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019 I Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson: Can the Church Heal Its Deepest Divisions?

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Ruth Perry | Leave a comment

In Season 1, Episode 19 of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders, I had the honor of sitting down with Sue Haupert-Johnson, Bishop of the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church. Our conversation explored not only her personal story and spiritual practices, but also what it means to lead with courage and faith in a season of deep conflict within the Church.

Bishop Sue shared about her early faith journey, the influences that shaped her call to ministry, and the ways her experiences—as a woman, a mother, and a leader—have informed her pastoral voice. Grounded in Wesleyan theology, she spoke of a vision for the Church that prioritizes connection over hierarchy and invites both clergy and laity into shared ministry.

At the heart of our conversation was the reality of navigating disaffiliation within the UMC. For many congregations and leaders, this has been a painful and divisive time. And yet, Bishop Sue pointed to the possibility of faithfulness even in disagreement—of a Church that listens, holds tension, and refuses to abandon love.

This season of change culminated in a historic moment at the 2024 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, where the denomination removed exclusionary language from the Book of Discipline, fully including LGBTQ people in the life of the Church. For many, this marked not just a policy shift, but a theological and spiritual turning point—an embodiment of God’s expansive grace.

The Virginia Annual Conference sessions in 2024 and 2025 became a powerful witness to what it looks like to stay at the table through disagreement. Through initiatives like the Journey in Understanding, the conference has sought to foster dialogue, healing, and deeper connection across differences.

What emerged from our conversation is a hopeful vision for the future of the Church—one rooted in authenticity, justice, and the leadership of the next generation. Even in the midst of conflict, the Spirit continues to move, calling us toward a more inclusive and compassionate community.

Please visit this link to see what a journey in understanding looks like: journey | VAUMC. It was a beautiful example of listening to understand, not necessarily to agree, and to go forward in unity despite disagreement.

In our conversation, Bishop Sue recommended two books: J.B. Phillip’s book, Your God is Too Small and Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict.

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

TRANSCRIPT:

Ruth Perry (00:15)
I am so delighted to have Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson today, the Bishop of the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church. Thank you so much for being here today, Bishop Sue!

Sue Haupert-Johnson (00:25)
My pleasure. I’m delighted to be here.

Ruth Perry (00:27)
Just laying it out there to begin with, I’d really like to talk with you about disaffiliation and leading through conflict. Because in my background, I very church experience in a local church where my dad was the and my brother was the associate pastor. And it got so ugly and just the fallout of that situation has been decades long now. I had two big lessons that I took away from going through that. Number one, it was a patriarchal church culture. And this was causing cognitive dissonance for me about that worldview because I realized if the women of the church had had a place at the these conversations, then the outcome would have been very different.

And then the other thing that I realized was this was independent church kind of separated from any denominational structure. So we didn’t have anyone to come in and help. And so those two lessons have come with me since then. And I was invited to pastor in the United Methodist Church three years ago. So my very first Annual Conference was the 2024 Annual Conference in Hampton.

And there was some tension there, to say the least. And even thinking back on in the last week, as I’ve anticipated our conversation, it just makes me emotional because it was such beautiful and Holy-Spirit filled experience, I feel, going to the 2024 Annual Conference and then seeing what came of it in 2025 at the Annual Conference.

And so I’m hoping I don’t get emotional talking to you today, it was just really beautiful and I really appreciated your leadership and I wanted to talk to you today. But before we get into that, can you go and tell us about the beginning of your story a little bit about your faith journey?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (02:02)
Yeah. Yeah, I grew up in a very large United Methodist Church. My family joked that we passed five United Methodist Churches to get to our church, but in some ways it was providential. It was a church where the bishop usually attended, so I knew all the bishops in Florida. A lot of the conference staff went to the church there, so I knew them. I was very involved as a youth and a young adult, especially in the music programs of the church. I consider the church as integral to my life early on in the sense that I learned all the Bible stories, that I knew the framework of the story, that I knew.

I don’t think I’ve ever doubted the presence of God in my life or the power of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but I had increasing issues as I went to college with the institutional church and just, I think I had to find faith for myself and the relevance of it. I was laughing, I was reading the piece this week about how don’t make fun of Christmas and Easter Christians on Christmas and Easter because how are you hospitable if you’re judging them? And I really am grateful that the 10 years I was out of the church, when I returned, I was welcomed with open arms.

And really, I had a profound experience of Christ, a profound experience. The Gospel of Luke will always mean a lot to me because I had achieved everything I wanted to in my secular life and was miserable. And I realized, you know, Jesus… Well, my experience of Him was He said, why don’t we try things my way now? Which to me was a very gracious presence in my life, you know, that, I’ll use what’s past, I’ll use what’s happened in your life. And I always say that to local pastors and folks who come to their calling later in life, that everything that happens to us, God uses in our ministry, in our increasing knowledge and love of God.

