Theology in the Raw - 792: On Being a Woman Pastor-Theologian: A Conversation with Dr. Sharon Hodde

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Sharon is a passionate follower of Christ who’s got a sharp mind and humble heart. Preston and Sharon talk about lots of things related to being a woman in pastoral and theological ministry. Sharon Hodde Miller leads Bright City Church in Durham, NC alongside her husband, Ike. In addition to earning her PhD, Sharon has blogged at SheWorships.com for nearly ten years, making God's Word accessible to women everywhere. Author of Free of ME: Why Life is Better When It’s Not About You, she has been a regular contributor to Propel, She Reads Truth, and Christianity Today, and has written for Relevant, (in)courage, and many other publications and blogs. She speaks regularly on topics ranging from leadership to body image to Scripture. She and her husband have two sons and one daughter. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest on the show today is Dr. Sharon Hoddy Miller. I got in touch with Sharon after one of my Patreon supporters recommended her as a guest. And I've only known about Sharon from a distance. I've known of her writing and some of her speaking, but I just had a wonderful, wonderful time getting to know her better. Sharon is incredibly sharp, very pastoral. She has a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. She's the author of two books. The first one is titled Free of Me, Why Life is Better When It's Not About You, which is an amazing subtitle. And her latest book is called Nice. Why? Oh, I was reading a different book. Nice, why we love to be liked and how God calls us to more. And we talk a lot about that book in particular, and the danger of niceness and how niceness is different than kindness. We also talk about women in ministry and how she has her journey in that calling. We talk about the coronavirus and other things in our very interesting cultural moment. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr with Sharon Hoddy Miller.

Sharon, thanks so much for being a guest on Theology on Raw for the first time. I'm excited. Thanks for inviting me. So you have a Ph.D. You're a theologian, even though you probably are going to resist that term. But I mean, you are very theologically astute. You went to Duke Divinity School, which I don't know if people know, that's not easy to get into Duke. I mean, that's like probably, from my opinion, one of the highest level divinity schools to get into. Maybe Princeton, Harvard would be up there. But you're a pastor at heart. And you and your husband both co-pastor at church, is that correct? Yeah, so he is the lead pastor, and I have more of a teaching pastor role. We realized early on

when we were planting, so our church is only a year and a half old. And we realized, yeah, we're brand new. We're like a little baby church. But we realized early on that I actually didn't want to have a pastor title at all because our kids are so young. And I also am an author and I travel. And I feel like if you have that title of pastor, it has expectations attached to it. But for my husband, it was actually really important for him that I be a pastor. Like he, we live in an area of leaders. We live in an area where this is actually one of the most highly educated areas in the country, like per capita, the ratio of people with PhDs is the highest in the country around here. And so we've got women who are leading in the workplace,

like they're CEOs and they're lawyers and they're doctors and they're professors. But then when they walk into the church, they're the administrative assistant. And so there aren't that many women in the church around here who are modeling, using your leadership gifts for the kingdom of God. And so my husband said, you need to be

leading as an act of stewardship for the women in this area. And so what we settled on was a title of teaching pastor, which has kind of boundaries on it, where primarily my leadership is just as a teacher in our church. So you get to teach, You don't have to deal with the nitty gritty of everybody's problems. You get to... I mean, I do because I'm married to my husband. Is he more, you know, somebody needed one-on-one counsel.

They're really working through stuff. Is that your sweet spot for your pastor more than you? Like, do you gravitate more to teaching to larger audiences and he's more of a one-on-one kind of larger audiences? And he's more of a one on one kind of person? Or is that? Yeah, he's more of a one on one person. He's really gifted as a counselor. He's incredibly wise. He really understands people and can read them really well. He's really gifted at managing people. I am not good at any of that. I'm like a famous misreader of people. And so I, but I love teaching. Like I love just going through scripture and helping people to understand it better and

like casting vision. That's kind of my, my passion and my wheelhouse. So the fact that both of you have PhDs in Durham where you're at, that's not abnormal. I mean, that that's, I don't think that exists in the entire state of Idaho where I'm at. I mean, for a pastor to even have like an MDiv is a kind of like a big deal. Like, wow, you know, but two pastors, PhDs. Even like on our street where we live, one of our neighbors has a PhD in something sciencey. And then right next to us, we've got another neighbor who has a PhD and he's a college professor. We have a lot. Yeah. It's, it's just people love, I mean, even just last night we were doing some premarital counseling and the couple was asking these really hard questions about

the relationship between Christ and the church and how that plays out in, you know, male-female relationships. And most, you know, most people don't ask those questions at all. They're just kind of like, okay, you know, but when you live in an area like this, very often you get people are curious. They like to learn and they don't just take it for granted just because you said it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you're a female pastor. Can you tell us about that journey? I mean, did you grow up where you had examples of female leaders in the church? Or was it kind of an uphill kind of journey for you or not so much? So I was raised Presbyterian. I was raised PCUSA. And so I did have female ministers growing up that wasn't like abnormal for me.

