Thrive

Dr. Randy Woodley

Learning from Indigenous Wisdom

Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, Ph.D., is a farmer, activist/scholar, distinguished speaker, teacher and wisdom keeper who addresses a variety of issues concerning American culture, faith/spirituality, justice, race/diversity, regenerative farming, our relationship with the earth and Indigenous realities. He graduated from Asbury Seminary with a Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies in 2010. His expertise has been sought in national venues such as Time Magazine, The Huffington Post and Christianity Today. Dr. Woodley currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at Portland Seminary. Dr. Woodley was raised near Detroit, Michigan and is a Cherokee descendent recognized by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. He co-hosts the Peacing it all Together podcast with Bo Sanders. Dr. Woodley and his wife are co-sustainers of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds, a regenerative teaching center and farm in Yamhill, Oregon. The Woodleys have been innovators and activists for over three decades. They have four grown children and six grandchildren. He has authored nine books, all of which we’ll link to in the show notes, in case you want to grab a copy.

In today’s conversation we talk about how he came to know Jesus, Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds. We talk about his books and what we can learn from indigenous wisdom.

Let’s listen!

*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.

Dr. Randy Woodley

Farmer. Activist. Distinguished Speaker. Author. Wisdom Keeper.

Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, Ph.D. is a farmer, activist/scholar, distinguished speaker, teacher and wisdom keeper who addresses a variety of issues concerning American culture, faith/spirituality, justice, race/diversity, regenerative farming, our relationship with the earth and Indigenous realities. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies from Asbury Seminary in 2010. His expertise has been sought in national venues such as Time Magazine, The Huffington Post and Christianity Today. Dr. Woodley currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at Portland Seminary. Dr. Woodley was raised near Detroit, Michigan and is a Cherokee descendent recognized by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. He co-hosts the Peacing it all Together podcast with Bo Sanders. Dr. Woodley and his wife are Co-sustainers of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds, a regenerative teaching center and farm in Yamhill, Oregon. The Woodleys have been innovators and activists for over three decades. They have four grown children and six grandchildren. He has authored nine books, listed in the show notes.

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.

