was the leader of SNCC at the time, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And it was her job to get him pulpits to speak in. And nobody would have him speak after he spoke on black power. When he got up on the bed of that truck I think it’s Broad Street Park down in Mississippi, Money, Mississippi, near Money. And he said, We need to get us some black power. We need to be able to break any political machine that wants to come against us. White America took that as a existential threat. And the black church even in the United States at that time was not fully engaged in actually trying to stay out of trouble.

So when my mom was calling around to churches, there was only one church in all of Philadelphia that would take Stokely Carmichael and place him in the pulpit. And that I believe was the Church of the Ascension. And so my mom was disillusioned and she left the church. And really the Civil Rights Movement became her church. And so I didn’t grow up in church.

So when I found Jesus, I grew up asking the question of who is God and what is prayer and, Who’s this Jesus guy? I thought that Luke was the main man in the Bible because that is the name of the church that where I was I was baptized, Saint Luke. And we went there like every other Easter on a good year, you know. but obviously he’s not the main man. He did write one of the main texts, but he’s not the main man. And so it was in the context of a white evangelical parachurch ministry, Young Life.

And then subsequently a white evangelical little country church, Wesleyan Church in Cape May, New Jersey, where I began to go every week to the youth group and and they discipled me over the course of a year, where I began asking the question of who is Jesus? What is prayer? How do we touch God? How do we reach God? How do we communicate? And that was where I found Jesus. And I ended up walking down the aisle at a Sunday evening camp church service on August twenty first, nineteen eighty-three.

And very soon after that, was handed a tract that told me that I needed to vote for Reagan, even though I was only 14 years old, I couldn’t vote. Where am I who am I gonna vote for at 14 years old? So I got that tract and I took it home to my sister and I shared with her, you know, if Mondale wins, I think it was Mondale, We’re all gonna be rounded up into concentration camps, because that’s what the track said. Mondale is the Antichrist and he’s gonna round up all the children and put them in concentration camps. Well, you know, just come to think of it, there is a leader that we have right now that is rounding up children and putting them in concentration camps. Maybe we should think about the Antichrist in that direction. Hmm, somebody said, hm.

Rev. Ruth Perry (08:24)
Yep.

Lisa Sharon Harper (08:25)
So anyway, right. So I for a long period was deeply like yourself, deeply embedded in the white evangelical church. was in campus mostly parachurch ministries, but also the church. I mean, I went to a United Methodist church before quote before they said before they went liberal. The UMC went liberal.

And I was in Campus Crusade for Christ, back when it was called Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1980s. I was in Intervarsity in grad school and then went on staff with intervarsity in the 1990s. And so I was on staff with intervarsity for 10 years and deeply committed to that evangelical vision of the world.

I had no questions and no qualms, except that by that time I had begun to understand that this race thing is for real and we need to deal with it within the evangelical church. I had not done major reading on it. I’d only read, interestingly, evangelicals’ take on it, which obviously doesn’t give you the whole story. But it was the experience of pilgrimage in two thousand three that changed everything for me.

I had already been leading in racial reconciliation in Greater Los Angeles with Intervarsity, now on staff with them for several years. And we did a pilgrimage called The Pilgrimage for Reconciliation. And it retraced the Cherokee Trail of Tears for the first two weeks and the African experience in America for the last two weeks. We were on the road for a month. Most people don’t do that now. It was a million-dollar project, it was crazy.

And it was Intervarsity. Intervarsity did this. they made this investment because back in the 1990s they actually did get deeply invested in racial reconciliation, but they found that people were beginning to complain that it was pulling them away from the real work of Christianity, which is evangelism. And so they were trying to figure out what’s the relationship between the two. There is a relationship in scripture, and you see that most clearly in ironically, Luke.

Luke four, when Jesus shows up on the scene and it’s his inaugural address and he says, Why have I come? Here’s what I why I’ve come. And he reads from Isaiah sixty one, I have come to proclaim good news to the oppressed, to the captive, release for the captive. the blind will see and the year of the Lord’s favor, which is economic like an economic overturning. It’s where the high are brought low and those who are low are brought high. There’s an evening of the playing field economically in the Jubilee.

