The Converge Biblical Diversity team is spearheading a vital mission: uniting churches and communities around God’s heart on cultural and social issues. Under the dynamic leadership of Dr. Michael L. Henderson, VP of National Ministries, and President John K. Jenkins, the team is committed to advancing a movement that reflects the rich diversity of the body of Christ and embodies God’s love for all humanity. The leaders of this initiative, Pastor Rod Hairston and Pastor Jim Eaton, bring a wealth of experience and a shared passion for biblical diversity, each offering unique perspectives shaped by their personal and professional journeys.
Transcript
Rod: Well, we’re excited to be here to introduce ourselves to you. I’m Pastor Rod Hairston and I’m a church planter and Converge pastor of Messiah Community Church is where I pastor, and for the last almost 20 years, it’s where me and Sheri and our family have been serving our community in the Baltimore County area. And yeah, I’m excited about Biblical Diversity and what God has in store for Converge.
Jim: Yeah, it’s wonderful to be with you. I’m Pastor Jim Eaton and very close friend with this man right here. We really are honored to be involved in this journey on Biblical Diversity. And I’ve been a pastor for 30 years, but I’m presently a consultant in the areas of cultural intelligence and multi-faith engagement in the public square. And so, kind of bringing the whole pastoral story to everything. Plus, as I’ll share in a moment, I have had growing up experiences in different cultures, and my wife, Natalie and I, my best friend, we’ve lived in many different cultural contexts. I’m also in Maryland, in the DC suburbs. And so, we’re just really honored to be with you and share a little bit of our stories as we get started.
Rod: Yeah. You know, there’s so many places that we can start when we tell the story, but I think a great place for me to begin is just my gratitude for our President, President Jenkins, whom I’ve known for many years, we’ve known for many years.
Jim: Yeah.
Rod: And he invited us into this role, and I’m absolutely honored to serve under his leadership. And then when he asked us to serve together, I don’t think I would’ve said yes if I didn’t get to do this with you.
Jim: Same here, same here.
Rod :So this relationship that we’ve had for so many years makes jumping into this role so much more attractive and exciting. So that’s the place for me, right? That we get to do this together. We share some different passions. We were talking about this recently, right? You and the spaces that you’ve served in-
Jim: Yeah.
Rod: Have made a huge difference. And I’ve been focused on relationships for a long time. I like to tell people that I grew up studying relationships and having grown up in the projects of Virginia, raised by a single mom experiencing poverty. I got to watch relationship dynamics for all of my upbringing. And that’s what served me to become very engaged in coaching couples. And so, working with people in the executive spaces and their relationship lives, and then in the NFL as a chaplain for 14 years working on relationships. But the relationship space has proven to be very consistent with these issues of Biblical Diversity.
Jim: Yes.
Rod: And so, I’m excited to bring my learning from that space into this space so that we can help our movement really move forward in this area.
Jim: Amen. Amen. So my journey has been similar. It’s relationship based, but it has been thoroughly intercultural because when I was young, only six years old, my parents moved from the state of Indiana all the way across to the country of Bangladesh in South Asia. And so I was raised in a, what they now call a third culture environment, and came to the US when I was 16. So some call me a hidden immigrant. And so, it’s like I have multiple cultures constantly moving inside of me, kind of like a hybrid vehicle that got a gas engine, electric engine. I’m not confused, I just have options. And Natalie has had this supernatural calling practically her whole life growing up in Ohio. But we have served in South Africa, we’ve served in Germany and for over 20 years in the DC area. And we just love the whole relationship based ministry of moving among many different cultural entities, both whether it’s Hispanic or Asian, African American, Latin, whatever it is. And we’ve also, in the last number of years, also been very engaged among Muslims and Jews in the public square.
Rod: Wow. Yeah. I love that about you, Jim. I think it’s one of the things that made us click right away was your love for people, your engagement and relationships with people. My story, as you know, already growing up in the projects in Virginia experienced a lot of dynamics, right? One of those was that there were not very many people who didn’t look like me in my community unless they were coming to sell something or they were police officers.
Jim: Yeah.
Rod: And so, I was taught, all of my, you know, my early years, right? You cannot trust white people.
Jim: Hmm-mm.
