The (Im)partial Church : Episode 18 | Adjusting the Paradigm
March 13, 2023
We all have a unique way of viewing the world. In this episode, Janine and Gerard explore ways to adjust the paradigm and view the world as Christ does. If this conversation inspires further questions feel free to reach out to us at theimpartialchurch@lhm.org.
The (Im)partial Church
Episode 02-08-18
Rev. Dr. Gerard Bolling: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Impartial Church. For the last several weeks, we have taken a deep dive into some of the struggles the church faces when it comes to tackling issues of race. We've looked at why it's hard to agree on the problem or notice that there even is one. We've discussed that each of us has a role to play in the body of Christ, and we saw how as parts of the body we are to champion each other. Without a doubt, the road ahead is challenging. However, we are all united in Christ. We share a goal to make our God and His kingdom known.
Professor Janine Bolling: In the previous episode, we talked about how we are to work toward that goal as a team. There were quite a few sports metaphors, and we realized that teams usually work better if we know our role and share a goal.
Gerard: Last week and this week are the reflective portion of the season. We've been asking ourselves some important questions in an effort to check our temperature, so to speak. We need God to reveal the condition of our hearts as they stand today. And in this week's episode, we'll be doing more of that.
Janine: So join us as we ask the question, am I open to adjusting my paradigm?
Gerard: Hey, y'all. I'm Gerard.
Janine: And I'm Janine.
Gerard: I'm the big brother.
Janine: But I'm the older sister, and we are brother and sister in Christ.
Gerard: We grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
Janine: I'm still living in Brooklyn, but I serve in the Bronx.
Gerard: I'm a professor at Concordia University in Texas and a pastor at a congregation in St. Louis.
Janine: It's been said Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America.
Gerard: Issues with race and cultures still plague our communities and our churches.
Janine: But what can we do about it? Should we see color?
Gerard: Or be colorblind?
Janine: What's our responsibility in bringing about unity in our neighborhoods and in our church pews?
Gerard: It's a delicate topic, but one we must tackle with grace.
Janine: So pull up your chair to the table, as we bring Jesus to the center of this conversation of ...
Gerard: The Impartial Church.
Gerard: It's such a cool question, too. I mean, we have to think even what is the definition of a paradigm? I mean, Janine and I were old Greek classmates; we were in the same class, the same Greek class at Concordia Chicago, and we would learn these things. We would learn these things called "paradigms." Do you remember that, Janine?
Janine: When I heard the word paradigm as somebody who's in the throes of research, I immediately went to dissertation mode. But yes, paradigms were also in Greek.
Gerard: Yeah, never ask a doctoral student about if they're a doctoral student, they'll tell you.
Janine: Hold up
Gerard: As I was doing my doctorate, I actually ... But no. Yeah. Do you remember that term like paradigm? Now that we know it as researchers, it feels so lucid, but back then it was literally learning like a new language, a new way to parse things, so that you had this structure that you were learning from and everything was informed by that structure. If it was the ace in Greek, you knew that the verb was doing this or doing that as it was a part of the paradigm. And really that's truly what the definition of a paradigm is today.
Janine: Yes, a paradigm is basically a pattern of something or a model to put it in simple terms. So anything that you use that is a model where you follow after it to influence your course of action is a paradigm.
Gerard: It's kind of training your brain and your eyes to also see those little patterns too-to help you understand the world from a certain lens, or you look at similarities and differences between things so that you're able to have proper communication with people to think through situations. It's quite literally recognizing a pattern, which really reminds me scripturally of Romans 12:2, and it says it this way: "Do not conform to the pattern of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind and then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good and pleasing and perfect will." See, we got to be careful of the patterns we're conforming to or the paradigms we're trying to fit ourselves into. I mean, we can fit ourselves into some spaces that are not always healthy for us.
Janine: When God's Word talks about patterns, I take it seriously in addition to when we think about it in the world, because those patterns are what are reinforced as the highways of our life. So anybody who's traveled on a highway before, have you ever been driving and you kind of get home and you don't even know how you got home, but you weren't doing anything crazy on the road. You were just going through the motions. That is a pattern that is a paradigm that exists in your brain of how to get home. And so when we think about the pattern of the world, what are we talking about? We're really talking about culture. Those are the patterns of the world, the world that you live in. So we're renewing something that may already have a very well-traveled route in our mind.
