Dr. Michell Temples serves as the Dr. Vernon C. Grounds Endowed Chair of Christian Counseling at Denver Seminary, where she teaches in both the master’s and doctoral counseling programs. She earned her PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision from Regent University and her EdD from the University of West Georgia, along with an MS in Rehabilitation Counseling from Georgia State University. A Licensed Professional Counselor in Colorado, Tennessee, and Georgia, Dr. Temple brings nearly two decades of experience in higher education and clinical practice. Her research centers on resilience, trauma, vocational rehabilitation, and the thoughtful integration of spirituality into evidence-based counseling. She has published in peer-reviewed journals on ethics education, rehabilitation counseling, spiritually integrated therapies, and resilience, and has contributed chapters to various books. She also maintains a private online counseling practice serving adults.
In this wide-ranging and timely conversation, Michell reflects on resilience, technology, and the fragile work of human connection in an age of polarization. Moving through themes of interrelatedness, humility, vulnerability, and relational legacy, the interview explores what it means to truly see life from another’s perspective—to “suspend disbelief” for the sake of empathy and community. Along the way, Michell cautions against dogmatism and cultural certainty, reflects on the promises and perils of digital trust, and offers practical, hope-filled guidance for pastors and leaders seeking to cultivate communities shaped not by fear, but by compassion, humility, and eschatological love.
Names mentioned:
Milton Bennett, Everett L. Worthington Jr, Angela M. Sabates
Matthew: Thank you for sharing some of your time with us. Maybe to get us started, I’ll begin with a rather long thought. I keep thinking about how, as members of the body of Christ, we perceive differently. Scripture gives us that image of being eyes and ears and hands, each with its own sensitivity. And if we’re really going to function as a body, I have to be willing to say, “Okay, I’m seeing one thing, but you’re hearing something I can’t hear. Tell me what you’re hearing.” That requires trust. It means admitting that my perception isn’t the only valid one. But in the Church today, that feels complicated. We have hierarchies, and sometimes those hierarchies are abused. We have divisions, and sometimes even common sense itself feels uncommon. So I wonder: how do we actually recover that shared perception—this interrelatedness—without falling into either certainty or chaos?
Michell Temple: It’s funny you bring that up, because every single thread you’re naming is something I was literally thinking about this morning on my drive here. I have a research project under review that should be published soon, and preparing to present it has made me hyper-aware of how timely all of this feels. What we’re seeing—certainly in the U.S., but also across the global Church—is that our sense of interrelatedness has really eroded. We’ve splintered into ideological, denominational, social, and political enclaves. And all that division does, quite frankly, is give us socially acceptable ways to perpetuate our own sinfulness. It pulls us away from the heart of the Greatest Commandment: to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
This ties directly to what you said about perception. There’s a whole body of literature on self-awareness and perceiving others, and the fascinating thing is that human beings don’t need much to be capable of understanding another person’s experience. According to Milton Bennett’s developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, the main requirement is simply this: we have to suspend our disbelief. I first learned that phrase in the performing arts. When you’re acting, you can’t enter a character’s world until you allow yourself to believe that their experiences—even the absurd ones—could be possible. You have to say, “This could be me. I’m not above this.”
But here’s the key distinction for real relationships: suspending disbelief doesn’t mean you become the other person. It means you sit down beside them—like you’re watching the same movie—and let them tell you what’s on the screen. You don’t grab the remote and say, “No, that scene didn’t happen,” or “Let me edit that part for you.” It’s their movie. Your job is to see it from their seat.
Joy: Oh, that’s so good: “It’s their movie.”
MT: Right? You’d think this would be easy, but it’s surprisingly hard. Genuine interrelatedness requires at least three things.
First, it requires an honest assessment of oneself and of the world. Life is hard. People can be difficult. We all have blind spots. Second, it requires humility—and I love Worthington’s definition here: an accurate self-assessment, a modest ego, and a focus on the other. Third, it requires compassion—which, contrary to popular belief, is not always pleasant. There’s research showing that compassion involves real discomfort. Think of those infomercials about suffering in other countries: many people watch just long enough to feel something, maybe donate if they can, and then change the channel. They’re not cruel—they’re overwhelmed. Compassion asks you to feel that discomfort and still move toward the person to help relieve their suffering.