And so I ended up when I was about 28 going back to church and went to Hyde Park in Tampa and had a really good experience And it wasn’t the pastor, it was mostly the older women of the church, Ruth, the saints of the church who had such powerful faith. I mean, they had lost husbands, they had lost children, they had seen everything in the world, and they still were just pillars of faith. And I often say I would kill to go back and prepare Communion again with Grace Spear. She was a 90-year-old woman who just tended to me, shepherd me. You know, when you talk about being discipled, and I think that’s the ideal way to learn the faith is to be discipled by people and to model. I mean, that’s what Jesus did with the disciples. And Grace did that for me.

And so those older women in the church, and I get mad at the ageism in the church because, man, those women have carried the church for a long time. And so I ended up realizing that my secular life was not rewarding and that I was being called to something more. And I ended up going to seminary fully intending on teaching theology, because who would want to serve in a church? And then I had a senior pastor at my home church who invited me, the staff parish committee invited me to come back to be on staff for a year. And I fell in love with it. And so, you know, 30 years later, here I am.

But people say to me all the time, they rag on the church and they talk about the ugliness in the church. I’m like, you know what? Multiply everything you’ve seen by a million and I’ve seen it. But I can honestly say that the beauty of the church that I’ve seen outweighs any of that. And when you glimpse the kingdom of God and when you glimpse a people of God working together as the body of Christ, that’s the hope of the world. And so rather than throw rocks at it and complain about it, my goal in life is to help create healthy, loving, welcoming communities that are out to serve the least and the lost.

And I get so frustrated when the church, I mean, this whole Christian nationalism movement is insane. God doesn’t align with the wealthy and the powerful. I love in the Magnificat, which I pray daily, where Mary sings, the poor God will fill with good things and the rich will be sent empty away. And I think that the church has got to really be a force for the voiceless and the weakest. And so when we lose track of that…

And I think the disaffiliation kind of reflected the politics of our time, right? We want our property, it just, I think it reflected everything that Jesus most despised. To use the church for your own political ends or to have your way or to promulgate a lot of misinformation and lies. I just would pray at night, God show me how these ends justify the means because I don’t get it. I still don’t get it. I’ll never get it.

Because I had lived in the church being against what I believed for most of my ministry, right? I’ve always been for LGBTQ inclusion. And so for them to say to me, well, the church left me. I’m like, the church didn’t leave you. I mean, come on, seriously? I lived in the church. You know, it doesn’t mean that I have to agree with it. There’s some basics we have to agree on, but there’s a lot of leeway and John Wesley realized that. So anyhow, I have little patience and I think back to those days and I still just shake my head, and go, boy, they lost themselves.

Ruth Perry (07:21)
I think a lot of people like myself, because I grew up very conservative, evangelical, and going back to that church conflict, that was really the first domino falling, where I started rethinking things. But I think dominoes have been falling for a lot of people who grew up evangelical like myself. And I’m just sick and tired of culture wars and I’m tired not being able to wrestle ideas that are like, I don’t want to be spoon-fed what to believe. I want to wrestle with it and really weigh both sides and determine for myself. And so I want some leeway in that process of maybe exploring something that someone thinks is heretical.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (07:46)
Right, right. Well, you know, and just when you think you’ve got it figured out and everything is neatly lined up, God, you know, meets a persecutor of the Jews on the road to Damascus. God totally messes with our certainty all the time. And so, yeah, you can think you’ve got it figured out, but then God’s gonna come to you in a way that you just can’t fathom, right? That’s the whole of gospel. And in the most unlikely of ways. So, yeah.

Ruth Perry (08:27)
So for 10 years you were pursuing a secular path for a career, what was that in, Bishop Sue?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (08:34)
Well, I went to law school and I think if I wasn’t in the church, I’d be a judge. I love justice. I love the intellectual part of law. I love weighing arguments and coming down to the just outcome. What I didn’t like about the practice of law was the business.

You know, at the end of the day, it was about making a buck and I wish somebody had clued me in how miserable life is when you have to bill somebody for every six minutes of your time. And that was that was the reality. And I just don’t care enough about money. I mean, I didn’t want to spend my life moving money from one person or one corporation to another. And don’t get me wrong. I am very grateful for people who do that and love it.

I am very grateful for good lawyers and I have good lawyers and I know good lawyers. But it was not my calling and nothing is worse to be working outside your calling. I don’t care whether it’s a church calling, well the vocation, right? To be in the wrong vocation I think is a hard thing. So there’s nothing worse than a miserable job. And I had a miserable job and I realized that God was not leading me down that path.