And so that was Jesus’s inaugural address. And so I was struck on this pilgrimage that this biblical concept of shalom incorporated that vision that we see in Luke. It held both. It held both the good news of Jesus and the reality that all things must be reconciled, not only back to God, but to each other. That the fall, the fall itself was not only a break between humanity and God, it was a break between all things. All things. And so God’s vision is not so small that he and she only imagines that only humans can be reconciled or should be reconciled to God. God’s vision is expansive. It is eternal. It is infinity. It is all things being reconciled to all things, including our relationship with God.

And and the relationship between the genders and the relationship between us and the rest of creation. No whales need to be saved. No manatee need to be saved. No elephants need to be rescued from zoos. No lions are emaciating in captivity. You hear what I’m saying? You hear what I’m saying?

Rev. Ruth Perry (12:00)
Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (12:00)
And there’s no climate change because in that vision we are stewarding the wellness of all the relationships in creation and the wellness of the systems that govern us, all of us. They govern us in ways that bless all. There is no cursing on the first page of the Bible, which is where this is all grounded. And so that pilgrimage really challenged my simplistic, incredibly narrow view of the gospel that I inherited from Intervarsity and Campus Crusade, mostly Campus Crusade, that four spiritual laws, right? And it challenged it.

It blew it up. And that’s where for the next thirteen years I really wrestled in the scripture through this concept of shalom. And that’s where The Very Good Gospel was born. It was born out of that wrestling. And it was born out of me speaking on it for thirteen years in various ways. And then finally people just started in my last few years, they said, Where can I read this? Where can and I’d have to point them to like ten different books that I was getting it from.

And then finally I just heard God say, Write the book, it’s time for you to write the book. So I wrote it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (13:06)
I feel like the well, I don’t feel like the evangelical culture is individualistic and it does emphasize authority and give hierarchy to some and put others under other, you know.

Lisa Sharon Harper (13:19)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (13:20)
And so reading The Very Good Gospel was the first time that I had all of those hierarchies plateaued and recognized where is the resistance in evangelical culture to caring for the planet? Like there’s so many things in evangelical culture that are contrary when you really think about caring for God’s good creation, where we would prioritize capitalism over caring for our vulnerable and marginalized and poor.

People in my area, they had a community wide revival this every year, but this past year the speaker, was talking about false gospels and the very first one is social justice. What is the resistance in evangelical culture to breaking down these hierarchies and to living with the ethic of shalom and abundance for all. Where does that come from, Lisa?

Lisa Sharon Harper (14:06)
Okay, let’s talk.

Rev. Ruth Perry (14:07)
Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (14:08)
Well, that’s a great question, and there is a very clear answer to that. Where does it come from? Randy Woodley, another mentor of mine and dear friend, theologian and practitioner, he traces it back to Plato and Aristotle. And and actually now that I’m reading a bunch of scholars for my own dis p PhD work, a lot of people are doing that. They’re tracing it back to Plato and Aristotle. they had this thing called dualism, right? So Platonic dualism. And in a dualistic worldview, things are either/or. They are light or dark, they are good or evil, they are either or. There’s not gradations, there’s not story. and there’s not nuance.

Rev. Ruth Perry (14:45)
Nuance, complexity, yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (14:48)
There’s not flesh, it’s not human, it’s actually a very mechanized, a mechanized worldview. And so the way that dualism has worked, and what Randy talks about is that once you have a worldview where things are either or, and that is your central worldview, and you then apply that to all kinds of things, including the body and the spirit, right?

So there’s either body or spirit. There’s not gradations and there’s not nuance and there’s there’s not and and then you add to that Aristotle’s hierarchies of human belonging, where Aristotle was actually Plato’s student and his accolate. And ten years after Plato wrote The Republic, Aristotle writes on politics, which is actually a compilation of his various lectures right and and writings. But politics he actually says explicitly if you have been conquered you have proven that you were created to be enslaved.

He literally says this. So he is the one who takes that dualistic worldview and puts it on steroids and then begins to bifurcate humanity. Because before that, they were saying, well, humans are above the animals and da-da-da. But now you have some humans are above other humans, right? So the civilized are above the barbarians, right? That was what Aristotle was thinking. That’s the worldview.