But when compassion lacks honesty and humility, it becomes hierarchical. That’s when we fall into what’s often called a savior mentality—where the marginalized group becomes the project of the more resourced group. It’s superiority dressed in virtue. So the question becomes this: when you see suffering, are you watching the movie from their seat, or are you still watching it from your own? Because if you’re watching from your own, it’s not really compassion—it’s projection.
Which brings me back to your original question. If we’re serious about being the body of Christ, we have to reclaim that middle space, that shared perception, where no single group gets to say, “We see the whole picture.” Interrelatedness means recognizing that we all bear responsibility. We all bring partial perception. And we all have to be willing to sit down together, suspend our disbelief, and say, “Tell me what you see.”
Matthew: Speaking of seeing and responsibility, there’s this company that started maybe twenty or twenty-five years ago called Demotivators. They make these parody posters—kind of the anti–“hang in there!” inspirational stuff. I’m not a pessimistic person, but sometimes I love them because they cut through all the fake cheeriness. One of my favorites shows this perfect little raindrop hitting a pond, and the line underneath says, “No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood.”
MT: Oh, that’s good. I like that a lot.
Matthew: Right? And I think about that sometimes—the way little things add up, especially when groups of people are convinced they hold the whole truth. That feels like part of the challenge we’re facing now.
MT: Absolutely. When I hear polarized thinking—when people speak as if truth belongs entirely to their group—I pull back. Because if humans are the vessels God uses to speak truth, then we have to remember that humans are also, well… human. We’re fallible, we’re biased, we’re limited. Even believers. So when I hear that “we alone have the truth” posture, I just think, Oh no… be careful.
Joy: Right. And given your field—interrelatedness, dialogue, bias, communication—you’re watching all of this from a different vantage point than people who are simply trying to survive the demands of everyday life. You have time to observe, to read history, to think ahead. And sometimes that can honestly be jarring. You start wondering where we’re heading, how this will affect our children, and what kind of world they’ll inherit if things don’t change. And at the same time, you need some grounding—not cheap optimism, but that deeper “God is still in charge” kind of hope.
MT: Exactly. It’s a both-and. One of the gifts of following Christ is that we can acknowledge the suffering in the world—because there is a lot of it—while also recognizing that good is still happening right now. Holding both of those realities regulates our emotional life. It keeps us from sinking into despair or floating into denial. It anchors us in that Pauline contentment: “Whatever circumstance I’m in, I am content.”
Beyond that is our eschatological hope—that in the end, God will make His home here. That’s the frame I’m working with in some of my writing: the idea that the believer’s task is to let God be God, which means engaging the world through what I call eschatological love—loving people as if Christ has already returned.
Matthew: That’s really beautiful.
MT: To love like that, we have to do two things. First, we withhold final judgment about people. Those sweeping statements—“You’ll never change,” “God’s given up on you”—those simply aren’t ours to make. Second, we practice long-suffering, which is the moment-by-moment work of offering grace again and again. Grace is unearned favor, and giving it requires serious ego management. Everything in us wants to say, “You hurt me—I’m done,” or “We disagree politically—I’m out.” But eschatological love says, “I will remain in relationship with you, even when it’s hard, even when we don’t agree, because I’m loving you as if the Lord is already here.”
It’s a lot of work. It’s honesty, humility, compassion—on repeat. And I’ll say something that may feel uncomfortable: right now in the U.S. and elsewhere, the dominant group—white Americans, particularly those within white or Christian nationalist movements—are experiencing a real sense of threat. There’s this language about the “great replacement.” And while I fundamentally disagree with that narrative, I do understand the fear underneath it. If you’ve been at the top of a hierarchy and believe you’re losing status, that is genuinely frightening.