You know, do I wish I’d been passionate about it? Do I wish I loved it? Yeah, it was pretty lucrative. But it wasn’t for me.

Ruth Perry (09:48)
Do you ever put your lawyer hat in ministry?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (09:52)
All the time. You know, I think what I appreciate now and how God uses, I think I would love it if everybody went to law school. I think it teaches you how to think, teaches you how to be logical, although it’s kind of a curse in the church, because a lot of argument in the church is emotional, right? And so sometimes I’m sitting with somebody going, yeah, that makes no sense. But it’s, you know, so.

Sometimes to be a logical person in the church is like a new lesson in frustration. But I’m grateful that I understand the law. I’m grateful that I understand how the business world works. I’m grateful that I’ve had clients. I’m grateful to know their lives. I’m grateful to just have a basic understanding. I mean, my undergraduate degree was in finance. So, economics, all of that stuff, I’m glad I’m grounded in it. Every day in my work it helps and certainly the legal part helps because a lot of our assessment is, is this right? Is this lawful? Is this being done in above board manner? In personnel, is this being done fairly? And so all of that, yeah, I think it was a valuable education.

Ruth Perry (10:57)
And how has your motherhood impacted your ministry?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (10:58)
Tremendous, you know. I think I’m a much kinder, gentler person since I was a mother because I realized when Samantha was a baby how easy it would be to mess one of these up. And so I started looking at my parishioners and anybody in general as, you have some bad parenting. And then if you throw in addiction and sexual abuse and just physical abuse and trauma. It doesn’t take much to really mis-wire a human being. And so I think I have a lot more empathy.

At the time I was pregnant, there was an unsheltered homeless man named Leland. And sometimes in churches they would have the pastor pretend to be homeless, we didn’t have to pretend; Leland showed up. To my church’s credit, they were lovely to Leland. And Leland was a regular part of our community. And he would call me so often and my assistant would be like, oh God, it’s Leland again. I’m like, you know what? I realize I’m the only human being he talks to. And I value our friendship. And so anyhow, I remember when I found out I was pregnant.

And I told Leland and he was crying with joy for me because we had gone through a lot of fertility stuff and it was hard fought. And Leland said, you know, Pastor Sue, I wish I was your baby. And and I said, Leland, no, you don’t, because I would kick your butt. But, I think to know people like that, that’s why I get so frustrated.

To speak badly about unsheltered people or to speak badly about immigrants or just you’re just showing your ignorance and you’re showing you don’t have contact with them on a daily basis because if you do your heart breaks and you realize my reality is not everybody’s reality and there’s some reality that I am very grateful I mean my last prayer before I go to bed every night is God thank you that I have a place and a name and that’s an old Jewish saying a place and a name but I thank you that I’m not a refugee or fleeing from a country with only the clothes on my back dragging my I mean with no assurance of safety or I don’t know how you can be cruel to people like that and I think that is the distortion of our times and the distortion of the faith and I’m pretty tired of it at this point so yeah.

Ruth Perry (13:07)
So you’ve already mentioned that you pray the Magnificat every day. And this nighttime prayer. What other spiritual practices do you have that sustain you?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (13:11)
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve long prayed the daily office. I pray the evening, the morning if I remember, but always the evening. And to me, there’s something about the regular immersion in Scripture, day in and day out. And the Psalms, certainly pray the Psalms often. To me, they’re especially powerful in these days we’re living in. And I worship weekly. Sometimes online if I’m observing a pastor that I want to see how they preach or how the service is going.

But to me the beauty of the faith and the heart of the Wesleyan understanding of things is we have a method. And so to me there’s something very reassuring about having a pattern of life, having a foundation, so that I do these things in good times or easy times so that I have them just to fall back on on harder times. And so it’s kind of the safety net, the fabric, the ground of my being that I rely on. And that’s been, I think the people of great faith that I know, that’s the hallmark of their lives. There’s a method.

Ruth Perry (14:19)
A lot of the audience that I have is ecumenical, so all kinds of denominations. What are the distinctives of Wesleyan theology and practice that most

Sue Haupert-Johnson (14:24)
Great. Yeah. Right.

Yeah, I appreciate, I think that sanctification or the notion that I as a human being am always a work in progress. And I think that’s valuable and that the goal is not to be in heaven sitting on a cloud with a harp. The goal is not my individual salvation. God is at work to save the whole world and is using me in that story. And so, I don’t sit around and guess who’s going to heaven and who’s not. I think God’s desire is, we all will. And my focus is, my every day becoming more perfect in love of God and neighbor.

