Tiffany Thompson: Hi, I’m Tiffany Thompson, Comment‘s executive editor and producer of the Understory Festival. The deepest resources of the Christian tradition refuse the false binary of rootedness and openness. And as the polarized political sorting of the current moment tries to push us into simplistic extremes, the Understory Festival was built on a resistance to this false dilemma.
So on the second afternoon of the festival, six practitioners gathered around one question: Must deep roots and open arms compete? Tim Dixon, the co-founder of More in Common, researches polarization and belonging in democratic spaces. He opens with the story of a skeptic won over at a Thanksgiving table. Maria Liu Wong and Bishop Vivian Grubb share a twenty-year friendship across Chinese Baptist and Pentecostal worlds in the metropolitan context of City Seminary of New York. Brian Dijkema, Cardus’s president for Canada, ponders the tree with its hidden roots of nourishment and public branches of outreach. Philosopher Chris Oldfield shares about hospitality transformed into an almost monastic rule of life in a South London intentional community. Shirley Mullen, president emerita of Houghton University, recounts a divided room in the academy that learned to speak by empowering the voices best able to be heard. And Bishop Claude Alexander gathers the threads, and Yale theologian Miroslav Volf closes in prayer.
Recorded in the Bethlehem Chapel, we invite you to join the discussion around the expansive questions asked by this panel. What traditions are worth nurturing and passing on to the next generation? Can the open-armed avoid thinning out into nothing in particular? Can the followers of a way avoid hardening into closed systems? And what could this look like in a lived reality of institutional practice?
Tim Dixon: You know, one of the lovely things about this city—I once lived in DC—is the trees. I love a walk in Rock Creek Park or the National Arboretum, and there’s many other places. And one of the amazing things when you look at the structure of a three-hundred-year-old oak is the fact that in that vastness, you can also get a seed and hold between your fingers a seed that is encoded with the full DNA of that vast tree.
And in More in Common’s work, what we do is we talk to hundreds of thousands of people across seven countries, working on how do we deal with the deep divisions in societies around the world. And often I’m giving lots of data and lots of examples and percentages of this and that. But what I want to do is just actually share a seed with you, because sometimes that little seed tells the larger story more than all of those details.
Now, we know that we’re in a world which is roiled up by divisions. And in seeking a sense of belonging, people often draw really hard lines that might be about nationality, they might be about politics, it might be about religion, it might be just about team sports. And there are good reasons why people draw that, because it gives them a sense of belonging. It gives them—well, often people feel that they’re defending something that’s important. But also it can be toxic. It can be exclusionary to people who are on the other side.
And so what we’re sharing about in this session is about that dynamic between that rootedness, the longing for deep belonging, and the tension of that against being welcoming and open arms. And I’m going to just tell you just one story of the work that we’ve done at More in Common that I think says in its smallness something big.
It relates to—we’ve done a lot of work on refugee welcome around the world. And one of the things we’ve worked on is to support efforts to create community-based sponsorship of refugees. So one guy had sponsored—he and his wife had sponsored—an Afghan refugee into the United States. He’s in the Midwest, and his father-in-law comes for Thanksgiving dinner. And the father-in-law: strong patriot, Florida retirement community, big believer in guns, big believer in being American, not very keen on refugees. And he finds out from his son-in-law that this Afghan refugee is going to be at the Thanksgiving dinner. And he’s not at all happy. And he says, “It’s not right. Thanksgiving is a time for family, not for outsiders, especially people like that who don’t even belong in the country.” And his son-in-law says, “He’s coming. He’s part of the family now. He’s coming.”
And so he was grumbling all the way along. But Thanksgiving dinner comes. He sits down next to him. And over the course of the evening, as delicious food is served and being eaten, he kind of warms up a little. Hears a bit more about the story of Abdul, the guy from Afghanistan. And over the course of that evening, he shifted in how he thought.