Gerard: And you see, there's like this inconvenience in that, too. As you were even describing it, I'm thinking to myself, you work so hard to ingrain into the mind of a person, from childhood even with all those formative years of elementary school and high school. And if you go to higher education institutions, all that, you're ingrained in your mind that you have to do things the fastest or the most efficient way. You have to manage time well; you have to cut this and not do that in order to do this, right? And how do you become a successful person, like that stuff is always at the forefront, and the world really feeds that to you and pushes that inside of you. And so there's these sort of inconvenient things that I think the Bible names that if you were looking for what was fastest or what was easiest, you would not do them.
So there are certain things that Jesus is asking us to do that break that pattern. Noticing my neighbor and loving my neighbor—that breaks my pattern of the success that I need, or having the bigger house than they have, or getting the pool first. Why would I love on my neighbor and think about what needs they have or why would I help somebody who's in a bad position and lose money by giving them money or giving them resources? These are all things that Jesus is calling us to do to care for one another. But it messes with our wealth and our success and our self-actualization and our self-image—all these different things inside of us. But really what it's doing is it's breaking those lenses of selfishness or as you would say, the pattern of selfishness, and going into something new. And that renewal process can be really, really, really hard. It's just not easy.
Janine: Absolutely. And so when we think about that renewal process and what it takes to actually do it, we have to think about what we're fighting against and some of the patterns that exist in the world that we may see as natural. We may think everyone does, but in reality they may just be subsets of our own culture. When we are doing wrongdoing in the world—we talked last season a lot about getting canceled—so people get canceled. And then what happens, what we find is sometimes they recreate themselves in another space.
What God's talking about here is a little bit different. In a transformation in the mind, we physically remain in a similar place. And so when we think about what that means for the community that we're around with a renewed mind, that's where we really see change come into practice. We're in the same space acting differently around the people who expect us to be back in our old ways. But we are shocking, being countercultural, surprising, interrupting, you must interrupt in order to change. And so that's really what God is asking us to do here in this verse from Romans when we're talking about being renewed.
Gerard: Yeah, and this is so cheesy, but Netflix has been something that me and my wife have been really into lately. That's our vibe where we choose a show on Netflix and then we slowly watch it together.
Janine: Wow. That is so crazy.
Gerard: And we go back and forth on who—
Janine: That's nuts.
Gerard: Anyway, so it was her turn to choose, which I always feel gut punched when it is. Because she likes these cheesy, romantic shows that all to me have the same outcome. But she chose her show and her show is Emily in Paris and—
Janine: That's a good show.
Gerard: Really good show.
Janine: That's a very good show.
Gerard: It's a good show, but this is literally why it grew on me. There's an episode really early on where Emily's really struggling from moving from the states to Paris for work. She's going to be there for some time, and she's just getting used to the culture of people, and she just doesn't understand people, and she feels really lonely and by herself. And one of her co-workers is really empathetic to this and comes up to her and says, "Something you need to know is that in the States, you live to work, but in Paris, you work to live." And she didn't get why they weren't bringing the type of energy she wanted to bring to work because she was trying to force fit her American society way of thinking into that space, but they're only working in that space vocationally so that they can live more and live bigger.
And so once she changed that and broke her paradigm, she was able to enjoy her time in Paris and to live courageously and to enjoy time with her co-workers and friends there. And I really think of that as it relates to what we're talking about; we get so stuck in our particular way of doing things. Sometimes we're blind like that character was to what needs to happen next. And that's why the Scriptures are so important because they're the glasses, the lenses, that we need to put back on in order to see what the "real" paradigm is that we're supposed to be living by. And this paradigm is sort of driven by action. Remember in the last episode we had talked about 1 Corinthians 13:12-26, comparing ourselves to behaving like a body, doubling down on our identity in Christ, etc., so forth. It was a literal change in behavior that allows us to not only say we're going to be different but actually be different and change and transform.
Janine: And when we're thinking about what peace or what part of the body that we are, that's where we understand what our role is, what role we're playing, but then also beyond that into the pattern of what needs to be transformed within us to move forward with this renewed mind that God speaks of that work that He does within us. When I think about being a part of the church, the larger church, the invisible church, I think about Revelation. And chapter 7 verse 9 in Revelation talks about what the ideal church looks at. So I'll read it so that everybody can kind of hear it.
"After this, I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands."
And so when we think about what that church looks like, first thing we see is this number that's uncountable. So when we think about those, that small group of people that we worship with on a Sunday or a Saturday or a Wednesday evening, when we think about the church that God knows in His head and in His reality, it is numbers that no one can count. And where are the people from? They're from everywhere. They're from different nations, from different tribes within those nations. They're different people groups. They speak different languages, and they're all centered on one thing. When we're looking at that church here on earth, we see a lot of brokenness within it. We don't know if we're always focused on that one thing, and who's standing in that multitude that no one can count. Do we feel that we're standing together?
