Mark Labberton: I’m so delighted today to welcome Tod Bolsinger back as a guest on Conversing. The conversation that we’re about to have turns around some of the most urgent issues facing culture and society, but even more the church, and that has to do with formation. What is it that actually forms our inner reality, our values, our perspective, our judgment, our understanding of wisdom about the issues that really matter? We can look at the American church today and realize that insufficient formation seems to be part of the way of telling the story of why the church is in the situation that it’s in, where we have underformed people who are leading in a way that is more of a reflection of being grounded in the culture that we’re a part of than being grounded in the character and love and gospel of Jesus Christ.
Tod and I have been collaborators and partners in work and ministry over many years, working closely together when he came to join the faculty as associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He was the founder of the Fuller Leadership Platform, an innovative approach to online formation and leadership development, and he served as a vice president for Fuller for six years. Tod is best known for a number of his books. The first book that really landed him on the stage was called Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. He then went on to become a finalist for another book that he wrote called Tempered Resilience: How Leaders Are Formed in the Crucible of Change, and then as the editor of a series of books called the Practicing Change series. Tod is a consultant and leader of a company that he now owns called AE Sloan Leadership, an executive coaching and consulting firm that works with church, nonprofit, and marketplace leaders in leading change.
Tod Bolsinger, what a gift it is to have you on Conversing today. I’m just really delighted.
Tod Bolsinger: Oh, Mark, it’s so fun. Nice to have this conversation with you, too. We’ve had lots of work experience together.
Mark Labberton: And I had said in the introduction that we had the opportunity to work together at Fuller and since that time as well in just sharing a lot of common concerns. Both of us are people who are committed to Christ, committed to the church, committed to the church in the world. And that is one sticky hot mess these days.
Tod Bolsinger: Well, I’m glad to be with you, too. And whatever the original Greek is for sticky hot mess, it’s right what it is.
Mark Labberton: That is what it is. Oh, my gosh.
So here we are. We’ve both been pastors, Presbyterian pastors, even. We’ve both known long seasons of pastoral ministry. We know institutional leadership around formation that happens in a seminary, in our case, Fuller Seminary. And we know what it is independent of those things to try to contribute to works of formation. And I know that you’re still continuing to write in this area and there will be in approximately a year, another book that will come out and we’re looking forward to that.
But I just want to centre our conversation, this question, what forms a Christian disciple? We know the answer is many things, but I’m just curious where you were maybe when you began ministry, what did you think formation is? Where did you think it was? about the time that you came to Fuller and then where does formation fit or how is it defined now? Just give us that arc of your own understanding.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah. So it feels like it’s a continual conversation about my learning and in one sense, going back to some obvious awareness, but then being just so profoundly aware that formation has become commoditized. Actually, one of Dallas Willard’s statements before he died that he was most concerned about was the entire conversation of spiritual formation would become like a cottage industry instead of like rooted deeply in the life of the church.
And, you know, my whole adult pastoral—and particularly even scholarly—life has been around formation. I did my doctorate. My PhD at Fuller was on communal practices of spiritual formation based on the doctrine of the Trinity. I decided that I would be a pastor who formed a community that would be deeply committed to forming people. And what I found myself doing over and over again is doing what I’ve been told to do, which is you set up a formation program. Associate pastor of Christian formation. I was one, as a matter of fact. As a senior pastor, I hired a couple. I mean, I came to Fuller to be a vice president of vocation and formation, right?
Because in one sense, I think the big aha of the last several years doing consulting work is formation is what comes out of a community. We are formed by the community we’re in. We’re formed by the soil. We take on the terroir of the soil, like the way a grape does for wine. And that the most formative thing is the actual community that we are part of. And that most of that is unconscious or pre-conscious. And that some of it is unintentional and at its very best, it becomes reflective and intentional, but cooperating with the actual soil. I mean, that’s been like the massive place. And for me, that’s been really important when I think about the idea of leadership, which is where I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years.
Mark Labberton: So it’s not just a program. We were laughing before we started about how lovely it would be if all you needed to do was just, you know, mount a really, quote, great, unquote, spiritual formation program. But in actual fact, it’s both more elusive and more profound and more complex and still absolutely essential.
