Healing in the Messy Middle—How to Transform Churches, Families, & Communities with Dr. Monique Gadson
Episode Notes
Have you ever felt like you’ve grown and healed, but the people around you haven’t?
In today’s episode, I’m joined by my friend and therapist, Dr. Monique Gadson, for a powerful conversation about how to ignite change not only within ourselves but also within the systems we're deeply connected to—whether that's our families, churches, or work environments. Here’s what we cover:
Here’s what we cover:
1. Dr. Monique’s insights from her work as a therapist within a church setting
2. How to be "in" but not "of" a system
3. The difference between toxic cultures and imperfect human gatherings
4. How kindness can sometimes hinder growth
5. The effects of culture-wide PTSD
6. Practical ways to find and nurture hope
Resources:
- And The Church Said podcast with Dr. Monique Gadson
- Episode 33 and Episode 60 with Dr. Monique Gadson
- Instagram: @drmoniquesmithgadson
- drmoniquesmithgadson.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 33: People Pleasing & Developing Your Own Inner Compass—Thoughts on Depression, Mental Health & the Church, and Finding Hope in Dark Places w/ Dr. Monique Gadson
- Episode 60: How to Make New Friends, Identify Red & Green Flags, & Extract Yourself From an Unhealthy Situation w/ Aundi Kolber & Dr. Monique Gadson
- Episode 73: True Belonging vs. Groupthink, Cliques, & Trying to Fit In—How to Belong to Others While Staying True To Yourself
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here this week. This is our very last episode in this series, “Therapists on Therapy”. I've really enjoyed the conversations in this series, getting to know different therapists, different resources, different areas of expertise. We'll have many more series like this because I love having other therapists on the podcast.
But for today's episode, I wanted to introduce you to a dear friend of mine who has a really unique background working as a therapist in church-based settings. So when we think about therapy, we often think about it as an individual endeavor. You're struggling. Something's not working in your life. You don't like the way you feel, or you're struggling in a relationship, so you decide to seek the support of a therapist.
Now, a typical therapy session, as most of us know, you go to an office or you log on virtually, and you meet one on one with your therapist. You have a dedicated space each week devoted to focusing on how to heal a wound or how to effectively cope with a tough situation or how to communicate better, how to treat anxiety or depression.
You do all of this in the privacy of that individual relationship. But here's the thing–as a therapist, we're working with somebody individually. We're equipping them. We're helping them get healthier. We're helping them think differently. We're helping them discover new strategies, new ways to protect themselves, new ways to set boundaries, new ways to understand a situation.
But then you go back into the systems around you. You go back into a family system. You go back into a church system. You go back into a work system. You go back into systems of other people and you're expected to apply these new skills, but other people don't always respond to the changes within you in ways that are helpful.
Sometimes they do, a lot of times they don't. I often think, how do we also change the system? How do we also tackle the problems that exist in systems around us? My guest today, Dr. Monique Gadson, has worked for decades within systems. She started her work within a church community and now works within an academic institution, where she works to bring healing, not only to individuals, but to entire systems.
As a consulting therapist, Dr. Monique has worked for decades with churches and organizations in leadership development, risk management, and establishing emotionally and mentally healthy environments. She holds a PhD in marriage and family therapy and two master's degrees in Christian psychological studies and clinician mental health counseling.
She hosts the podcast called And the Church Said, where she discusses church and culture from a Christian counseling perspective, and she is an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.
Monique has been on the podcast two times before, back in Episode 33, where she talked about overcoming people pleasing and some of her thoughts on depression, and with Aundi Kolber in Episode 60 on how to make new friends and identify red and green flags. She has such a wealth of wisdom. I loved this conversation. We talk so candidly about what it means to heal systems, because the truth is, God designed us to exist in communities with other people.
It's so important to think about not only how we heal ourselves, but how we also bring healing to the communities that we're a part of. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Monique Smith Gadson.
***
Monique, I am so thrilled to get to have this conversation with you. I get to have lots of conversations with you, so it's really fun for me to record this conversation so that other people can hear it as well. Thank you so much for being here with me today.
Monique: You know I love being with you. You're wonderful. Your podcast is one of my favorites anyway, so it's really fun to be able to record for one of my favorite podcasts and one of my favorite people, so thank you.
Alison: One of the things that is so interesting about your background, Monique, is you are a therapist, but your work, almost from the get go, was within a church context. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that looked like? You are really pioneering on the front end; you set up shop as a therapist within a church. How did that happen?