They didn’t have a white-black worldview yet. That was the enlightenment period. But then you get down to the enlightenment period and they’re taking that thinking forward, and that’s where you get the Doctrine of Discovery, is in that period, right? So the quote enlightenment period is also from the perspective of those who were conquered in that time, it was the age of conquest, not the age of discovery. It was the age of conquest. And there were ways that the church was complicit in that, the doctrine of discovery.

comes from the church. It actually is founded in the Catholic Church that declared that taking the logic of Aristotle that gave permission for explorers who went out all over the world and discovered land, right, that had uncivilized, unchristian people on it, okay, you can go and take that land and you can enslave the people according to Aristotle. Not according to scripture. According to Aristotle.

And now you get scripture interpreted through the framework of Aristotle. And then you have to ask, all right, what is the authority here? What is the authority that that Pope, Pope Nicholas V, right? What’s the authority he was resting on? Well, he was resting on the authority of Aristotle in order to interpret the Scripture in a certain way, but you can’t when you just look at the basic makeup of that scripture, you can’t do that. Genesis was written by recently enslaved people.

You’re not going to get a justification for slavery from recently enslaved people. Jesus comes from a lineage of serially enslaved people. At the time that Jesus was born, the year that Jesus was born, 500 people were crucified per day, when a centurion marched through the Northern Galilee territory and cru s basically squashed an attempted uprising against Caesar because they were being occupied. So this general crucified five hundred people per day. Five hundred.

So that was happening the year Jesus was born because people were trying to rise up against the oppression, the imperial opp impression against them. And that comes down, it trickles down. Our lead authority then becomes secular philosophy, not actually the scripture, and certainly not Jesus, who proclaimed in Luke 4, this is why I came. And so now we’re interpreting Jesus through the lens of Aristotle, through the lens of of of Romanized Paul.

Right, who actually goes through his own, we see him go through kind of a conversion over the course of his life in terms of who he says is in and who’s out, right? So why does the church so complicit in it? Because the church is all up in it for like the last six hundred years. The church has been all up in it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (18:56)
Yeah. And I hear a lot of fear mongering because now I’ve moved to the South and I live in the Bible Belt. I think it’s nine years this month. Eight years ago I came to a Red Letter Christian revival that you came and spoke at and you prayed for me because I was having a hard time adjusting to living in this area where there’s a lot of Christianity but a lot of blindness. It seems to be, what’s the word? Like intentional blindness.

Lisa Sharon Harper (19:24)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (19:24)
We’re in a community that has black neighbors. But how well do we know their story of being here in this town?

Lisa Sharon Harper (19:32)
Well, I think when you move it forward into the American context, particularly the American South. I did some research recently in the course of you know PhD studies on the history of the Southern Baptist Church. I’m no Southern Baptist Church scholar, but it doesn’t take much to do some basic history. And Reverend Richard Furman was the Southern Charleston Baptist Church, the first Baptist Church in Charleston, back in the 1840s. No, 1820s, 1821, 22, when Denmark VC attempted an insurrection. And it was going to be one of the largest rebellions in the South up to that point. There had actually, up to that point, been like a thousand possible attempted rebellions and rebellions across the South from the 1700s forward. This was not an unusual thing.

But Denmark VC was highly organized and he was going to have a major uprising. And it was squashed because someone, another black person actually ratted him out. And so he was beheaded along with the people who were rising up with him, and their heads were put on stakes all over South Carolina. And Richard Furman, the pastor, he went against the tide at the time. The tide at the time, in light of of DeMarc VC’s attempted insurrection, was to say, maybe we need to incrementally do away with this slavery thing. That was literally what people in South Carolina were saying. Maybe we shouldn’t have this anymore. Maybe we need to, you know, do away with this. Richard Furman, who had seven slaves of his own, he rose up and said, No, we need to entrench it further. We need to get more heinous with them.

Of course, he didn’t use that word, and he is actually one of the people who actually created the more heinous slave codes that came out as a result of that. And he gave the theological biblical exegesis or the argument support or apologetic for slavery. He gave that. And that ended up being the same apologetic that they then used during the Jim Crow era. So that one pastor gave america about about 150 years of evil. And it was only about 20 years that he convened the very first convention of the Baptist Church in the South, there in South Carolina.

