Overview
Today on the podcast, I talked to Dr. Gregg Okesson, Dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Seminary. Dr. Okesson is a church planter and served as a faculty member at Scott Christian University in Kenya. All told, he spent 13 years serving and working alongside the people of East Africa. He also recently released a book entitled “A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World.” This book received Christianity Today’s 2021 book award in the Mission/Global Church category.
This conversation was an absolute delight! We talk about Dr. Okesson’s background, why he wrote “A Public Missiology,” some of the problems facing the church right now, and how we can develop a faith that isn’t shaped by culture, but that is deep, thick and complex enough to encounter the complexities of the world. We talk about how to recognize and tear down idols that have become cultural norms and how to develop sustainable habits that transform not only our lives, but the communities in which we live.
Let’s listen!
*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.
Dr. Gregg Okesson, Dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Seminary
Dr. Gregg A. Okesson is the Dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism, and the Ira Galloway and D.M. Beeson Chair of Leadership Development, Mission and Evangelism. He received a B.A. from Wheaton College (Psychology and Bible), an M.A. from Wheaton Graduate School (Biblical Studies), an M.A. from Wheaton Graduate School (Intercultural Studies), and a Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies from University of Leeds, UK (African Christianity).
Before coming to Asbury in 2011, Dr. Okesson was a faculty member at Scott Christian University, Kenya, East Africa for 10 years where he served as Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and a lecturer in theology. Prior to this, he was a pastor in upstate New York, worked in Student Development at Wheaton College, and was a church-planter amongst a Muslim people-group in north-central Tanzania. Dr. Okesson and his family lived in East Africa for 13 years.
Dr. Okesson has authored numerous articles and serves on the editorial committee for the Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology and the Africa Study Bible. He is the author of Re-Imaging Modernity (Wipf & Stock, 2012) and co-author of Advocating for Justice (Baker Academic, 2016). He is also the author of the Christianity Today 2021 book award for A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World (2020).
More broadly, Dr. Okesson is interested in attending to linkages between theology, missiology, and global realities, particularly those dealing with poverty, development, power, institutions, and societal engagement. He is married to Kimberly Okesson and they have two young adult children.
Heidi Wilcox, host of the Thrive Podcast
Writer, podcaster, and social media manager, Heidi Wilcox shares stories of truth, justice, healing and hope. She is best known as the host of Spotlight, (especially her blooper reel) highlighting news, events, culturally relevant topics and stories of the ways alumni, current students and faculty are attempting something big for God. If you can’t find her, she’s probably cheering on her Kentucky Wildcats, enjoying a cup of coffee, reading or spending time with her husband, Wes.
Show Notes
Transcript
Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast. I’m your host, Heidi E. Wilcox, bringing you conversations with authors, thought leaders, and people just like you who are looking to connect where your passion meets the world’s deep need. Today on the podcast, I had the real privilege of talking to Dr. Greg Okesson. Dr. Okesson is the Dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Seminary. Dr. Okesson was a church planner and served as a faculty member at Scott Christian University in Kenya. Also, he spent 13 years serving and working alongside the people of East Africa.
Heidi Wilcox:
He also recently released a book entitled, A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World. This book received Christianity Today’s 2021 Book Awards in the missions global church category. So this conversation was an absolute delight. We talked a little bit about Dr. Okesson’s background, why he wrote a public missiology, some of the problems facing the church right now, and how we can develop a faith that isn’t shaped by culture, but that is deep, thick, and complex enough to encounter the complexities of the world. We talk about how to recognize and tear down idols that have become cultural norms in our society and also how to develop sustainable habits that transform not only our lives, but the communities in which we live. Let’s listen.