And for John Wesley, the whole goal of the human life is perfection in love, so that I have perfect love for God and neighbor. And obviously that’s a lifetime task and it’s the work of the Holy Spirit in my life every day. But what John Wesley saw is that when we die, he thought most people were perfected in love on their death beds, which makes sense, right? Because you’re perfected and then you meet Christ face to face and Christ sees himself when you get there. That’s the ongoing sense of I’m a work in progress.

Why I’m not Calvinist. I think there’s too much emphasis on when I was converted. You know, like it all happens at once? I don’t think so. You know, the day I came back to the church and that I count as my conversion time was just the beginning. Like my husband says, you know, it’s like if you stop there, it’s like getting to Disney World and just cheering when you get inside the turnstiles, but you don’t explore the whole Magic Kingdom. And so to me, the beauty of the Christian life is the

Ruth Perry (15:47)
Yeah.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (16:07)
day to day, becoming more like Christ. And you know, I hope I’m more like Christ now than I was 10 years ago. And if I’m not, then that’s when I have to really lean into the method because I should be. And I say when I preach in churches all the time, because there are usually older folks in them if you haven’t noticed.

I’ll say if you’ve been in United Methodist Church for 30, 40, 50 years, you should be darn near close to perfection and love. So I don’t know why you’re being so mean petty or unchangeable and rooted in the past because God’s always, making all things new and I think we all need to be made new. So that’s to me the Wesleyan theology in a nutshell, is that through the method, through these practices, through connection with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit works in us day to day until we become like Christ. And that’s a much richer, more beautiful understanding.

And God’s doing that in the world too, right? That God is trying to transform the whole world and all of creation is groaning for the new heaven and new earth. And so instead of like sitting around and talking about who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell, I think my better job is to love people and to introduce them to Christ so that they become all that they can be. And that’s to me the challenge.

Ruth Perry (17:29)
Yeah, we tend to make God so small.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (17:43)
Well, if you want to read a great book, it’s a classic. J.B. Phillips wrote a book called Your God is Too Small. And he’s dead on in that book because every chapter is about how we how we make God in our own image and how God, a lot of times, God reflects our parents. However you’re parented has a huge impact on how you see God, I think.

Ruth Perry (17:53)
Another question I people would if they’re like me coming from different background than the Methodist Church is about all the hierarchy and even like what is a bishop and how do you describe your role?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (17:58)
Right. I think rather than thinking about it as a hierarchy, connection is better. Connection, because we can do more things together than we can alone. If we pool our resources. I just was in a meeting all morning with global ministries and, when people put their resources together, we can do amazing things.

A connection that nobody’s alone. If you’re clergy in the United Methodist Church and you’re feeling alone, then the connection is failing you and we’ve got to do what we can to shore it up. And, you know, I really didn’t think of it this way until I was on a panel with Nadia Bolz Weber. And she said to me, you know, Bishop, I am Lutheran because I need a bishop. I need somebody to hold me accountable.

And I think that’s, like you said, you had all of that nightmarish experience in the church, in the conflict, and nobody was around. And sadly, churches don’t really benefit or really see the beauty of our connection unless they get into trouble. But I’ve had churches where there’s been embezzlement. I’ve had churches where there’s been sexual misconduct. You’ll have a pastor the next week, and you will have a whole team come in to help answer questions, do pastoral care.

So I like the connection better than the hierarchy, but that said, I remember meeting a pastor’s widow years ago and she said, this is the first time I’ve come back to United Methodist Church because my ex-husband who just died was a pastor and he did untold… No, he wasn’t United Methodist. He was another denomination. And she said, he got away with a ton of stuff that he never would have gotten. He wasn’t properly vetted. He wasn’t properly supervised. And she said, I will never go to a church that’s not a United Methodist church because I know that you vet your pastors, that you have a standard for pastors, and that you take action when pastors do things that are inappropriate or unlawful.

And so, I mean, I’m not Pollyannish enough to think that it’s perfect, but I think that we do our darndest to make sure that our churches are safe, to make sure that our clergy are not doing harm. And I can honestly tell you, if it hits my desk, it’s dealt with. So I get great satisfaction out of that. So and you know I’ve told the cabinet, I’ve said, you guys, if somebody brings you a complaint and I don’t get it, because that’s where it dies down. I mean, I’ve seen it in the past where things get pushed under the rug and I said heck, if I find out that you didn’t give me a complaint, I’ll file a complaint against you because we have got to know when stuff is is being reported or lifted up or brought to our attention. So I don’t mess around with that. I guess that’s my legal background too. But yeah, no, don’t turn a blind eye to anything.