Monique: Yeah. Not only did I set up shop in a church, but let's be very specific–in the black church when it was not necessarily the trending thing that it somewhat is now. Truly a God thing. I always felt called to the black church specifically.
Growing up as a PK, the black church has been central in my life, from then until now, and I had come to understand it felt like there was this void in the church, in terms of us talking about mental and emotional struggles that people were experiencing. So I went to graduate school, trained as a professional clinician, and was talking with my pastor one day about what I had done in graduate school.
And, before I know it, they are asking me to come and be a part of the staff at the church. Yeah, I had the opportunity to really cultivate what a counseling ministry/having a professional clinician on staff looks like in this particular context.
Alison: Your experience and your expertise is so interesting–having the “both and” of the individual training, the clinical training, the background, but being within a church context. What do you see as the pros and cons of being situated as a counselor within a church community?
Monique: My social location from the years gone by, was having to help people understand that these two do marry well together, counseling and faith. Historically, when I started out, there was a lot of skepticism, a lot of suspicion. It felt as though there was this attempt to brainwash.
Being housed within a church gave people the opportunity, especially over the context of the numbers of years that I found myself situated there, it would give people the opportunity to understand that it does not have to be in direct opposition, one to the other. It is very much biblical for us to attune to our mental and our emotional needs.
Not to cast shade, if you will, on however pastors choose to present their sermons, but sometimes when the context is just, here is the biblical passage and I'm preaching it and perhaps not hone in on the emotional state of this individual, or not look at how this person's mental health suffered. It may be the tendency to not see that, if it's not focused on more specifically.
So that was a pro of being able to be in that context. One of the cons would be having to understand that when we're thinking more systemically, you can have an individual that is situated within a community where sometimes the work that the individual is attempting to do for their own betterment of their emotional and mental health might not be supported in the overall community.
Let's see. That was a con at times in spaces, not overall, but there are things that we would try to promote in terms of emotional and mental health that some people would question from a spiritual perspective. You talk about spiritual bypassing. You know how some things are misinterpreted. “If you had faith, then this would not be”.
So there are some places where those were problematic. Then you'll get the person to come back that would repeat the cliche that they've heard–if I'm too blessed to be stressed, then why am I feeling this way? I’m having to think about the environment that we are going to send people back into.
Alison: Okay. So let's talk about this for a second, because this is a dichotomy that really happens on every level. We have therapy, you go in, you're getting healing resources for your individual healing, but then you have these systems and a system could be a church, it could be a family, it could be an institution, it could be a place of work, it could be any group of people. We need to be parts of systems; we don't exist in isolation.
So inevitably, you go back into a system and especially when we think about the context of the church where there's so much overlap, if the messages within the system are not supporting or reinforcing what you're learning in therapy, it creates dissonance for the person and also for the therapist at times.
So let's talk about it on two levels. Number one, for the individual, you're experiencing this dissonance. I'm hearing one thing over here from my therapist, but then I'm at church and they're saying something else. I see what you're saying. That could be really magnified if your counselor is literally within your church setting and they're not totally aligned. I guess I'm curious, as a therapist, it seems to me that when you're within that context, you're both thinking of your individual clients, but you're also thinking about how to help this system be a safer place for folks who are hurting. Did you have the power to affect some of those changes?
Monique: That's my hope and my prayer. A lot of the work included, how do I impact the system? And it would look simple. For example, in our grief support group, people are coming and they find themselves on this grief journey. I would talk to the participants quite often about how we often find ourselves in the middle of a grief journey, not only as a participant, but also as an educator.
We're having to say to people sometimes, that's not helpful when you say whatever it is that you say. So especially in the case of a person who experienced miscarriage, I noticed (more so even personally, as well as professionally) people would say, “something might have been wrong with the baby. That was God's way of protecting”.
And you're thinking, what in the world does this even mean? So you would hear those types of comments, and we would actually talk about that sometimes in the support groups, where we are saying, these things land in ways that are so not helpful.
We need to think about how it is impacting us, and to empower ourselves to say to other people why that is not helpful. Perhaps even what would be a better thing to say or not to say in those moments. So that's one example of ways that we are thinking, if you can impact the system, and we know from thinking about systems in nature, that if one person enters, one person exits, the system changes.
So if we can get a person to enter that system who is better educated, better informed, then we are looking to impact change even in that way.
