This interview appears in Faithfully Magazine No. 1 (Spring 2017).
Jo Saxton is an author and speaker known for her passion to help women step into their calling to lead. She is the director of 3D Ministries, a global organization focused on helping leaders to implement discipleship and missions in their churches. The international organization’s roots lie at St. Thomas Church in Sheffield in the U.K., where Saxton served as a youth pastor and college pastor before moving to the U.S. with her husband.
About how long ago did you and your family transition to the States?
We moved to the States, me my husband, about 12, 13 years ago.
So you’ve been here for a long time. I guess you’re well used to it now?
It took me about five years to work out what I didn’t understand, and then 10 years in, I began to feel a bit more used to things. There are so many things that are different culturally that I didn’t expect.
How about on the church front? How are Christian communities here in the States compared to those back in London? Are there any differences that really stand out?
I think that was probably one of my biggest culture shocks, really. The primary difference, I would say, within the U.K., both in London and then in Sheffield where I went to college and worked for a lot of my adult life, [is] the church is quite small. In Sheffield where I was, maybe 2 percent of the city would be found in church on a Sunday. In London, I think it’s closer to 10 percent. But compared to some of the places I’ve lived in in the U.S. it’s a lot. It’s a post-Christian culture. And it’s not that it’s necessarily hostile to Christianity. It’s just not necessarily seen as remotely relevant.
So the whole approach as a church, the whole posture of the church, was very outward focused, in terms of how do we reach into the community. How do we serve the community. There wasn’t the expectation that if we put on an event or anything like that that people would come to us. There was far more an impetus to go to the world around us, I think.
It’s not that that’s not true here, it’s just that the church has a far bigger place in the culture at large, I think, in many of the cities I’ve lived in.
Do you think Americans take church for granted?
I don’t know whether it’s for granted, but it’s certainly more of the fabric of the culture. So even the sense of people who would maybe go at Christmas and Easter, that was quite a surprise to me. I thought, like, “If you’re going to do it, why don’t you do it?” That kind of thing. I didn’t realize the kind of sense of family tradition. That would hap- pen maybe sometimes at Christmas in England [or] for a family kind of christening or obviously birth, major events. Obviously in England we don’t have Thanksgiving, so there wasn’t anybody going for particular times of the year in that sort of way.
You pastor a church with your husband, Chris, in Minnesota. What’s that like?
We recently handed the church on. We planted a few years ago. It was a bit of an experiment in many ways, because we both felt quite commit- ted to not earning a pay packet or anything like that when we did it. It was just a community of friends who had come to a point of trying to work out what it meant for us to be church and to live as the church in tangible ways. Meanwhile, I was speaking and writing in various places and my husband was working. So it was really dependent on the team we gathered around us. We had three principles, which [were] we want to work out how to follow Jesus, how to share life together— because we saw that as a tangible part of the church community in the New Testament—and what would it look like for us as Christians to make a tangible, healthy contribution in society in the light of our faith, because our understanding of faith has always been that. The salt and light thing mattered. You know, if we were going to be Christian, then that should actually bring some good to the place, where ever we were, and to the people that we met. So that was an impetus of our church’s life.
So we’d have Sunday gatherings but we’d also meet in what we described as missional communities, like little extended family units who had a mission to focus [on] together. So one was particularly focused around a school and how they could serve that school and the needs of that school and some of the families in that school. Another was focused around your neighborhood. And another one—well now we hand- ed it over to the leadership team, a number of [us] are looking at what it looks like to adopt refugee families who arriving in Minnesota and how we can serve them best in the best way that we can. So that’s pretty much the church’s life.
We rent a space now. It meets in a coffee shop (which means the coffee is great) and we’re trying to keep it as low maintenance as we can, really, so that all the resources that we gather as a community can go back into the community in whatever practical way we can.
You said you and your husband handed over leadership of the church, but you’re still apart of it?
Yeah, we are. I think it was a community that in many ways are like our family. So it didn’t make sense to leave the key relationships there and the relationships our children had developed there. So we’re still involved. But the wider leadership team is taking it on and are running with it and honestly, they’re doing a better job than we were. And I think
a part of what we enjoy doing is raising up leaders and equipping people to discover what they’re called to, so for me there’s always a part in which I like to get out of the way and see other people fly.
When I visited the church’s website and looked at the staff page, it seemed that you were the only person of color. What is the makeup of the local community and the makeup of the church itself? And not just regarding race or ethnicity, but also age and gender.
I would probably say it’s, male/ female, probably 60/40 or maybe 55/45 percentage-wise. In terms of ethnicity, it is a very, I mean, I think they are a couple of families of color that are in the context of the church. And I think that has been one of the main..well not one of, the main conversation for the church community as it’s developed over the past… Well, I think since it developed, really.
Our community was initially part of another church that we’ve come away from a few years back which was in the neighborhood. But I would say the neighborhood make- up where it’s based, in terms of our recent location—we were in a movie theater for a while, we were in a park for a while, and now where we are. I would say it’s way more diverse than the church context, in terms of multiple nationalities. I would say that the church has been on a journey of looking at … what does it mean to look like the neighborhood the church is actually in and what does it mean for the relationships people are building where they’re working, where they’re serving and things like that.
The ongoing conversation is to assume… I mean, obviously, as a woman of color, not for people to assume and say, “Well, we’ve got a woman of color who’s leading so that means integrated” and it’s like, well no, not at all. Not even remotely. And particularly as I came in as an export. I’m Nigerian and I’m a Brit and had arrived in that community not through them building relationships and reaching out in an integral way. In the stepping-back, it’s been fascinating to watch people re-engage, particularly as we serve the schools and the neighborhood and begin to reach out to refugee communities.