Gerard: Let's hear more from Brooke Hempell. She's from the Beyond Diversity survey. Let's hear more from her about making space for our brothers and sisters in Christ, in an intentional and healthy way.
Brooke Hempell: The vision that that gives us is beautiful. So, first it tells us that God designed and celebrates our diversity. That in heaven we're going to see even more of it. And it reminds us of what we should long for even in our hearts. So, that's the starting place, ironically, because it's the end, but it's the starting place. But the reality is we're not there. We're here on this earth, and this earth is very broken in a lot of ways. And so, I see many people and I heard many people who talk about this in their research reference that concept, even if not that exact Scripture of "Well, this is why we need to be in proximity to each other; we need to be in community with each other. Let's have a multi-ethnic church." Right? Because we want to be that multitude standing before the throne, praising God from whatever our background looks like. But we're all doing it together, and that is absolutely to be desired. And we should try to do that; we should long for that. But it's often not enough in this broken world that we live in. And that's where the research kind of uncovers some of these nuances. When we skip ahead to that stage, and we haven't really dealt with the realities of the day-to-day of life in this place that we're in, and I'll say on this earth, but really in this country, especially. Then we haven't pulled down all the barriers that are necessary for us to be able for us to worship in that way together. That's a picture of heaven because it's not easily achievable here on earth. We can't just get in a room and think we're all going to sing praises to God together and everything's fine. It's not all fixed. Because our day-to-day life in still really challenging. So, part of the study was to look at multi-ethnic churches, and we would hear from people who would in those environments both White and Black and Asian and Latina. For example, no matter what their background they would often say, "It does feel like we're in proximity to each other, but it still feels like there's this kind of White-led culture, like I'm a part of this big church and we've got White leaders who are making decisions, and they're inviting us into their thing, but they're not really changing to fit us. They're asking us to accommodate them or this environment. And they're usually not aware of it. And so, one of the reasons to look at that Scripture is to remember that is the picture of this beautiful diversity that God created. Let's remember that you can't just assume that you can recreate that here on earth and then you're done. There's hard work to be done to become aware of what our inherent way of operating is. And that's called our culture. Culture's hard to put your finger on, especially if it's your culture, because you don't know it's your culture. But our cultures do clash, and so we have to be more cognizant of each other, more aware of our differences. Not so that we can point out the differences, but so we can celebrate them and invite people to show us what their way is, and to show us how they express something, or how they would do something, or even just the hardships they're going through, and that draws us, ironically, closer. The more that we hold back those layers and kind of expose them to those differences, often it draws us closer because we get to share those things in a way that we can't if we just pretend they're not there.
Gerard: She went on to talk about how diversity in and of itself is not a silver bullet.
Brooke: It really does gloss over the hard work to be done. At the core of it—I'm running this way down, based on a lot of research, a lot of focus groups and interviews—at the core of it is actually oftentimes a misalignment of influence, and I'm going to loosely say the word "power." I know that can kind of cause people to bristle and go, "What do you mean by power?" But it's like who makes the decisions? Who gets to say the way things are going to be? And so when we just want a statistical diversity that means we want enough people in the room, but we haven't changed the power dynamics; you don't have healthy diversity. And that's what we're really trying to point out in the study, that if I as a White leader decide to build this community of Christians, and everything I do is from the way that I would think of doing it then I actually haven't been working very hard to build diversity. Because what I'm doing is putting people in a room, but I'm not building those connections and I'm not actually reaching out and wanting to know them, wanting to celebrate them, wanting to invite them to teach me or show me things that are different. So, it's that, am I putting myself in a position of wanting to learn from my brother or sister or am I putting myself in a position of influence over that person?
Janine: And I think that's very true. The person whose name I cannot pronounce, but [person's name here], she talks about the danger of a singular story. And I think that's what Brooke is hitting on here where when we don't include people in different areas of the church, we lose that diversity. So if your base has diversity in it, but it's not represented within middle management or other supporting church workers, those things you're going to lose by the time you get to the end when it's time to truly craft out how to make people feel included within the church. So how can you share with me how to make youth feel included at church if we don't have youth in the worship planning. We're only going to be talking about what we might see and what we might interpret rather than going to the source of the people who have those experiences.