Alison: It’s so interesting to think about a support group within a larger church context. The overall system, the church system, isn't going to be perfect. People are going to say things. It's like a giant family. People are going to say things that rub you the wrong way. The pastor's going to say things that you don't even agree with, or that hurt.
We don't expect a family to be perfect. We don't expect a church family to be perfect. There's toxicity, there's toxic cultures, and that's one thing. But then there's imperfect human gatherings of people, which is every single church on this planet. We're talking about that category in this group. But what's interesting about what you're saying is when you have a support group or a counselor within that context, there's a way in which I could see where it'd be harder, but there's also a way in which suddenly, you've gone through something really hard. You've lost a family member.
People are saying things that aren't helpful to you within the church family, but you've got this other subgroup within the family where you can process that, where you can get support, where people do get you, where you might even feel buoyed up to go back out into their larger family and say, hey, that's not helpful, because you're not alone.
There's a way in which that subsystem creates more health within the larger system. It's like a large extended family where there's different pockets within the family of varying degrees of safety.
Monique: That's a beautiful way that you describe it, and the hope is, even as you were talking, I was thinking about allergy shots. Yes. Probably because I soon have to take them. But anyway, when you think about even the concept of the allergy shot, you are being injected with these things that you are allergic to that are supposed to build your system up over time to calm it. It's oh, okay, I don't have to blow up every time this particular foreign substance, if you will, enters into my system.
Like you're saying, it is not necessarily the toxic system. But if it's okay, helping people to understand how to better support a person, to really understand that everything does not necessarily have a spiritual response to it or needs even a spiritual response to it, it doesn't have to be spiritualized away, when we can get a few individuals who understand that and who can demonstrate that with another individual, that is a way that we can begin that process of trying to create the environment, the larger system, to become, more healthy.
Alison: Monique, it feels to me like the trajectory of your body of work, even what you're doing now at a graduate school setting, from the inside of an organization, you're trying to introduce or expose some of these micro-toxins, these micro things that hurt little by little. Through that, you’re creating a healthier system. That's hard work.
When you're embedded within that system as a therapist, where you're really trying to go in and help that individual, you're simultaneously aware of how the system is creating harm, even at the best of circumstances. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a two-front battle. How do you sustain your own spiritual and emotional health through that?
Monique: You know, I talk to people like you, haha. You're grateful for people who get it, who understand that. I have that opportunity to go and say that this is hard. I don't know that people necessarily get it. It is exhausting and it is hard when you enter into a system, and you understand the need to differentiate who you are, even within that system.
Many years ago, of course, then I was a whole lot younger as a clinician. So over the years, I've thankfully gathered more experience, more wisdom, but you do understand that you have to have a sense of who you are as it relates to this particular system. As much as you can, how is it that you think about impacting the change without being lured into that homeostasis that the system is going to want to maintain?
So back when I said a minute ago, anytime someone new enters or exits, the system changes.
Remembering that it's okay that things are a little bonkers right now. All pieces of the system usually are going to operate in such a way to bring that balance and that calm, if you will, back. Whatever that norm is for that particular system. That is what they're wanting to bring back into existence.
When you enter into a system and when you are trying to bring about change and when you are having to name things, when you are having to call out and identify the factors that create anxiety within the system, of course that is going to cause the system to become anxious.
When that happens, then the system says, hey, you are the foreign particle. How is it that we can deal with you so that our anxiety can ease? Because that's going to be the nature of the system. The person, such as myself, who has to embed in the system while also trying to bring about a level of change within that system, we have to be so very mindful that things that come to us are about us and also are not about us.
We have to understand that it's survival anxiety that is being stirred within a system, meaning this system treats that particular entity as something or someone that needs to be annihilated, if you will, to be able to bring the system back to a level of calm. So I have to be mindful. This is why we have to enter into the system knowing what the assignment is.
I've said this several times over the years in the various systems that I have found myself: a lot of prayer, a lot of journaling. Journaling is my thing. I prescribe it anytime and everywhere I can. But for me, those are the tools that I definitely have to rely on. Praying and journaling and being in community with people who understand how I am being adversely impacted working within those systems.
To be able to be reminded, this is my assignment, go in, do your assignment, step out when you need to, take a break, take a rest, dust off your equipment, put it back on and get back at it. That for me is how I usually have to approach it. I think about David in Scripture and I remember reading this not too long ago and actually journaled quite a bit about it.