A few days later, he goes back to his community in Florida, where he writes the regular newsletter. And he says, “You know, what I can’t understand in our country is why people are so prejudiced against refugees. Because I met a refugee called Abdul. And I want you to know that he understands the American Constitution better than most Americans I’ve ever met. He loves this country. He paid a big price. He was a translator for the US Army. His parents were killed because of that. He made his way to this country. He loves this nation. He loves the freedom. He has so much gratitude, and he’s building a new life. And this is exactly the kind of people that make me proud to be an American.”
Now, my question about that guy is: What happened? Did his values fundamentally change? They didn’t. It’s just that his core values were around patriotism, loyalty, a love of his country. But he thought that what that meant was drawing a line here between an us and a them. What happened once he met Abdul, had that connection, and learned that story was those boundaries shifted. They expanded.
That is the key thing that I—in working across different countries, around detailed strategies, national level, working with political leaders, and right down to the community level—it’s not so much that you confront the people who have a narrow sense of belonging, but it’s more that you help them to tap into their deeper values, deeper aspirations, and realize that that point—that dividing line—can be pushed out a little. That it’s not about an us and a them; it’s about a larger us. And in all kinds of small ways and big ways, that, I think, is the moment of transformation, when we break down the idea that this is one thing against the other, and rather understand this is about shared humanity.
Maria Liu Wong: Hi. When Anne invited me to share a little story, I thought it would be appropriate for me to do it with my friend here. So my name is Maria Liu Wong. I’m the provost of City Seminary of New York, and I’ve worked with Bishop Vivian—we’ve been friends for twenty years. The seminary is twenty-five years old, so we’ve basically grown up together. And we’re based in Harlem, and we’re an intercultural theological learning community trying to do something different with urban theological education, reimagining what it could look like. And so—
Vivian Grubb: Maria’s son just graduated college. I’ve known him since he was in a stroller, to put things into perspective. I am a third-generation Pentecostal preacher. We’re noisy. And I’m an extrovert. And it is so interesting that my friend Maria and I have had this lasting relationship.
I want to start off by saying—this morning, as we were thinking about this morning, a phrase was mentioned in one of the teachings, where he talked about trauma, or he talked about difficulties. And one of the issues was trauma either breaks you or breaks you open. And I think when we’re confronted with differences, that’s what happens. You are either broken by staying apart, or you’re broken open. And I think that that’s what happened with me and Maria, as we come from different backgrounds and different contexts, but we have found a place at the feet of the cross that has helped us to grow together.
Maria Liu Wong: I’m an introvert. I’m forced to speak in public, like these settings, because of my work. I grew up as a missionary kid. My parents are very conservative—Chinese, Baptist-ish. And I grew up being told that certain people were not part of the church, and I should not listen to certain types of music. And that was my formation. And it wasn’t until maybe college that I began to meet Christians who didn’t look like me. I grew up in a Chinese church, and my parents’ ministry was to Chinese people.
But then I think, somehow in that story, God invited me to build this learning community with people who didn’t look like me, but who loved God and loved the city. And that’s how I think it got started. So City Seminary—we’re going to refer to it as the garden, because we all have gardens; we have places that we can grow. And it’s an organic garden, meaning that it wasn’t a planned growth. We had all the ingredients for growth, but it required an openness to grow.
Vivian Grubb: I think one of the big keys to being able to embrace differences is having the same mind, or the same openness, the same desire to either—for us in New York City—to shine the light of the gospel in our city, in an urban context, and also just to want to see people grow and develop. And that certainly is the heart that Maria has, and that’s the heart that we have. And we’ve kind of migrated towards each other as we stay—and I’m going to keep saying this—stay really close to the cross. Because my background is different. Her background is different. And we can certainly, as was mentioned earlier, we can certainly draw a line in the sand and say, “You stay over there, and you stay…” But we kept finding that we became better as we got to know the other.
Maria Liu Wong: And I think that’s linked to the pedagogy of: What does it mean to be formed in community? You can read a book. You can read a lot of books about other people. Or you can become friends and be transformed when you go to their church and worship with them. I would say now I’m Presbycostal, because of the ways that I have learned to see how big God is.
So I think being in community, walking with each other’s families. So she’s seen my son grow up. Her son now works with me in our Faith and Families initiative, where we are visiting churches—immigrant diaspora churches around New York City—trying to document and understand how God is working in spiritual formation and faith transmission practices in these different congregations. So I would say it’s been relationship and friendship and an openness to have a bigger, wider, more rich, expansive understanding of who God is that I think has shaped us.