Transcript

Heidi E. 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 got to talk to Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley. He is a farmer, activist, scholar, distinguished speaker, teacher, and wisdom keeper, who addresses a variety of issues concerning American culture, including faith and spirituality, justice, race and diversity, regenerative farming, our relationship with earth and Indigenous realities.
In 2010, he graduated with a PhD in intercultural studies from Asbury Seminary. Dr. Woodley currently serves as distinguished professor of faith and culture at Portland Seminary. He was raised near Detroit, Michigan and is a Cherokee descendant, recognized by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma. He co-hosts the Peacing it All Together podcast with Bo Sanders.
Dr. Woodley and his wife Edith are co-sustainers of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds, a regenerative teaching center in farm in Yamhill, Oregon. The Woodley’s have been innovators and activists for over three decades. They have four grown children and six grandchildren. He has authored nine books, all of which we’ll link to in today’s show notes in case you want to grab a copy.
In this conversation, we talk about how he came to know Jesus, Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice, and Eloheh Farm and Seeds. We also talk about his books and what we can learn from Indigenous wisdom. Let’s listen.
Dr. Woodley, I am just delighted to get to talk to you today. I’ve been reading your books, listening to some podcasts that you’ve done and the one that you host, and just really been looking forward to our conversation today. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Thanks, Heidi. I’m glad to be here.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah, yeah. I’ve really been looking forward to it. So I want to start out by giving people a little bit of an opportunity to get to know you. So if you could, just tell me how you came to know Jesus or the Creator.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, I think maybe the long story would take me all the way back to a church camp when I was 10 years old and I had a Native counselor. I don’t know his name, but he went by the nickname of Cream Puff, and he basically invited me to meet Jesus as a 10 year old kid. And so I did, and that was meaningful. And then I strayed for a long time. A couple years later, as a teenager. At 19, I was basically addicted to meth and had a pretty raunchy lifestyle, and under a number of circumstances, that’s when I sort of walked down the aisle and in the old fashioned way. And I met Jesus and I prayed and I asked one thing.
I said, “If you can deliver me from these drugs”, because I’d been addicted for over a year and I couldn’t get out myself, “then I will serve You the rest of my life and I won’t ever look back.” And so I sort of felt like a horse kicked me in the head and kind of got up from there. I was all just by myself in a room. And I went, “Wow.” And then I never had that desire to do drugs again. And I started trying to investigate, well, what does it mean to follow Jesus? And that was October 23rd, 1975, and here we are today.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
What have you learned about what it means to follow Jesus?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
I think it’s been a learning experience, for sure. It’s not the same thing that I thought when I was 19, as it is now. I think at the time, I had these people who were well intentioned, loving, mentoring me, and they were like, “Just do what we do.” And so what does that mean? “Read the Bible and pray and come to church and tell other people about Jesus.” And so that’s what I did. And eventually I answered a call to the ministry and I became what I would refer to as a flaming evangelist. And I was for years in that mode, for a number of years, but I always felt kind of weird.
It was like there was something about this process that wasn’t right, and I hadn’t developed the whole gospel, the wholistic understanding of the gospel. And I also felt like that I was, in a lot of ways, objectifying people to become the objects of my evangelistic pursuits. And I know people who follow Jesus have all kinds of ways of rationalizing that, but still objectifying people is not what Jesus was about.
And so it took me a while to figure this out, and then at the same time, figuring out my own Indigenous identity and what that meant in my pursuit of God. And so I had a lot of things to work through, and eventually I think I’ve come to some real peace and understanding what it means to follow Jesus. And I’m sure that’s kind of what we’ll talk about maybe the rest of this interview, I don’t know.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
I’m curious, you said you had to come to understand your Indigenous identity as part of learning to follow Jesus. What was that experience like for you?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Those well meaning people, who I love, who first mentored me… At the time, I had a very, I would say radical understanding of myself as a Native person. And I had long hair and wore it in a braid sometimes, and I had Indian posters and American Indian movement stuff in my room and the newspapers, and all that kind of stuff. And basically they told me, and this is where the dualism slipped in, if you will, this idea of, “That’s all of the flesh, just do what we’re doing.”
Well, Jesus actually came in the flesh and came to me in my flesh. And so I think I had a little bit of perverted and understanding of what that meant. And so I cut my hair and got myself a three piece suit and basically what meant was for me to become a white person. And I tried that for five, six years and it just didn’t seem to fit well. And that was just part of this discovery process. And then to realize that eventually God made me who I am. I’m a mixed blood Cherokee white person who has a proud heritage and have now more than half of my life in Indian country, involved in ministry in lots of different ways.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. You have been. One of the things you and your wife Edith started Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice. How did that come to be?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah, so Eloheh Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds is the current rendition of our outreach, if you will, our organization. I was pastoring a Native church in a very, I guess people would call it cultural contextual way in Nevada. And our church was made largely of Native people who came from a traditional background, not a church background, but a more Native traditional background and people… That hadn’t been really done among mission. And so people were trying to find out well, what are you doing? What’s the formula?
And I’m like, There’s no formula. Just come and visit us and you can find out. And then we started getting calls from people to come and speak and you know how that goes. So eventually we went halftime at the church and halftime with our Eagles Wings Ministries, it was called at that time. And then after a year we saw that wasn’t going to be possible. And then we finally branched off for this whole vision of Eloheh.
Basically we looked after years of serving our Indigenous people in lots of different ways. I mean, everything you can think of from houseless ministry. To food closets to et cetera, et cetera, and discipling programs, all these things. And what happened was that we just said that the government, nor the church has done a good job at all and in any denomination with our Native people, and we know how to create a new model that would empower our people and give us agency as opposed to disempower, continue the sort of colonial baggage and legacy that we were given.