Gerard: Exactly. I mean I think that it's one of those things where it becomes easy to just say, "Let's have diversity for the sake of it, and let's just have everybody here." But then you don't realize internally maybe the group of people that's the minority feels like they're looked over or that their cultural traditions are not accepted or that they have to change themselves to fit in with the majority group, and it can become sort of uncomfortable. And it's also important for us to understand that maybe it means that—not that we have to throw away our traditions—but we have to be open to learning from the traditions of other people. I mean it's important to put yourself out in those, as Brene Brown would say, "brave, but safe spaces" where you can say to yourself, "Hey, I am really afraid to do this," or "I don't know much about this type of situation, but I'm going here," just to see and to learn about who you are or who another group of people is, in general.
I think that when you see that beautiful representation of the church where everyone's there, there's all different languages being spoken, etc., so forth, you don't see much of the same hum-haw. But instead you see this beautiful diversity of people in the church that are together. And it goes to what Brooke said about starting at the end and going back to the beginning, which I think is very beautiful language. In the end, that's what Christ has called us to be, right? And He's going to restore that. But then now that we're here somewhere in the middle, I guess, and we're the church here, we should be trying to reflect that image always as the body of Christ.
Janine: And I think it's really important to explain what imagery you're trying to reflect.
Gerard: Yeah, you're not trying to reflect an image to make yourself look good or to make yourself seem like you're better than other people, but you are trying to reflect a biblical image of who God has created you to be already, right? Because that's a part of God's restoration plan. God has this big giant recycling plan where He's going to repurpose us, even though we don't deserve to be repurposed, that's what He's done. And so in that we have to remember that He's calling us to be that worshiping community of that church and that we see in Revelation. But as we're here on earth, we know that there's going to be brokenness on this side of heaven that prevents us from getting there. But we shouldn't just put our hands up and say, "Oh well." We should instead then still strive to work towards being the vision of that church. Christ has done all the work on the cross for us. He's died for our sins. We follow Him." But in following Him, He calls us to higher purpose of what we're supposed to be doing. And I think that that's an important thing to name on an everyday basis. Again, because it's not easy. It's really hard.
Janine: And I think what really helps with that is maybe first even reflecting on your own traditions. Right? So why you do what you do. Do the reason behind it? Do you truly know the reason? We learn it one time or two times in confirmation, and then we forget why there's seven candles or why we like the Advent wreath. When we think about church traditions and we think about the richness of them and we start to understand which ones are truly based in Scripture and which of those are influenced by our culture, then we become a little bit more loose with our give-and-take of others. So we're not asking to introduce pagan or to introduce demonic things to the church, and by no means. Rather we're asking what those traditions are. There's a lot of people in our congregation who are—they're tree people and there are nativity scene people.
And every year we alternate in our congregation which one is in the back. And there are going to be people who take pictures with both. But to some people that development of this—we have an artist in our church or artist-in-residence in Miss Nidia Watts, who does an amazing presentation about 10 or 12 feet wide. And it's the whole scene. So you can walk through the scene of what it's like to walk over to the manger in miniature form, which is really cute, and she does a nativity all out of handmade materials. Then the next year there'll be a tree. And so that's a tradition. Does it matter what's in the back or does it matter that Jesus Christ is celebrated at this time as we wait in grateful expectation? So when we think of traditions like that and we think which ones are rooted in Scripture, which ones are adiaphora—does it matter if we do them or if we don't. Then we start to understand how we can be more inclusive in the presence of diversity that is new and different for us.
Gerard: And I love that image of it doesn't matter. Sometimes I need to hear that. Sometimes we need to hear that the main thing is the main thing. It needs to continue to be the main thing. And for us that would be who we are called to be in Christ and who He names us to be would be even a better term for it. Under different circumstances, each of us are really likely to experience some form of privilege as well. And I really want to move to this conversation because it's informed by the Scriptures. So we got to listen to what Paul says about it in his letter to the Philippians. It says in Philippians 2, "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God to be a thing, to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the Name that is above every name, so that at the Name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the Father."
See, there are so many action words from this text. There are so many things that Jesus is doing in setting the example for us. He's coming not in this high and mighty form, but in the form of a servant. He's being humbled. He's being put to death, even the worst death, a torture on the cross. And He doesn't want to be exalted in that moment. He needs to come down low and stoop down low for us in order to scoop us up where we're at. And so those are things that we have to remember when we talk about doing things like having a life with Christ and being a follower of Jesus. What does that mean? It means walking the way of Jesus as well, and going through what He went through, and boldly following behind him, which can be a really difficult thing.
