Who is our message impacting?
A few years ago I took a seminar from a friend of mine who owns a communication company. The online seminar taught how to deliver a message more effectively. The primary take away was that communicating a message is not just about presenting the facts or a story revealing value. It includes both along with a symbol for people to remember and connect back with the message. My friend understood how to help people get their point across, connecting people’s brains and their emotions with a lingering effect through a memorable icon.
In reading Jonathan Haidt’s text, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, I hear a similar theme to my friend’s content on communication. Haidt emphasizes the coupling of intuition and reasoning, though not balanced, as the way we both communicate and react to other’s verbal and non-verbal communication toward us. He even explains at the end of his second chapter that he has used both historical data and his own story to begin to win over his readers to an intuitionist perspective on moral psychology.[1] Haidt’s purpose is not just to dupe his readers, but also to help them grasp his very thesis, that we all have particular ways of seeing the world that we perceive as good and true. Yet, without understanding our own biases and ways of functioning we will never be able to comprehend how other’s see from a differing perspective to be able to empathize and accurately relate with them in an open way. He quotes Matthew 7:3-5 as the “take home” message of the text, noting that we are all self-righteous hypocrites with the need to “first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will clearly see to be able to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”
Haidt’s research is not simply theoretical or psychological. As a social psychologist and New York Times best selling author, Haidt has dedicated his life’s work to examining “the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures.”[2] “He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of people with whom they disagree”[3] and has multiple websites and TED talks accessible to the public.[4]
Haidt’s work is extremely necessary in today’s polarized culture that is highly emotive, though emerging out of an enlightenment era where most assume they operate primarily from a rational paradigm. Using the metaphor of a small rider (reasoning) on a huge elephant (intuition), Haidt shows that “the rider’s function is to serve the elephant. Reasoning matters, particularly because reasons do sometimes influence other people, but most of the action in moral psychology is in the intuitions.”[5] His argument is that intuition, or the elephant, is what drives reason. Reason can help to guide or give clues but intuition, loaded with cognition and emotions, is truly the larger and more forceful of the two.
In my research on discipleship, I have been interviewing pastors, which has led me to have many more conversations around the subject. One aspect I did not think much about when I began was the concept of discipleship and the other, relating to discipling people who are different from us and the potential separation within discipleship of certain groups by those in positions of leadership. I was not intending to ask practitioners about the who but more about the what in regard to content of discipleship and their practice. But in one of my first meetings I had the inclination to ask a question not in my notes, being whether or not the leader discipled people of the opposite gender or only the same gender. Although I was not shocked by their response, I did begin to take note and ask the other pastors interviewed the same question. Their answers have varied but there is a theme emerging among them. Most women interviewed disciple both men and women. The men primarily disciple other men.[6]
Beyond the interviews, I have seen other trends fitting into the conversation on who is being discipled. While at lunch with a group of Wesleyan Holiness regional leaders the topic of Bill Hybels and the recent news of his alleged involvement with multiple women from his church came up. I decided to ask about how the #metoo movement and all of the allegations against men in leadership were affecting their male pastors and their leadership with the women in their churches. They all began to nod and note the “Billy Graham rule” of not being alone with a woman one is not married to[7] and how their male pastors are becoming even more careful (some said hesitant) around the women in their churches.
There are multiple reasons for th
e Billy Graham rule and pastors choosing to only disciple the same gender, particularly when referring to male leadership. However, each of the leaders I have spoken with serve in denominations that offer all of the same leadership opportunities to both women and men based upon their theology. As I read Haidt, I couldn’t help but ask if the reasons for not discipling the opposite gender are more based on the elephant than the rider, more on intuition and not reason. Perhaps the fears of the culture have once again crept into the church causing leadership to make decisions without fully recognizing personal bias. Once blind spot are present the leader becomes the “self-righteous hypocrite” unable to embody the very theology they teach to the detriment of the whole church.
Many more questions arise around the topic of discipling the other for me to investigate but Haidt’s work on moral psychology has opened possibilities for underlying divisions within my own and other egalitarian denominations and why like tends to disciple like, whether in gender or ethnicity, or both.
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012, 59.
[2] Haidt, Jonathan. “The Richteous Mind” Bio. http://righteousmind.com/about-the-author/biosketch/ (April 5, 2018)
[3] Ibid.
[4] Public access to Haidt’s work: moralmind.com, CivilPolitics.org, http://righteousmind.com/
[5] Haidt, 108.
[6] This study does take into account group discipleship as well.