And so ever since then, our plight has been to both decolonize and indigenize. And then we found out along the way also that if we’re going to heal, we all have to heal together. And so we have both sides. So we deal with Indigenous people and we deal with non-Indigenous people or non-Indians, and our whole goal is to decolonize and indigenize. And we started that after four years of leaving the pastor in Nevada, Carson City, Nevada.
We began in Jessamine County there. And while I was getting my PhD and me and a couple other Native folks, Richard Twist was there, Terry Leblanc, Ray Aldred, we were all in a sort of a, I guess unintentional cohort that became intentional, and to helped each other through our Asbury experience. Came out and said, we want to now create something that’s more Native friendly. And so we created the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, which is called NAIITS. And then we eventually started a program out of the seminary where I am in my last semester before I retire.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, wow, congratulations.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yes, at Portland Seminary and part of George Fox University. But yeah, eventually lost. We had 50 acres there in Jassamine County in Nicholasville. We lost that due to violent pressure from a white supremacist, a peer military type group, just as I was finishing up at Asbury. And we eventually had to sell and move to keep anybody from being killed. And that’s how I ended up in Oregon. And then we had one small rendition of Eloheh for seven years, and it was only three acre place with some very restrictive zoning.
And then two and a half years ago, Edith and I moved in the middle of COVID to this 10 acres and began to build our third farm from scratch, by the way. Yeah, we got it the third time we figured out how to do it. And so now we’re here and we’re starting to have our schools again. We’re starting to have groups come in. So the vision is just completing now, finally after I think 24 years.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, wow. Wow. So we’ll link to your website in the show notes, but could you tell us about a couple of events or things that people could join if they’re interested, either virtually or if some of them live close out in Oregon?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, if they live close, the last Saturday of every month we have a volunteer workday out here on the farm. We also have schools, so extended weekend schools, but right now we’re limited. We don’t have a building. We’re actually going to raise funds for a building this fall, so that we can have things all throughout the whole year. But right now it’s only too hot in the summer and too rainy in the winter. And so we only have this small window to have in person teaching. But we’ve had some, we’ve got one coming up this weekend. And my wife also is a part of a group with another Native woman, and they had a retreat here not too long ago, a school if you will, called Decolonizing with Badass Indigenous Grandmas.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
I love that.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And that’s gone over real well. And then I have some online cohorts that I do through the winter time, and until we get our building finished, then once we do that, we’ll be having once a month extended weekends here. Yeah, so.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Very nice. Very nice. You said that one of the goals of Eloheh is to decolonize and indigenize, what does that look like? I guess maybe a better question is, I mean, you can pick if it’s a better question or not, that’s up to you. But what can we learn from Indigenous wisdom I think may be a better way of asking that?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah. Well, I started out as a commission missionary, and it wasn’t long before I realized in the Native community that I was actually a, I guess you’d say a double agent, that the church actually had more to learn from Native people than Native people had to learn from the church because the values that have sustained our people for so long, for time and memorial, I’m sure they developed over time with the land. But those values are very much the values that Jesus taught. And oftentimes Native people are more consistent with those than the church.
In fact, I would say that the church, because of the platonic dualism that’s tied up in and baked in the bread, if you will, of theology and ecology and economics and education and the penal system and everything else, that it’s very much fragmented. And whereas Indigenous way of thinking that it’s more holistic. So this idea of platonic dualism with that being the foundational fallacy of the Western worldview, where you understand the ethereal world or that which is spiritual or that which is of the mind, and you privilege that above the material world. And so that’s very much a western way of doing things, a western modality.
When you do that, all kinds of weird things arise. You start thinking the mind is better than the body, the spirit is better than the earth. You start ranking things in hierarchies, and that’s where you get all your anthropocentrism, thinking humans are above nature rather than just part of nature, thinking that men are above women instead of just being equal, that one race is more superior than another race.
And so all of those kinds of things stem out of this foundational fallacy of platonic dualism. Well, in Native America, we’ve been affected by that slightly, but especially those traditional folks, they don’t think that way. They think in a more holistic way. And so, the church has fallen prey to that over these years. And then it doubled down at the time of the reformation and the time of the enlightenment.
And so it was given a recharge that was following the Renaissance, which was the revitalization of all Greek thinking, Greek culture, Greek art, Greek architecture, et cetera. And so we are captive to that. So how do you decolonize from that? Well, first of all, you have to hear a story differently than the ones you’ve been told. And so you have to hear from people who are different, people who understand differently.
And that’s often the role of Indigenous people is to help non-Indigenous people, western thinkers, to change the way that they think, to convert them to a different worldview. And worldviews are not immutable. One of the things I learned in Asbury is that anthropologists used to think that worldview is I immutable, but you can actually learn other worldviews and you can learn to think in a different way. And so that’s the gift that we have as Indigenous people to help non-Indigenous people decolonize, shed that old platonic, dualistic worldview and start to see reality in a whole again, which is what Jesus taught.
Jesus was not affected by the enlightenment, apparently He wasn’t infected by the dualism that would’ve been present in His day. Maybe His upbringing in Nazareth protecting from that, I don’t know. But He was, I think, a perfect example of a decolonized mind. And He understood that reality. He said, “Don’t swear by heaven because that’s God’s throne, and don’t swear by the earth because that’s footstool.” In other words, it’s all sacred, the materials, the ethereal, everything. And so I think Indigenous people can get the church back on track to a way of thinking closer to what Jesus thought.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. How does our colonial view sometimes, or maybe you would say most of the time, keep us from seeing the truth of scripture?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, we’d like to think that we all come to scripture unbiased, but bring our baggage with us. And so part of that baggage is that worldview that wants to separate, that wants to create hierarchies. And so it’s doomed from the beginning. So one of the things that someone said to me a long time ago was “When you read these stories, first of all realize they are stories. The 90% of scripture is in story form.”