Ruth Perry (20:51)
I very much appreciate that. And I will say, just three years in the denomination for me now, the connection has been so strong and I’ve felt so supported and encouraged and uplifted in so many different ways by so many different people. And I’ve met so many really wonderful, kind people. And I love my little congregations too.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (20:53)
Yeah. Good. And you know Ruth, I would say, you know, and anytime I have a pastor who’s like, I just don’t feel connected, I feel like, I’m like, you know what? You do something about it, right? If I’m not feeling connected, I always was the first one to call a new pastor in town and say, and not just United Methodist, I think it’s incumbent upon us to create community and to create community that’s not our church members, right? So I always had excellent ecumenical friends, clergy from all denominations, rabbis, imams, because there’s a unique kind and those are colleagues that you need.

So I would say if you’re feeling alone, now if it’s depression or mental illness or something causing that, we’ve got to address that. But if it’s not, you hold the keys, right? You have a phone. You can go visit. So you take the initiative and create connection. I love clergy and laity who create connection because I think that’s how we model Christ.

Ruth Perry (22:10)
I was in a day of training for the Living Waters District in January, and I was in a lay servant leader class, and one of the ladies said that she met you in the restroom at the Annual Conference. And then she said, you introduced yourself, and she introduced herself and said, I’m just a lay person. And your response to her was you are not just a lay person, that we’re partners in ministry, and she was just really touched by that. How would you describe the relationship between clergy and laity?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (22:31)
Right. Yeah. You know what? I wouldn’t even make that distinction. I love that our English word for vocation comes from the Latin for call, right? So any of us who have a vocation is called. And I think God gives us unique gifts and calls us to different things. In fact, when I graduated from seminary, one of my professors was really annoyed that I was pursuing ordination because he said, man, I wish you’d go back and be a lawyer because people don’t expect lawyers to talk about Jesus. So I think that laity are called by God and put in places.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Miss Kerry. Miss Kerry was an administrative assistant in the federal courthouse when I worked in the federal courthouse in Tampa. And she was called to be an administrative assistant and she was Jesus Christ agent in that federal courthouse. If you had a problem, if you were grieving, if you needed a word of encouragement or support, people flocked to Miss Kerry like moths to flame. And I know God called her to be there. So I don’t divide clergy and laity. I think that we’re all called to something. And if you happen to be called into representative ministry, I don’t think it’s because you’re any better.

I think it’s just, you know, God chooses weird people for weird things. If you read the Bible, you know, I’ve always loved Jesse who Samuel comes looking for the anointed one and Jesse’s bringing out all his, older and better sons, right? And Samuel’s like, no, no, no. And then, you know, David, he’s like, I got this other kid. And sometimes I think, God calls us not because we’re the best or the brightest, or the most, certainly not the most holy, if clergy are the most holy. I’ve met a lot of laity who are more holy than clergy. But I think that when you start seeing people as called by God into all arenas, then you don’t privilege representative ministry over any other.

And one thing that whenever I talk to a group of laity, who are exploring a call to ministry, say, you know, I think one of the grievous mistakes the church has made is when somebody gets really involved in a church and has done everything every office a lay person can do in the church. Well, it’s time for you to be a pastor. And that’s just not the case. So I think God is calling people to be excellent lay people. And any pastor knows, gosh, you’re so reliant on those folks.

And I have had tremendously gifted laity who have… They’re the backbone of the church, certainly not the clergy person as it should be. so no, let’s get rid of the laity clergy distinction and just talk about what has God called you to do in this world to bring the kingdom about. So don’t ever walk up to me if you’re a lay person and say I’m just a lay person.

Ruth Perry (25:19)
So can take us back to the season of disaffiliation I think pretty much everybody has heard about it or something about probably a skewed telling of it So just from someone who’s been there and seen it and been part of the leadership. What was the season of disaffiliation about in the United Methodist Church?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (25:40)
Yeah, I think it was about, you know, I had a DS, she said, this is just a property grab. I think it was, I think the time was ripe for it. I think that the rise of the conservative in the political realm really fueled the conservative part of the church to rise up. I think that what I lament was there wasn’t a lot of, let’s talk about this. Let’s reason about this together. Let’s hold each other as, you know, siblings in Christ and honor Christ in each other. That kind of went out the window.

And I know that there was probably poor behavior on both sides, but I experienced it mostly from those who really poisoned a lot of our churches with really radical claims. I can understand if you disagree with me about human sexuality. Certainly not an essential of the faith. Certainly not anything Jesus talked about. You know, and there’s always been, it seems like the… When one controversy dies, another arises. I know until 1971 every bishop was asked if they would support integration. And if you answered yes, you might not get elected in the South. And then the next issue of the day was LGBTQ. And in 1971, that kind of started being the litmus test for bishops.