Heidi Wilcox:
Dr. Okesson, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast today. I have been really looking forward to our conversation.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Well, thanks for asking me. I’m privileged to be a part of it.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Like I said, I’ve really been looking forward to it and there’s a lot of things I want to talk to you about today. But first of all, I want to talk about your own calling. So as I understand it, you’re a third generation missionary kid and a missionary yourself. How did you experience your call?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. It’s an interesting question. I think I was born in Africa and even though I only lived there in my early childhood, I think I carried that heritage with me. It was an important part of who I saw myself to be and was involved in a very mission-minded church back here in the United States growing up and had parents that were deeply involved in world missions. So having really educated, godly men and women in our home from Africa and Asia and Latin America was just normal for me. So I think I just carried that as a really important marker in who I was. Actually, when I graduated from college, I went to Urbana Mission Conference and went through all these booths and was kind of trying to sell myself to become a full-time missionary. And God closed all the doors and it was really-
Heidi Wilcox:
Really?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
… painful for me because I just felt like, “God, this is what I want to do.” Next day, I went back to my home church and the very next day they asked me to be the youth pastor. My immediate answer was, “No. I want to go and be with the nations.” And yet it really was God was calling me to love North American youth, be involved in evangelism discipleship. And those were powerful, beautiful years. I coached lacrosse in a high school, I was involved in youth lives, and then eventually we would go to be missionaries. But it was really like God was just saying, “You know what? I want you to be faithful in a local congregation. I want you to study culture. I want you to become immersed in North American culture before I’m going to release you or send you to now be a part of ministry amongst the nations.”
Heidi Wilcox:
When it was time for you to go be a minister amongst the nations, how did you know that was the right time again?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. Again, it was really the Holy Spirit working in our lives. I was actually pursuing a PhD in Scotland at the time and was headed down that path. One morning I was reading in the book of Proverbs, “All of the ways of a person look right to them, but God looks at the desires of the heart.” It was so powerful. The Holy Spirit was saying, “You’re doing a good thing, but you’re not doing it the right time and you’re not doing it for the right reasons.” So I went back and I told my wife… We were married at that time. We’d been married just a couple of years. I said, “I just feel like I have to say no to this.”
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
It was within the same week again that God opened up a door for a conversation about theological education and leadership development in Africa. And I was involved in theological education and leadership development at Wheaton College. But it was really God saying, “I need you to say no to something before I can give you a yes.”
Heidi Wilcox:
Wow!
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So we went through that process and met with a dear mentor who helped coach us in terms of where the greatest needs are in the world in terms of who God had made us to be. And that sent us back to Africa. Even though I’m a third generation missionary, I didn’t see myself going back to Africa, but it was a pretty strong call for being involved in theological education, church planting, leadership development, training church planters, training missionaries in Africa for Africa. That was really that call to go back to Africa.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. And around that time, you and your wife adopted children from the Philippines, is that right?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
No. Both of my kids are adopted from the US.
Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, okay.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
They’re half Filipino.
Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, okay.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
God just stepping into our world, both of them were things that birth mother initiated. Even though we were pursuing adoption, they were times in which we were approached by someone. So they’re both Caucasian and both Filipino, but they’re not biological. And they’re two years apart.
Heidi Wilcox:
That’s awesome. So tell me a little bit about your time. You spent 13 years in Tanzania, is that right?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
We spent two years church planting in Tanzania and then 11 years leadership development, theological education, training African church planters, missionaries in Kenya. So 13 years in Africa, you’re right.
Heidi Wilcox:
Okay. Wow! What was that experience like for you and your family?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So we moved into a Muslim village in Tanzania. No electricity, no running water, we lived in a house just like everybody else did.
Heidi Wilcox:
Wow!
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
My son at that time was two months old. And I mean, talked about deeply incarnational ministry. I mean, without a doubt, two of the hardest, most profound, most impactful years. And actually, in a really fascinating way, some of the two richest theological years of my entire life. When we come to talk about the book, I can add to that some more. But yeah, nobody in our village knew English. We had to learn in unwritten, oral language.
Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, wow!
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So a lot of awkwardness. And I’m good with awkwardness, but those years were just chock-filled with awkwardness.
Heidi Wilcox:
Wow! And maybe a little lonely too I would think if you couldn’t easily communicate with your neighbors.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, certainly the beginning. We ended up forming really powerful, strong relationships with Muslim leaders, even lived in a Muslim leaders home for-
Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, wow!