Janine: It is difficult to follow behind, obviously, Jesus Christ. However, what I think about is what we are given before you talked about the name, so the name that we're given in life, or the name that we carry on our back, whether that's a team name on your back or a family name. God gives us names as well. He gives us our name in Baptism. He calls us by name as His own children. And so then when we think about the privilege that we have, what we think of here is what Jesus was willing to lie down. In this case, obviously, He's willing to lie down His own life, but He lies down a bunch of other things before that. So He takes the form of a servant and is born in the likeness of men and humbling Himself, even coming as a baby, the most helpless creatures that we care for of our own kind here on earth. When Jesus does all of these things, when Jesus gives us this action first, when Jesus creates this model or this paradigm for us of putting ourself as not number one, it is anti-cultural; it's counter cultural. It almost feels outside of our own human experience, certainly the human experience in an individualistic nation. So when we think about being a servant, being humble, thinking of someone else before ourself, and then we think of the end: "Therefore, God has exalted Him and bestowed upon Him the Name above every other name.
When we talk about the last being first and the first being last, we start to see that giving up a piece of ourself to include someone else in the body of Christ really doesn't sound like such a big ask, when we think of what Jesus has done in comparison. And that's not to compare the works of Jesus with ourself, but it's to show that we have a leader. We have Someone to follow who is willing to do everything that He asks us to do. If you're not willing to do what you're asking your followers to do, then you shouldn't be telling them to do it, right? That's one of the lessons of leadership, and that's one of the lessons that Jesus teaches us first in His time in its earthly ministry.
Gerard: That really speaks to me. I even think of the fact that the best leaders, you don't have to have that person name the fact that they're a leader all the time. They don't have to say, "I'm the president, I'm the president, I'm the president," or "I'm the king. I'm the king, I'm the king." People just know that they have authority because that's how they lead. Jesus didn't walk around saying He was better than everyone else. Instead, He healed people and He spent time with people who are vulnerable or sick or people who are going through things. And He said things that touched the hearts of people, and people followed Him, and He allowed them to do that. He fed people. These are all things that you would do for vulnerable populations. And I think what's really important is to put that first in the forefront of our minds and to understand kind of who Jesus was trying to reach. And that helps inform who we should be trying to reach and who we should be trying to connect with as well. Not on our own volition, but because of what Jesus has already done.
Janine: I think it also helps us to inform what we can expect. So when we look at what Jesus experienced, and then we look at what our experiences are, we say, "Well, this must not be right because all of these people are against me." When we look at what Jesus experienced, He says, "That's exactly how you know what you're doing, that you're doing what I asked you to do. Because all of these people are against you." Now, does that mean when every single occurrence or experience of opposition that, the haters, they're powering me forward? No, we have to have that self-evaluation time. We have to have that comparison with Scripture time. We have to have that renewal of the mind. And then we look at, okay, what was happening to Jesus, to those who walked alongside of Him in these times? How does that compare with nowadays? How does that compare with the problems that we're facing in the world today?
Because some of them are the same, and some of them are different. Some of them had no solution in the time of, in the earthly time of Christ. And today we have different solutions, so we can do things that the others of other human beings in our past have paved our way for us to do. And so when we think about the good works that God has prepared in us for us in advance to do, we're thinking about the good work of racial reconciliation, including the people in the body of Christ, celebrating diversity in a meaningful way in the context of the reality of what it means to have an identity in Christ. And all of that stuff builds together. All of that builds together into one thing. And we go back to that image that we have of the invisible church in Revelation 7, where they're all praising God, they're all facing the Lamb, and there is a multitude of people that no one can count.
That would be something that truly honors God, that patterns itself with the earthly ministry of Jesus. So we started off with the what—partiality, racism in the church, and we ended up at the who—so that's our body of Christ. And from this point on, what we're really going to be exploring is the how. How do we live into our role as Christ's followers. In the Lutheran Church, we call this the doctrine of sanctification.
So this is not talking about where our identity lies or who God sees when He looks at us or how we are justified. But rather, how does the world understand who God is through our presence in their lives. We work, we play, we pick up, we drop off. There's all these people that we interact with, but how do people get to know who God is through our presence in their lives? And that's what we really need to explore in the next episode. So I actually have a surprise for you, Gerard, in the next episode.
Gerard: Surprise.
Janine: A surprise. So you won't want to miss it. Well, you can't miss it, but everyone else, you won't want to miss it either. So I'll see everybody next time. Well, we'll see everybody next time on The Impartial Church.