Heidi E. Wilcox:
That’s true, yeah.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And so if you don’t understand story, then you probably are coming with some kind of a weird outside agenda. But Indigenous people understand story, and other people from other countries and places around the world, understand story differently than Western people. Western people, the first thing they want to know is, did this happen? What are the real facts? Is this true? Whereas an Indigenous way of understanding is, what’s the truth in this story? What is the storyteller wanting me to learn? And that’s how these stories were written.
I don’t think, even all the way down to the New Testament, especially Jesus never intended for these stories to be interpreted the way that the west has interpreted them. And so yeah, that’s the first thing, is to understand that these are stories. And someone said to me, “You need to understand them. Look at them through your Indigenous eyes.” This is when I was struggling with my identity.
And I was like, what does that mean? And so I started thinking more like, what about the more community values, less individualistic? What does that mean? How do I apply that to these stories? What about generosity? This is all the things that Jesus taught. If I start using, in other words, Jesus, who again very similar, not completely, but very similar to Indigenous values, use his values to interpret these things, then I’m going to maybe have a more correct view of what they are. And so I think I became a red letter Christian before the red letter Christians exist. And so if I didn’t understand the story in light of the eyes and the values and the stories of Jesus, then there was something wrong with that story.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
So I’m glad you, excuse me. I’m glad you brought up story because one of the things among many I found fascinating about you that I’ve never heard anyone else do is that you didn’t read the Bible for two years, but instead had it read to you. And so I’m like, that is a unique way, a more original way to receive scripture. I mean, most of us listening are all blessed to have copies of scripture, but to hear orally for two years, what was that like for you and what did you learn? And I’m assuming it changed you a little bit. So how did that experience change you?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah, so from 2004 to 2006, which was primarily my time at Asbury, and I guess the cats out of the bag now, my professors are going to know, but I didn’t read scripture once, I decided that what I wanted to do was hear orally, so I’m not breaking it. I’m hearing the more like a story rather than looking and seeing verse 13, verse 14, verse. And it began to make a lot more sense to me that way. When I heard the story and I listened to the story and I said, what’s the story really about here? Who are the characters? Who can I relate to? What’s the storyteller trying to tell me? And it was just much easier through listening, rather than reading. And it definitely helped inform my perspective.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah, for sure. I did that. I mostly listened to it for a year. I did the Bible in a year, and I had this app that read it to me. And that was partly, I don’t know if this is the best thing, but partly so I could be doing other things while I was listening. So I think it would’ve been better if I would’ve sat still and actually received it more. But I really appreciated that experience in being able to receive it in that way as well.
Talking about being Indigenous to a place, you have said that “We’re all Indigenous to somewhere.” I think this was in Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth. “We’re all Indigenous to somewhere. We’re all from somewhere. We can all become root in the land that sustains us.” How do we reconnect with our own Indigenous, because I’m not Indigenous, I’m Indigenous to Kentucky now, but my people a long time ago are not. How do we reconnect with that?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And it’s a really good question. So I encourage people who are reading Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth, and these one hundred meditations, do not skip the introduction because the introduction is really where I establish the connection. And so I talk about various ways that, and that we are all Indigenous from somewhere. And I make that point in several ways. And I do distinguish between the small letter i, indigenous and capital I, which would be the host people of that land who have been here for, well, I would say minimally most 12 to 14,000 years.
They’re actually anthropologists and sociologists now who have been doing research and are more and more saying, perhaps we’ve been here much longer than that. Some would even say 200,000 years. But I think 28,000 is the oldest popular in the Channel Islands right now, popular version of people who were inhabiting that land. But anyway, regardless, it’s been a while. And so if we are people who have been here for so long, then I think we earned the right to have that capital I Indigenous, but everybody’s Indigenous from somewhere.
I mean, we all began as people who understood how to live with the land, regardless of where you’re from. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t have survived. Your people wouldn’t have survived. So that it’s like, well, what in a sense that do I need to do to reclaim my own Indigeneity? The first thing I do is to find out what are the Indigenous people of your land doing now, culturally, politically? What are they about? Investigate that, educate yourself, understand the history, all of that, which will shed light hopefully on some of the values and some of the experiences that you might have in that land, and it’s difficult.
I’m not saying it’s not difficult because we are a very mobile society. I mean, it’s just like we’re everywhere. That’s what colonialism does, is it relocates people. But also what about your own ethnicity, Indigeneity, ancestry, sometimes a lot of people. I hear people talk about, “Oh, it’s my Irish calling, my Celtic roots are calling. And I feel a sense to participate in that.” And so they educate themselves about that more and more, or they sort of get on the land and just let nature speak to them and figure out how do I connect and how do I relate? And if you can do that with a group of people even better, because that’s what it means to be Indigenous, not to be individually Indigenous, but to be Indigenous with a group.
And so I encourage people to chase their ancestry, to get with like-minded people, to have ceremony from their own ancestry or create their own, of course not to misappropriate Native culture without permission, but it’s important to also not just understand, okay, this is my experience on this particular land, but there are people who have been here so much longer and I have things to learn from them. So yeah, there’s a lot of different ways, and there’s probably ways I haven’t thought about to become Indigenous to the land, but that’s what we need to reconnect. We need to rediscover our own Indigeneity.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. How does doing that restore our relationship with not only other humans, but also with creation?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