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
… probably a month over those years. Deep, deep friendships and experienced all that they experience in terms of fragility of life and disease and poverty and malnutrition. We experienced those things in our body, perhaps not at the same level that they could. We were three hours away from the closest hospital. We were about eight hours away from the closest good medical assistance. So eight hours from the nearest city. So we did have a vehicle and we were able to leave periodically. But yeah, they were lonely years, they were years of incredible spiritual warfare; just learning a people, listening to them, learning their language, loving them, and being loved by them.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And I think that was powerful. I don’t want to sound heroic because I actually… looking back, I feel like we received from them so much more than perhaps even we gave to them.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. What are some of the things that you… as you reflect on it, that you see that you received?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Well, hospitality. I mean, I learned hospitality in that village and then the other 11 years living in Kenya. I mean, just so, so deep and rich of a welcoming received. I mean, friendships and laughter. And in this book that we’ll talk about, I dedicate the book to the villages in Tanzania and to my theological college in Kenya, because really, I feel like they taught me theology. I had multiple degrees and the credentials, but really, I think they taught me how to connect theology with everyday life, with public realities.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
I mean, there’s this a different mapping system, cartography, different lenses, hermaneutic lenses of looking at theology. I mean, I am who I am because of how much I feel like my brothers and sisters in Africa have taught me. And that doesn’t mean that I occupy some special position now, it’s just the fact that… Well, a well known missiologist, Brian Stanley, talks about reverse conversion, how Western missionaries would go to another place in order to convert people, but in the process found themselves to be converted themselves into the ways of thinking and theologizing and looking at life.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
When you’re racing off in the middle of the night on precarious roads carrying somebody who is dying to the nearest hospital, there’s no way you can do that without also entering into their world and reflecting on God and salvation and the mission of God and what he’s doing in this world. So those years were just so profoundly rich years in terms of learning from my neighbors.
Heidi Wilcox:
It sounds like it. It sounds like they were beautiful years.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
They are. Looking back, the danger is always to romanticize. And as the years go by, it’s easier to romanticize, but they were hard years. I mean, they were years of tears, they were years of malaria, tuberculosis, worms. I mean, they were years of wrestling, crying out to God. So they were powerful, powerful years. And they were beautiful years, but they were messy years.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I think one thing that I’m starting to learn in my own life is that a lot of times I experience joy and sadness or good and hardship at the same time and learning to hold both, and in some ways, appreciate both, not just the good things, because… Yeah.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. And sometimes it’s hard to see the good things in [crosstalk 00:13:53] and then five years out, 10 years out, you’re looking back and all you remember is the good things. And that’s the danger of the romanticizing, but I don’t think it’s always a bad thing because we want to be able to look back and to say, “Wow, did I change! Wow, did I grow and the Holy Spirit was there and he was working in powerful ways and ways that I didn’t even fully understand during the throws of it.”
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, definitely. So then how did you come to Asbury Seminary?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, so again, interesting stories. So we were struggling with the education of our kids. So we were homeschooling, we would bring in tutors to help us on school. Then our last year in Africa was actually at a hospital. I was integrating theology into a medical curriculum and it was located where there was an international boarding school. So our kids were able to go to an international school. But I was working myself out of positions and we were really looking at what is the next step. So we were looking almost entirely at other places in the continent of Africa, even North Africa, and some other countries really wanting… As our kids entered into middle school, we really wanted some stability.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So my wife and I went to the 2010 Cape Town Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. And down there, a friend of mine from Wheaton told me about a position at Asbury. And on paper, I thought, this is incredible. I mean, it sounds like me. But I wasn’t sure that we were ready to go back to the United States. To make a long story short, Terry Muck, who was the Dean of the ESJ school at that time, he was at the conference and so he and I had a meal together, or maybe just a coffee together, and he asked me to apply. So it was kind of a process of God saying, “Here’s an open door and this is where I want you.”
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And truly, I mean, again looking back, I’ve been here 10 years. We have the nations in our school and such an incredible diverse body and to be able to work with master’s students and PhD students from all over the world as well as from all over the United States has just been such a privilege.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. So really, as you’re telling me your story and your calling to the nations, really your calling didn’t change even though your location did.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. And I’ll be honest, I probably still struggle with my location. But besides the fact that our school is so diverse and I oversee our global partnerships here at Asbury, so I get to travel a lot when there’s not a pandemic. My wife and I are working with a denomination to plant a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic church here in Lexington because we really want to worship with the nations. So I think you’re exactly right. I hesitate because there’s always the sense in which I wrestle with the fact that we’ve come back to the West. But at the same point, we’ve crafted such rich relationships here. And truly, Wilmore, Kentucky for being a small town is such this… it’s like a little United Nations here.