But when I went to college is when I became more evangelical. I was really involved with FCA and I joined a Southern Baptist church. And that was the first time really that I was growing in my faith was in college. But that was also the first time that I was told you know being for a woman to be a pastor is unbiblical that's what I was told and I was really confused by that but at the same time I thought well you know they they had these scriptures to show me and I wanted to honor God's word and so I just said okay you know and I hadn't really had dreams of being a pastor or anything. It was more, I think my leadership gifts were pretty clear early on. And so I don't want to be uncharitable, but I think sometimes that was told to me in a

way of like, just so you know, like we see these leadership gifts in you, but like, just so you know, like this is, this is the clear path for you. And like, this is the closed door. Don't get your hopes up, Sharon. And so I was, I was surprised, but I didn't, I wasn't upset or anything. I very much just wanted to honor God's word. And so for a long time, I was part of just Southern Baptist world. And then in seminary, so I was part of one church in college and then in seminary and in most of my twenties, I was part of the summit church, which is J.D. Greer's church. And so I was there and, um, loved it.

The summit is a great church and we still have great friends there. And J.D. is a good friend of ours and he officiated our wedding and all of that. But during that time, when I met my husband, he, he was really struggling because he could also see my leadership gifts and, but seeing that there was no place for me to use them. And so he was struggling with seeing like even at the summit where, and I'm really like not bad mouth, like summit is the best. It's such a great church, but because of their theological convictions, there would be men coming in who were like first year seminary and they were

automatically being given, you know, internships and things like that. Whereas I've finished my MDiv and there was just no like job for me. And that is completely like that as their tradition, as their convictions, like that, I was not surprised by that. Like there's no condemnation in my heart at all towards that. Um, but my husband, Ike, he said, you know, Sharon, as your husband I'm gonna have to give an account to God one day for how I stewarded your gifts and right now I don't feel great about that and so he he just really wrestled with that um and then during that time he finished I finished my MDiv before him. We decided to move up to Chicago for our PhDs. And sorry, I have a kid trying to get in right now. Hold on a second.

You can open the door and give it a quick kick or something. Hey, buddy. Hey, you can say hello. I'm in a meeting right now. Okay. Can you go? I'm just going. Nope. it's okay

reality um anyway so this is us under quarantine it's great yeah oh yeah um this is the new normal yeah so anyway um i like completely lost my train of thought oh so we moved up to chicago to work on our PhDs. And that was kind of a natural break with the SBC, which was a huge gift because I don't think it was something that we would have ever like left the summit over because it was just a really, we just loved it there. And it was God is moving there. But we went up to Chicago and we were at Ted's and the really neat thing about Ted's is you have folks like DA Carson who are there who, you know, he's gospel coalition guy. Um, but you also had professors who were egalitarian and they were all coexisting, you know, at the same school.

They all upheld the authority of scripture. And that was really eye-opening for me because when I had been at the summit and at Duke Div at the same time, at summit, they were giving me this really thought out theology for why women could only do such and such. But when I would ask a lot of my peers at Duke, like, what do you think about these verses in like first Timothy or whatever? It was, it was a very just kind of, um, unengaged answer of, well, you know, the Bible also talks about slaves submitting to their masters. And so that was it. It was just kind of like, it's a cultural thing. We don't even need to worry about that anymore. And that felt

like it was not taking scripture seriously. And I was not, I just wasn't compelled by that at all. And so at that point, when I was at Summit and at Duke, I kind of thought, well, between the two that seem to be really like sinking their teeth into what scripture is teaching here, it feels like the SBC is on this. And so that's what I'm going to go with. But at TEDS, you had people who are equally committed to the authority of scripture, who were rigorously studying it and trying to understand it and just coming to different conclusions. And that was really, that was a huge turning point for me to realize that there were people who believed women could be doing more, who still, you know, upheld the authority of scripture. And that created a new kind of category for me. And so that was a really

pivotal turning point for me. And then when we moved back to North Carolina, when we were done, turning point for me. And then when we moved back to North Carolina, when we were done, we just kind of realized our time at the SBC was just over. It just wasn't our future as much as we loved it. And we love so many leaders there. And still, I was not planning on being a pastor. But when God called us to plant this church, my husband actually, and that's, that's something I kind of joke about now is I say, well, if anyone has a problem with me preaching, I just tell them I'm submitting to my husband. So, so this, I love this journey. And just, just so you know, um, my audience is probably split on this. In fact, I'm, I'm kind of on the fence. I was raised staunchly or complementarian. I was raised staunchly egalitarian or complementarian.