Understanding that fear does not mean validating the hierarchy. It means I can say, “You are not being replaced. No one is taking what belongs to you.” The real issue is a scarcity mindset—the belief that there isn’t enough dignity, enough influence, enough space for everyone. As long as someone believes that lie, oppressive systems will continue. So when students with very different or even troubling views come to me, I try to hold that same dialectical stance: both-and. They can share openly. I don’t shame them. And I also gently challenge the scarcity mindset. Because if I’m loving them as if the Lord is already here, then I know—deep down—there is enough. God is enough. That’s where the hope comes from.
Joy: Before we shift topics, I’d like to come back to three themes you hinted at in an earlier conversation—reimagining community, navigating virtual relationships, and this idea of relational legacy. They feel closely connected. Are those the right places to linger?
MT: In a way, we’ve already been in that territory. Whether you’re gathering in person or online, the core question is the same: what kind of relational legacy are we cultivating? Let me give you an example. When my husband finished his doctoral degree, we hosted a small celebration. I remember looking around our living room and thinking, This is beautiful. The people in that room were wildly different from one another—racially, culturally, across generations. Nothing homogenous about it. And I realized that this is my children’s relational inheritance. They’re growing up learning how to relate across difference. That’s a skill. That’s a legacy.
Just this week, I noticed something else. As we were leaving the house, I saw our neighbors hosting gatherings too. But every group I passed was homogenous—racially, culturally, or in worldview. And I found myself asking, Why is that? Inviting someone into your home is intimate. So if your home life is homogenous, your social world usually is too. The research lines up with that. Even when it’s not people who look like us, it often becomes people who think like us.
And that extends to virtual community as well. It’s completely normal now for kids—and even older adults—to form relationships online. As a parent, that can feel unnerving. So what does healthy connection look like in that space? In our home, we have one non-negotiable: if the camera isn’t on, you’re not engaging. I’m not letting my child build a relationship with a faceless stranger in a dark room. Show your face. Show your space. That’s basic transparency.
Another boundary is that computers don’t go into bedrooms. Not because we distrust our kids, but because screens belong in shared spaces. Presence still matters, even when it’s digital. When the iPhone introduced FaceTime—long before COVID—everything shifted. Younger generations started forming friendships through screens in ways that felt intrusive or strange to people my age. But if we don’t adapt, even a little, we lose our ability to guide them. Because in the end, whether it’s who we welcome into our physical home or who we allow into our digital home, the same question sits underneath it all: what kind of relational legacy are we creating? That question shapes how our children learn to be in community, wherever that community takes place.
Matthew: Speaking of online communication, and the horrible things that happen on, let’s say Twitter, now X, I keep wondering what would happen if online comments had to be given on video instead of typed. Imagine people having to say their harshest words out loud, on camera, fully themselves, rather than hiding behind a username. I suspect a lot of that cruelty would disappear.
MT: Maybe in Canada—Canadians really are wonderfully kind. And in parts of the U.S., that would probably be true too. But—this is me again, standing somewhere in the middle—I also know there are people who absolutely would berate others publicly on camera. We’ve seen it. So for me, the goal isn’t to ostracize them. It’s to challenge that dogmatic way of thinking and to ask, “What’s underneath that anger? What are you afraid of?”
There’s a term, homophily, that simply means we naturally gravitate toward people who look like us. That’s normal and human. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about people who intentionally alienate whole groups, often as a way to protect themselves or maintain some sense of hierarchy. And again, the question for me is always, “What fear is driving that?”
Still, I agree with you. If most people had to speak their hostility out loud, with their whole selves visible, they wouldn’t do it. Many simply wouldn’t be able to. There are always exceptions. But I would hope—and honestly, I pray—that we would pause before speaking harm into a space where we can truly be seen. Because right now, even pastors and church leaders in the U.S. are saying deeply hurtful things online. It’s sobering. And it makes the work of building healthier ways of relating, even in virtual spaces, all the more urgent.
Joy: Very practically speaking, if someone isn’t a specialist in communication or psychology but genuinely wants to be more thoughtful, less dogmatic, more open—what can the everyday person actually do to make the world a little better? Are there better ways of learning to watch the movie through someone else’s eyes?