Heidi Wilcox:
It really is. Yeah. What is the name of the church plant that you guys are working with?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, so it’s Every Nation Lexington. We actually have our first informational meeting and we’ve been doing a lot of discipleship on UK’s campus. And very diverse, largely focused upon a college age. So we’re going to formally launch the church in the fall, but have this spring doing a lot of pre-launch meetings. And like I said, have been doing discipleship for years and so I have a strong base of young men and women who are going to be a part of that.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. That sounds awesome and really exciting too.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. It’s one of those really life-giving things that it feels like just a beautiful gift brought into our world.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, for sure. So I want to move on and talk about your book, A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World. Your book is really exciting, but it’s even more exciting because it received Christianity Today’s 2021 Book Award in the missions and global church category. So congratulations on that. That’s very exciting. Why did you choose to write this book now?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. So I think this has been in many ways a journey. It’s a culmination of decades of God taking me on a journey. As a missiologist, as a missionary, as somebody who was a youth pastor and very involved in evangelism, I mean, witness is in my DNA. But I think for years, witness was solely something that happened to individuals. By the way, I don’t ever want us to move away from a witness to individuals. But I think God has shown me that we are called, especially as the church of Jesus Christ, to witness the larger realities. So my years as a youth pastor involved in college ministry at Wheaton College and then really it was living in the village where we were church planting but we were dealing with poverty.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
We were involved in witness, but we were involved in issues of health. So how do you connect the gospel to disease? How do you connect the gospel to poverty? How do you connect church planting to agriculture? And really, I think it was my neighbors and then in the years that followed teaching at a theological institution and having my African students ask me questions where they were making those connections, or they were certainly trying to make those connections, and me realizing that perhaps my understanding of the gospel was too small to address larger, complex issues in life.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So there is a field of public theology which is wonderful and there’s great contributions, but there’ve been a team of us who are a part of the American Society of Missiology that have been wrestling for the last probably 15 years or so with what does a public missiology look like. And actually in the very end, the appendix of the book, we have kind of a statement where we have as professors have kind of crafted what we think public missiology is.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. So that is begging me to ask the next question. How do you define public missiology?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. So maybe the easiest way to refer to it is that as missiologists, we care deeply about witness, we care deeply about the gospel of Jesus Christ through the church into all facets of the world. And of course, all you have to do is just read scripture to see that that is the story of the mission of God, that is where God is taking the world. So the question is, what does witness, what does the gospel look like? What does it look like in and through local congregations where we take very seriously all of the world? So then when we ask the question, what is all of the world? Well, it takes us into really messy, complex realities.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
We’re all habituated and we just come out of just a really hard year where that kind of began with a pandemic and then the incredible group of racial violence that we saw. That has been with us as a country for many years, but just we saw it in really stark terms. Then to go through this highly polemical, political season, I think just shows the fact that we are habituated into a very complex public realities. And yet, do we understand the gospel? Is our understanding of the gospel as thick that actually can address, that it can interpenetrate that it can, that it can speak to the public realities that we live in?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And there are many people, especially the generation Z and millennials who are giving up on the church, because the church just keeps giving really overly simplistic answers to really complex problems and yet we have a gospel that is so rich, that is so beautiful, that’s so multifaceted that, that isn’t just a cognitive thing, but is something that captures our affections and needs our embodiment and it needs to actually be lived out in local congregations. So, again, I think I’ve written this book because I really feel like we’ve got that polarity between we live every day within this… John Wesley talks about complicated wickedness.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
We live every day in that context of complicated wickedness and yet we have been discipled into a very thin understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ and yet there is so much more. And really, that’s what the Holy spirit has taken me on a journey into understanding how much we have in scripture and in this biblical narrative and in our understanding of the gospel. So its really trying to connect those two.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I really enjoyed reading it by the way. I found it very fascinating. So I really appreciate you giving us, not just me, but all of us, this gift. So, thank you.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Thanks.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. You touched on something I wanted to ask you about regarding millennials pulling away from the church, because the church historically has given a simple faith like the right way to live. But as millennials have grown up, I’m a millennial, as I’ve entered more of the world, it has seemed kind of thin and hasn’t matched the complexity that I face and the others in my generation are facing. So I guess I have a two part question. What can millennials do? Because I keep going to church, I haven’t stopped going, I’m like, “I’m not sure it kind of works for me anymore,” which that sounds like it’s all about me, but I think you understand what I’m saying.