So I went to John MacArthur Seminary undergrad. My audience knows this. I don't need to get into it. So really much like you could not believe the Bible and be an egalitarian. I've shifted way, way, way on that. In fact, most of the people that I respect, most of my friends and scholars who are very evangelical, very biblically centered, they would all be on the egalitarian side. Actually, they would say non-hierarchical complementarian, so that there is a beauty within sex differences. There are, you know, God made us different, and that's good, that's beautiful. Some of my friends like Mike Bird and, you know,

others might even endorse male headship in the home, but when it comes to the church, so, you know, so I, and I understand the arguments on both sides, and I just haven't, honestly, I haven't done a real deep dive into 1 Timothy 2, because when I, whenever I look at the bibliography on stuff, and I'm kind of a guy that maybe like your husband, you know, we're talking offline earlier that I need to read everything. I need to see every angle before I, on a controversial thing before I can really land. And I look at the bibliography on 1 Timothy 2 and I'm like, yeah, I think sexuality and gender is going to keep me busy for a while. I get all the space to take this on. But I really do understand the biblical arguments for both views. And I'm just, sure where I'm at. All that to say,

my audience, I always get whatever I have people who are egalitarian on, I'll get a bunch of emails saying, what about this? What about that? They didn't address this. I'm not going to put you under that kind of gauntlet now. Yeah, no. I mean, one thing that we, and I hope that this came through just even how I was talking about my time in the SBC, is we do believe that this is an issue which Christians with a commitment to the authority of Scripture in good faith come to different conclusions. Yes. And that we don't have to break unity over that. Yeah.

And that's something that we especially believe is important right now for leaders to model is the ability to hold hard things in tension and to still say that Jesus is bigger than this, because we are in such an increasingly polarized culture where you're kind of, you know, cancel culture or whatever, where it's kind of like, if you align with this, then you are dead to me, you know? And we think it's really important for leaders right now to model, no, like there's a reason why Paul talks about unity over and over and over again is incredibly hard and people on both sides are going to be mad at you,

but it really matters. And that's something on this where we, we really value our friends who come to different conclusions on this and hold them in fellowship. Yeah, I could not agree more. I mean, gosh, in 2020, yeah, I can just repeat everything you said because I think you're spot on. And, you know, I've known people who are both egalitarian or complementarian, and they're just, they're maybe on the egalitarian side, kind of like you said, like they're kind of like looking for just the quickest, easiest thing to explain away the passages.

They're not, you don't get the sense that they're really eager to submit the scripture, even when it's hard. On the flip side, you have complementarians who are kind of doing the same thing. Like, you know, they don't want to consider an actual biblical argument for egalitarian. It's just kind of like, no, that's unbiblical and whatever. It's just, it just is, you know, and, you know and and and you know i love that middle space on both sides where they're kind of giving honor to each person and you can sense that both sides are truly trying to seek yeah and we don't we don't actually use the term we don't claim the label of egalitarian because we, I, I, I find that non-hierarchical complementarian really interesting

because I do think that the, the differences between men and women are there and they were written into creation. Now I find that what those differences are to be somewhat mysterious, but I'm not willing to just say they don't exist, you know? And so that's, that's a tension that my husband and I are still kind of working through, but we don't really find that we fit neatly in either side. That's probably good. If I may, what, what were some of the, when you're at TEDs or even after TEDs, what were some of the arguments on the, for lack of better terms, the egalitarian side? They were like, man, that's biblically really compelling. And I don't think my conservative past really, you know, wrestled with that.

Like, what were some of the arguments, biblical arguments that kind of swayed you? A lot of it was just the actual women who are leading in scripture. You know, you look at, you know, Deborah is a really famous one. And the way that her story was always kind of narrated to us was that she was leading because there was no man who was like doing a good job. And so it was just sort of like a condemnation of, you know, male leadership at that time. But that's not anywhere in the text, you know. And so that was very, at the time, I just kind of accepted that as a valid interpretation,

but it's actually an imposition on the text. And so seeing things like that, there's a prophetess named Huldah in the Old Testament. Seeing, you know, there's the junia the whole junia debate and that i mean that's even kind of comical the way that junia's name was turned into the masculine form for a while because to serve like a theological agenda and just all the kind of acrobatic work to try and understand this can't possibly be saying that this woman was an apostle now i i don't want to you know be unfair to someone who has a different perspective but again it to me personally it just felt like it seems like you're stretching what is