When he was going to battle Goliath, Saul tried to put on David his armor.David was like, this isn't working for me. And so he took it off. He goes and he chooses his slingshot and the stones. So he's like, this is me. This is what I need to be able to do this assignment that I feel like the Lord has sent me to do. We have to be very mindful, again, of who we are, especially in the Lord, and what is it that He has called us to do, to be able to get in there and do our work.
You're not going to go in and not be unscathed whatsoever. No way, but we do have to have an understanding of our assignment so that we are able to stay focused on the task at hand.
Alison: This is why I wanted to have you on the podcast. This is what I love about you, this work that you're doing so faithfully to disrupt, distress, and introduce anxiety into a system in order to change the system, so the system will be healthier for the individuals that it tries to serve, which is the goal!
We're not even talking about completely toxic systems. We're really talking about, for the most part, healthy, but broken human systems.This is what is so nuanced about change. To the listener who's at a church where they're like, I love this church, it’s not toxic. And by toxic, when you're someone like you who's going in and you're disrupting and you're naming things and you're calling out things and you're saying, hey, I don't think this is quite right.
You're getting pushback. It's hard. It's not fun, but you're also not getting gaslit, you're not getting shut down, you're not getting exiled. That would be toxic. That would be abusive and it would be untenable. Sometimes it's a fine line. But for the most part, it's like the system has invited my voice and they want to hear from me. They're listening. There is enough of a relational trust.
This is why I wanted to try to have this conversation. It's a hard conversation to have because we're talking about that messy middle, where it's not this, you gotta get out because this is toxic.
It's also not, I love everything about this community. It's meeting all of my needs. It's that murky middle where there's some good, but there's some things that are hard, which is so much of our experience.
This is really what you do. You go into that kind of place and try to introduce change, one brave step at a time, like David with his slingshot. It's so profound, Monique, what you do, and for the listener, whether you're a therapist or not, when you show up in a system and you name things and you call out things, it's not always instantly gratifying, but it is that good, hard work of bringing change.
There is a cost to it.
Monique: There is a high cost for sure. Even back to what you were saying, it's not always necessarily toxic/abusive, but it can be, like you say, such a fine line, that I am saying, oooh, do you even understand how close you are tethering to it potentially being toxic and abusive?
Because of this messy middle, I think one of the hardest concepts for me to get people to understand is about being kind. Okay, being kind, yes, versus what could be the other side of that coin, maybe rude. Of course, I would prefer you to be kind. And also, I am saying when it comes to sometimes having to enact change or a change, kindness doesn't cut it.
Kindness can be a scapegoat, if you will, preventing transformation from taking place. Transformation is going to call upon us to be uncomfortable. It's going to call for us to have to look at self in the mirror in ways that more than likely, will uptick the anxiety. But if we don't have the threshold to deal with that, then we might resort back to, let's be kind and be nice to people, and we'll be hospitable.
We'll open up a space for you to come in, which, hear me say, I'm not minimizing that. But if we're talking about what might be needed, which will include a transformation to take place, which is going to require, as you're saying that messy middle, we don't get to do that without being touched in some ways and touched in ways that again, probably will increase our anxiety.
Alison: Yeah, it's not always comfortable, and kindness, to your point, can mask this false peace. As opposed to, ooh, I don't like that. I don't really like what she's saying. Which again, the more honest and sincere might be, I don't know if there's anything I can do about it. I don't like it. It's hard to sit with. It's uncomfortable.
Just sitting with that, which as clinicians, we're trained to sit with, but a lot of folks aren't, and that's how change occurs in any kind of system, in a family, in a church is sitting with, ooh, I don't like what you're saying. I like you. I don't like what you're saying. This might not have even been what I really wanted when I asked for your input. You're actually giving me real input. Let me sit with that discomfort.
Monique: Whether it's a family, if it's the parent having to say the hard thing to the kid, or yes, in this day and time, yes, young adults are reflecting back and maybe parents were not perfect. Again, not necessarily saying toxic, abusive, that's a totally different context and yes, it requires, a different kind of approach, but yeah, there are some times as parents, we need to hear from children like, okay, oh wow, I didn't realize the way I said it or the way I was, was that problematic.
Whatever the case, it causes discomfort. The mirror has been held into your face and you're like, whoo, okay, don't like what I see there. But it is apparent that something needs to change. So in that family system, yes, that can happen in the church setting having to even be mindful when we think in Revelation, the letter to the churches.