So talk to us more fully about the soil. That makes intrinsic sense to me, but just amplify that some more.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah. So one of the parts that I’ve spent a lot of my time doing the last several years has been just thinking about the whole notion of regenerative agriculture. I was kind of tickled and haunted by this little documentary called The Biggest Little Farm that was about a filmmaker and his wife who was a chef who took over a piece of really soil-depleted land just north of Los Angeles. And in seven years, they turned it into this vibrant, organic—
And actually three times I took doctoral students to visit it, like just so that we got a chance to tour it and talk about it. Two other times I went by myself. I found myself just captivated by the fact that if you want to grow good fruit, abundant harvests of good fruit, you don’t focus on the fruit, you focus on the soil. And that in so many ways, this brought me back to the scriptures, right? The scriptures are filled with these agricultural metaphors. I mean, I tell people like Jesus literally says that more powerful than his preaching is the soil that the word falls into.
It’s stunning, right? It’s like he says that 75 percent of his own preaching is going to be fallow because it’s going to fall in the wrong spot. And I think, you know, as a person who spent a lot of my life doing a lot of sermons, it’s kind of humbling.
And then recently I’ve been thinking more about this in terms of in my work, in our leadership work we do with churches and nonprofits going through change.
Mark Labberton: Yes.
Tod Bolsinger: There’s been this lament, especially around crisis, like in times of crisis, we were not as Christian as we thought we would be. And what people went back to is they wanted to find a—find the solution, find the program, find the, you know, whatever it would be that would fix it. And a bunch of the research, a bunch of the work that my company has done and that I’ve done has been really about, it isn’t found in a technical solution. It is found when you transform the soil into something healthier and more robust that will produce the fruit you want to produce.
Mark Labberton: So if the American church in its current state is the production of what arises from the soil that we have, what is lacking in that soil to have produced a church like the one that we see? Which I want to say is, as you well know, too. There’s all kinds of vibrant, healthy places where the church in America is really doing remarkable things, profound things. And then there’s other things that we see that are just so much more problematic. So what is that soil detriment or loss or lack that we need?
Tod Bolsinger: Well, one of the ways to think about it before we talk about lack is to think of it this way. It’s a little bit like the old notion that came out of the leadership world, that your system is perfectly designed for the results it’s getting.
Mark Labberton: Yes.
Tod Bolsinger: Right. There are no dysfunctional systems. They all produce. So your soil will produce the fruit of its health. So there’s been scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez and others who have said, hey, look, Trump’s rise and, you know, 80 some percent of white evangelical males supporting him. It was not a surprise. It came out of a culture that was cultivated over decades, particularly within the kind of the evangelical world that you and I have spent our lives in, that this is the fruit that would come.
And that so many of the things that I can remember being in seminary, I say this all the time, when I was in seminary, there was not a single scholar or person I knew who even entertained the idea of Christian nationalism. Not one. And I don’t know a single church that started a program in Christian nationalism or had an associate pastor of Christian nationalism or started a strategic plan for Christian nationalism. It just came up out of the soil.
So if you think about the soil as the nutrients that are there and that have been replicated over and over by what’s grown there and what’s cultivated there and what goes back in is composted there. Well, then we can say, the soil we have of Christianity today is the result of everything we’ve done. And what we have to look at is say, if we’re not getting the fruit we want, then, okay, how do we go back and examine that? And then how do we also change that? How do you actually change that soil to get the fruit we want?
Mark Labberton: Part of the question that I want us to talk about is how much that soil is a function of our broader cultural setting and how much of that culture has to do with church culture and then how the two are different or not, and how it is that one soil and another soil ends up being greater than the soil that we would wish the church culture soil at its best, not just period, but at its best. The soil of the gospel and the meaningfulness of Christian faith and Christian community and Christian ministry is the soil that’s principally shaping people’s hearts and minds. But we know that soil is actually planted in a much wider soil, which is made up of so many other parts that has nothing to do with all of that.
Tod Bolsinger: So one of the ways that I got into this subject, again, I felt like I came back to it. So I hadn’t done much work in formation for a few years. I was really working on organizational leadership change. And every single time I got to a place where somebody was challenging me. Basically asking me the question, how do I do this? I found the answer was a formation response.
You and I talked about this about vocation. You know, we talked a lot about the vocation is not found. It was formed. And so we literally were working on how do you form people to hear the call of God and faithfully live out that in their lives. And we did that at the seminary. I was talking about leading change and a number of my clients said, yeah, but what do we do with resistance? What do we do with sabotage? How do you develop resilience? We found that resilience was actually a response to formation. You’re formed to be resilient.
