Jamie Goodwin
Communion of the Saints
Jamie Goodwin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership
About 12 years ago, I took an evening walk with my friend. She was a pastor in a local megachurch and had some important upcoming career choices.
After a bit, the conversation turned towards my updates. “My life is just so good,” I said.
We walked quietly. Then she asked, “Really?”
Suffice it to say I needed this wise friend’s care and candor in our shared walk. Overall, it is true that my life was thriving. Yet it was equally true that I wasn’t attentive to the parts that were intercenine, destructive to myself and others. Though I considered myself mature, there were areas in which I had remained adolescent. The net effect was that I was less alive to all my realities.
At the time, I was a ‘gig’ mom – half stay-at-home and half consultant, applying for Phd programs and married to the leader of a Christian high school. Like other Evangelical women leaders, I was living a life that a few could relate to and many questioned. I learned to code-switch in discourse in my given contexts: consultant and academic, mom, and a school community’s first lady (a term jovially assigned). I avoided discussing gender in the latter two, on the surface because anything but positivity felt selfish, but really to avoid trouble, even good trouble. Yet my body and soul were keeping the score.
Now, at the Humanitarian Disaster Institute, we teach that leaders can’t give what they don’t have. The compassionate, brave, shrewd and steadfast responses required in our field cannot be manufactured. Rather, it is the product of an internal capacity, received and grown with God, cultivated, pruned, and passed along. In issues such as refugee care, humanitarian response, and gender-based violence for example, we see cases of leaders and organizations that devote themselves to mutuality between genders, as well as those who don’t. We analyze organizations that lack mutuality, be it due to ignorance, weakness or rebellion, which produce deformities, everything from benevolent patriarchy to horrific abuse. Yet the varied results come from the same necrotic roots.
In my vocation as a Christian scholar, I strive to be a leader who devotes myself to mutuality, modeling for my students what is historically understood as the communion of the saints. In the CACE seminar this spring, immersed in the care, wisdom and candor of my female and male colleagues, I received this truth again and more deeply than before: that it is by the grace of God that I am an Evangelical woman scholar. It is eternally meaningful, both for me and for others. As Paul taught, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.” (I Cor. 15:10)
And so at Wheaton we don’t advocate for mutuality between genders as the world advocates. “Identifying these sins as sins is not a matter of being politically correct, but being biblically correct” (Ryken, 2001, p. 11). It is a vision of Christ and His Kingdom in the Wheaton of some tomorrow that compels us: men and women’s shared destiny as co-heirs with Christ, mutually conformed to His likeness.
“Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba,Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” Romans 8:12-17.
Ryken, P.G., (Ed.). (2017). The Communion of the Saints. Living in Fellowship with the People of God. P&R Publishing.