just there in the text to say something. And so it was seeing stuff like that. I mean, even just little things like for a while, there was a long time where I was kind of told that being a male head means being the breadwinner and stuff like that. But at the same time, you had women like Joanna, who were financially supporting Jesus, like she was the breadwinner. And she was, you know, this leader, she was managing Herod's household. And so you had, you could see very clearly that even Jesus didn't fit into these boxes. And so it was seeing a lot of just the examples of women leading and how radical that would have been for that culture, for women to not be property,

but then to actually have be dignified in this way. And then, I mean, I could go on and on, like, you probably need to like, stop me. But the fact that, you know, the first women evangelists, the first evangelists were women, or how, you know, the letter to the Romans was delivered by a woman and probably, you know, you know, given verbally and explained by a woman, you just continue to see women doing these really radical countercultural things for the culture like that. And that to me was never mentioned, or it was just extremely downplayed. And it was really eye opening. It makes you suspicious, doesn't it? Like with the Junia example, and this is Romans 16, 7 for the audience. You have this, well, it's not a debate anymore, but Junia is a female name.

And I think some manuscripts clearly, didn't they change it to, is it Junius or whatever the male form is? Because they were uncomfortable with the possibility that Junia is considered an apostle in that passage. I think from my vantage point, the grammar is a little more ambiguous in my mind. But I remember the one conversation I had with N.T. Wright, which was the highlight of my life. He said there's no debate. I mean, he's like, no, it clearly says she's an apostle, but done. I'm like, well, I'm not going to disagree on anything Greek related to NT Wright. So maybe he's right. But for my, I don't know. I just, I don't, I didn't see this as clear, but, but all that to say the, it's the covering up, right. It's the bending in the direction.

Somebody wants that text to go. That makes you a little suspicious. You're like, whoa, hold on. Like what else is being thing that was the thing that was really i don't know eye-opening to me is for so long i was taught if you believe if you believe women can lead then it's because you don't take scripture seriously yeah because you are distorting scripture and you are twisting it to say things that it doesn't say and i think think I, I, I realized that no, like both sides have done that. Both sides are doing that. And we need to be honest about that. Like let's just be honest about it and say that we are broken human beings

who see imperfectly trying to understand an infinite God. And we're doing it imperfectly, but we need each other. Yeah, that's good. That's good. So tell us about your dissertation. We started offline. We started to get into that. And I had to say, hold on, this is good stuff. I want to put you online here. So you tell us what your dissertation was all about. Yeah, so I looked into why evangelical women go to seminary. And what gave me the idea for the project is, so I mentioned I went to Duke Divinity School, and there, women, the gender breakdown is pretty even. It wasn't like a thought in my mind. But when I got to TEDS, I noticed that the women in the MDiv program, there just weren't that many. And I was also noticing that just their overall experience was very different from mine.

And I was really curious about that and started wondering, like, why do so few women go? And why is their experience so much different? And thought I would actually research on that. But then I realized, you know, I don't want to do an expose on what the church is doing wrong. I would much rather do an appreciative inquiry into what the church is doing right. Like what are, what was in place for these women who discerned a call to ministry and then decided to steward that call by getting training. And so I actually went to three complementarian seminaries for my research. And the reason I chose that... Real quick, which ones? I'm curious. Or can you say? I did Ted's, Covenant, and Southeastern. And so there were also different denominations. and southeastern. Okay. And so there are also different denominations. And I, the reason I chose complementarian seminaries is I also, I really wanted my research to be relevant to

conservative traditions. Like I wanted to highlight even within your tradition where like, these are your convictions, what is happening in which you are cultivating the whole body of Christ. You know, what's happening in your local churches that is doing that well, where we're not just cultivating the gifts of the men, but we're also cultivating the gifts of the women and honoring your theological convictions. And so I interviewed women, just sat down and heard their stories. And I always tell people that my doctoral research

was a thousand times better than my husband's because he just had to sit in a library and read a bazillion books, which sounds like an actual nightmare to me. But I got to sit and hear all these stories of calling and seeing, it was like I was getting this sneak peek of this generation that God was raising up for his church. And it was really inspiring and beautiful. And I left each one just feeling so encouraged, but I was looking for, you know, common factors and I found a number, you know, one, one obvious off the bat was just everyone could articulate a sense of calling, but they didn't, it didn't necessarily come the same way. People had very, very different experiences of calling, but they all had a sense of calling.