Well, what’s interesting then is there is this juxtaposition of we are formed by the culture around us in ways that we’re not even aware of. Like I’m clearly formed by having been an American, by having grown up in a family where education was important and all these things that were almost pre-conscious. But there was also some deliberate choices that were made, even choices that I entered into, like going to a place like Fuller, as opposed to going to a seminary in our denomination, right? That shaped me.
So one of the ways I’ve been thinking about that is where you see admirable, extraordinary fruit. What was it about that culture? And so in this book that I’m writing, I went back to this incredible story that I remember hearing about in an ethics class when I was at Fuller in the 1980s about this group of Christians, Huguenots in France during World War II, where they literally, this group of about 3,000 Christians who lived in this little village in the mountain plateau, very hard to get to, way off the beaten path, who had a very hard time getting a pastor, they became a community that saved somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust. It’s an extraordinary story. It’s just this remarkable story, right?
And when I heard that story, I assumed that was a story about extraordinary leadership. That’s why I wanted to tell that story. I thought there had to be an extraordinary leader who shaped a vision, who called people to it, who rallied the troops. I was thinking Henry V, right? You know, once more unto the breach, dear friends.
And I actually ended up talking to people who were there. I talked to the daughter of the pastors. She was 93. She was a teenager in Le Chambon. And she said to me, when I said, I think your parents were heroes. She looked at me and she said, you’re very romantic about this. These people just lived out their faith. And it hit me that word just was carrying a lot of doing a lot of work, a lot of ways. She just assumed the most natural thing in the world was this group of people would have opened the door to whatever people came their way, even at the risk of their own lives and welcome them in, because that’s the scriptures they had studied, said to do.
And you and I have studied those same scriptures and been with lots of people who not only wouldn’t open the door, they would pass laws to keep people from not showing up at the door. So there is this overlap about the way the culture, the common culture impacts us. And there’s also this thing that disrupts it by realizing you can cultivate a culture that is countercultural to the world around us.
Mark Labberton: Yes, yes. And we have lots of other examples of this too, mostly in minority communities, small little communities, like an Amish community where one of their own boys killed four of the girls. And the natural response was to not only forgive the boy, but to care for the family who was grieving because their son had done this thing. Like forgiveness was their natural response, right? Or the—like Mother Emanuel.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah. One of my doctoral students was an AME pastor who literally during that worship, during that funeral, when Obama was there at the funeral, he literally said, I need your permission. I have got to attend this funeral. So he was on Zoom in my doctor of ministry class watching this funeral because his father was participating in it. And every single person up there with the president had been a mentor in his life. This was a huge shaping experience of his own formation as a pastor. And today he leads one of the largest AME churches in the country.
But it came out of the soil of his upbringing, of his denomination. It’s a long way of saying there’s this juxtaposition. There’s this unconscious stuff that we take in. And then there’s this intentional cultivating that we can try to do based upon what we want to produce.
Mark Labberton: So, Tod, speaking personally, where would you say this particular kind of these ingredients that are not necessarily the obvious and structural ones? They can be institutional sometimes. I realize that. But what was the soil that—you now would say maybe in a way that you haven’t even ever really seen as clearly until this chapter of your life—but what was the soil that was actually forming you? I just want to add in the layer of your thick Italian culture and lots of pasta and lots of really great community.
Tod Bolsinger: Well, that’s part of my upbringing. But what’s also part of my upbringing is my parents were public school teachers. Right. So I grew up hearing every day the heroes of my family were people who were educated. Yes. So it never even dawned on me that I wouldn’t get a lot of education.
My parents told me stories of my grandfather who was an immigrant. Like I literally went to Ellis Island and saw his signature. And I took my niece and my grandniece. So we’re representing four generations of a 16-year-old boy who came as an immigrant. So when I hear people talk about immigrant stories or talk about people who get nervous about immigration. For me, this is my—I don’t look like the immigrants, not even the immigrants in my town. But I am two generations removed from someone who literally fled World War I and conscription and came to the United States and found his way across the country to be in a little redwood town in Northern California where he met my grandmother. They founded an Italian restaurant where I was babysat when I was a little boy.