So I think a lot of it, if you look at it, a lot of it was in the South. And I think that the Bible has always been looked to to support, to condone slavery, to condone segregation, to make… The huge issue in the early 1990s was divorce. And so it just seems like we’ve always got to be arguing about something. But what I appreciated about the United Methodist Church was because we had a trust clause and because we understood that every United Methodist Church is an outpost for our denomination in that town, that that preserved it through a lot of these controversies.

You know, other denominations, I always thought we were so much better, because every Baptist church would split 10 or 20 times in 100 years. No, we had a trust clause. And that said, you know what? This will be, no matter what controversy rises, no matter how much we disagree, this will still be a United Methodist church in this community. And we’re thinking seven generations down the road, and we’re not gonna let whatever the argument du jour is separate us. And that is held. And so I really, don’t think we ever should have abandoned the trust clause.

I think we should have said, and if I had been, if I had had any control, I would have said, you are welcome to leave. If you disagree with the church, you are welcome to leave, but you are not welcome to stir up everybody to go with you, and you were not free to take the property. And, you know, I stayed in the United Methodist Church when LGBTQ rights were not recognized, because I did not see that as an essential of the Church. And if I thought it was, I would have left. I would have not taken anybody with me. I would have not created any kind of… Because I value the body of Christ.

And anytime you come to a vote, anytime you come to, and we saw that at Annual Conference, you know, the year you talked about, you bring it to a vote. If you’ve read, there’s a great book by Amanda Ripley called, Real Conflict, I think it’s a conflict book. But she says, the problem is it becomes all about winning and losing and you lose sight of the controversy at hand.

And it, you know, if you’ve read James, the tongue is a fire and it burns and it burns to the gates of hell and that’s what happened. I mean, to hear churches that disaffiliated because they were told the United Methodist Church no longer believed in Jesus or the resurrection. To be told that the United Methodist Church, that all we want are drag queens. I mean, every little, every one situation was blown, you know, the

It just… And I wish that there have been wiser minds and I wish the denomination had held strong and said, you know what, you are free to go. But you aren’t free to take our property and you aren’t free to create war zones out of our churches. And unfortunately, that’s what happened. And I don’t know how you live with yourself if you do that. I mean, there are some points where you’re just like… And it was hard.

I know I told my cabinet in North George, I’m like, If I say something that does not reflect Christ well, if I, you know, stoop to that level, call me on it. But I just was amazed at what was said and what was written, what I received, to be called like, what was it they always called me? Apostate. She’s apostate. And then the gender stuff came in like, the Jezebel, the evil woman, because something about women’s leadership, especially the far right, and you see that in our politics too, is threatening and must be destroyed, right? I mean, don’t think Pam Bondi was just let go. It’s no mistake that the first two fired out of the cabinet were women because even the religious leaders that they’re looking to denigrate women and…

I just, it just got out of hand. And I think it’ll take a long time. I know I’ve got a lot of scars. I know you have scars. We all have scars because, we should have been better and that the body of Christ deserves better. And, you know, I just, I was amazed because I had so many talks and so many discussions and tried to, I worked so hard and then I realized, they really don’t want to work this out. They want what they want and I can’t, I can’t fight that. So.

And you know, move on. It’s time to say, we need a more excellent way. We don’t need to ever let this happen again. And a part of it was we lost our identity. What is the Methodist identity? United Methodist identity. And how do we be Christ-like in all things, right? I mean, Jesus said, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. I think he meant it. But I just watched slicing and dicing in the worst form.

Ruth Perry (31:42)
So you’re someone who takes the Bible seriously. You read it every day. You’re doing your best to be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. And yet you’re failing this litmus test, Bishop Sue, on this very important issue. How do you defend your perspective?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (31:45)
Yeah, right. Yeah. You know, I think this is why I appreciate tradition and experience. I mean, if you’re a real student of the Bible and not just verses in the Bible, you see God’s… I mean, there’s a great passage where God talks about, will give identity to the eunuch. They weren’t allowed in the temple and God says, I will restore them. You see God work through the unlikely. You see God include the Gentiles, right?

And to me, the miracle was that the Jerusalem church said, yes, right? We do see there’s a wideness in God’s mercy. We saw that. so it came through my experience in the church, and dear friends of mine who came out after I knew them well, right? It was like, everything I’ve been told by our culture about LGBTQ folks is not born out in my experience. Some of my best friends, some of the most loving and giving people. And also I came out of seminary at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And so I watched as so many loved ones were taken off life support, watched men sob at the loss of their loved, you know, another man.

So I saw the depth of love. And if all love comes from God, how do you make sense of that? Right? And some of the most faithful, devout, really lovely followers of Jesus Christ were LGBTQ. And so I had to say, you know what? If all of sin, and I’m not sure why that, you know, gets special sin, I had so many people yell at me full of pride and anger and ugliness. I’m like, I don’t understand how this sin is any different from what you’re calling sin and LGBTQ folks.