Another that was really common is they discern their calling oftentimes through ministry experience. oftentimes through ministry experience. So whether or not it was like a mission trip or working with children's ministry or women's ministry or college ministry, whatever it was, there was usually some summer camp where they were in ministry and something in their brain kind of like clicked. And that's important to know just for are we creating spaces where this can happen for women in churches? But the number one factor that I found that every woman articulated that I also thought was just really beautiful was they all had someone, usually multiple people in their lives who just named their calling or identified their gifts. And it could be a parent, it could be a grandparent, it could be a pastor, it could be a professor. And that was also a really,

one thing that I've just never forgotten is it wasn't always like this huge moment. Like there was this one woman who was taking a New Testament class in her undergrad. And she said after class, her professor had asked if she would just like stay behind for a minute. And so she stayed behind and he said, have you ever thought about seminary? And she said, no, why? And he said, well, you have just this natural gift for understanding and explaining scripture.

And I think that you should consider going on and getting your MDiv. And that probably took five minutes of that man's life, but it completely changed the trajectory of hers. And so it's not even anything really hard or difficult, but, but what I could see over and over again is that God uses the church to call, to raise up the church, that he uses his people to call out, to call people into their gifting. And I've, I've just never forgotten that. I take it really, really seriously now, whenever I see just anyone with any kind of gift, it doesn't have to be teaching or leading. It can just be a gift of mercy or hospitality. I don't miss the opportunity to just speak that over them because I know now that's actually how God calls people into the spot that he is assigned for them.

How would you respond? Because I could hear some of my really hard, maybe hardcore, not even hardcore, but just complementarians say like, well, yeah, you know, but that whole idea of calling and experience, I mean, these are kind of subjective realities, you know, someone could say, well, yeah, I've got you know, friends who are gay Christians and they got married and they had

this sense of calling to get married and their marriage looks better than most heterosexual couples, so you have like experience and internal subjective, really like, without a doubt, I know God is calling me into the same sex marriage, you know, or that's just an example in my world that comes up a lot. So somebody could say like, how is that any different than, you know, I, and I'm just, I'm kind of trying to echo the argument. I'd love to hear your response.

Well, that was exactly why I did my research at complementarian seminaries is that people were, these were women who had Southern Baptist pastors coming to them and saying, not, I think you should be a pastor, but instead saying like, I see this teaching gift in you, or I see, you know, this, this ministry gift in you somehow. Or I see, you know, this ministry gift in you somehow. And they weren't necessarily, you know, breaking out of their tradition by doing that. They were just simply naming, like, I see that God has put this spiritual gift in you to be used in some way. And so I think that you should steward that within our tradition. So just to be clear, they weren't using it as like an argument for like an egalitarian view. They were just saying, hey, you're clearly gifted at this area without, okay. Yeah. And that was really actually pretty cool. Like I really appreciated that, that there are Southern Baptist pastors out there who really believe that scripture teaches that

only men can be elders or only men can be pastors but at the same time they can acknowledge god has put some of these gifts into women to be used in some way and to to understand that the king the the body of christ is richer if if women are using their gifts even if it's you know for women's ministry or for you know children's ministry or whatever capacity that they allow, they were still able to like hold those things together. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kind of, it's funny in my own like very conservative background, you know, we would always kind of listen to like Beth Moore, you know, back when she was commentating and it's like, gosh, she's kind of killing it. I wish I could preach like her. So

there is this almost like subtle admission, you know, kind of quietly that like, yeah, some women just really kill it on stage, you know, even, even though we're like, ah, but they can't be pastors or whatever. But, uh, no, that's helpful. Tell us, I guess, in your own research, but also in your journey, like what, what have been maybe some of the challenges being a woman in, in ministry and education, or even like your time at Ted's, did you ever feel like you were looked down upon or talked down to or just treated differently as a woman?

You know, overall, my experience has been pretty positive. Just even during my time, and I belong to a couple different Southern Baptist churches. There was a very short period of time where I was living in Charlotte after college, and I was at a Southern Baptist church in Charlotte, and I had this one just crazy, crazy experience where this guy just kind of had it out for me, and we were at like a church softball game, and a woman was invited to pray before the softball game. And this guy just lost it. And for some reason, I wasn't even the one praying and he started screaming at me and like, it was my fault somehow. I still, to this day, I have no idea. Um, but yeah, he, he just raged at me and said that, you know, when a woman speaks in front of men, um, when a man could be doing it, that it's like castrating him.

Like it was crazy, crazy, crazy. And, and he, so he screamed at me in front of this whole crowd of people and I walked out to my car and I just cried. And I walked out to my car and I just cried. But later, our church, and this is like a huge Southern Baptist church in Charlotte, they disciplined him for that. They were like, you do not talk to your sister in Christ this way ever. And this does not represent who we are as a church.

