IA network members joined StoryCorps One Small Step for 30-minute, one-on-one conversations across lines of difference.
These kinds of conversations happen every day among students, co-workers, and family members in America, and the Interfaith Leadership Summit is a space where participants can learn to seek them out with the purpose of respecting diverse identities, fostering meaningful relationships, and cooperating for the common good.
In the full conversation, dialogue educator Cole Johnston and college chaplain Roger Gordon speak about their journeys to bridgebuilding, the awakening that can come from encountering hardship, and the value of leading with vulnerability in sharing your story.
For both Roger Gordon and Cole Johnston, the road to bridgebuilding has brought challenges — from misunderstandings about their backgrounds, to pain and loss in relationships. Through these experiences, both have made careers in professions that call them to see and serve beyond themselves.
Now manager of student programs with StoryCorps’ One Small Step, Johnston was first drawn to work as a dialogue educator when he was an undergraduate student during the 2016 election, having grown up “in deep Trump country as a first-generation college student at Cornell University, which is kind of the inverse of Trump country.”
“I realized that I had an opportunity to connect to communities that didn’t really touch or understand each other at all,” he said.
I remember thinking, there’s got to be a better way to respond to people with whom we disagree so much.
Gordon, who now serves as director of spiritual life and college chaplain at Principia College, remembers the energy after the 2016 election well. He was studying to become an army chaplain at the Boston University School of Theology.
“At the time I was pretty upset too,” he said, reflecting on the devastation, heartbreak, and shock many in the community felt. “But I remember thinking, there’s got to be a better way to respond to people with whom we disagree so much.”
Between this and encountering supportive neighbors on the other side of the political aisle while on active duty in Tennessee and Kentucky, and building trust with a member of his squad whose views actually “deeply offended” Gordon, he came to recognize the necessity of cooperation across difference.
“That kind of solidified for me that as a country … we need to be better about building bridges and not having to necessarily agree but cooperate,” said Gordon.
On their journeys, both Johnston, who came from a Christian family in rural Oregon, and Gordon, who is a Christian Scientist, have had transformative moments that defined their vocations.
For Johnston, a challenge to his faith came in September of 2023, when he met an Israeli engineer who was visiting the U.S., fell in love, and, despite their differing viewpoints and frequent dialogues about Israel and Palestine, were partners on Oct.7, 2023.
“[The relationship] prevented me from being able to tribalize in the way that I think I might have without that situation,” Johnston said, describing how he felt like God came to him through prayer at the time when he was most angry. “Now I think that there is something to people that is more than just their experiences and their identities and their genetics. I think that there is a something sacred about them, and it’s changed the way that I operate as a professional.”
I think that there is something to people that is more than just their experiences and their identities and their genetics. I think that there is a something sacred about them.
Gordon also had a transformative encounter that revealed something to him about his faith.
“A family member was in the hospital,” he described. “And I remember praying a lot for this family member. But I one day was walking through the hospital, and I can’t really explain it except to try to say I felt overwhelmed with this feeling of all these other people in this hospital who just needed more hope and help and love and support, and I felt like I had something to offer to them that maybe they didn’t have.”
This led him to follow his church’s “inspiring history of military chaplaincy,” and take on a calling to become an army chaplain, where he felt an obligation to dispel misunderstandings about Christian Science.
Now, as a chaplain at the only Christian Science college in the world, which has recently opened its enrollment to students of all faiths, he works to build bridges across lines of difference on campus.
Speaking of the shared element of their distinct stories, in which they both found something larger than themselves, Gordon said:
“There’s something about the pain and tragedies that happen that wake us up to how much bigger the world is than our narrow little sense of life, and maybe of privilege … And weirdly, maybe there’s goodness in that.”
Rachel Crowe
Rachel Crowe, Staff Writer for IA Today, tells compelling stories about interfaith cooperation across diverse communities and supports our narrative programming. She is a graduate of Gettysburg College where she earned a BA in English with a Writing Concentration and a German Studies minor.
