I went into my doctoral research expecting theology to do the heavy lifting. I was wrong.
For my dissertation, I studied how Christian evangelical leaders in large corporations navigate questions of inclusion and belonging. I assumed that a leader’s denomination and doctrine would predict and influence how they approached difference. Tell me what someone believed, and I could tell you how they would lead.
That correlation is not what the data showed.
What the research found
For my interviews, I spoke to twelve senior leaders who self-identify as Christian or spiritual and hold real authority over how their organizations treat people. Denomination predicted almost nothing. Two leaders from the same tradition, affirming the same statements of faith, led in opposite directions on belonging. What separated them was not what they believed on paper; the distinction was in what they had experienced.
The leaders with the deepest commitment to belonging were rarely the ones with the most refined theology of it. They were the ones who had been near it.
Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner named that layer of life. He called it the microsystem: the immediate, face-to-face world of direct relationships. In my data, the microsystem beat the macrosystem of doctrine and denomination every time. Proximity was the strongest predictor of how a leader actually treated people unlike themselves.
Conviction runs downstream of proximity. This is not a new idea. Social psychologists have known for decades that sustained, cooperative contact changes attitudes in ways that persuasion alone never manages. My research found the same pattern sitting inside the lives of faithful leaders.
A leader on a bus
One participant made the pattern unmistakable. He had founded Christian schools built around racial and economic justice, and one of them bused students in from an under-resourced Boston neighborhood.
Those students were caught in a bind no outfit could solve. In their school uniforms, they drew the attention of gang members. In their neighborhood clothes, they drew the attention of police. Two worlds, and no safe way to dress for either.
This leader did not respond by writing a policy. He asked the students if he could ride the bus with them for a couple of weeks. In his words, “I wanted to watch and experience.” So he rode along quietly, an unremarkable adult presence, learning a daily reality he had never had to live himself.
That is where his convictions came from. Not from a seminar, but from a seat on a bus. And his convictions did not stay abstract. What he saw on those rides reshaped how he ran his schools, moving him from the students he had imagined toward the students he had sat beside.
He was not alone. Another leader in my study, a nonprofit CEO, built his organization’s disability inclusion work from the ground up. His reason was not a policy position. It was his daughter. Raising a child with a disability taught him to see barriers he had never noticed, and that sight did not stay in one lane. He carried the same instinct into other kinds of difference, including areas toward which his theology gave him no particular push. Proximity to one person widened his commitment to many.
Why proximity fits a Christian worldview
None of this should surprise anyone formed by the Christian story. Proximity is the shape of the Incarnation, the doctrine at the center of the Christian faith.
Christian theology describes God’s decisive move toward humanity as nearness, not distance. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling on Earth. God did not stay at arm’s length and explain. God drew close. The tradition holds that a people was shaped by that nearness.
If that is the pattern at the center of the faith, our students should be no exception. A doctrine of belonging, held at a distance, does not do what nearness does.
This is not an argument against doctrine. It is an argument about what turns doctrine into conviction, and what quietly fails to do so.
What proximity means for our schools
Here is the uncomfortable part for those of us who lead and teach. Most of our formation strategy is built on position, not proximity. We write the belief statement. We add the chapel series. We sharpen the mission language. Then we are surprised when students graduate fluent in what we believe about human dignity but are strangely untouched by it.
None of these practices replace teaching truth. They are, however, how truth gets metabolized into a life.
We are teaching position and hoping for conviction. The research says that gap does not close on its own.
The move is to engineer proximity on purpose, the way that the school founder engineered a bus ride. Here are a few concrete places to start:
- Audit where your students have sustained contact across differences—not one-time service projects, but ongoing relationships. If the honest answer is “nowhere,” you have just named your real formation problem.
- Build proximity into the calendar the way you build in curriculum. A recurring partnership with a school unlike yours forms more than a well-designed unit about it ever will.
- Put your own leaders in the microsystem. A head of school who has never sat where their most vulnerable student sits is leading from the macrosystem. Get on the bus. You will still not fully take on another person’s lens, but witnessing it will change you by having an understanding of their positionality.
- Stop measuring formation only by what students can articulate. Watch who they will sit with, advocate for, and stay near when it costs them something.
None of these practices replace teaching truth. They are, however, how truth gets metabolized into a life. Doctrine tells students what belonging means. Proximity is what makes them believe it.
We can keep making better statements. Or we can get closer. Only one of those forms a heart.
