For Paul Bullock (current MDiv student), it all started—and ended—with a migraine. At 22 years old, Paul envisioned for himself a prestigious future in the military that would have him traveling the globe for 20 years. Yet just weeks into his career, debilitating migraines cut short his basic training and led to a medical separation from the Navy.
As Paul anxiously awaited clearance to reenter the Navy and restart his career, his grandmother, who was essentially a second mother to him, passed away after a long illness, causing him to question what was truly significant in life. He then began to feel an existential pull towards a more spiritual and eternal perspective, and he wondered whether or not his original plans with the military would satisfy this newfound hunger.
He worked at a car dealership as he waited for reentry. One day, while selling a car to a corrections sergeant from the nearby correctional facility, an unexpected conversation unfolded as they went on a test drive. The sergeant affirmed Paul, saying, “I feel something different about your spirit. I feel like you could be someone powerful, who could impact young men in prison. What do you think about leaving this place?” He offered Paul a position as an administrative corrections officer.
Paul did not have an immediate response, but later that week, Paul recalls, “I was walking through the carport at work, and I felt in my spirit a voice that said, ‘Follow me, and I’ll make you a fisher of men.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m there!’ A couple weeks later, I quit the dealership.”
Paul admitted his decision may have been foolhardy: “I quit on a Friday. Then, I was freaking out because my wife and I were just recently married, and now her husband doesn’t have a job. So by Sunday, I’m getting ready to call the car dealership back and say, ‘Hey, can I come back?’” But Paul never got the chance. On Monday, the sergeant called and informed him that he was being prepped for training and to report for work at the corrections facility.
Paul worked 12-hour shifts, five or six days a week, in the maximum management mental health unit. There, because of the sheer amount of time they spent together, he found himself developing relationships with the incarcerated men. Since it was a mental health unit, he didn’t make rounds to simply maintain order but to pay attention to the mental and emotional status of the various men, particularly whether there might be attempts at self-harm. “There was so much stuff that I saw and experienced that most people wouldn’t believe. I really saw the hopelessness of humanity—people desperately reaching for some type of hope. There were Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and a whole bunch of others,” says Paul, “but the common thread was that people were seeking something larger than themselves.”
Yolanda “Yo” Miller leads spiritual formation groups for Fuller, the De Pree Center, and Soul Care in Boulder, Colorado. Learn more about her and her work as a soul coach at yo-miller.com.
Lindsey Sheets is a photographer, video editor, and colorist for FULLER studio.
For Paul Bullock (current MDiv student), it all started—and ended—with a migraine. At 22 years old, Paul envisioned for himself a prestigious future in the military that would have him traveling the globe for 20 years. Yet just weeks into his career, debilitating migraines cut short his basic training and led to a medical separation from the Navy.
As Paul anxiously awaited clearance to reenter the Navy and restart his career, his grandmother, who was essentially a second mother to him, passed away after a long illness, causing him to question what was truly significant in life. He then began to feel an existential pull towards a more spiritual and eternal perspective, and he wondered whether or not his original plans with the military would satisfy this newfound hunger.
He worked at a car dealership as he waited for reentry. One day, while selling a car to a corrections sergeant from the nearby correctional facility, an unexpected conversation unfolded as they went on a test drive. The sergeant affirmed Paul, saying, “I feel something different about your spirit. I feel like you could be someone powerful, who could impact young men in prison. What do you think about leaving this place?” He offered Paul a position as an administrative corrections officer.
Paul did not have an immediate response, but later that week, Paul recalls, “I was walking through the carport at work, and I felt in my spirit a voice that said, ‘Follow me, and I’ll make you a fisher of men.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m there!’ A couple weeks later, I quit the dealership.”
Paul admitted his decision may have been foolhardy: “I quit on a Friday. Then, I was freaking out because my wife and I were just recently married, and now her husband doesn’t have a job. So by Sunday, I’m getting ready to call the car dealership back and say, ‘Hey, can I come back?’” But Paul never got the chance. On Monday, the sergeant called and informed him that he was being prepped for training and to report for work at the corrections facility.
Paul worked 12-hour shifts, five or six days a week, in the maximum management mental health unit. There, because of the sheer amount of time they spent together, he found himself developing relationships with the incarcerated men. Since it was a mental health unit, he didn’t make rounds to simply maintain order but to pay attention to the mental and emotional status of the various men, particularly whether there might be attempts at self-harm. “There was so much stuff that I saw and experienced that most people wouldn’t believe. I really saw the hopelessness of humanity—people desperately reaching for some type of hope. There were Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and a whole bunch of others,” says Paul, “but the common thread was that people were seeking something larger than themselves.”
Yolanda “Yo” Miller leads spiritual formation groups for Fuller, the De Pree Center, and Soul Care in Boulder, Colorado. Learn more about her and her work as a soul coach at yo-miller.com.
Lindsey Sheets is a photographer, video editor, and colorist for FULLER studio.