And I think we’ll just close with this kind of key metaphor for us, which is the Ephesian moment. And this is Andrew Walls, who’s a missiologist, and he was talking about the city of Ephesus. It’s so diverse, and yet there was unity.
Vivian Grubb: I think for us, we realize that there’s no one part of the body of Christ that completes itself. We need each other. So as we think about the seminary, we’re just two people in a community that is very, very different—from Catholic to Methodist to Anglican to, you know, Pentecostal, Apostolic, Presbyterian. But we’re just an example of this widening community of seeing how we all need each other to complete the body of Christ. And that is expanded and extended in this room as well.
Brian Dijkema: Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Dijkema, and I’m not an American. I’m Canadian. And I had the privilege last night of reading “O Radix,” which is a poem by Chris’s countryman, Malcolm Guite. And not to get all Presbycostal on you, but I do love that, and I resemble that comment. I think that there is something in the Holy Spirit working, because my wife and I are one of these strange people that Ross was encouraging to be crazy, and we started a little Charlotte Mason classical school called Oak Hill Classical Academy. It’s a beautiful school. I encourage you to go there and listen to it. It sounds like children babbling. It’s like a babbling brook, but with children. It’s beautiful.
And the motto of our school is—and for the scholars in the room, please forgive me; my Latin is worse than my daughter’s, so I’m just going to try it. The motto of the school in Latin is called Radix coronam nutrit, which means “the root nourishes the crown.”
And I thought that since Anne asked me to read that and then to do this, there must be some Holy Spirit at work putting all of these things together in such a beautiful way that I would not have planned. Or Anne’s just that good. Or maybe she’s just a channel of the Holy Spirit—perhaps that’s it.
But I think that that metaphor of our school, the metaphor of a tree, is in fact a metaphor for our lives in many ways. If you think about a root, a root is underground. It is intimate. It is hidden. And your home life, your personal life, your intellectual life, your inner life is also hidden. Only God knows your thoughts. You can’t even express them to your spouse perfectly. And there’s a sense in which your roots, yourself, that thing which is close to you, your own community, is that thing that is the root, that holds you, that creates you. But that root works itself up into open arms, into the branches. And the branches are not hidden. They’re very public. In fact, they’re the thing that you look up and you can see, and you can see it all. And so there’s a sense in which there is a symbiotic relationship between the root nourishing the crown.
And for me at Cardus, we work in public life all of the time, and I’m regularly struggling with this tension of being away from home, speaking publicly. I’m speaking to the public, to the commons—to not my own house, but to, in our case, in our parliamentary tradition, the place where we speak to one another in public for the common good is called the House of Commons. And it looks a lot more like this than your Capitol building. And there’s a sense in that that House of Commons is also a house. It’s a home. It’s a public home. It’s the branches. And it’s the families of our country that feed that. And in that sense, it is also hoping to feed our own homes.
We have in our national anthem—it says, “O Canada! Our home and native land!” It speaks of it as our home. And we speak about Canada and its rights and its laws and its parliament. And I’m going to use our other language. It says, Protégera nos foyers et nos droits. And it means we expect that the state will protect our foyer—our homes, our hearths—and our rights. And so you see, again, a beauty of the symbiosis between the roots of the home—the family, where your spouse is, your children are, the private spaces in your life, the church gatherings, those places—and the role of the very public House of Commons.
There is, of course, tensions there. There’s something called crown shyness, where, you know, trees will not overlap. They’ll be with one another—and I feel a little bit that way with other countries, maybe even your own. But there is a sense, too, that roots, even if there’s crown shyness, roots overlap. And there’s an intimacy that they are also dependent upon one another. And the understory, if we wanted to get really deep into it, there is fungi and other things like that through which information is shared through different intimate places. And I think that’s the metaphor for the way we live. And that’s the metaphor I live by, actually, with my work at Cardus.