And of course the Southern Baptist denomination was born about twenty years later, when the Northern Baptists were now saying, Well, wait a minute, we shouldn’t have this slavery thing and and no, you can’t send missionaries overseas if they hold slaves. And the Southern Baptists, armed with Furman’s theology said yes we can and so they broke off from the Baptists and actually in that period every single denomination in the country, every denomination experienced a split along the lines of slavery. Every denomination did and so when people say well they were just a person of their era no they weren’t they made a choice.

Because there were a good number of people who actually were not for it because of their faith. and the abolitionist movement, headed like spearheaded by the black church, was among them, right? So was leading that charge and and they understood clearly that you cannot you cannot enslave another human being you cannot subjugate the image of God on earth and then claim to follow God. You just can’t do that. So, how do we have what we have today? Richard Furman created this apologetic for slavery. And who did that benefit?

Who does that? It benefits the slaveholder. It benefits the slaveholder’s bank account. That’s what it benefited. They got to have free labor and justify it. And they didn’t only have free labor, they created slave farms. I mean they dug into, they got blood on their teeth for the depth of evil that they participated in. And they did it through the cover that they got from their theological apologetic for slavery. And with blood dripping from their mouths, they then went and preached the gospel in church. They never repented for that.

They went to war to protect it and lost. And then once the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments were passed, they began to understand, you know, there’s consequences for what we’ve done. But then once the compromise of 1876-77 happens, what do they do? They bring back out Richard Furman’s theology.

And they used that as the theological cover for Jim Crow, which literally just continued the culture of the plantation, the white men walking into the homes of black men and and and black families and literally in front of the children and the husbands raping the wives at will. Stringing up and lynching nearly six thousand people over the course of ninety years, not even a hundred years. Six thousand people.

With impunity because it was the theology was so pervasive across the South that it permeated into the judicial system, into the policing, I mean police was actually created in order to entrench it. Right? So how do we have what we have right now? Like how is the church, especially in the South, willfully ignorant because they are doing what they’ve always done. They are spinning the story.

They have spun the story. They have omitted their evil. Why is it that most white people in Tulsa, Oklahoma have no idea that the Tulsa massacre ever happened? Because they were not taught it. They went silent on this day or several days when they went blood dripping from their mouths. And they never told their children that they did that. Now their children don’t know. And they’ve only picked up their politics and so they’re, you know, dedicated Republicans.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:14)
And more upset about having to take down Confederate statues and the Confederate flag and more upset about transgender people. There’s so many inconsequential

Lisa Sharon Harper (25:22)
So stupid. Stupid stuff.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:24)
things that they just stay angry about

Lisa Sharon Harper (25:26)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:26)
so that they don’t have to face the truth. But the truth sets us free.

Lisa Sharon Harper (25:29)
Exactly. It’s like, why? What is it? Like, why can’t people just say, We were so wrong. We were just so wrong. And that’s okay. We’re not lesser human beings because we were wrong. We were just wrong. And we did wrong. And now, you know, things need to change.

I mean this is I think this is literally the big question of the day. But here’s what I think about that. I think that the reason why it is so hard for white Christians to face slavery, like really face it, what it really was, and the reality of it is because repentance is a small death. You know, I talk about that in The Very Good Gospel. It’s a small form of death. It’s death to self. It’s death to the rightness of the self. it’s death to ego. It’s it’s death to the vision of dominance.

And if you believe, which I do believe this this is a core belief of people of European descent, and I say that specifically European descent because i it’s not held within indigenous peoples around the world. But a core belief of people of European descent is that to be well you must dominate. And I think that comes from Aristotle, Plato.

Dualistic thinking, either/or winner/loser thinking. You know, everybody’s trying to figure out we how do we dig our way out of this? I really do believe the answer is in our faith. It is repentance, it is confession of the truth. And by repentance what I mean is not just saying I’m sorry, but to literally give reparations, to repair what was broken, to repair the imbalance of power, to share power.