So these are all parts of who I am that I know have shaped me. But they’ve also created things that I just assume to be normal. I think the biggest disruption of this work has been how many of us assume that my experience is the same as everybody else’s experience. And therefore, what I think is normal is right. And I don’t even know how to relate to people who’ve had completely different experiences.
Mark Labberton: Yeah, I mean, I look back and think of my immigrant family as well, in this case from Holland. And they came, I too am two generations removed from that. And I certainly also grew up with those stories of exactly how that happened, why they came, where they first landed, how they made their way to, in my case, to Washington State or to Oregon. And what the outgrowth of that was and how their lives got planted and the enormous challenges they had.
And it gave me very vividly, especially in the case of my maternal grandmother, who found herself a widow with four little girls on a wheat ranch in eastern Oregon without electricity and without indoor plumbing and without a husband. And in that context, she’s going to raise these little girls to be ladies. She was not—my grandmother was not a prissy lady, but she was definitely a very dignified woman. And her sensibility about her daughters was that they would grow up to be well attended to and that they would have a sense of decorum about their life. And though they lived in this raw way in a frontier setting. And because of growing up hearing those stories my whole childhood and the way that God provided for them, but also the way that those stories shaped character and expectations and deflected any sense of self-pity. And, you know, it was like life is hard and it’s going to be really good.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just and it’s the most and it becomes reflexive. And I think this is the formation conversation. How do we make things reflexive that look like Jesus as opposed to look like whatever else is around us? Right. And it starts with a lot of reflection, including a humble reflection about the things that formed us.
So one of the examples you and I have talked about before is if you are trying to bring change to a university where the most esteemed people—and we, you and I have known them, I mean, geniuses, right? The most esteemed people were formed for a very particular calling like scholarship in the world. That formation makes them unique for what they can produce, but is also a deficit.
Like the way that, for example, when I was at Fuller after living, after pastoring for 17 years in a predominantly white community, the students told me, hey, you have a lot of assumptions, particularly about race, that you haven’t even thought about. And I remember thinking once, well, I want to believe in a colour-blind society. I’ve read Dr. King. And it was so interesting to have somebody say to me, that’s like somebody saying, I don’t see race, is like somebody with a Hummer saying, I don’t see bicycles. I just see—I see vehicles. You’re dangerous. You’re going to run me over.
And I remember I intentionally went and sought out what I called a cultural competency coach. I’d had someone say to me, you struggle with cultural competency. And so I looked it up and I studied it. I read books on it. And then I went to somebody and I said, I think I want to be a cultural—I need a cultural competency coach. And I’ll never forget. He looked at me and said, Tod, why do you want that? I said, well, because I discovered I’m in my 50s and I’ve got a PhD and I’ve been in leadership since I was young. And I’ve been in environments that are very homogeneous and that I’ve been able to thrive in. And I’m now in a more diverse environment. I’d like to be more culturally competent. And he went, you’re never going to be culturally competent. You are in your 50s. You have a PhD. You’ve been in leadership since you’re young. I said, what do I do? He goes, how about if you work on cultural humility? Oh. I remember I sent him a check, said, okay, you’re going to coach me. Right. That’s—that I can work on.
Like, like, again, my culture has shaped me. It also limits me, but I don’t have to be a victim to it. I can actually work on being shaped to have the fruit that I wanted to have, which was to be more able to function in a more diverse world. Right.
Mark Labberton: That was especially the seminary that we were part of. I do think that whole notion of humility is a big piece of this because part of the problem of the discipleship program or formation program is a lack of humility about what we’re actually even talking about. We’re talking about becoming evidence in the world of the likeness of Jesus Christ. And not only that, but Christ living dead and risen, this thing that is infinitely beyond our grasp.
So in actual fact, as I’ve been reflecting on this, it’s the—it’s also admitting the absolute absurdity and impossibility of this. And then actually coming through all kinds of things that we can talk about through the discovery that there is something very like Christ about many people that I have met who are people that are typically the less visible, the more profoundly internally shaped, the more humble before God, themselves, anyone around them, but who are so transformed that you just, you know, like the image that Paul uses, we pick up the aroma of their life and we go, that—like that. I want that aroma. Where does that come from? How did that become fully integrated into your life, right?
I can think of a number of people who have been major exemplars. That’s this soil that we’re talking about, right? That’s part of this. So I take that in. They are part of my community. I want to be in communion with them. And as I settle into that soil, my life begins to change because now, this person who may or may not have titles, headlines, degrees, et cetera, but has an authenticity, a reality of the gospel about them. That is the soil that I crave, maybe more like that.