And so I think that my experience of the depth of their faith and truly faithful people who I know are so connected to God that if for one second they sensed that God disapproved of them loving somebody of the same gender, they would have renounced that. But they never got that sense. I just had to start, you know, and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, right? And Jesus, thou art full of mercy.” And so at some point a friend of mine said this well, he said, if I have to meet my Maker and I have to meet Jesus Christ face to face, I think I’m going to err on the side of I was too loving and too open then the other way.

And so I just had to learn that everything I had been told to hate and to ridicule and to mock about LGBTQ folks was absolutely wrong and misguided. And that just came from knowing them. Same with the homeless people, right? Everything I’ve been told about them, Leland dispelled. Everything I’ve been told about divorced people, right? Because we grew up, my goodness.

God works through that. So I think it’s having a little more openness to mystery and that God does work in weird ways and that, you know, it’s time to let everybody be faithful. I, you know, and I may be wrong. Anytime I talk to somebody and they can’t say I may be wrong, I am eternally frustrated. But I don’t think I am. Yeah.

Ruth Perry (35:10)
I appreciate John Wesley’s rules for living. Do good, do no harm, stay in love with God. And I think the church, like all denominations, the church in America has done a lot of harm, whether they were well-intentioned or not. It’s hard to believe it was all well-intentioned because the harm has been just extraordinarily heartbreaking ⁓ that families would disown children. That suicide rates would be so high, that we shame and other, and we don’t see the belovedness of God LGBTQ. All of that is very harmful. And so at the Annual Conference in 2024, a college minister came forward with a resolution. Is that the right word, resolution? Suggesting that the Virginia Annual Conference make an apology for harm done to LGBTQ.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (35:34)
Right.

Ruth Perry (35:57)
after the General Conference had removed the exclusionary language. And so for three days, the Virginia Conference of United Methodists, from different perspectives, talked about this. Speeches for and against. As I was in my hotel, I would hear people talking about it, passing through the halls, people were talking about it. It was just, the air was buzzing and the conflict was palpable. And so, for me having that church conflict background, I’m a little keyed up but worried about things. And that last business session, when a group of pastors came forward and suggested rather than taking a vote because it would be so divided, it would have been close to 50-50, they suggested a commission be put together kind of like a truth and reconciliation

Sue Haupert-Johnson (36:34)
Mm hmm. Right. It was, I think. Yeah.

Ruth Perry (36:43)
that would take time to think and work more deeply on this and hear from people from all perspectives. I just remember, it felt like the whole room just kind of everybody’s shoulders relaxed. And the Holy Spirit, was palpable, that that was the right thing, most God honoring path forward. How was that conference behind the scenes for the Bishop of the Virginia Annual Conference. What was your experience?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (37:09)
Right, right. Well, I remember, you know, we even have people stand up and the vote was that even. And I realized I got to just buy myself some time so that we could talk about this until morning, right? So, and we had to have ballots made anyhow. So, that’s what I was thinking to begin with. And I think it was an affirmation from the Holy Spirit that three clergy walked up to me. Two of them were, well, one was very pro LGBTQ and one was totally against. And they said, what if we just talked about this? What if we created a group to talk about this and see where we end up? And I said, that’s exactly what we need. And clearly the Annual Conference wanted a third way, a more excellent way.

Because you know, one thing that bugged me about the whole disaffiliation thing, if I was ever in a church, like if we had a capital campaign or a building campaign and the vote failed 55 to 45, we wouldn’t go ahead with it. We would, you know, let’s talk about this. Because clearly there’s, there’s nothing that is helpful about an up or down vote because if you’re on the losing side you feel like crap, right? And so what we did was we created this commission and we had folks who were LGBTQ. Interesting to me how often they’re left out of the conversation on that commission as well as very conservative folks. And the beauty is over a year they sat together and they grew to love one another.

And so it really, you know, they might vote opposite, but they both want each other in the church. And so let’s get rid of the votes and just realize that if, you know, if we have the essentials, we have the rules, the general rules for a reason, right? That’s the orthodoxy. And we can argue all day long about other things, but at the end of the day, we need to stay together.

And so, you know, heck, I don’t agree with my whole family around the Thanksgiving table. And to me, I don’t want a church full of Sues. How do I learn and grow? It’s difference that has brought me along the journey. And so I think that if we can agree, well, one of the best, I can’t even remember who said this, but somebody said, you know, if you have one hand on the cross, you’re pretty close to one another. So why can’t we just all have a hand on the cross and, you know, in the non-essentials, think and let be and let Jesus sort it out, right? I always like Paul’s, you know, in Corinthians, we see through a glass darkly, but then we’ll see face to face. So let’s just acknowledge we’re seeing through a glass darkly.