So we like to understand ourself apart from nature, but we are part of nature, and we are related to nature. We have a reciprocal relationship with everything in creation. So I call this the whole community of creation. I wrote a book when I came out of Asbury called Shalom and the Community of Creation. So that people can understand that we are part of it and that God created it all, and that each has a different role to play, even down to the mosquito that bit me on the elbow the other day. I got to realize, that mosquito has a role to play too somehow. Don’t know what it is, but…
And so, what do we do when we find ourself in this segmented, isolated, anthropocentric worldview? We have to begin to get out of that. And we have to hang with people who don’t see the world in that way and begin to change our views about these things. And when we do, our theologies change, our politics change. We talk about, you look and you see people who are involved in racial justice, and people who are involved in earth justice, and all of these different things, but they’re all the same thing. And I talk about Jesus teaching this shalom value, this shalom life way. This is what Jesus came to restore was this old, what I call Shalom Sabbath Jubilee Construct.
Our job then is to set the world. We are unique as human beings, and this is the unique part of us. We are unique in that we are the only ones qualified to keep things in balance and to keep things in harmony, to bring about shalom, and to repair this broken and fragmented world. And so that’s our job, whether it’s doing earth justice or racial justice or whatever it is. We’re all about doing the same thing, which is what Jesus taught, which is to repair the breach, if you will, to make things whole again. And of course, part of that is seen with a holistic worldview.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Absolutely. You were talking about a little bit of the disconnect just now and then earlier in the podcast, but oftentimes we’re disconnected. We see God as separate from being Creator a little bit sometimes. And I think there’s a difference in that as you point out. What does it mean for us to see Jesus not just as Savior, but also as our Creator?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah. Well, I think first thing we do is we go to scripture. So there’s five places in scripture where Jesus is exclusively named as heaven, what we would theologically say, the efficacy of creation. And so John:1, Colossians:1. Hebrews:1, Colossians 1 and 2, and then I think it’s 1 Corinthians 9:7, I can’t remember exactly that verse, but they all… Let’s just take John:1, it’s very emphatic. And all of these things are written in a pneumonic devices. They are sort of poetry or song or we’re not sure what they were, but they were made for people to remember these things. So obviously they were important.
And so what did they do with Jesus? How did they place Him in this whole order of creation? And that what they said was like in John:1, He being Jesus, “He made everything that was made and without Him nothing was made that made.” Very emphatic, very poetic, very pneumonic so that we can remember that is Jesus who had the efficacy of creation. And so the West has no… Because the West has aired by creating a sort of redemption, salvation narrative without all the rest of Jesus. So they go to the cross without the incarnation, without the life and ministry of Jesus, and the way he lived his life, without his own theology as he taught and preached.
And it becomes a simple message of the cross and redemption. So there’s no place in western theology for Jesus as Creator. So what does that mean? If Jesus is Creator, He creates this good world. He expects us to maintain it and repair it and keep it in balance and in harmony, and then He dies for it. So, that means something very much… It’s a much wider theology, if you will. It’s a much bigger view of who God is. But again, there’s that hierarchy and dualism, God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And I’m a Trinitarian, not for the reasons probably a lot of other people are, but I’m a Trinitarian because I believe that that all of nature reflects unity and diversity. So God has to be unity and diverse. But yeah, so we have trouble with that Jesus as creator, but I think when people begin to understand that, and that becomes a part of their theological thinking, it will mean something different with everything that they think about theology.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. One question I wanted to ask you, I meant to ask it a little bit earlier, but as we’re exploring Indigenous theology and our own in Indigeneity, how do we stay true to our own story, even as we’re learning about this new way of thinking? Or is that even the correct way to be looking at it, that we need to stay treated like our story?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, I don’t know what you mean by our story, but I think if you are exploring your Indigeneity, that is your story.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Okay. Yeah. I think I was asking about not misappropriating Native American history, because that is obviously not my history, and maybe not those three people listening, but how do I stay true to me and who I am, even as I learn about this new way of thinking?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, it’s good to know Native people and ask them, but besides that, I think you just know like, hey, this comes through my bloodline, and that this comes through my cultural experience and that doesn’t. So it’s sort of like, until I’m given permission to participate in that, then I don’t have the right to do it.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, I see. That makes sense. So you’ve written, I don’t, let’s see, several books at this point. You just released a Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer Look, on September 1st.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
So I’ve written nine books.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Nine books, okay.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And the three came out this year in 2022.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yes, yes, yes. So I’m guessing maybe those were some of the results of the pandemic a little bit, and having more time maybe.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
That and starting a new farm at the same time.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. So your books are kind of a bit of a personal journey for you as well. Is that a fair assessment?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, I think everybody who writes and everybody who speaks and preaches autobiographically in some ways. So yeah, I think they reflect my thinking at the time and my identity at the time.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
So you did this a little bit in our pre-podcast conversation, but I think it would be good for our listeners too. Would you walk us through each of your books and tell us a little bit about them?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah. So you mean the ones written this year?