So just talk to us about in this process, soil is such a key ingredient that—I’m still just taken by that image and how it got baked in. So in Le Chambon, for example, what have you learned about how that became normative or regularized or built in?
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah. So whatever. So there is a thing about practices. There’s something about their practice, but it’s practices that come almost reflexive practices that come out of their values and their experience. So the thing about Le Chambon, first of all, they were Huguenots who themselves had been refugees.
Mark Labberton: So just for everyone, not necessarily being up on Huguenots, just give people a little.
Tod Bolsinger: So think of them as Protestants in a Catholic world, right? They were a group of Protestants in a predominantly Catholic world. And I’m not being anti-Catholic. I was raised Catholic. So, but almost all of us, when we’re in the dominant party, we tend to think of anything that comes in as a small group as being a threat.
Mark Labberton: Immigrants.
Tod Bolsinger: Like immigrants. Oh, I literally saw a Facebook post today from someone who was part of my church, who literally put up a political post that literally said, how many Muslims are in Congress? And the punchline was, anything above zero is too much. And just said it publicly. And literally in my head, I literally was like, she was in my church. So what was my preaching doing all those years to have a person who literally thought that the United States Congress should have zero Muslims in it? Just I’m gobsmacked, right?
Well, okay, so think about instead of Muslims in a Christian world, think of Protestants in a Catholic world where some of those ideas are just there. And they end up in this little village off in the mountains because they were left alone there. There was a little enclave. And what they were was they were all people who made a living by hosting Parisians who wanted to get out of the summer sun and the heat and come to the mountains. So think about a group of immigrants who are Airbnb owners who are good at hosting people whose primary corporate value was hospitality because it helped the city survive. Yes. Who understood that in a time of crisis, the one thing we know how to do, we know how to welcome people into our home.
Because they were so far off in the distance, they didn’t have a regular pastor. So they learned to study the scriptures with each other. So they had daily Bible reading that was built on people. There was no big expert. They had to learn how to be people who read the scriptures and applied it to everyday life. So people have literally said, like the key spiritual practices of their life was reflecting on their heritage of being refugees, of welcoming strangers, and of reading the Bible.
And what’s interesting is when André Trocmé, who becomes their pastor, who becomes a hero, he only could be hired there because he was a pacifist. And it’s World War II and the rest of France doesn’t want any pacifist pastors. So he’s fleeing. And he was wildly competent. I mean, it would be like having one of our famous preachers today not being able to get a job and ending up in a small enclave in El Paso, Texas, like taking—like caring for refugees—like that was this. We think about all those things came together and that was what shaped them.
And then they had to keep making the intentional choices in a time of war. When everybody was trying to grapple with, are we going to be rebellious or are we going to just collude with what it meant to be Christian? And he has a famous “weapons of the spirit” sermon that he gave about we will resist, but we will resist with the weapons of the spirit, which includes we will love our enemies.
So this remarkable, it’s both reflective of the soil that we already inherit, but it’s also intentionally cultivated toward the sense of call and mission that we have in front of us. And that’s a lot of the work my company does. It helps people think the way you thrive in a changing world is not to become something you’re not. It is to be the healthiest version of yourself reaching into the very real places of pain in the world. That’s when you thrive as a church or a company and institution.
Mark Labberton: You know, I remember one Sunday, in Berkeley, being in the middle of preaching a sermon and feeling very grateful for that congregation and all of its eclecticisms and variations and all of the things that come along with ministry in a weird and wonderful place like Berkeley. But I also thought, you know, I don’t know that we’re as committed to being Christian or as committed to being Berkeley Christian as we’re fundamentally formed by being in the soil of being mainstream.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah, there you go.
Mark Labberton: And therefore, the peculiarity of being a follower of Jesus, which we might associate, for example, with a Mennonite bun on women’s heads, for example, or we think of peculiarity looking odd in some physical manifestation. The oddity that Jesus is about is not manifest per se in those particular ways. It’s meant to be exercised by this extraordinary hospitality, by the capacity to forgive, by the pursuit of justice, by standing with the weak and the poor and the isolated and the marginalized. These are meant to be the peculiar things that we do.