Rod: So, you know, my three uncles, all of whom have passed away, but they would constantly rehearse this with me because they had such negative experiences. And I remember watching police officers sort of cruise through our neighborhood, and if guys were, you know, drinking beer or playing dice, right? They would get out and chase them. And my uncles would remind me, this is why you can’t trust the police. This is why you can’t trust white people. And then I began to hear this from my mom because she as a young African-American mom was working in the banking world and trying to make her way. And she often lamented not being able to have opportunities that others of her coworkers were getting. But I thought the world was so much better than what they were lamenting. And I was like, “Oh, it can’t be that bad. It’s not that challenging.” So in my sort of youthful optimism, I just kind of dismissed them and said, “No, it’s not that bad.” You know, they don’t realize that life has changed, the world has moved on. And so, as I started getting into like sixth, seventh grade and those things, we were part of that generation where busing was starting to happen. So I’m going to these schools where I’m now meeting people who don’t look like me, and I’m like, “Oh, this is really cool.” And I told you this story about my classmate who invited me to come to his house, and he was a white kid named Tony. And so, we leave the school grounds one day, we weren’t supposed to, ’cause I wanted to see how white people lived. I wanted to see what life was like for them. And we walked three blocks to his house. And, you know, he lives in a single family home. I lived in a project, you know, sort of row home. And I’m like, “Man, this is gonna be amazing. It’s gonna be different.” And I get to his house and I’m like, it’s really not that different. You know, it was just kind of normal. And then we walked back to school and I was like, “Okay.” So that sort of started shaping me like, “Okay, we’re not that different.”
Jim: Yeah.
Rod: Fast forward, I go off to school to Virginia Tech, and I’m very idyllic, right? I’m 18 years old, I’m driving through the mountains of Virginia, and this is gonna be an amazing experience. And I’ll never forget, Jim, one day, walking across campus with my backpack and these guys go cruising by in a pickup truck, and there’s about three of ’em hanging out the back of the truck. And they yell out to me, “Get out of here, nigger.” And I just froze right where I was. I couldn’t believe that I was experiencing what I was experiencing. And that awakened something in me that I could never forget. How real this is in the world that I was living in, and I’ll just add this last part that, you know, at that time I was getting involved with campus ministry and I was one of two African-American students involved in a movement of more than 300 students. And no one was having this conversation with me about race, racism and this challenge facing our nation, even in this large Christian movement. So those are some of the things that shaped me and made me think more deeply, like, what’s really going on and how do we actually bridge some of these gaps?
Jim: So good. My experience was very different, but at the same time, it has some parallels. And so growing up in Bangladesh, I was growing up in an entirely brown world, and I was a white minority. I was an American minority. I was a Christian minority, and that was normal for me. So I was constantly crisscrossing between having my friends with American friends and then my Bengali friends as I was growing up. And that was just normal life. And when I was 16 and we moved back to the US and that was kind of my permanent move to the US to finish high school, go on to college. And that’s when I went into culture shock because I had studied everything about America. I knew our history and I’d grown up with other Americans. So I had no accent, but I was fluent in English and Bengali, and I was emotionally fluent in at least two or three languages, cultural languages, but I just didn’t know it. And so I’m in America, and the whole racism thing just completely baffled me because I thought, we’re the country of the Statue of Liberty. We’re the country that liberated Europe at the end of World War II. Everyone wants to become an American. So what’s going on here? And so I just began to pursue two things. One was trying to figure myself out because I began to realize I was a blend of cultures. And so, there was all of that, but then at the same time, trying to figure out our own society, because I love this country. I love moving here, but it greatly grieved me and puzzled me at the distances, at some of the conversations even Christians would have with other ethnic groups. And so when Natalie and I began to date, and then we just knew God was calling us into ministry. We did an internship after we were married at the end of my seminary training, and we did a one year internship in Cape Town, South Africa. And that was when they were transitioning from apartheid to Mandela as the president. And God implanted a vision into our hearts during that year of multicultural ministry, of a ministry around righteousness and reconciliation, and helping bridge people together who may have thought all their lives that they have nothing in common, they can’t come together. And that’s been the calling we’ve pursued ever since, whether it was in Germany for a season and now in the DC area for many years. But it has been a journey that is delightful and painful. And it’s the kind of journey that just keeps putting you on your knees before God, because this is such something so close to his heart, right? And yet at the same time, here we are in our country where the polarization is at record levels. I just read the other day that the Anti-Defamation League said in the last year, Anti-Semitic acts have risen by 361% in one year.