I'm thinking about the church of Laodicea. And, the word says that, if you're not hot, if you're not cold, if you're lukewarm, I'm going to spew you out.
So there is something about saying either you're for the word of God or you're not. That's really the way it is. But to hear things being proclaimed in a church setting, whether we personally might agree or not, but it's lining up with what the Word of God says, it may make us uncomfortable.
Alison: Yeah.
Monique: But that's how this transformation is going to take place. If we're saying we're trying to be a thing or we're wanting to be more welcoming or more diverse or more whatever the case may be, okay, the reality of how that might have to happen versus the ideal. You're going to have to spend some time in that messy middle. We're in this time in our culture where we are so conditioned to quick fixes.
So much so that we don't have, again, this threshold to say, you're right, and it might require more than some bandaging to make it appear to be what it needs to be. So whatever that system is, it can play out in different ways.
Alison: Yeah. We want the quick fix. We did it. Look, we checked all the boxes. We're now a healthy culture, we're healthy, or folks are tearing the whole thing down. I'm out. Sometimes that's needed, but so much of change, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I actually heard Trevor Noah say this on a podcast recently. I thought it was really interesting.
He was talking to Adam Grant and they were talking about groupthink. In religious cultures. Trevor Noah was saying when he grew up, his mom, a faithful believer, very religious, they went to church all the time, what Trevor Noah was saying was that the paradox of his mom was that she was very loyal, very devout, deeply held beliefs, and she constantly disagreed with the sermon and said, I didn't agree with him on that.
I didn't agree with him on that. I don't think that's right. As a kid, he learned what we call cognitive complexity. You can hold a couple of different things, which to me, I was listening to it thinking, that's a tiny little thing where someone from within is still retaining some individuality, some differentiation. I'm a differentiated person within this setting. That's again, very nuanced. So many of us think, if I'm part of this institution, I have to be sold to everything that they say, or I have to be out.
You and I've had this conversation. What does it mean to be within? It's funny, Monique, we talk about this biblically. You said this to me recently: be in the world, but not of the world. We think about that primarily in the context of secular cultures. Be in it, but not of it. But the truth is, it also can apply to our faith communities.
Be in it, but not completely subsumed by it. Keep your own presence of mind. Keep your own discernment. Keep your own cognitive complexity. Disagree. Agree to disagree on some topics. That's what you're trying to do in this very subversive, subtle way within contexts, is encourage that kind of mentality of, we're all in with Jesus.
We're all in with Jesus. We're not all in with a gathering of imperfect humans, necessarily. We don't leave our individuality at the door.
Monique: We don't. When you talked about the tearing down, I do believe that there is a season. Scripture even speaks of there being a time to tear down and there is also a time to build up. What we failed to move to or toward, let's tear it down. But what is it supposed to build back up into?
Now, if we're trying to build it back into where, as you're saying, I can be of it and in it and it's all like me and I am all like it, then that's problematic, because the diversity in how we're created. God did not intend for us to be the same.
The hard work that we are facing today is yes, how do we learn to differentiate? How do I look at you and say, you're going to have a different opinion than I have? It does not mean that your difference of opinion is going to equate to my annihilation. Because that's where we jump to kind of automatically.
And then hear me say this. A lot of stuff has happened in the last, I don't even want to know what number to put on the years, but in the last couple of years, it's a lot. We are in very polarized times. I would say that we are all, as a collective, dealing with a post-traumatic something.
I would say it's beyond the pandemic. The pandemic is scapegoated into it. It was large enough of an event in our lives. So I'm definitely not minimizing it, but I would also probably make an argument that there was a lot that existed prior to this pandemic that would now factor into some of this post traumatic whatever it is that we are experiencing.
So when we are hearing rhetoric that will give us the idea that if not for this group of people or this thing, then this would be the outcome, we're going to be pitted against one another. Things have been flattened to the point that it's an either-or in our minds.
No messy middle! It's an either- or. That in and of itself is going to, I would argue, create a survival anxiety because nothing can really be watered down to that. But we're trying to make it fit. And it's not fitting. So then we are beset with this survival anxiety.
I observe it in families. I observe it in classrooms. I observe it in church. I observe it in institutions. When we think about what we do from a clinical perspective, we understand that the bodies are activated and triggered, and now in survival mode. When we're there, we already know that all of our rationalizing has gone offline. We're in fight, flight, survival, freeze, fawning, all of those collectively.