This is why I think why Rodney Clapp in his book on early church history makes so much of the fact that it was Christians who, in the middle of the black plague, stayed in the cities and nurtured the people that were dying. That’s the utter peculiarity that comes out of what you’re saying, is the soil of something being ordinary. I can’t imagine. I’ve never read anything that would lead me to think they thought they were being heroes. It was just that they were being Christians in a setting that had so many people that were suffering and dying, and they were going to be there for them.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah, yeah. And that’s why Rodney Clapp’s work has been so powerful, because he points out the power of the uniqueness of Christianity. Another historian, Alan Kreider, makes an even finer point on it. He says the church grew during that day, that season. They grew without writing a single tract, not one tract, on evangelism or church growth. They had no church growth strategy, no evangelism strategy. They focused on one thing, which was the cultivation of Christian values and character. So for the early church that grew the fastest was focused entirely on formation.
And that, and what’s interesting is we go to that and go, this is why we need a bunch of small groups, right? This is why we need a Bible study. They got, no, it was everything about their being, our purpose for being and doing everything about us. And what if—you know, his book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, it was literally they believe the cultivation of patience was the most godly thing they could do that would be countercultural to the Roman efficiency of the day. This is so cultivating patience. I thought to myself, I have not given a sermon on patience once in my life. Not one time. It’s sort of pathetically exposing in that way.
Mark Labberton: I’m sure I haven’t either. These are the counterintuitive things. I mean, I do think you have to be around counterintuitive people to cultivate counterintuitive behaviours.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah.
Mark Labberton: At least for me.
Tod Bolsinger: Yeah. Well, and what’s powerful about that is being around—where you said that. So one of the parts, I would say that the Venn diagram of this book is really around three things. One is this notion that adaptive leadership is really about the way in which you shift values, attitudes, and behaviours to be effective for your mission in a changing world. Like there’s, it’s a deep change. The second part of it is this notion that’s going to happen in a formational culture that is shaped by the work of a couple of scholars out of Harvard named Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey.
But the most, but the third part and the part that is really interesting to me is it’s also the awareness that it’s holistic and it’s not just cognitive, like being around someone, right? It’s precognitive. It’s really the way in which our brains respond to things before we have words. And that the experience of being a belonging, of being loved, of being known, of having someone attend to you in your fear, like a huge part, I believe, that is shaping the church today is how much reflective fear and how much fear specifically of loss is keeping us from being able to live as Jesus followers. The Jesus who told us to lay down our life, the sermon on laying down your life never seems to lead people to actually lay down their lives because the precognitive and the unconscious realities of our life are stronger than our words.
Mark Labberton: You probably know that scene in the film that Richard Attenborough made about Mother Teresa, in which she’s in East Beirut and the bombs are falling. And she knows that there’s a centre that is taking care of severely disabled kids. And so she says to the military people and to the UN people that are there, we should go and get children out of there. And they said, no, but see Mother Teresa, the bombs are falling. She said, well—and right. So, that’s why we should go and get the children. What could be more obvious than that we should go there because the bombs are falling?
Tod Bolsinger: That’s exactly right.
Mark Labberton: And you can see, because this is all live filmed, they’re awkward. They can see that they’re being filmed. They’re not about to say outlandish things. But finally, they try to placate her and say, well, if the bombs are not falling tomorrow morning, we could go in and get the children. And then, beautifully, the film captures this moment that goes on for several hours. In the morning, the bombs are not falling. And immediately, all these Red Cross vans are going in to get these children out.
And as this happens, what you’re realizing is that it was a good thing. You could say that the bombs weren’t falling. But from Mother Teresa’s point of view, the instinct that you would go there because the bombs are falling, not just even despite the bombs falling. It’s like, no, it’s because bombs are falling on these people that we should get them out of there. That’s an instinct again that even though, you know, we can think of Mother Teresa as a figure dim and distant in another way, that film and its silence. This is the most powerful part of the film, that whole sequence. It all happens in silence. There’s no monologue. There’s no dialogue. There’s no people talking. You’re just with Mother Teresa picking up children with severe disabilities to get them to safety.
What’s amazing is that later in the film. Without any comment either. You realize now all those children are free from their fear. And you’re seeing the same children and they are visually utterly different because of this instinct.