And so I want to say too that that really I think that probably shaped me in a more profound way than I could ever truly understand because I know women who have been treated that way but their church did not defend them and it really meant a lot for me for that church to say that is not who we are and that kind of behavior is never okay. And I've been really fortunate because I've had a lot, like even my dad is one of my biggest advocates. I mean, he really, he, he would get into debates with JD and he, he would always say to me, like, never let a guy, never let anyone tell you, you can't do something because you're a woman, you know, that was kind of my, and I was like, okay, dad, but you know, I was fine. But I've,

I've just been really fortunate to have a lot of, and then my husband obviously is a huge advocate as well. And so I, I'm a picture of someone who has been honored and esteemed by my brothers in Christ and just the recipient of that in so many different ways that it, it, I've, I've had run-ins through the years. I've definitely had times where I've felt like you were talking to me this way because I'm a woman and you're treating me like I'm a little girl, but those are really few and far between compared to the number of times where I've just been built up by my brothers. I love, I just love how honoring and positive you are speaking about your SBC experience. as a woman who now believes in, you know, a more non-hierarchical, complementarian position, but you still speak highly of your SBC brothers and sisters and even your experience there.

That's pretty rare these days. I mean, I feel like the SBC is kind of the whipping child, you know, of evangelicalism. Any chance we get to kind of like point out their flaws or whatever, we do so. So I just thank you for being so honorable. You know? Well, I know like everyone's experience is different and mine is just mine. But that, that is, I've just been really like, no one respects JD more than me and my husband. And so, yeah, we, we just have a lot of friends there. He's amazing. He's one of my favorite. And I'm not Southern Baptist. I probably never would be. But yeah, I mean, JD and who else?

Russellmore. Yeah. And there's those voices that are just, they're just, you know, they're kind. They're humble. They're able to get along with people across the divide and stuff. And I just, I, there's, I, yeah, I love that. Those voices. Speaking of kindness, you wrote a book called Nice,

Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More. Now, nice, not, because kindness is a biblical virtue, but as you say in the book, niceness is not. Can you give us the gist of your book? I find it, I haven't read it yet, but it's just the whole thesis is fascinating to me. Yeah. So let me back up and say just kind of where the idea of it came from. So my first, this is my second book. My first book was called Free of Me, Why Life is Better When It's Not About You. And that was about, that was really inspired

in a lot of ways by Tim Keller's The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness and just needing like I love the vision of that tiny little book but I needed handles like I needed to understand how do I live this and so free of me is the kind of practical application like how do you actually live out this vision? And so in the beginning of that book, I think it was like the first chapter. So I had this little paragraph where I was reflecting on my childhood, my growing up years, and I was raised in a Christian home, wonderful Christian parents. And I was a really good kid. I was a high achiever, rule follower, you know, all of that just kind of crave the approval of all the adults in my life. And so I was just this nice Christian girl. And I in free of me, I could just

look back and see that I did. I was a nice Christian girl, because of my faith, like I wanted to honor God. But I was also a nice Christian girl because it got me things. Like it won me everything that I like really wanted. And so in hindsight, I could see that my motives for my behavior were just really mixed. You know, I wasn't sure if I was nice because of Jesus or just because of, you know, it was so advantageous to be. So I had just like a few sentences about this in Free of Me, and I hadn't planned to write anything else about it. But the concept continued to haunt me a little bit because I realized that I hadn't really left that behind, but I'd carried it into adulthood and that I'd also

carried it into ministry. And the moment, the clarifying moment for me when I realized that I was continuing to be somewhat enslaved to this idol of niceness is I felt like God was pushing me to write on a topic that was controversial. It was related to something in the news. And I thought I should write about it because I thought that Jesus had something to say about it. But at the same time, I thought, I've never written about this before. I don't know what people are going to think.

I don't know if my readers are going to get angry, if they're going to say I'm distracting from the gospel, like all these things. are going to get angry, if they're going to say I'm distracting from the gospel, like all these things. And so I was kind of sitting there in front of my computer staring at these words and thinking, okay, the Bible isn't unclear about this. Like it's very clear. The reason I'm hesitating is because I'm sort of departing right now from this image that has served me really well. now from this image that has served me really well. And the fact that I'm hesitating to be obedient, that was a huge red flag for me. And I just started to do a lot of soul searching after that. And the reality is, you know, this is a whole other like gender dynamic that we haven't even talked about. But for women in ministry, if you are positive and upbeat all the time, and you kind of talk about certain spiritual things, but nothing that's like really

happening in the world, it is financially lucrative. Like it is, it will, you will do well in ministry. Like it, it actually pays to have this very nice Christian woman image. And the consequences are great when you depart from it. And there's no greater example of this than Beth Moore. You know, Beth Moore had built this whole ministry. And I mean, she was, was trusted just implicitly as this Bible teacher. But as soon as she stepped, you know, just out of this nice Christian woman image, the backlash was just furious, you know? And so I, I've been processing a lot of that and just processing it for myself personally.