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah, this year is fine. If you want to go back further than that, that’s fine too.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
So I wrote a couple books that were self-published, and then there’s my doctoral dissertation, which is all about this harmony way and across Native America. I first wrote a book around 2000 on diversity, Living in Color: Embracing God’s Passion for Ethnic Diversity, where I wanted people to understand the nature of God is diverse. Then coming out of Asbury, I wrote, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision, to try and show where our Indigenous people line up with our values with Jesus. And a lot of that was based on my research that I did in my dissertation.
And then I wrote a book with my podcast partner, and I was his mentor during his seminary years, Bo Sanders. We wrote a book called Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59 P.M. Conversation. And so we wanted to, with all that was happening with Evangelicalism, we wanted to put in some words and some thoughts and talk about some things. A lot that we talk about is critical race theory and some of these things way before it became political hot buttons. So that was in 2020, I think. And then in 2022, so I’ve written three books this year. The first one was called Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days Reconnecting or Sacred Earth, and it’s a hundred short meditations and in action point after each one, and that’s doing real well.
And I’m glad to see people… I’ve gotten to see a lot of people have shared their experience and are telling me it’s working for them. So I’m real happy about that. And then in April, a book, I did something called the Hayward Lectures up in Nova Scotia. And then Baker Academic wanted me to do a book based on those lectures. And so that book is called Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine. And that’s where I really lay out this whole idea of the difference between Indigenous worldview and the Western worldview, and how I would really say the Western worldview is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, interesting.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And I lay that out in that book. And then finally, this book that just came out two weeks ago, Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer Look. And this is a book where I think after being a commission missionary, being a flaming evangelist, being a pastor for seven years, being a pastor to pastors, being a missiologist and a professor, that it all comes down to, here’s what I had to say. And so we have to realize in the West that the missionary project is tied directly into the Western worldview, and particularly coming out of empire, tied directly to white supremacy.
And so it’s very paternalistic, it’s very sort of white western, even though people wouldn’t say. And I’m not condemning all missionaries by any means, but what I’m saying is its foundations, its DNA, it’s baked in the bread, as we talked about earlier. It is this sort of supremacist view that we have all the answers and you have nothing. And again, it’s the subject object. It’s treating the people involved in mission as objects as opposed to partners, I would say co-laborers who have things to teach each other.
And so I’ve developed these 10 missiological principles, and that we need to go in, and it requires a great deal of humility. But then I spend about six chapters doing that, and then I go into, well then what was the real mission of Jesus? And if we can get that right, maybe we can get mission. And so I spend the rest of the time talking about that and how we might do it differently.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. Well, we will definitely link all of those in our show notes so that people can pick up a copy if they would like to do that. Thank you for walking us through those.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah, thanks for asking.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. One of the things that I also want to talk about is, from what I’ve learned about you, there is no gap for you between what you believe and what you do. And so you have said “Jesus didn’t really care what you believed, He cared about what you do.” Could you unpack that for us a little bit? And then with saying that, I’m curious about how and why you came to Asbury.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Oh, okay. So first part, and you might have to remind me of the second, because I’m getting old.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh yeah. I did what they told us not to do, and I asked two questions at the same time.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
It’s okay. You have to watch that with old people. We lose track sometimes. We get caught up in the first story. So I think Jesus said it better than I could say it. He said, and I like this story because I’m a farmer. And I have two sons, and I have two daughters and two sons. I have six grandkids, but my two sons grew up mostly on the farm. And Jesus tells a story about a farmer who had two sons. He’s talking to the Pharisees, and he says that first son, and I might get the order mixed up because I haven’t looked at this story in a while, but it just came to me that the first son says… The farmer says to his son, “Go work in the field.” And he’s like, “Okay, I’ll go work in the field.” But he never went.
And the second son, he says, “Go work in the field.” And he’s like, “I don’t want to work in the field. Why don’t I always got to work in the field? You sent my brother to work in the field. I’m not going to work in the field.” But then he ends up going, and then Pharisees says, “Well, who was justified? Who is righteous?” It was the one who did it, not the one who had the best intent or the best doctrine or the best thinking.
It was the one who actually fulfilled commands and values and life and ministry. And so I don’t think God cares a lick about our doctrine. I think God only cares about what we do. And what we do for each other, and what we do for the community of creation, and what we do to set the world back in balance. And we do that through the power of the Holy Spirit and through our particular faiths.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. So in thinking, that was the second part of the question. And why did you come to Asbury, because doctrine does inform beliefs in some way?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, I would like to think that is true, but apparently if you look at Christian history and you see things like the crusades and genocide on Native Americans and a lot of other things. I think correct doctrine doesn’t really, I mean, I’m sure there’s a reciprocal relationship between what you believe and what you do, but I think what you do informs what you believe more than anything.
Or at least with Americans in the Western worldview. It’s like, “We did this thing, we had to do this thing that wasn’t quite right, but here’s the justification for it.” And that’s different than how Indigenous people think. Indigenous people might do something that they thought was not quite right and then just say “It wasn’t right.”