And so I’m going to end with one extremely stereotypically Canadian story. You all know that our flag has a maple leaf on it. It’s a source of some tension for the provinces that have no maple trees, but we’re just going to lean into it. And I grew up in eastern Ontario, and my uncle has a sugar bush. And a sugar bush is a place where you make maple syrup.
And what I think is fascinating is that maple syrup comes when the energy that photosynthesis has gathered in the leaves—in the fall, in the time of dormancy, the tree drives the sugar down into the roots. And the roots hold on to that sugar in the time—the winters, the withering that I was speaking about in the Malcolm Guite poem last night. And it holds on to it all through the frozen, frozen winter. And they are long. And sometimes one longs and wonders why one’s ancestors didn’t settle in Phoenix rather than in Ontario.
But come spring, when the snow melts, and you start to hear the babbling of the brooks again, and the streams start to run, and it starts to warm up, and it gets zero at night, and it gets above zero—I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but just stick with me. Zero is freezing. Above it is not freezing. And what happens is that sugar drives up through the trunk, back into the leaves to feed the leaves again. And we, somewhat parasitically, tap it. And then we boil it, and we distill it.
And I like to think of maple syrup as a sort of quasi-Eucharistic—I don’t think this is spot on, but it’s a little quasi-Eucharistic. You’re taking the sugar that has been stored by that beautiful relationship between the leaves and the roots. And I think this is true also in our own communal life together. And it’s all poured in. It’s from many trees. The sap goes into one place, and you distill it and you distill it and you distill it, and it gets sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. And it is the thing that brings brightness to the eyes when you taste it. And so that’s a metaphor I live by in my work, and we at Cardus do. But that’s how I think about roots and open arms.
Chris Oldfield: Well, I’m Chris, and it’s lovely to be with you. I’m glad you mentioned Ephesians. I heard Rowan Williams once talk about Ephesian rhapsody, and I’ve just been lost in wonder at that theme for a few years. They say hobbits love things that grow. And I suppose in Ephesians, there’s this thing about: What are you growing out of, and what are you growing into? And that’s two questions that I ask myself a lot. I’d ask you: What are you growing out of? What are you growing into? I ask a lot of friends that. I’m interested. A lot of people are growing out of a lot of things. A lot of people want to grow out of faith, hope, love, the things they’ve received. I’m the kind of guy who’s finding it increasingly that’s what I want to grow into. And I’m interested in that.
I think in my twenties, I worked in something called the kind of Christian student ministry world—InterVarsity, I suppose, would be the equivalent. And a lot of the time I spent asking a question: What is a Christian? I mean, what is a real Christian? No, I mean, really, who are the real Christians? I think there’s a lot I learned from that question, but I think I’m growing out of that question, because the question Jesus asked was not, “Tell me, Peter, who do the crowd say that they are?” And I’m really interested in who Jesus is and who we could be in him. And that’s the kind of thing that I’m interested in in my life. Who are we becoming?
There’s a dynamic in the Ephesian letter where St. Paul says something like this: “We too, like the rest of our kind, were in the same boat. But God, because of the great love with which he loved us, has made us alive together.” And there’s a sort of mistake of: you who called yourself this, you look down on those who called themselves that. You don’t need to become like that. You don’t need to become like that. We both need to grow up into this new way in Christ. So I’m interested in how to do that.
A lot of the models for discipleship, which I was formed into, sort of broke down when I had kids ten years ago. And as they decimated our social options, we began to think, Well, what does the Christian life look like? And two of our friends at the time were going through—they were going through it. One was going through a harrowing divorce, and one, her life had just not gone the way she’d wanted. And so we just said, “Look, we’ll come, we’ll cook, you cry, we’ll feed you, we’ll pray, off you go.” And we did that for about a year. And as their life began to feel sort of manageable again, we said to one another, my wife and I, “Why don’t we just do that more?” And so we just invited people. I work in philosophy; invited people I met there. My wife, Liz, she kind of works in media space, and she worked at the Theos think tank for a while—just met people, invited them to dinner.