But I think that there is this fundamental belief in people of European descent that power cannot be shared, that either you will dominate or you will be dominated. Because that was the experience in Europe for millennia, right? Like they literally did go for millennia, multiple millennia, dominating each other. That was the thing. But there are people groups, there are regions of the world like where domination was not necessarily the thing. It wasn’t the goal. It wasn’t it was just to live and to live in harmony actually. Again, that’s something that I learned from my mentor and friend, Randy Woodley, that the ethic of indigenous people is actually harmony. It’s not winning. It’s harmony. And so we can all learn from that. And by indigenous I don’t just mean

Native American, I mean people who are indigenous to their land all over the world. I mean the Sami people up in northern Europe, and the Celtic people, and people of every African nation, the Aeroba, the Igbo. I mean, these are ethics that are held almost nearly universally within indigenous peoples. And it is when you break the relationship with land, when you leave your land in order to go out and dominate the other, that’s when that is broken and that’s what Europe did. That’s why you I think Europe has a unique responsibility for people of European descent have a unique responsibility for the ethic of domination that permeates our world today. Because y’all won. You won.

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:43)
Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (28:44)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:44)
So good theology restores and reconciles and leads to abundance and healing and beautiful things? the fruit of poor theology is bad. And we can see the fruit. Today we see it in the concentration camps and the people being unlawfully detained and held and people dying in our streets, and we see it in USAID being cut and millions of people that are gonna die from that, and the Palestinians that have been genocided, and I mean there’s so many examples of ways that poor theology has led to death and destruction. And the

Lisa Sharon Harper (29:16)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (29:16)
fruit is there to see if you can be open to seeing it and experiencing that death of repentance. Can you make a biblical case for Shalom and this theological framework of abundance and no hierarchies and all of The Very Good Gospel. Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (29:31)
Yeah. Talk about The Very Good Gospel. I mean, here’s the thing is that, you know, one of what I’ve learned about Shalom is that as I talked about earlier, we were created for overwhelmingly good relationship and relatedness between all things. That’s what we were created for. And that meant that there was blessing and no cursing. And I believe that the scripture in the first chapter of Genesis is through an epic poem explaining to us what we were created for and how we were created to be in relationship with each other.

And we get another account of creation in Genesis two. It’s much more intimate. It’s God’s hands and the muck, right? It’s, you know, literally God creating human from the earth. And and we see a much more detailed, it’s not epic poetry anymore now, it’s story. And in that story, we see that the climax of the story is actually the flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, and the first creation of community on Earth, which is Ish and Isha, and that the human now has community and we are bound to each other.

And then you see the fall. And in the fall, what happens is that each of those relationships that God had just declared overwhelmingly good, a chapter and a verse ago in chapter one are all torn down. That’s the fall. They fall down. Those relationships fall down. And they fall one by one, starting with the relationship between us and ourselves, when we run and we hide from God, that’s shame entering into the world and and our relationship with God falls in that same moment, you know, when we’re hiding from God. And then our relationship between the genders just crashes to the ground when the man points at the woman and says, She made me do it, right? And now the woman is going to yearn for her husband, even though being with her husband is going to make her come to near death and and death in some cases in childbirth, right?

And even after having that child and suffering all of that pain, she will forget the pain and still go back to her husband and have to have pain all over again. This is the fall. This is the natural consequence of when we come out from under the covering of God. When we come out from under the call to steward the overwhelming wellness of all the relationships on earth. And how did we do that? We didn’t listen to God.

God said, don’t eat of the fruit of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And I don’t necessarily think that this is something that happened in history. When I now read the scholars, they actually believe that there’s lots of different understandings of what that means and what were they trying to communicate? But one thing I do know is they were trying to communicate truth.

So it may not be fact the way we understand fact and history today. History didn’t exist back then. History is again an Enlightenment era discipline, the way we understand it today, the recording of things that happened as they happened, through you know a particular lens. But back then they were not trying to record what happened, they were trying to share truth.

That was the goal of these texts and the moment of telling the stories and songs and the poems. And so the question I’m asking then is what is the truth that is being communicated through that Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 account? Well, the truth that is communicated is that God is God and we are not. That we are created in relationship with God and each other and the earth.

And that that relationship is broken when we grab at our own peace at the expense of the others. When God said, don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that knowledge was not just head knowledge. It’s literally kinetic in the body knowledge, experiential knowledge. So then I’m asking, how are they experiencing evil? How are they experiencing good and evil? Well, they’re experiencing it by not trusting God. First and foremost.

When God said, Don’t eat of the tree, that that command in itself gave them an opportunity to trust God and not eat of the tree or not trust God and eat of the tree. They chose not to trust God, and that broke relationship with God. And you can’t have shalom without God.