MT: I’ll start with honesty—remembering that we live in a fallen world. And as believers, we don’t get to exempt ourselves from that. We’re very skilled at saying, “It’s not me, it’s them.” But the truth is, it’s all of us. We still have the capacity to harm. We will say things that wound. We already have. That’s part of being honest about ourselves.
So one of the simplest cognitive practices I recommend is this: regularly tell yourself, “I could be wrong.” Not performatively. Not as a rhetorical move. But internally—creating actual space inside yourself for the possibility that your perspective is partial. That is real ego management. Because so often, while someone is talking, we’re not actually listening—we’re preparing our reply.
Humility grows out of that. And humility doesn’t mean thinking poorly of yourself or highly of yourself. It means an accurate assessment of who you are. I have strengths. I have weaknesses. And I use the word weakness on purpose. Some people like to say, “Well, I just have challenges.” No—sometimes it’s simply a weakness. I’m not good at this. And that’s okay.
The moment you can admit that, relationship opens up. Because it’s far easier to receive help when you know you truly need it. Many people are excellent at giving help but terrible at receiving it. That alone can be a quiet spiritual diagnostic.
Joy: That connects with something you said in one of your lectures—that vulnerability is really about being susceptible to grace and assistance. I loved that, because “vulnerability” gets used so freely now, but people aren’t always sure what it actually looks like.
MT: Yes, exactly. All of this—honesty, humility, ego management—can be gathered under that single word: vulnerability. Vulnerability is what allows real relationship to happen. It allows both giving and receiving. And that mutual movement is what creates interconnectedness. In our house we say it simply: everyone helps because everyone counts. We all have needs. We all have strengths. Nobody’s contribution is insignificant.
Let me give you a small example. One evening I had a kettle on for tea. I didn’t even ask, but my twelve-year-old daughter heard it whistle, took it off, and poured my water for me. Now, I usually hate that because I’m afraid she’ll burn herself. But instead of correcting her, I received the gift. Later, I went upstairs, thanked her, and she just smiled and said, “You’re welcome.” That moment mattered. If I had minimized it—“Thanks, but don’t do that next time”—I would have quietly taken away something she was offering in love.
Vulnerability is usually not dramatic. It’s ordinary. It’s daily. It’s letting people contribute imperfectly. Even in marriage, it’s the same. My husband does not clean the kitchen the way I do. But if he tries when I’m exhausted, why would I come behind him and complain? Why would I undo the gift? That, to me, is what vulnerability looks like in practice.
Joy: I love how concrete that is. It reframes vulnerability as something available to us throughout the day, not some future spiritual achievement.
MT: Exactly. And this is where vulnerability connects directly to resilience. One of the core domains of psychological resilience is social support—the network of relationships that provide emotional, relational, and practical care. If a person cannot be vulnerable, they cannot fully access that support. Family, friends, church, community, even agencies like schools and hospitals—those only function as support if we are willing to receive.
As believers, we affirm that we were designed for relationship, both with one another and with Christ. That design requires vulnerability, and it is deeply tied to resilience. Community, though, does not mean sameness. That’s a common misunderstanding. When I talk about community, I am not talking about groupthink or mob mentality. I am talking about thriving within and across difference.
A social psychologist I often cite, Angela M. Sabates, shows from the creation narrative that humanity was designed for community and also for distinction. We are made in God’s image and likeness, not as duplicates. Difference is not a flaw. It’s a feature. And it does not prevent genuine community.
Matthew: As we come to a close, I’d love it if you could speak directly to pastors for a moment. What would you most want to leave them with?
MT: What comes to mind is this: how are you shaping the relational legacy of your church? When people look back on the community you shepherded, how will they remember the way relationships were cultivated? How did your congregation relate to the city around it, the province, the state, the world beyond its walls? Did the church’s relational legacy stop at the sanctuary doors, or did it extend outward with generosity and humility? My hope is that it would reflect what I’ve called eschatological love—loving people as if the Lord were already here. And very practically, I would urge pastors: do not polarize your people. Do not create divisiveness by implying that any group—or even you as the pastor—is morally superior to another. The Holy Spirit is still at work. And we must never behave as though the Spirit has finished working on anyone. That, I think, is deeply practical. And it is deeply faithful.