And it caused me to ask a lot of questions about this nice Christian image that had served me really, really well. And so that was kind of one layer of what brought me to this topic. But the second layer of it was also looking at, in the last couple years, I think we've seen what is really going on for the health of the church. I think God has unveiled a lot. And seeing people that I knew who were nice Christian people getting on Facebook and making these arguments that were just grossly unbiblical and doing it in a way that was ugly and thinking, okay, so all these people had this veneer of nice Christianity. Like we all know how to play this part. We're really

good at looking good, but underneath there's just spiritual sickness. And so I think those two things together made me think, okay, what have we been discipling ourselves into? It feels like we're discipling ourselves into this veneer of Christianity that looks like the real thing, but is actually just an appearance. And underneath, we are spiritually malformed. So that's kind of the back, the backdrop of it all. That's, I mean, super interesting because yeah, niceness, nice, it has this real positive image. And I think people do mistake it with love or kindness. How would you just like, what's your briefest way to distinguish between niceness and kindness would you say yeah so the person who helped me understand this i believe his name is barry cory i think that's oh yeah yeah i know barry the president of biola yeah he's amazing yeah okay

so he i hope people have been buying his book because i've mentioned it on like every podcast it's called love kindness um i have it yeah oh okay here i wish i could hold it up but it's very i got stacks of books everywhere yeah so he he makes this distinction in a way that i found to be really helpful where he said to imagine niceness as having uh soft edges and like a squishy center. Does this sound familiar at all? Yeah. And then he says, think of harshness as having hard edges and a firm core,

but kindness, it has those soft edges. It has gentleness and peacefulness and love, hospitality, all of that, but it still has a firm core. It has a spine. It has conviction. And so I found that to be a really, a really helpful way of thinking about the difference because niceness is ultimately self-serving. And so it collapses when it's not reciprocated, whereas kindness is ultimately in service to God and others. And so it's not dependent on the response that it elicits. That's super helpful. Yeah.

And that, and that was really for me too. I think an easy way to diagnose, am I being nicer? Am I being kind? Is how you respond when your warmth is not reciprocated. So niceness tends to flip really quickly into resentment and entitlement. You know, like if you're nice to the checkout person and they're rude to your waiter or neighbor, whoever is rude, you kind of like clutch your pearls and you're like, you know, how could they, I was so nice to them. Like, how could they, I was so nice to them. And

so you, you know, when it flips that that was, that was never about them. That was about you. But kindness doesn't flip like that because it wasn't about eliciting a certain response. It was just about loving people. Yeah, no, that's super helpful. And the niceness just like you described earlier, just kind of superficial. I'll just picture this kind of skin deep, you know, like manifestation. But kindness has these deep roots in the kind of agape love, loving your enemy and neighbor alike kind of feel to it, you know, and kindness might include

they may overlap, but niceness doesn't necessarily include kindness. Like another, another metaphor that I use is, you know, you think of like a Christmas tree where you decorate this Christmas tree with like all these ornaments and you light it up and it's like very beautiful and it's it's just sparkling and glowing but fundamentally a Christmas tree is a dying tree like its roots have been cut off it's not actually growing like everything that makes it beautiful has just been kind of artificially hung on its branches and eventually that comes out like eventually if you let a Christmas tree stay in your house long enough, it starts to like, actively decompose, you know, like you can smell it.

But kindness is a fruit of the spirit, which means it's not just something you hang on your branches, it's something that that grows out of you. And that is cultivated organically. That's good. We'll be we're coming up on our time here, but I, before we go, I have to, I mean, here it is April 7th when we're recording. I don't know when this is going to be released. Maybe the coronavirus will be behind us. Maybe we'll be an all out apocalyptic chaos. Everything's day to day, but I would love, do you have any thoughts on just our cultural

moment, just from a human perspective, from a Christian perspective, or from a pastoral perspective, a church leader? How have you been processing where we are right now? Yeah, it's been really interesting. My husband and I have been processing it in very different ways, which has also been just a new dynamic for our marriage. We keep kind of trying to speak grace of ourselves because we're like, we've never been married during a pandemic before, you know? And so I, I'm very much in crisis. I get sort of this clarity where I can see what is essential. And I think for my husband, he's been more like, what does this mean for our church? You know, for me, the adjustment has been just

establishing a new rhythm adjustment has been just establishing a new rhythm that has been really tough because our kids are so little and so they need constant supervision so that has been that's been challenging but the thing that has been really helpful for me is we've so we've been preaching through the gospel of Mark since the summer, and we're going to finish it on Easter Sunday. But it was really interesting. Near the end of Jesus's life is when he gives some of his hardest teachings. And so we were going through, we were calling this series within the series Controversial Christ. We're looking at these hard, unpopular teachings of Jesus.