Now, I’ve probably watched that film maybe 10 times over the years. And part of it, it’s always because of that sequence. And every time I’m there, even though I’m not physically there, I’m inhabiting a way of being that I go, that—like I want to be that kind of person with those sorts of instincts. I’m not bred that way. I have plenty of self-protection. I’m not a hero. I’m not somebody that’s throwing myself into harm’s way all the time. But boy, do I want to be that kind of person because that surely would be for me an example of the concrete reality of this discipleship formation that’s so much deeper than a program on discipleship.
Tod Bolsinger: Or even the content that we should do it, that we should talk about it. Instead, it is one of the most powerful parts of the research I’ve done on this for the last several years with a number of my doctoral students is this little book by Jim Wilder who graduated from Fuller. He was one of our psych grads and he worked alongside Dallas Willard and Dallas Willard’s wife. And he talks about the brain science that points to the fact that most of our churches are all entirely on the cognitive side.
Mark Labberton: Yes, especially Presbyterian churches.
Tod Bolsinger: Especially Presbyterian, right? He said, you don’t get rid of the cognitive stuff, but you have to realize that what’s forming you before the cognitive are all these instinctual pre-cognitive realities that shape even the way we look at the scriptures, right? And that until you can slow that process down and recognize that, for example, one of the things that you need to be able to be courageous is you need to know that you are safe as in your own being. Not safe in your body, but in your being.
And literally, he tells—the UCLA brain scientists said the experience of knowing that you are loved and known and people love you as you are. They’re trying to come up with a word. The brain scientist came up with a word. What is the most formative thing for adults? It is to be in a room with people who are happy to see you.
Mark Labberton: Yes. Yes.
Tod Bolsinger: And they called that joy. That’s the word they gave it. The brain scientists and not Christian. They said joy. Joy is the experience of you seeing someone who is glad to see you. It’s Curt Thompson talking about like everybody comes into the world looking for someone, looking for them, every baby. Like the deepest thing that we want as humans is to feel like we are safe in our attachment.
And I think that one of the parts about an order like Mother Teresa’s is, this is who we are. If you belong to us, we are going to function this way. We’re going to be this way. And you are loved. You are here. You are known. That experience is profound. And I think one of the parts that we’ve been talking about in this, that I’m writing about in this book and we talk about with our clients is cultivating joyful belonging is actually necessary to bring a formation. You have to be in a community of people who genuinely delight in you, love you, enjoy you, welcome you. I always say it makes me, my prayer is, God, please make me the kind of person my dog thinks I am. Right? Because of her, I want to be a better person, right?
Mark Labberton: Yes.
Tod Bolsinger: It’s so interesting that that’s a formative reality. And what’s powerful about Le Chambon was not a single person betrayed a Jewish person, even when there were Nazi officers knocking on the door. I just believe they had this profound, deep attachment to each other that wouldn’t violate that.
Mark Labberton: Tod, here we are as people who have been pastoral leaders, who have been academic, institutional leaders of Christian formation and education. And we know that what we’re talking about right now is not something that can be, as it were, stamped out. It’s not something that can even be done in a very large group. It has to happen really in a more intimate group. It can become infused in a wider group. But the depth of what we’re talking about is something that happens in a deep, sustained communion, right?
And so what are you saying as you go about writing this current book and as you continue to lead your company? I’m not here asking for the program. That’s not what I’m meaning. I’m just like, where are you pointing people to this kind of deep formation with joy, as you’ve just described, that emerges in this capacity for love?
Tod Bolsinger: So the biggest piece that I argue in this book and that we’re talking about is if we want our people to embody our mission. Like do the thing we’ve been called to do to actually live as Christians, right. In churches and to, and if you’re in a, like in, if like an institution, if we want to have people embody our mission to train up pastors, to shape global leaders, to like to live out and embody our mission, then it’s not just a matter of having a good mission statement, though. That’s an important thing. It is literally creating a, cultivating a community that is what I would call an intentionally formative community.
It’s very intentional. We’re going to form. It starts with knowing that you really belong here. You experience this as a joyful community. We genuinely love each other. We delight in each other. We cultivate that. And then, and it ends with our embodying our practices. Like we embody our values. So begins in joy. It ends in death, like laying down our lives for our values.
But what’s interesting in the middle part is the research that I got from Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey about deliberately developmental organizations. They literally looked at companies, just companies that wanted to form people, said, we’re going to have a dual bottom line. We’re going to increase shareholder value. We’re going to sell our widgets. And we’re going to develop our people. When they were asked the characteristics of those companies. And they were very broad, really different ones. There were three common words that showed up in the word cloud. And the words were, trust, pain, and care.