And I think this discovery of “we too, like the rest” is a dynamic that I want to grow into. Tim Keller, the pastor in New York, used to say there’s a process people go through when they say, “You’re nothing like me; I could never be a Christian,” to “You’re just like me; you can’t be a Christian,” to “Wait—what I proudly called myself and who I thought you were, it’s sort of not interesting anymore. Who could we be in Christ?” And I’ve seen that journey in my own life. And we invite ourselves and others to grow into that life and love of Jesus in our home.
To cut a long story short: five years ago, we moved into a community home with two friends, and that’s grown. And we’ve been there for about five years in South London—Peckham, if you know it. And it’s a place we invite ourselves and others to grow into the life and love of Jesus. We started inviting people for dinner, like our friends, and they came every Monday night—we’ve been doing it for ten years—every fortnight. And we asked people, “What are you growing out of? What are you growing into?”
A couple of years ago, we discovered that people didn’t leave. And so we said, “Well, why don’t we set an end point of about 10:00 p.m. on a Monday night?” And we said, “Well, as a house, we have rhythms of prayer, so why don’t we just say, well, the housemates will go and do Compline, and you’re welcome to—off you go.” But the first time we did it, they all just came with us. You know, fifteen people just walking down to the bottom of the garden to a little shed we’ve called the chapel. And they said, “What do we do now?” “Oh, well, okay, we’re going to pray Compline.” “What’s that?” “It’s—you can think of it as performance poetry, if you like, but it’s some words we’ve been given to be able to consecrate the day and thank God for the day.” And do you know what? A lot of people who come say that’s the thing they’re coming for.
And there is all sorts. We’re talking polyamorous Marxists. We’re talking people who are Conservative MPs. And, you know, you name it, we gather around a table.
And there’s a line that I learned from Ivan Illich, which I’d like to read, which means a lot—and increasingly a lot—to me. In a piece, I think a conversation called “The Land of Found Friends,” Illich wrote this:
I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope could be tied, it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality—recovering threshold, table, patience, listening—and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand, and on the other hand, radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.
And that—we sometimes say friendship is our theory of change. Sometimes it feels like all we’ve got, but it’s pretty wonderful. And we see the fruit. A friend of mine last week said, “Staying with you, it was like it became a way in,” he said. He’d had this I-it question about—he would say—the sacred, God. And praying with you—another friend called it a gateway: “You were my gateway drug.”
You’d be welcome if you’re ever in London.
Shirley Mullen: Thank you for all these comments. I do have to comment—thank you, as a fellow Canadian, for your reference to maple sugar. My father boils his own sap. He’s ninety-eight years old now, and he will be glad to know that this is a Eucharistic practice, so I’ll let him know that.
Anyway, I’m Shirley Mullen. I’ve spent the last forty-five years in the academy in various roles—professor, provost, president, board chair—and we were asked to give an example from our world of how roots and welcome go together.
Well, when I first started thinking about this, I thought, Well, of course they go together. Of course they go together. But then the more I thought about the circumstances in which I then—I realized that in order for roots to—the kind of framework that produces a welcome. And in order for that to happen in various contexts, there has to be a certain amount of confidence in the root system to permit you to welcome and invite others into that.
And higher education right now is not a very confident place to be. I mean, for some schools, it’s enrollment. For others, it’s government funding. Some of the categories that we all grew up with—the idea that reason will help sort through whatever, everyone agrees on truth—I mean, so many of the transcendent things that gave higher education a certain measure of confidence are not quite what they used to be. And the academy itself—those of us who’ve come through this system are much more chastened and careful in how we speak, for many reasons. And certainly the public has heard a lot about that in recent days, and there are good reasons why the public has lost a lot of confidence in higher education. This is not an environment where it’s obvious that higher education is going to be able to help us with making sure roots produce welcome.
But I was asked to give a particular example, and that’s what I’m going to do. And I’m a pretty cautious person, so I’m just going to say I hope I don’t step on anyone’s toes. I’m going to tell you the situation as I experienced it.