Rod: Wow.
Jim: And the Muslim community is reporting record rises in Islamophobic things, particularly against young people. So it’s going all over the place and we just feel so thankful to God and to President Jenkins, Dr. Henderson, those who’ve invited us to take this journey. And I’m so thankful to be taking it with you because I feel the same way, to be able to do this with you is a great honor.
Rod: Well, we are in it together.
Jim: Amen.
Rod: We’re in it together. We say we’re better together. And I think our journeys of pain, of learning will serve us as we try to serve the Converge community. I think I’m most excited about taking what I’ve learned. It’s actually quite a marvel that I’m not bitter, Jim. We were talking over dinner recently about some of the other experiences. I think we have such amazing opportunities as the body of Christ to be the light in this area of Biblical Diversity. And we’ll talk in another video about why diversity is such a big deal to God.
Jim: Yes.
Rod: But I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities for sharing the gospel, right? We’re not accidents, we’re not coincidental in our different makeups, ethnically and racially. And I think we have a great opportunity here as a movement to really be serious about how we declare and share and express the gospel as we do it, thinking about all of these issues of diversity. What it comes down to for me is that the gospel must be credible to everyone. And that’s the thing that I have learned over the years and having shared my faith with people from many backgrounds, from many parts of the world, that the gospel must be shared in a way that says, we care about who you are and what your particular story is.
Jim: Oh, that’s so true. I resonate a 100%. I just think how we’re in this season now, and we’ve been in this season really as a country since our inception 400 years ago, really. But it’s just had different iterations. It’s had different seasons and outbreaks and different times where, let’s say for example, at the turn of the 19th, 20th century when the immigration rise was happening from Eastern Europe and America kind of went through this spasm, so to speak, of racism against different groups and it seemed to be going backwards. And right now, we’re in another type of season. Our demographics are changing. The nation is growing since 1965, which leveled the playing field for immigrants. We have people coming literally from all over the world on an equal footing. Whereas before 1965, it was heavily favored toward European immigration. And so now, we have literally the peoples of the world coming here. And we have this amazing opportunity to bring the gospel, and we will talk about this in another video, is here are some of the scriptures where God opens his heart and says, this is what I want to see in the church and what we have an opportunity to do for a watching world. And it is true. I’m in so many contexts all the time now where I’m among nonbelievers, non-Christians who were talking to me about my faith. And one of the great questions that’s frequently asked is, as a white evangelical, why do you seem to have so much difficulty in the political arena? And why do you seem to have such a difficult time with working with other cultures? And I think we really do have a prime opportunity. It’s not an option. It’s not out there far away from our mission. It’s really right at the core of our mission. Because when people sense that you truly love them, you honor them, you respect them, you respect their stories, their cultures, their backgrounds, everything they bring to the table, you’re saying bring your full self to this table, that transforms everything.
Rod: Man, I don’t think I could have said that any better. What you said that I heard was the value of seeing people.
Jim: Hmm-mm.
Rod: And I remember songs like, “People Need the Lord” of the old Steve Green song. I was kind of raised on that in campus ministry and learning that the gospel is for everyone. And yet seeing in times, like in the ’90s, right? When I was moving to Los Angeles to do ministry at UCLA, seeing this upheaval with the Rodney King incident and all of the riots in LA that we’re really missing something, right? Because the division, as you shared, like a lot of my white evangelical friends had a very different conversation like, what’s wrong with these people? What’s wrong with those people over there, down there, as opposed to how do we connect with their pain?
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: How do we connect with their pain? How do we understand what’s hurting them? What’s going on in their lives? And I think when we keep our hearts on the mission, the great commission, we have to care about what people are going through and who demonstrated that better than Jesus going through Samaria.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: And we’ll get into a lot of the other biblical passages.
Jim: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Rod: But I think this is a great opportunity for us. I’m grateful to be a part of Biblical Diversity because I think it is both biblical in God’s heart, right? And we get to do this together. We get to help our movement really begin to connect with people, see people bring the gospel in a credible way as we, you know, we don’t have to ignore people’s pain. We can actually understand people’s pain and then love them, care about them, and promote the truth of Jesus.
Jim: Amen. Could not have said it better.