Diversity and Sanctification
A week ago we celebrated Easter, Christ’s victory over death, hell, and the grave. Without debate, Christ’s bodily resurrection is the most central and consequential event — and doctrine — of the Christian faith. The apostle Paul makes this clear in I Corinthians 15:14 when he writes, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
During my Good Friday morning devotions, I compared the crucifixion accounts of Luke and John. And I was struck by the diverse reactions of Peter and John in the moment, and even the existence of Peter and John in the story. Both Matthew and Mark tell us that at the point of Jesus’ arrest, “all” of his disciples deserted him.
But Luke includes those sobering words that Peter followed “at a distance” (always dangerous for believers) and we know what he ended up doing. John remained at the cross long enough for Jesus to ask him to take care of his mother (John 19:25-27) and for him to witness the soldier piercing Jesus’s side and water and blood flowing out of him (John 19: 34-35).
Along with James, Peter and John were Jesus’s “inner circle” during his ministry. Unlike the other disciples, they were invited into the room where he raised Jairus’s daughter, they were with him on the mountain when he was transfigured, and they were called to pray in close proximity to Him in the Garden of Gethsemane the night of his arrest. Jesus’s arrest and death were so traumatic, however, that James was nowhere to be found, and Peter denied him. Only John seemed faithful to till the very end. Given the context, I guess the faithful presence of one out of three friends wasn’t bad.
The twelve disciples, or apostles, are an incredible study in diversity. While they were all Jewish, they were politically diverse within their context. Jesus’s “church” combined a Zealot committed to the overthrow of Roman rule of Palestine, and a tax collector who colluded with the Roman rulers for his own benefit. This is a kind of diversity that many American churches seem increasingly unable to incorporate (and here and here) in recent years as American politics seeks to dominate every institution.
As my first regular blog post on 8/7/23 explained, matters of race and ethnicity have always been significant for me. In our world, diversity is traditionally a code word for race and ethnicity. Of course, much more is commonly subsumed within diversity rhetoric, such as issues of gender and sexual orientation. In the context of the body of Christ, or your local church, we often focus on the diversity and functions of the gifts of the spirit that Paul teaches about in Romans 12, I Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4.
But recently I’ve become aware of another critical dimension of diversity that is almost impossible to clearly name, and thus incredibly difficult to navigate and explicitly embrace. I am thinking about the diversity of personalities and leadership styles.
We can’t name them easily because there are so many different models used to identify personality types and leadership styles. Do we use the old Greek model of phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholy? Or maybe we should go with the now classic Myers Briggs, or the DISC assessment, or even the ever popular Enneagram test? Maybe the solution is to instead use the Clifton Strengths Finders assessment?
How many leadership styles are there? Six? Ten?
Even if we could all agree on one assessment, there are so many issues with validity and reliability, among other things, that it is best to view them as only rough approximations. See here and here and here and here. Our results on a given test can even change over time, so these categories are not fixed for all time.
Regardless of the category or label, it can be just plain challenging to connect well with, or work closely with, people whose style differs significantly from our own. Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with one or more of the above named assessments and their various terms. And if you are, you are aware of the challenges that inhere in relating to someone who is in an “opposite” category. While it is easy to work with or report to someone who is very similar to yourself, there is much to be learned by working with someone who is different that you are. My question is this: If you advocate for environments with diversity along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, perspective, and giftings, do you also lean into contexts where you must interact closely with individuals who are different from you in style?
I now understand that this is part of the genius behind God’s creation of both marriage and the local church. Proverbs 27:17 says “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” The only way iron can sharpen iron is by creating much friction between the two pieces of iron. Usually by hitting. Friction requires contact. Contact requires very close proximity.
If you divorce because things are too difficult, if you leave a church every time you are offended, you lose proximity, and contact, and friction, and thereby you lose the opportunity to be sharpened by the relationships in your life. This means you don’t have to change, which means you don’t have to learn anything new. In the context of our Christian journey, these separations can mean we abandon a relationship through which the Holy Spirit was working to make us more Christlike. We could be avoiding a key aspect of the sanctification process (being in community with other believers) as God designed it. How else would we develop the fruit of the spirit — patience, kindness, etc. — if it wasn’t through relationships with fellow believers that rub us the wrong way?
None of this is meant to justify remaining in an abusive, dangerous, ungodly, or manipulative relationship under the guise of “church.” This is why we need to know scripture for ourselves so we can properly discern these matters with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Peter and John clearly had different personalities, and Peter’s personality seemed to afflict him with “foot in mouth disease,” but regardless, he was chosen by Jesus, and I believe, because of that kind of personality that got him in trouble repeatedly, he was also the kind of person that would go into the tomb rather than just look into it, the kind of person that God could most easily use on the Day of Pentecost, and the kind of person to introduce the Gospel message across the cultural divide to gentiles by going to Cornelius’s house. A person with John’s personality could not have done those things nearly as easily. I’m thankful that God has many different personalities in His kingdom, despite the challenges of relating to each other. We each are accomplishing something unique for the kingdom that is related to how He made us.
How helpful it could be if everyone in leadership would invest in one or more of these tests and initiate conversations with their colleagues about their personality or leadership style and how to most effectively collaborate in work and/or ministry. These tools are not precise, but they are heuristic devices.
So for the fun of it, my Enneagram is 9w2, and my top 5 Clifton strengths, in order, are: learner, intellection, input, context, and relator. My wife’s top 5 strengths are: command, significance, futuristic, input, and responsibility, and I love her deeply and that love keeps growing deeper as the years go by. But at the end of the day, all that matters is that we become like Jesus.
As Peter said: 5 make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (II Peter 1: 5-8)
The only way to advance in this sanctification process is by choosing to stay in community with fellow believers, and the more different from me they are, and the more I lean into those relationships, the more I will develop these traits Peter mentions. I suspect that he knew this through personal experience. Just a hunch.
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