[7] “The Billy Graham Rule.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_rule (April 5, 2018)
About the Author
Trisha Welstad
Trisha is passionate about investing in leaders to see them become all God has created them to be. As an ordained Free Methodist elder, Trisha has served with churches in LA and Oregon, leading as a pastor of youth and spiritual formation, a church planter, and as a co-pastor of a church restart. Trisha currently serves as leadership development pastor at Northside Community Church in Newberg, OR. Over the last five years Trisha has directed the Leadership Center, partnering with George Fox and the Free Methodist and Wesleyan Holiness churches. The Leadership Center is a network facilitating the development of new and current Wesleyan leaders, churches and disciples through internships, equipping, mentoring and scholarship. In collaboration with the Leadership Center, Trisha serves as the director of the Institute for Pastoral Thriving at Portland Seminary and with Theologia: George Fox Summer Theology Institute. She is also adjunct faculty at George Fox University. Trisha enjoys throwing parties, growing food, listening to the latest musical creations by Troy Welstad and laughing with her two children.6 responses to “Who is our message impacting?”
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Trisha,
Great post again Trisha. Haidt’s work is definitely “not balanced” and he does try to “dupe” the readers with his heretical “splinter-in-the-eye” use of Scripture. I’m glad to see you tie in you field-research experience to the post. I think what you are hearing from those male ministers who do not counsel or disciple women may be more about the “how” instead of the “should.” It is complex, with so many environmental traps and temptations that “when in doubt” avoid counseling scenarios that can lead to stumbles and falls.
I have a B.S. in Psychology, so I can appreciate where Haidt is trying to come from, but he falls very short of a satisfying, all-encompassing conclusion to bridge the gap between religion-politics. Back to your gender-bias about discipling opposite sex; what did Solomon say, “there is nothing new under the sun?” (Ecc. 1:9). During my Public Safety years, I watched how just doing a simple interview with a witness, suspect, or member of the department became much more conservative and restrictive over time. These changes, like in high-profile falls of religious leaders, did not come from the “good” that was done, but from the “bad” that was done due to and by people failing to “resist Satan.”
I for one refuse to be taken hostage by the bad practices of others and still believe there is hope for improved discipleship and counseling practices with opposite gender. With adequate safeguards, accountability partners, environmental changes, and revisions of counselee-counselor expectations there is plenty of room for “co-created” solutions with the Holy Spirit for our good and God’s glory.
Stand firm,
M. Webb
Interesting connects Trish. I appreciated you bringing up the billy graham rule and how it can be seen as limiting for women. As Ive said before in our cohort, I got my current job because I went out to a 90 minute lunch with a senior pastor. If I was a woman he would have never accepted my invitation to lunch. It would have been a 30 minute meeting in his office with his assistant present.
Exactly, Kyle. There really is an imbalance.
You raise some very important questions about discipling a person of the other gender. I have had counseling meetings as a pastor with members who are women, though that seems to me to be more “professional.” I wonder what you mean by discipleship and what that looks like, practically. I think there are certainly limits to certain relationships, but I don’t know about a hard and fast rule.
Great work at tying your post to your project. Your point regarding the Billy Graham principle, though just called common-sense around our church, is subject to the same scrutiny I believe Haidt was trying to suggest, and yet he himself sometimes failed to do. Though as a woman, you may see the disadvantage to a woman, but as a man…especially in light of the #metoo campaign, we recognize how easily a career can be lost by an accusation. Though a man may be seen as a sexist in this regard, it should also be noted that not every accusation is a real one…therefore, the best way to protect one’s self from those who may be out to make a false one, or even leaving room for misinterpretation, it is better to walk the line of precaution. Though I do counseling and teaching probably more so to women than men, I still have to take special precautions with women more than I do with men. To be honest though, I know they are safe with me, but I am not always sure that I am safe with them.
I am curious though, with the #metoo movement, society has forced men to take a closer look at the way they treat women…which I think is wonderful…however, do you think that it has changed the way women look at men?
This is a tough topic in a world of accusations. I am a firm believer that we should not act out of fear and to not provide a platform for leadership mentoring/development to women as well as men is shortsighted and wrong. How to handle that training whether one on one or in a group, in your office or at another location etc…might depend on the depth of the training you are providing. Trish this can be a scary topic not as much because we don’t trust ourselves nor the ones we are training, but for the potential false accusations that happen from observers. I am thankful in my context there is not the same views. I can sit and have lunch or coffee with either male or female teammates and no one thinks anything of it. ( I love that freedom). All of that to say, finding a way to mentor and train all that are called is definitely a better solution that saying that one only mentors males (or females)