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, they call it out.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And so it’s a more honest approach, I think. And traditionally, and we actually create doctrines, and we create theologies that excuse things that aren’t right. And instead of just saying, no, I was wrong. This was wrong thinking. This was a wrong way to do things. And so as a result, the Western worldview is all about beliefs and very little about what you do, whereas opposed, there’s no separation between what you do and what you believe in Indigenous value. If you ask an Indigenous elder, what do you believe? He’ll tell you what he does or what she does.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, that, wow. As you’ve been saying, that’s a whole new way of looking at things.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
And I kind of show that in some charts in Shalom and the Community of Creation, I’ve got that started. That’s where I started thinking about these worldview things. And Asbury was a big part of that. So why come to Asbury? So I was going around speaking and things like this and looking for a place to start our school and community, and Eloheh basically, the whole vision farm, et cetera. And I was asked to come speak speaking Asbury.
And while at Asbury, and then we also asked two of my friends Ray Aldred and Terry Leblanc. And so we ended up spending a week there doing chapels and doing courses and all these kinds of things. And then at the end of our time, the people at Asbury extended an invitation to us. They said, “We think you’re doing some of the best missiology in the world, and we want to get behind it, and what can we do?” And so my response was, “Well, I’m looking to build a school and you’re on Cherokee land anyway, so don’t you just give me like five acres, I can start my school.” They didn’t blink.
They said, “Okay, we’ll look into that.” But they came back eventually and said, “We can’t do that. We discussed it, but what we can do is offer scholarships to, there were actually going to be four of us, to the four of you.” And so we had to go through… I had already had a master’s degree in of a master of divinity, and so I just had to take the GRE, I guess, or whatever it was, and I passed. And so we qualified, and then we started this cohort together, if you will.
And while we were there, we had a wonderful experience. I mean, I had incredible professors and I had people who allowed me to challenge them and allowed us to challenge them. So they would, for example, give us books, all white authors. And we were like, why don’t we have any Native authors here? Why don’t we have any people of color here? Well, we want to be able to read people who are outside of the train of thought that Western theologians have come out of. And so they would say, “Okay, well let’s substitute this book for this book.”
And I think one of the highest honors I received anyway when I graduated was that I had my mentors, my professors, who were my dissertation coaches. So that would’ve been Michael Rynkiewich, and Eunice Irwin, and Russell. And they took me out for a steak dinner and after I passed my doctoral dissertation, and they said, “I want you to hear this. You guys have been missionaries to us. We have changed a lot of our thinking and converted, and we have seen some great things come.”
Howard Snyder produced a number of good things. One of us is Pocahontas and Jesus or something. I forget the name of it exactly. I did the Forward to it. Howard with another person came out with this incredible book called Salvation is Creation Healed, which gets right to the heart of Native theology, really. And so we were so happy, and I used that in a lot of my theology courses. I require that book.
And so there was always this give and play between us and the professors. And I think it also influenced a lot of the students who were there who began to speak out, who normally might not. And so yeah, it was a very good learning experience and one that I would say it was reciprocal. At first I turned it down. I mean, the first year it was offered, I said, “No.” Yeah, because I’m about building this place.
But they said, “Well, what if we helped you?” So the second year it was offered, my wife was with me when they offered it, and I said, “No, no, I’ve got to build our school in Eloheh, and stay true to that vision.” And Edith said, “Well, you need to pray about it.” And I said, “Well, I prayed about it.” She said, “Well, you prayed about it last year, now you need to pray about it this year.”
And after some thought and prayer, we said, “Okay, let’s do it.” And one of the motivators was really my wife who said, because I wasn’t interested in really doing more education, but she said, “For a Native person to have a PhD, it’s going to allow you to go to places where none of the rest of us will ever be able to go. You’ll get invited to speak, you’ll get invited to be a part of things and have influence on behalf of our Native people, that you would never get without this.”
And so she was a hundred percent, and it’s a hundred percent true. That’s the way it’s happened. So she was wiser than me, which is not unusual for women to be wiser than men. I think that’s pretty common. But so I’m thankful to her and I’m thankful to Asbury as well.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. How has your education here equipped you to continue your work? Maybe in some new ways?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
So when we lost our property there in Nicholasville in Jessamine County, I was able to come out and I got a job first couple years as a halftime adjunct at George Fox, at the Seminary. And then three quarter time, and eventually I became a tenured professor. And I think last year I won the Graduate Research and Scholar of the year award. And my wife and I have been granted the state of Oregon last year. We’re the humanist of the year. We work with people from different faiths, doing a lot of different things. So my books and et cetera. So it’s been an open door. So, yeah.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. That’s wonderful. You mentioned it earlier, but one of the final questions I want to ask you is talking about the Western worldview kind of being baked in the bread. And you’ve talked about… So listening to you today and reading your books to repair has made me realize that in my own life, that some things that I’ve always thought were true have just been baked in the bread. Where do we go from here, as I’m staring around this question, where do we go from here once we realize some things have been baked in the bread, what do we do now?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Well, I think being open is a big thing. I mean, it’s hard for us when we are sure we have all the answers. And that’s what church does. That’s part of the dysfunction of the church is to say, only ask the right questions because we have all the answers to those questions. But if you start asking the wrong questions, we don’t know what’s going to happen. But yet, one of the great names for Creator in Native America is great mystery. Yeah, we don’t know.
And Jesus described this wonderful when he said the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is like the wind, it blows here and there and everywhere, and you don’t know which direction it’s coming or going. And as a pastor, that’s when I really realized we can follow the spirit or we can take control of the situation, but if we do, the Spirit’s going to leave. And so we’re going to end up on a path that maybe we don’t want to. So remind me that question one more time. I lost track.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh no. Where do we go from here? We realize things have been kind of baked in the bread.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah. Think about Jesus. He’s always sitting down with diverse people. He’s spending time with Gentiles, He’s spending time with women, He’s spending time with Pharisees. He’s spending time with tax gatherers and the [inaudible 00:54:33]. All of those people, Jesus wasn’t just teaching when He was there. His life experience didn’t hold the same experiences everybody else. He was listening and He was learning, and He was applying what He knew to them. Well, if Jesus can do that, we surely should be able to do that, right?
I mean, we should be able to be open enough to realize we need to be around diverse people, people with different experiences, different worldviews, so that we can continue to take what we know to be true and apply it and then find out what is more also true. So that openness is really the first step is just saying, in its humility, is I just don’t have all the answers. I need to be a lifelong learner. One day maybe I’ll know all the answers. I actually don’t think we will.
But one, I think I agree with that. That’s what being existence is, is learning. And so if we’re an open learner and we continue to just be good students all of our life. I don’t call my students, students. I call them co-learners. So collaborative learners, we’re all learning together. And if we can do that, maybe we’ll get there. And it’s the journey. So it’s this, all these conversions. Yes, there’s an initial conversion, but there’s continuous conversion after that, continually converting to truths that we don’t know.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Oh, yeah. That’s really good. That’s really good. Well, our conversation has given me personally so much to think about, and I’m really grateful for your time and the work that you are doing in the world. It has really started to change me, and I appreciate that.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Thank you so much.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. I have one question that I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, but before I do that, is there anything else you’d like to mention that I didn’t know to ask you?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
No, it was great. Thank you.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Okay. Okay. All right. Well, the last question that we ask everyone is, 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?