And at the end of the day, I think Jesus wants us just to love one another and to respect each other and to defend each other. And, you know, and I went hasten that I’m part of a family and man, we disagree and we’ll fight each other. But man, if you’re on the outside and you say something against one of us.

You’re getting the whole group against so, you know, why can’t the church be more like that? If you’re messing with an undocumented person or you’re messing with somebody who’s weaker and doesn’t have status, if you’re messing with somebody who’s mocked because of their sexuality, the whole family should be standing up for you just because you’re a child of God and you’re my sibling in Christ. So I don’t understand why we’ve lost that. But we’ve got to reclaim that the church isn’t going to survive.

Ruth Perry (40:36)
I’m going to post video of the report at the 2025 this commission gave (vaumc.org/journey/). I’m going to post that in the show from what you just said, what gives you hope now as the United Methodist Church moves forward?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (40:40)
Good. You know, increasingly the church is finding its voice. And increasingly, and I’m talking about the church that defends the poor and the, and I’m hopeful, I’m hopeful, my 24 year old gives me hope that younger generations are longing for relevance and longing for a better world and a better future for all people, not just for themselves. And they think much more communally.

And certainly my daughter does not think in terms of race and ethnicity. You know, it’s a different world. And I’m hopeful that we can turn it over to them and let them move the church in beautiful new ways. Because we’ve held onto the past far too long. We’re way too rigid. And we need to follow where Christ is leading.

And I think it’s new in different ways, which should be exciting, but for a lot of folks it’s threatening. So I’m hopeful we can take their lead and follow them into a better future.

Ruth Perry (41:47)
If you could speak directly to those who have felt hurt or excluded by the church, what would you want them to hear?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (41:53)
That the church is not Jesus. That the church, you know, ideally when it’s in its most beautiful form, it is the body of Christ. But human beings are sinful and broken. And so any human organization is going to be broken. So I plead with you to not write off Jesus because of what you’ve experienced in the church, and to ask God to show you and to send you people in your life who truly represent Christ and to go with them and to not assume that just because you’ve had one bad experience or a lifetime of bad experience in one church, but that you open your eyes and heart to the possibility that God can work through a group of people and you just need to find that group.

So that’s what I would say. Because I mean, I’ve been hurt by the church too. think that, it’s not, you know, I can’t even say the church. It’s individuals in the church. It’s people who weren’t, they weren’t being faithful to the method, right? They weren’t open to their own growth. heck, think Saturday Night Live nailed it with the church lady, right? When you’re just a pinched old woman who’s judgmental, that’s really not a good representative of the church.

I think back when I was a kid there were two missionary women and we called them the buzzard sisters because all they did was sit in the church. never showed the love and the grace of Christ. They were just the hall monitors. And if that’s your experience of people in the church, luckily there were many others who showed me a better way and showed me Christ. But don’t presume that everybody who calls themselves Christian represents Christ.

Ruth Perry (43:24)
I want to thank you so much for being on the Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast today, Bishop Sue.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (43:28)
My pleasure. Thanks. I’m so glad you’re doing this, Ruth. And greetings to everybody out there. And I hope our paths cross one day.

Ruth Perry (43:35)
Would you like to have the last word? Is there anything else that we haven’t covered today?

Sue Haupert-Johnson (43:40)
You know, I think my last word is as we approach Easter, I love the account where the angels at the head and the foot say to the disciples, Jesus has gone on ahead and he’ll meet you in Galilee. And I’ve always thought about, know, Jesus is already ahead of us. He’s out there and he is still waiting for us, and he is in the least… the places we least expect to see him with, the people we least expect to see them… least expect to see him with. But he’s out there and so I invite you to join in the journey of going and finding him. And that is what life is all about. So join us in that journey.

Ruth Perry (44:21)
Amen. Thank you so much. God bless.

Sue Haupert-Johnson (44:22)
Amen. Thanks a lot. Blessings on Easter and thanks again. Appreciate it. Bye bye.

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

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Ruth Perry | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Ciampa (08:29)
Ha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Ruth Perry | Leave a comment

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

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

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

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Perry (12:39)
That’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Perry (16:46)
Yeah. Yeah!

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

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

Scott Harris (17:11)
Correct.

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

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

Scott Harris (17:52)
Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Harris (19:17)
or something from

the beautiful Kingdom Builders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Perry (27:39)
Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Perry (34:38)
Thank you.

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

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

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

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Tag Archives: God

019 I Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson: Can the Church Heal Its Deepest Divisions?

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

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

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