Heidi Wilcox:
But I don’t want to lose that grounded-ness and that part of my faith, because it is important to me. So I guess I’m curious, what can I do as a millennial? Then how can the church kind of respond, not just to me, but to all of us to help us develop a thick faith as you call it?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So let me try and answer that maybe in a reverse order to say I think it’s really important that churches listen to millennials and listen to their questions even if we’re not able to kind of wrap this up in a little package with a nice bow on top and say, “Here’s your answer.” And saying that, that does not mean that we move away from belief or conviction or passion. And I think that’s the beautiful thing of it, is that a thick faith does not mean a faith that is just academic. A thick faith is not something that we believe lightly. It’s not a half-step to relativism or pluralism. And I think that’s the thing that it actually takes us deeper into the character of God, it takes us deeper into the narrative of scripture.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So I think the first challenge is that our churches have got to do a better job listening and just saying, “We are not connecting the dots between this incredible gospel that we have been given through the power of the Holy Spirit and the lived realities of people in realms like political divisiveness and racism and gross economic polarity.” We’ve not connected those. We’ve got to do a better job. Maybe this is going to sound too simplistic, but we’ve got to immerse ourselves over and over again in the narrative on scripture. We’ve got to let that be the narrative that guides us because we live everyday by narratives.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
It’s just that the narratives that we live by are narratives that have been defined by a political ideology or have been defined by kind of a cultural context, or sometimes they’ve been defined by who we don’t want to be. So we don’t want to be liberal, so we let that be our narrative, whereas we’ve got to really allow the mission of God to be our narrative. So I think we’ve just got to do a better job telling the story, retelling the story, re-retelling the story, and welcoming people into that story to help them to understand that it’s not just pastors, but it’s everyday people that are called to participate in the divine nature and to lift these things out in their everyday lives.
Heidi Wilcox:
So what does that mean for me and my generation and how can we respond and engage with that?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. So I think we’ve got to do the connecting pieces between our understanding of the gospel and the lived realities of everyday life. Ideally, local congregations are actually the places where this takes place. At the end of the book, I have three case studies to try and show how three different churches, one in Montreal, one in Nashville, and one in Kenya actually lives these things out, because too often, we have tried to address complex social problems with simplistic individual answers and yet we’ve been given a community, we’ve been entrusted into a community.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And I over the years I actually have found just an incredible love for the local congregation. It’s one of the reasons I’m in part involved in a multicultural church plant, is that you’re not going to sidestep messy, political, racial, economic issues in a multicultural church. And I think that’s exactly what we’ve got to wrestle with. We’ve got to make the connections between the gospel and the issues that people are experiencing every day of our lives, which takes us into domains that perhaps we feel uncomfortable with them.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. How do we navigate the sacred and the secular? Is there an appropriate separation?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, it’s interesting. In the book, I try and talk about them as movable slots that people use to make sense of their world. Certainly, the enlightenment, what it did was it just separated and said, “These two realms should not touch each other.” And the secular is this enormous realm that involves our everyday life, our work, our politics, our money, our leisure, involves science and involves all of this. And then this really little box is the sacred and we normally associate it with just with the local congregation or our devotions. And yet, I mean, I think that we need to see that the sacred is in and for all of life.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So we’ve got to combine them. The problem is, is that as especially Western evangelicals, we don’t have a great history of combining them well. So we sacredize political ideologies and in the process do incredible harm. We cannot allow our political ideologies, our economic ideologies, we can’t just simply baptize those with spiritual or religious warrant. And I think that’s where there is sometimes the importance of distinction. I won’t use the word separation, but maybe I’ll use the word distinction, because we just know all throughout Christian history that bad things certainly do happen when the sacred combines with the secular.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