The trust that came from knowing you were with a people who not only welcomed you, but you shared a set of values that we all practice together. That trust kept away from cynicism, right? This is what we’re about. We wouldn’t think of ourselves any other way. That trust, which is a set of shared values that show up in practice, is really important.
So if you say that you’re going to be a community that cares deeply for your students, okay, how does that show, how do students experience that from the administration and the faculty? I think about this all the time because we were in the seminary. When we were leading the seminary, my son was at Seattle Pacific University when they had their shooting. And I remember him being terrified. And literally their president said, come to the chapel tomorrow. And the entire theology faculty will be there to care for you and love you because all of them are pastors.
And I remember thinking, Mark, would we ask our theology faculty? Like our theology faculty are so clear about this is what I’m gifted to do. We would probably have called out our psychology faculty, but we probably would have hesitated at asking our theology faculty at a seminary to do pastoral care in a trauma. Partly because we actually know a lot of research about trauma, right? I use that illustration not to be critical, but to say the gut instinct of this school that I sent as a parent, I sent my son to was everybody on our faculty will know how to care for someone as well as teach them. That’s trust.
Pain is the pain of vulnerable self-reflection. Everybody in the community can acknowledge where I need to grow. They call it working on your backhand. It’s like people playing pickleball who only want to hit forehands. So for me, I gave you one example. It was my coming to the school and being around a lot of our colleagues and realizing my backhand was, oh, my gosh, I do not have cultural competence. My privileged background makes me less prepared for the kinds of students coming our way. I need to work on that. And to create an environment where it’s okay, not only it’s okay, but it’s expected that everybody can be vulnerable about the area they’re personally working on. So we might not all be working on the same thing, but we’re all working on something. We’re all being formed.
And then the last part is care. And care is not comfort. Care is supporting people in their growth in an environment where we share the values. And that combination, joyful belonging, shared values, shared vulnerability, shared support that is intended to create embodied change values is the most shaping environment. And that has to be right at the heart of every single thing we do.
Mark Labberton: You know, I’m struck by the studies that have been done about mission trips, which are often one of those things that, as we both know, many, many churches—most churches that I’ve known—have so-called mission trips. And what’s been shown again and again from studies that have been done is that if that’s a transformative experience, it’s because of what has happened before. It’s what happens there. And then it’s absolutely about what happens after because of actually wanting to harvest what might not yet have been articulated or owned or understood, reflected on in the way you’re describing. And those are like micro experiences in theory.
Tod Bolsinger: They are micro experiences of what you’ve just described. But then instead, what we do is we’ve often packaged them in ultimate safety to make sure that no one has any pain, any vulnerability, any sense that they are actually being called to be transformed in their own personal way in order to be able to live into this world that they’ve just entered. And when they get home, their job is to give a presentation at the worship services and then not take any of those practices back into the life of our community. Like the way we all live there, we’re not going to live here because back here, we’re back in Orange County, California, and we’re a Presbyterian church, right?
And it’s one of the reasons why graduate programs usually end up getting very low marks later. You know, MBAs, MDivs like we have, because they realize nothing is as formative as the organizational culture you’re in. You can go to your degree, you’ll come back. And within years, you’ll be more like the culture you’re in than you will like the people you studied with.
Mark Labberton: Tod, we could literally go on about this for hours. And I can’t wait for this book to come out. And I would love to invite you now to come back when the book is out so that we have the whole book and people can have a chance to read and digest it. But also, as you continue to work on this, I’m just going to be super interested to see how this progresses because it does feel to me that in my own writing and certainly in the writing that you’re doing, you’re hitting on nerves that feel to me primal nerves. They’re fundamental nerves about being human as well as about being a disciple and being a discipling community and being a sign of the kingdom in the world.
So I would love to have you back and sort of see the next chapter as it were and understand where things have come. And also to be able to reflect further. In the current enormous challenges of the American church, which are, to me, as I’ve said many times, feels like a five-alarm fire. But because we can’t live it with that intensity, we just tend to say there’s issues. Well, I think that itself suggests that we’re not really interested in taking it on. And I appreciate that you and your company and the work that you’re doing is actually committed to taking these things on. I’m very, very thankful for you and thankful for what you’re doing. God bless you.
Tod Bolsinger: Thank you, Mark. My pleasure to be here.