So I was in a group of very thoughtful, all well-meaning, all good-intentioned Christians, mixed ethnicities. And in 2019 or 2020, several of the African Americans in the group were very excited and animated by the New York Times 1619 Project. And they started talking about this in this context. And they were, again, very enthused—unmitigatingly enthused—about this. And being an academic myself, and also a historian—although a European historian, not an American—but I was very much watching some of my colleagues in the room who were historians, white historians. And you know how historians are given to argument, and they have to correct things that are out there. They have to do that. I could just feel these white friends: “You know, it’s more complicated. We need to talk about this.” But fortunately—I think fortunately—they chose to be silent, because they thought, Well, if I say anything, it’s just going to reinforce all the things that are already being criticized about the traditional origin stories of America. And so they didn’t say anything.
So because I knew people in a variety of the settings, I listened to the behind-the-scenes conversation. I knew there were certain tensions in the room around ethnicity, but nobody dared to talk about it. Nobody dared to talk about it. And so for several years—and I’m not exaggerating—these good, well-intentioned, thoughtful, intelligent people could not talk about something that was so important to the work that they were doing together. And several of us began to say, “This is not acceptable. This can’t be.”
And the good news, and this is what I want to share with you today, is that several years later—we’re now at 2026—those discussions have started to happen. And they began to happen not because we decided to have arguments about the various complexities and all the nuances of various narratives of the origin stories of the United States. But they started to happen because, first of all, people began to notice each other. They began to pay attention. They began to sense: Who are the people who are being hurt by the fact that we’re not talking about this? And we all began to realize that we were all being hurt because we weren’t talking about these issues.
And then what began to change it was some of the people in the room realized, I am not the person to speak to this, because if I speak to this, it will be this way, this way. But there was a deliberate intention to look around the room and say, Who are the individuals in this room whose own stories would give them the credibility to speak to these issues in ways that everyone in the room could hear them?
And my submission to you today is that each of us in this room have parts of our stories that give us people on both sides of us who do not understand each other but trust us more than they understand people on the other side. And so in that setting that I’m describing for you, we began to look for the voices of the people who could speak to the issue, who could be heard. So part of the work of what you might call the traditional, stereotypical power people in the room was to be silent, but not to be inactive—to look around and say, Who are the voices that we can empower, who can carry this conversation forward when we cannot?
So that community is still working on the issues. But that example of using our own story to [figure] out what context that we have obligations to speak to and bring people together—but also, whenever you are in an empowered situation, to look for the people who may be able to speak when maybe you can’t.
Claude Alexander: Wow. Seeing the breadth of our deepest values—how that which we hold deeply should not be narrow but should be broad, and out of that creating an openness for us. That differences can either break you or break you open—that’s a matter of posture. The roots that feed. That maple—I’m going to use that. That’s preaching. Growing up and growing into: Who am I becoming? Chris, as you said that, I had to also write: What community am I helping become? What nation am I helping become? Conviction and hospitality: What does hospitable conviction look like? And courage that breeds openness, and courage that comes from the knowledge of the other, and leveraging our proximity to serve as bridges.
What do you experience in yourself or around you as the patterned challenges of deep roots and open arms? How might you, or how are you, carrying both at once, and at what cost, and to whom? Are deep roots and open arms necessarily in tension, or are they interdependent?
Miroslav Volf: I was asked to offer a benediction, a prayer. And I think that’s also what I feel is appropriate. So lift up your hearts.
Blessed are you, the one and only God, the God of Abraham and Moses, the God of Jesus Christ. And blessed are we, O Master of the universe, for you are closer to each one of us than we are to ourselves. You are the Most High God. There’s none above you, and there’s none beside you. And yet you are the humble God, for your entire being is love. You look upon each one of us with delight, because we are your children. And you look upon us with sorrow, because even at our best, each one of us is both prodigal and self-righteous. And you hold us as a mother does her newborn child, at once hard and forever.
We are at our best when our deepest roots seek nourishment in your self-giving love. The more we love you and the more we are faithful to you, the less we are tempted to climb over each other in striving for false self-elevation, and the wider our arms open to embrace each other.
Send your Spirit upon us—the Spirit who hovered over the primordial nothingness as you brought your creation into being, the Spirit who rested and energized your beloved Son, our brother, Jesus Christ. Send that same Spirit upon us, that we may be formed into the image of your love. Amen.