Because God is the author of Shalom. So after that, the natural consequence when we don’t trust God and God’s way to peace is that we lose peace. ‘Cause all that we can get for ourselves is broken peace because we are not God. So that’s when we see all of those relationships fall, and it’s like a snowball that grows like a becomes an avalanche, right? And it starts with that shame entering the world, but it ends with colonization and imperialism just fourteen chapters later.

Right, so you go from shame entering the world in chapter three to the relationship between humanity and creation and men and women and the agenders breaks and and then death enters the world and we’re driven from the garden and then the relationship between families breaks because of you. By the way, they are named Adornment and Shadow. So right there and it’s amazing, right? In Genesis 4, this is like what page 4

Rev. Ruth Perry (34:28)
man. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lisa Sharon Harper (34:32)
of the Bible, patriarchy enters the world. And it’s a break. It’s so far from naked and unashamed and clinging to one another. Now you have adornment and shadow.

on the fourth page of the Bible. And that is not God’s prescription for goodness. That is the consequence of grabbing peace in our own way. And then you see the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages, which leads to ethnic enmity. And just a couple of chapters later leads to colonization. One king trying to exact his will over several smaller kings. And that’s where you get the first mention of the word war.

First mention of war. You know, fourteen chapters after Tov Meod, very good. So Shalom, the biblical concept of Shalom is grounded in that first chapter and second chapter of Genesis, where we see what overwhelmingly good related in relationship looks like. And it is restored to us when we follow God and God’s way. It’s the ethic, it’s how we live in the world together. It’s whether we are living our lives in ways that mend the broken relationships rather than capitalizing on them.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:45)
It’s so powerful. I’m just thinking about the journey you went on as you wrote Fortune and

Lisa Sharon Harper (35:47)
Fortunate. Yeah. Yep.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:51)
looked into your family’s history here in America and in the South, and all the ways that the world was designed and the systems were constructed to keep those relationships broken and to keep people under oppression. What was the spiritual and emotional impact of that journey for you.

Lisa Sharon Harper (36:10)
My goodness. I have to tell you, it was incredibly hard to write that book. I mean, it was incredibly hard for multiple reasons. Number one, it took thirty years of research. and I did not start the research thinking I was gonna write a book. I was really started the research as a black woman just trying to figure out who am I. I didn’t know the names of my great grandparents, except for one. I knew the name of one great grandparent and met her, like knew her as a as a child. but didn’t know anything beyond that.

So started the research with my mom. My mom actually is the one who went to the National Archives and was searching for this person and that person. And then in the early 2000s, I started to join her in that effort and started asking questions in the early 90s, but really joined her as an as a genealogist for our family in the in the early 2000s. And I was just boom, like I was overtaken by, wow, this is incredible. You know, a Gen Xer, I am the first generation to be able to know where we come from as African Americans because of DNA. Like that is a science that my mom did not have, my grandmother did not have. They did not know that we come from the Yoruba people and the house of people of Nigeria. When you trace it back through my matrilineal line, my mom’s mom’s mom, going back a thousand years, that’s where we were. We were with The House of People in northern Nigeria. We were with the Yoruba people in southwestern Nigeria.

Like when I first did my DNA and and it came back, obviously the thing that’s a little bit ironic about the whole DNA thing is that that technology is advancing all the time. It’s getting better and better and better and crisper and crisper. And so, the DNA story that shows up in our little pie charts when you when you send away for it and it comes back, it it changes. It gets more and more detailed and and even corrected over time. But I’ll never forget the first day that I got mine. I got it and I wept because it was clear to me in my body.

In fact, I don’t think it was only me that was weeping. I think it was all the ancestors who make up me, who literally, literally are me. My DNA is their DNA. I think they wept with me in that moment because it was a deep, deep weeping, because it was the first time that we knew where we were from. There is a healing work that comes when you are able to be grounded on land, know what land you are from. Because in that you don’t only know the land, you know the story, you know part of your people’s story. So I don’t know the ancestors’ names that came over. I haven’t d deep enough research like, you know, Alex Haley to go back and find my Kunta Kente.