But God, I mean, God in his Shalom is the God that cojoins these together. So we’ve got to think of ways to integrate our faith into all aspects of life but without simply just baptizing who we are and what we do with some kind of religious or spiritual warrant.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. That makes sense. And talking about the cultural norms, a lot of times… I think what you’re saying is, sometimes the culture norms get so embedded within our Christian faith that it’s hard to make the separation between what is culturally acceptable and how the world works for us specifically and what is from the Christian faith? How do we learn to recognize the ideologies behind this and then make changes where needed?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s certainly it’s a bigger question that I’m going to be able to answer too. But we’ve got to learn to study culture. So I gave a strong plea for us to know scripture, to participate in the scriptural narrative. We’ve done a really poor job as Western evangelicals, as Western Christians, and even studying culture. So we think, “Well, it’s culture, I know it,” but so much of culture is invisible and it operates deep within us that we’ve been inculturated into it, we’ve been habituated into it. So the first step is actually seeing our ideologies, seeing our own culture, and that’s often one of the hardest steps, because it’s so much a part of us. So obviously, I go and I live in Africa and I come back and there is a sense in which you can see things because you’ve been away from it.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
You see things in new ways that you’ve never seen before. But it’s hard to do that just with a short-term missions trip and it’s challenging for us to do it while we’re immersed in culture. I do want to come back again and again to the gospel of Jesus Christ and I think that the power of the Holy Spirit can allow us to see our cultural ideologies. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer both talk about how through the cross of Jesus Christ we have to learn to say no to our political ideologies so that by the resurrection of Jesus Christ we can say yes to immersing ourselves back into the political realm, which is a realm that it flows out of our humanity, it flows out of the nation.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So I think learning to say no and learning to say yes is important, asking the Holy Spirit to help us in the process. Again, I come back to worshiping in a multi-cultural, multi-national church, forces us as we are living alongside brothers and sisters from different racial backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, different political camps, and listening to them can help us to see our own cultural ideology. So, my personal passion is that so much of it actually can and should happen in local congregations. I think the sacraments, I think the liturgy, I think we’ve got plenty of resources, but we’ve just not connected them with the culture that we live every day of our lives.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I think that’s true. I was talking to an alum who lives in Haiti and he was talking about some of the voodoo practices, which of course are a lot different than what we’re talking about now, but that exists in Haiti. But something he said talking about that, how these practices become so embedded in your normal way of life that you don’t even see them like you were talking about. And he was sharing about how if you drink a can of pop with a lid on it, that I forget if you should throw it away separately or screw it back on and throw it away together so that your soul can’t get out. And he said, “It took me a while to realize that this wasn’t of God, because it was just something I grew up doing and had been taught to me.”
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, that’s exactly it. So let me apply that to our context here in the United States. Many of us, our political ideologies, we’ve been habituated in them our whole lives. Our parents kind of handed them down to us, our churches have largely reinforced them, we’ve read scripture largely through those political lenses which has reinforced our particular reading through the lenses of these ideologies, we’ve tended to gravitate towards other people that share similarities. And then social media of course, these echo chambers that social media creates just reinforces. Then on top of that, the other camp. Whether the other camp are Republicans or Democrats, they become the other and we set about vilifying them.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So we deepen our political allegiances because we don’t want to be like that person, or we don’t want to be like that politician, or we don’t want to be liberal, or we don’t want to be conservative or evangelical. So these words carry deep, rich meaning. So we live our whole lives like this. So let’s say we’re 25 years old and we’ve been habituated in this our whole lives, I mean, you need something that is equally thick and rich and multifaceted to actually untrain us. And what I am arguing is that I think the gospel of Jesus Christ and the mission of God as embodied in local congregations actually has that ability to do that.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
But in some ways, we kind of pick on things like voodoo because that’s safe, because it’s in another cultural context. But I think you must’ve seen our own idolatries in the United States in 2020.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. That’s what I was trying to say, that I would not have thought it was in the US, because voodoo isn’t a practice that is as common here, but the similarities between how it happens is very much the same. That’s what I was trying to say.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. I know and that’s a great illustration.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. So, I’ve been thinking about this, especially with the political season that we’ve just come through. What is the place of our faith in our politics? Do we want to separate these out? How do we integrate them well?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. I think they’ve got to be integrated and they’ve got to be integrated in ways that are contextual. So I think some churches are in a better position to engage in robust discussions and to create even some tension. Other congregations need to take baby steps in doing that. So in the book, I use the analogy of weaving because I think weaving is a beautiful picture. It’s actually a biblical picture of something that is integrative but can happen in different ways with different pieces of string or yarn or fabric. So I think it’s really important for church leadership to say, “Well, we are going to address these issues, but we’ve got to find ways.”