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Yeah. Well, I don’t want this to sound trite because it’s sort of part of my book and everything, but if I don’t spend time outside, I get weird. If I don’t spend time in creation and appreciating and watching the hummingbirds, and watching the ladybugs, and picking my corn or whatever it is doing. Sometimes deer come to our front and we sit and watch them. And if I don’t expose myself to the wonders of creation.
One time I had this trip and then the same trip I saw Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean in Niagara Falls, and it was like, these things are just so much to take in. It’s wonderful. And it’s just one way of showing me how big God is and how vast everything is, and then how I get to be a part of it all, which is this. I’m just this little spec, but I get to be a part of all this. And so I think that’s the most precious practice to me, is just to be able to be out outdoors in creation.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Yeah. That’s beautiful. Dr. Woodley, thank you so very much for your time today. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.

Reverend Dr. Randy Woodley:
Thanks, Heidi.

Heidi E. Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation with Dr. Woodley. I don’t know about y’all, but this conversation is changing my life and I hope is making you think about things that you may never have thought about previously. If you know Dr. Woodley, be sure to thank him ever so much for being part of today’s episode. And as always, you can follow Asbury Seminary in all the places on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @AsburySeminary. Until next time, I hope you’ll go do something that helps you thrive.

 

Latest

Andrea Baare

As a businesswoman and theologian with experience in both the marketplace and ministry, Andrea Baare struggled with a sense of guilt for many years. She often wondered if she made the right choice moving into the business world instead of pursuing full-time ministry. [...]

Nik Fraustro

Nik Fraustro remembers when Sunday traditions changed in his family growing up. According to him, Sundays were for football, baseball, and other sports. His family didn’t go to church and his father was a corpsman in the United States Navy, meaning they were accustomed to moving. [...]

Generation Awakened

Today on the podcast we are joined by Rev. Dr. Sarah Baldwin to talk about her book, Generation Awakened. Dr. Baldwin is the Vice President of Student Life & Dean of Students at Asbury University and […]

Eddie and Allyson Willis

Camp ministry and retreats had already played a significant role in both Eddie and Allyson’s lives before they met. When they did meet it was, serendipitously, at a United Methodist Conference camp [...]

The Global Impact of the Asbury Outpouring

Today on the podcast we are joined by Robin Lim (M.Div. ’23) and Mark Sayers. Rob and Mark became friends following the Asbury Outpouring, which began in February 2023. We talk about their individual experiences […]

Jess Avery

For Jess Avery, one of the first calls to leadership in the church came at a Dairy Queen in Dublin, Georgia, when she was 16 years old. At that age, Jess had already developed a desire for spiritual community and started a small group at her high school of like-minded students in their pursuit of the Lord. [...]