But I do know Hannah Reynolds is the farthest back I can go on my mom’s, mom’s, mom’s matrilineal line. And so her ancestors stretch back to the Yoruba and Hausa people. I do know what happened to Nigerians. And to the Senegalese, which are also mixed up in my in my DNA, that Sambo Game, Fortune’s father, was from Senegal and it shows in a DNA. There are several people in our line that were Senegalese.

So that’s a story. That’s actually a traceable story. I can learn what happened to the Senegalese. I can learn, what ships they were brought over on. We actually know that now.

And so without knowing their names and their micro stories, I can know the macro story of what happened to my people. And that grounds me. That can ground me. Because until then, and let me just say this is really important, until I had that story, my experience of being a black person in America is very similar, interestingly, in this way to being a white person. That my

value, my purpose is only defined then by my blackness or your whiteness. And whiteness and blackness were created in order to define who has power and who doesn’t. Who has the power to own land and who doesn’t? Who has the power? Who has the right not to be enslaved and who doesn’t?

Who has the right to vote and who doesn’t? Like who has the ability to exercise agency in the world and who doesn’t? And theologically then speaking, who is human and who isn’t? Because what it means to be human is to exercise agency. To exercise dominion in the world. That’s agency. And so as a black woman who wasn’t able to trace my family.

I then needed to prove my worth. I needed to prove my worth based on what I could produce. Because that was how black worth was delineated in a black-white construct. In the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow era, we became as valuable as we could produce. You could produce less, you are less valuable. Literally, you take less money in the trade.

And so to be a valuable black person, I needed to be able produce my bales of cotton per se, right? And for people of European descent, being named white meant that you were placed automatically by virtue of the color of your skin and your ancestry in Europe. Particularly northern Europe.

That you were dubbed of the noble class. In other words, you got the opportunity to become a member of the noble class based on how much money you could gather, how much money you could accumulate. And the way to do that here was by owning enslaved people, right? That was the explicit, like explicit understanding. And so.

The question of whether or not you are a worthy white person. Whether you’re living into your whiteness, living up to your whiteness, or are you a failure as a white person? You know? I think a lot of the people who were out there on the mall on January 6th in 2021 are people who have failed at whiteness.

Right? They are not the ruling class. And they resent that. And they are looking at the other to say, you’re the reason why I’m not the ruling class. I need to subjugate you so that I can rise. Because that’s the logic of domination that permeated Europe. And so when I was writing Fortune, it was hard to write because one, it’s hard to actually have access to these ancient histories, these ancient in our terms in America, hundreds of years, especially for black people. And so I had to find ways to get around that by legitimately studying the meta histories in order to understand at least the circumstances within which my ancestors lived. But it also was really hard the closer I got to my generations because the facts are there and you actually know what happened. And now I as a writer, in order to communicate them clearly to you, I almost have to relive them.

And so it was incredibly painful. It was just an incredibly painful time. I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget. And actually this is ironic ’cause it’s the first chapter. It’s not a latter chapter. And the first chapter as I was researching for it. I’ll never forget the moment when I was doing the research on Fortune and Sarah and their families and how Fortune had several daughters that were also indentured.

And so did Sarah. One of her daughters, she was indentured, and she had children who were also indentured. And it’s like, what’s there happening? Because the law didn’t say that that indentured servitude was supposed to be generational like that. The law was very specific. You’re indentured if you are a servant and you have sex outside of marriage with somebody and you have a child in your indenture. Then you are indentured for a further three to seven years and your children are indentured for XYZ time. And this shifted over the first maybe first decade of these laws being passed around 1700. But it eventually shook out to say that if the father was white then your child would be indentured for twenty one years. And if the father was black, like if if a servant got it on with a a black enslaved man, then her children would be indentured for thirty one years, right? And I started doing the math on

Fortune’s children and how long they were indentured, and then Sarah’s children and how long they were indentured, because they actually do turn up free eventually, right? And it’s like twenty-one years. Twenty one. Which meant they were being raped regularly by their indenturers in order to gain free labor for another twenty one years for the family.