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So this denomination that I’m a part of, a dear friend of mine, who’s actually my pastor, and you’ve had him on your podcast, Brian Taylor-
Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, yes. He’s the best.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, Brian’s great. So he’s up in Cincinnati and his church is planting our church in Lexington. So he and I did a thing right before the election, they call it Courageous Conversations. And the two of us just got up there and started talking about politics and tried to name some of the things we’re trying to name even in this podcast. The danger with this is that you’re speaking of things that are very sensitive, sometimes are beyond even our understanding. But I think Brian and his team have done a marvelous job laying the framework for a very safe, congregational culture where we actually can wade into these things.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And there were people in that church that voted for Biden and there were people in that church that voted for Trump and did so for very strong reasons. But I think that would be an example of a church that says, “Well, we’ve got to talk about these things.” There’s an organization called Colossian Forum that does a great job with trying to find really contentious issues and enabling people in local congregations to talk about them. So we’re spending a lot of time… I’m spending a lot of time on politics. But certainly issues of race, issues of economics, these are all really multifaceted issues and you cannot separate race from economics, from politics. You can’t just tease them apart, which is what makes them so challenging for us to address, is that there’s, again, this thickness to them.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, definitely. They’re separate, but connected. Yeah. One of the things you also talk about is… we’ve been talking about it, but how our theology and belief has been disconnected from our actions or our missiology. How can we get those back together?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. Our president’s done a marvelous job of just foregrounding the importance of the body. And I think we often have fallen prey, especially the evangelical church in North America, to a neo-gnosticism where the spiritual is really what we need and we don’t put any emphasis upon the body. So I think practices are really important and congregations regularly do practice. So we need practices of reconciliation, and you can’t do a practice without your body. That’s a mutual aspect. I think we’ve got to retrain our affections. What do we love?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And I think hopefully, people who listening to this would say that perhaps we have seen how our political ideologies in this last season have been loves for us that are greater than our loves for our brothers and sisters in Christ, greater than our loves for the kingdom of God in this world. So we’ve got to retrain our affections, we’ve got to retrain our bodies. And again, I just think local congregations are a great place to do this. We worship, we participate in sacraments, when there’s not COVID we hug each other, we cry with each other, we do life together in small groups, we forgive each other.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
I mean, these are all practices that involve our affections, they involve our bodies, and I think we need just more and more of those because we’ve been habituated, we’ve been trained in ways that don’t represent the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. One of the things that you… you alluded to it earlier, but you talked about in your book. You did three case studies of churches in Kenya, Montreal, and Nashville. Why is it so important that we study local congregations and their communities?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. So I got into this actually in my PhD work. I actually began using ethnography, which is a social science skill for studying churches in Africa. And actually, it was amazing to me, once you actually use these methods, these skills, you start to see things that you’ve never seen before. It’d be like somebody before they actually do inductive Bible study. They didn’t see the text of scripture, but now they’ve actually developed a skillset to actually do inductive Bible study and they’re seeing so much more of the text. Well, the social sciences are these really helpful resources that help us to study culture. So I’m not a social scientist, I’m not an anthropologist or a sociologist, maybe I’m a wannabe anthropologist or sociologist.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
But I’m a theologian who cares about theology in the midst of culture and everyday life. So I have benefited so much from studying local congregations and what I’ve seen is that there’s so much more in local congregations than we normally are aware of. And it really was that process of spending probably seven, eight years of studying local congregations in Africa that really has given me this passion that we need resources to study local congregations, certainly to see what our strengths are, because I think we actually have more strengths than we’re willing to give ourselves credit as well as be able to see some of our gaps, our binders.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
And I love the body of Christ, I love local congregations, I love them works and all. I guess I would tell your generation, please don’t give up on the local church. The local church is not perfect in any location but it is where Christ is manifested in this world through the power of the Holy Spirit and we need gathering and scattering. We can’t just scatter because then we’re going to go without anything to witness to the world. So it’s in our gathering that we rehearse the person of Christ and his life, we participate in the sacraments, we tell the story of the mission of God, we worship, we forgive each other.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