And one of the hard teachings is, I think it's in Mark 13, he talks about the end times. And the timing of that, where we were talking about the end times, I think it was like our second or third week under quarantine, was not lost on us, you know, that we're sitting here and everyone's kind of like, what does all of this mean? And we're like, okay, well, let's talk about the end times, you know, while we're at it. But what we noticed when we're in this particular section of scripture is that Jesus talks about actually two different end times in this passage. He's talking about the end of the temple and he's talking about the end of the age. And of nt right nt right actually i think

he his opinion is that jesus is only talking about the end of the temple he has like very strong feelings about this for some reason um but to me what this signified is that there are and and you see this when you look back on history, that there are multiple end times that they all foreshadow, you know, this coming end time. But I think that that also helps us understand why for all the descriptions that Jesus gives about there being wars and rumors of wars and, you know,

violence and division and upheaval and fear. And there's been so many different eras of human history that have seemed to fit that. And so every time it happens, people are kind of like, is this what Jesus is talking about? Is this what Jesus is talking about? And the answer is yes, to some extent he is. That there are these end times throughout that foreshadowed this ultimate end time. And that every time you experience an end time, it's because God is also giving birth to something new. Like another language that he uses is these labor pains. And you don't have labor pains without birth coming afterwards. And so that for me,

seeing that, it lowered the stakes of this whole thing just a little bit to say, okay, this doesn't necessarily mean that this is the end of the world. It just means that this is an end time, that our previous way of life has come to an end. And, you know, it might resume in some form or fashion later. I don't know how long as a church we're all going to be meeting online. I don't know what that's going to do. Like businesses are coming to an end. Dreams are coming to an end. There's so many things that we planned that we thought we had control of that are now coming to an end. And we feel the grief of that. But those labor pains that in times, it also means that God is giving birth to something new.

And so it's turning my attention to, okay, what is God birthing here? Like, what are these the labor pains of? And that feels just a lot more hopeful to me. Yeah, no, that's good. That's super good. Are you familiar with, I think it was, was it Phyllis Tickle? super good. Are you familiar with, I think it was, was it Phyllis Tickle, who said something like every 500 years, there's kind of a, and again, I haven't read it. I just keep hearing other people refer to it. And I've thought kind of similar things as I've thought through history

that every 500 years, you have kind of these major upheavals that end up purifying, in a sense, the church. And, you know, you have the fall of Rome, 410 AD, and the wake of that, you have the, I think, I would guess this, the split of the East and West church in around 1000 AD, then of course, the Reformation in 1500. Now here we are 500 years later. And I think we all, at least most American Christians would agree that, yeah, we could use a cleansing. Now I have to quickly say, gosh, nobody celebrates what's going on. But it is kind of, this is just part of life, especially, you know, pandemics are actually have been fairly common in a broad scope of things. Now we, we haven't had one like this, but I mean, if you look back, I mean,

you know, 1918, the flu, you have, you know, the bubonic plague and other things that have, you know, the 1918 flu has killed 25 to 50 million people. That's, I mean, crazy, you know? um, but these, these natural tragedies do have a cleansing effect and causes us to rethink really fundamental categories. So I'm, I'm kind of like, I mean, it's, I'm mourning, lamenting as Lindsay Wright has told us to do, but also curious and in a sense, cautiously hopeful about what's going to happen on the other side of this.

So yeah, I don't know. But yeah, I love your thoughts on that. Okay, so once again, your book, Free of Me, Why Life is Better When It's Not About You. I love that subtitle. It's awesome. And then, of course, the book Nice that we talked about. So Sharon, thanks so much for being a guest on the show. Many blessings on your life, your ministry, your work. I hope that this coronavirus doesn't halt the work that you're

doing. You're speaking and you're writing and your church and everything. Thank you. And sorry about my kid busting in. Not at all. I love it. No, that's part of the theology in the wrong brand. So thanks so much for being a guest on the show. We'll have to catch up again sometime. That sounds great. Take care.