Alison: How do you find your way, navigating differences, navigating healthy differentiation, within a community context? It requires that groundedness, that calm nervous system, that ability to hold nuance, that individual work that we've been doing, but we now have to bring into these community spaces.
Because we need them. I really agree with you. Culturally, we're seeing this on so many levels. You would think it's easy–I'll go to therapy and not go to church cause I'll get my needs met. I'll experience love and attunement but I don't have to deal with all the stuff you and I are talking about, and yet we need to figure out how to find our place within a group of people.
We do, that's part of our design. You're right, we are in need of a new way of thinking about how to be together. What we're really getting at here is this: how do we be a collective of individuals, which includes differing beliefs and different cultural experiences.
You and I talk about this. We've had very different experiences. You've had different experiences in a black church and yet sometimes when you and I talk, there's more overlap than differences in doctrinal issues. And, there are differences where we come down in how we view scripture, how we view this, how we view that, there's differences in personalities and styles, and all of those things matter.
But the reality is, it's messy to figure out how to come together in a group, honoring these differences on different levels, honoring our individuality, our individual personhood, our individual beliefs, while simultaneously creating a group, creating a whole where we come together.
I'm not sure we've scratched the surface of how to do that. And so with that sort of backdrop, I'm curious, what brings you hope?
Monique: What brings me hope. So even as you were talking, maybe I can connect those two because as you talk about us as individuals living in this diversified world where, more than likely, there are going to be more people that do not look like us, think like us, vote like us, talk like us, or dress like us, or whatever the case may be, eat like us, fill in the blank.
But when we understand that we can create a microcosm, that can eventually impact the macrocosm. That is what gives me hope. We have these conversations. We have conversations, the two of us, and we have conversations with other people. And to be able to experience that, as a microcosm, gives me hope that when we are done talking and these individuals go and live their lives according to how we did in that group, that gives me hope.
I say this to students–if we don't see or if we ourselves are not injecting into society what we need to see, not what we want to see, because sometimes we can be skewed by our own wants. But what we need to see, even when we think more scripturally, in terms of loving neighbor, in terms of understanding that every individual that has breath is an image bearer of God himself, if we're not injecting that into society, then I would truly be hopeless.
But to be able to experience it and to know that there are individuals who are going out into other systems, I'm praying and believing that they are impacting those systems in ways that the system may not like, you're shaking things up and we don't want to be shaken up. We want to be as we are. Then I have hope. That gives me hope.
Alison: I love that. That could be the whole theme of this episode for the listener. Go out and be that image bearer and bring goodness and honesty and authenticity into whatever space you're going into. That is how you will begin to change that system. Tell me, Monique, as we wind down here, these are two questions I like to ask all my guests.
What would you say to that 20 something year old you that was starting a counseling practice in the midst of a church? What would you say to her now?
Monique: I would say to her now, you were on assignment. You were on task. When you don't have a blueprint, if you will, to follow, when you really are having to follow what you pray is the leading of the Holy Spirit, when you have very few who are in agreement or who are pushing against or pushing back, you can doubt what you're doing.
But when you have many years behind you and are able to reflect back, you know that you were on assignment and you were on task. That's what I would tell her.
Alison: That's beautiful. What's bringing out the best of you right now?
Monique: Whew. What is bringing out the best in me right now? I think, to be honest, the hard stuff, the things that it would be easier again to just bypass. In this stage of life, stage of spiritual growth. The complexity of the diversity of the world is bringing out the best in me including having to go deeper into that messy middle.
Alison: That messy middle. I love that. You are an absolute gem. I honor the decades of work you have put into changing cultures, changing systems, whether in the black church, whether now in a more predominantly white institution.
You go in, you take the assignment, and you live it. I could not be more grateful for who you are and for how you have honored that assignment that God has given you. You are beloved. You are welcome here. Anytime we want to learn from your wisdom, where can my listeners find your work who want to connect with you and learn more?
Monique: Yeah, so I play around on Instagram at times. Dr. Monique Smith Gadson, so that's the Instagram handle there. The website would be the same, drmoniquesmithgadson.com.
Alison: All right, you've got a podcast, called “And the Church Says”, and there's some great episodes on it for folks who want to listen to you. You've got some great conversations in there. Go back and hear that. Thank you so much for giving us your time and your wisdom today. I'm so grateful for you.
Monique: Thanks for having me, Alison.