It’s in the gathering that we embody who Christ is and for this world and then we send each other out as individuals and as a community into our worlds. God is had me on a journey where I have learned so much and have seen so much beauty within local congregations. I have a very simpler… probably a very basic, I should say, chapter in the book that talks about how do we study local congregations. Then I point people who want to get more into the sociology or the theology to other resources that can benefit them.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. In your case studies, I was particularly drawn to the congregation in Kenya. Would you tell us a little bit about that congregation? Because I was just amazed by how they transformed their community.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. And it’s really neat. So at the seminary, we would send out students into different churches and then we would go and minister with our students, our students who were studying theology. We would go and minister to those churches. So it’s an older what you would call like an African initiated church that broke off from missionary church back in the ’40s or the ’50s of the last century. And they just welcomed me as a one of them and my family. We ended up probably five or six years becoming members and participating in that church.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
They had such a great focus upon poverty and agriculture and land and yet they did it in a way that they didn’t move away from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, they didn’t move away from evangelism, they didn’t move away from Jesus Christ, but they actually wove their passion for development and land and agriculture and gardens and health. And I would go out and see their ministries, and to this day, it’s one of the best examples of a congregation and public witness that I’ve ever been a part of and was privileged to be a part of that church for quite a few years.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, because weren’t they the ones that worked with the local government to create… Were they the ones that made a park or am I misremembering? But I know they created lots of gardens and transformed the education system, worked with the local schools, and things like that.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah, that’s exactly it. The bishop would say, “Our job is to create little gardens of Eden everywhere in the world.” And they did it. I mean, you walk into their church and all around you it’s arid and dry, and you walk into their church and it’s just a bounding with life. So you see the impact and then you go out into the rural areas and the communities and the ways that they’re integrating, church planting with agriculture, with community health, just wonderful examples of the kind of public witness that we need.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I like how you described it in your book. I think it was habitus that create Christian ferment. The way I understood it, you can correct me, is just regular people who are living in the world but doing things just a little bit differently to make a change.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Yeah. And I think that’s a great way of saying it. And as we do those little things differently over an extended period of time, there really is this gospel impact, this gospel witness that happens in a community and I think all around the world. So I get the joy of traveling and I see these kinds of things. I could talk about ministries and churches in India that have done it, and we have churches in North America. So it’s easy to give up on the church, it’s easy to give up on the body of Jesus Christ, yet this is… As Leslie Newbiggin talks about, the local congregation is the hermeneutic of the gospel. And I that’s a beautiful way of saying it.
Heidi Wilcox:
Definitely. We have one more question that we ask everybody before we wrap up the interview. But before we do it, we’ve talked about a lot of things today, is there anything else you’d like to say that I did not to ask?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
No, I think you’ve done a great job addressing a lot of the themes that I talk about in that book. I will just say that this is a new field and there is a lot of room for people to certainly disagree with what I’ve said or amend it or revise it, but really just calling us to say, “How does witness address larger facets of life?” And let’s not be afraid to move in those directions, but let’s do the theological and the cultural acts of Jesus that can actually move us in that direction.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, definitely. So, last question, because the show is called the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast, what is one practice that is helping you thrive in your life right now?
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
So, can I mention two or does it just have to be one?
Heidi Wilcox:
You can absolutely mention two.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Well, one sounds so mundane, but probably for years, lifting weights and exercise has just been so life-giving to me. I joke with people when I go off to the weight room. It’s probably my favorite part of the day, which maybe sounds so shallow, but it’s actually devotional for me. Then really, this issue of being amongst the nations, whether it’s travel, whether it’s planting a multicultural church, whether it’s working with my students, to me, I joke with people. It’s like oxygen for me. I feel like just being around people that look and feel and see things differently has become such important oxygen for me that is just so life-giving. It’s life-giving theologically, it’s life-giving devotionally. So just trying to find opportunities to step outside of our comfort zone and to worship with the nations.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. That’s lovely. Well, Dr. Okesson, this conversation has been a delight. Thank you so much for your time, the gift of your work and your research, and for saying yes to this interview.
Dr. Gregg Okesson:
Well, thanks for the privilege. Really grateful to do it.
Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation with Dr. Okesson. This conversation gave me a lot to think about with hope. I hope you enjoyed it as well. And of course, you’re free to grab a copy of Dr. Okesson’s books wherever you like to buy books. As always, you can follow Asbury Seminary in all the places on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @asburyseminary. Until next time, go do something that helps you thrive.