So they were generationally raping and impregnating each generation. And I when I saw that, because I was like, why is Sarah surrounded by women and there are no men in her picture? Like, why is there never a husband? And she was taken to court to be indentured, and her children were also taken to court in each generation to be indentured. And

why are there never any men? Is she in a brothel? Like I really was like, what’s going on here? And then I just started really no, no, no, she’s not in a brothel. She is in like really distinguished homes. Like the Fuchs family on the eastern shore of Maryland. They were gentry class. Like they were literally with William the Conqueror back at the time ten sixty-six, when he came they were at his right hand at that point.

They were indenturing Sarah. Right? Then she has children and they are indentured for twenty one years.

And the DNA. I traced it like when you could do this, you can’t do this now. They actually stopped this right around the time I was doing my research. They connected us DNA wise to the Fuchs family. Like I had Fuchs DNA in me. And that’s when I realized, my God. Well now they capped it. You can only go back five generations now. Right. They won’t let you see beyond five generations of your DNA. Who does that benefit?

Who does that benefit? So it was emotionally difficult to do the research. But I just felt and knew this is necessary because you have to know the truth to tell the truth. You’ve gotta seek the truth to know the truth. So I had to keep going. And I’m glad I did. And what I found in that research was that the remedy

Is right there in the center of our faith. It is the resurrection, it is the cross, it is Jesus who gives us the power to reverse the fall. Jesus conquered death. Jesus began to reverse the relationships between men and women. And we see that even in Paul’s epistles, who in some cases is saying, Don’t let women speak, but actually, in most cases, he is

lifting up and championing the women who are in the ministry, naming them first between their husbands and it like the women were the leaders, actually. you know, he names Junia, who is an apostle, he names her as an apostle, a woman. What does that mean? It means that she was leading the church an entire city. Like that’s that is a reversal of Lamak with his two wives.

Right? We see Paul again, pushed by his faith in this Jesus, this this brown colonized man who beat death, he then writes to an enslaver telling him to free his slave because his slave Philemon is now equal.

He says in Galatians that if you have been baptized in Christ, there is no longer slave or free, male or female, Jew or Greek. In other words, your lens that empire has given you, really, the lens of dualism, the lens of either or, the lens of domination, it gets washed in the water of baptism. It gets washed away. And all you you see when you come up is the image of God, the call of each and every person to exercise stewardship of the world, to be able to exercise agency in the world. And that means that slavery must go. That means that subjugation must end. That means there is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male or female. And that doesn’t mean that these people don’t exist. It means that the logics of domination do not exist within the kingdom of God. So you cannot be a citizen in the kingdom of God and operate according to the logics of domination.

You just can’t.

Rev. Ruth Perry (48:02)
And our hope is that Jesus is going to return and we’re gonna live in a new creation where all of the divisions have been healed and everything that the fall broke is going to be restored. And so we can get on board now in that ministry

Lisa Sharon Harper (48:15)
Come on.

Rev. Ruth Perry (48:16)
of reconciliation. Why wait? You know, this is what we look forward to. We don’t want to be at enmity with our neighbors. We want to love them and want for them what God wants for them.

Lisa Sharon Harper (48:24)
And let me just say, we don’t want to be at enmity with God.

Rev. Ruth Perry (48:27)
No.

Lisa Sharon Harper (48:27)
You don’t want to be at war with God. Because when you participate in the subjugation of the image of God on earth, you are actually waging war against the kingdom of God on earth. Because the image of the king in ancient times was a marker of where the king rules. And the image of God is in each of us.

So when you subjugate another human being, you are subjugating the image of God. I think that’s how God sees it. I think God understands that you are waging war against God. So what is it going to take then for us to lay down our arms against God? I think it’s gonna take repentance. It’s gonna take baptism.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:05)
I think that’s where we need to end today. I want people to sit with that or reflect on that. I want people to read Fortune and The Very Good Gospel

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:10)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:14)
and to follow you. Where’s the best way to follow you, Lisa?

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:17)
The best way to follow is on Substack.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:19)
Okay.

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:20)
Now Substack will get you linked to everything else, right? So my Instagram page is also a great place to be. And also of course Facebook, all the socials, LinkedIn, all the rest. But Substack is where you’re gonna find my writing. It’s where you’re gonna find out about things that are happening and offers and so Substack at Lisa Sharon Harper and you’ll find everything you need there.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:39)
Thank you so much for coming on my podcast and sharing such an important and powerful message today. God bless.

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:45)
God bless you. Thank you.

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