Paul saw beyond the jumpsuits and shackles. He called the men by their names rather than their inmate numbers. He expressed care for their real issues, like when they lost family members, rather than just engaging in small talk about sports or the weather. Growing up in an underserved and marginalized community, Paul viewed these men with humility. He points out, “Many officers would look at them and literally say, ‘They’re the scum of the earth,’ but I didn’t view them like that because I knew that one poor decision could change me from having a brown [officer’s] uniform to a blue [inmate’s] jumpsuit.”
Paul engaged in profound conversations with the inmates, conversations that were more authentic and vulnerable than ones he experienced elsewhere. Desiring to care for them in a more holistic way, he pursued a degree in ministry leadership at Southeastern University. Now, Paul had something even more fascinating to chat about in the rec yard on his rounds: his homework. Paul describes the power of these formational conversations: “They’d say, ‘Hey, Bullock, what do you think about this passage?’ because they knew I was going to school. But there were also guys who had been studying the Bible for 15 years because all they’ve got is time. One of the things that I really appreciated about working in prison and the relationships there was that there wasn’t a mask that you had to put on. For the most part, everybody knows that they’re ‘bad,’ right? So there’s no need to hide things from one another. So we would just be honest. And there was this accountability and growth that shaped me and how I think about ministry now. Their freedom had been taken away, but there’s freedom that I felt there that I don’t feel within the traditional church.”
After graduating with his degree, Paul was eager to begin what he considered “real” ministry at the time—ministry in a church. He began attending a megachurch with an attendance of over 15,000 and was dazzled by the sheer scope of its influence and ministries. Initially, he was convinced that he wanted to contribute to its impact and served in a residency. However, in 2020, he witnessed the church’s responses to COVID, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and was alarmed.
For Paul, the final straw came when a Black staff member left after experiencing both microaggressions and blatant racism. Not only did the staff member leave the church, he left the faith, leaving Paul shaken. Paul eventually left the church as well, but a couple months after his departure, he was invited to co-teach a class on race and the gospel at another sizable church. After the second class, the senior pastor invited him to join their staff. Paul says, “It seemed to be a sign that God hadn’t left me, and there was a place where I could be me.”
This church was different. Paul describes, “Before I came on staff, our senior pastor heard Miles Macpherson speak at a conference and thought to himself, ‘Our church does not look like heaven. It is a very white place, and we’ve not even thought about this issue before.’ So the senior pastor returned from the conference and did a month-long sermon series on race and the gospel. And hundreds and hundreds of congregants left immediately. It cost them a lot.”
Paul says the church made tremendous progress in diversifying its reach and its congregation: “We have become the most diverse church I’ve ever been to. When we say we want to be a church that looks like heaven, that is exactly what we are.” However, he continues, saying, “We look like it. But what about the empowering of people of color? What about really stepping into some of the lament and challenges of the people of color? How are we loving people from all these different backgrounds, racially, ethnically, socioeconomically? There has been a lot of good, but I also have seen some people harmed, not intentionally, but nevertheless harmed, because of the traditional church model.” Paul began to see that while the church was growing in its understanding and its desire to serve different communities, it had yet to develop true and effective empathy for its diverse members.
In 2021, Paul came to Fuller to continue pursuing the call he sensed to ministry. There, he began to discover a global faith that was a more expansive experience than the faith he had learned about in his undergraduate studies. Fuller equipped him with language to articulate his thoughts, emotions, and experience, even as a growing frustration with what he perceived as a gap between the appearance and lived experience of his church began to well up within him.
It was about this time that Paul met Jim Tippins, a chaplain who identified gifts in Paul while they collaborated on a community event that the church was hosting. When Paul expressed his frustrations, Jim said to him, “Man, you’d make a great chaplain! But you don’t have to pit the church against the community. I know you want to do all this stuff out in the community, but you need to figure out how you can serve God and serve people within and without the walls of the church.”
These words resonated in Paul’s heart months later when he met chaplain and Fuller professor Dr. Mary Glenn and took her classes “Encountering the City” and “Understanding and Engaging Christian Community Development and Asset-Based Community Development.” Through several conversations with Dr. Glenn, Paul saw that he could embrace his core Christian convictions without conforming to traditional Christian systems that violated his values. “I still believe and have my core Christian convictions, but I believe that there is a different way to engage people without the rigidness of the traditional church,” Paul declares. “As much as I can see the faults and flaws in the church, I do believe the church is the answer. I just question, what do we define as the church?”
Thanks to the seeds planted by Jim Tippins and being nurtured in his classes at Fuller, Paul found his trajectory once again rerouted, this time, towards chaplaincy. Paul reflects, “This is how I’m wired. I just didn’t know how to say it in a way that made sense. Those classes and conversations with Jim and Dr. Glenn helped me embrace who I am.” He continues, “Chaplaincy engages people where they are, both within and without the walls of the church. It means being able to maintain and hold your Christian beliefs and convictions while being a spiritual guide to those in the community and those around you. I’ve found my home here.”
Now Paul plans to build a community space called Theology and Therapy for people within and without the church to “wrestle with their faith without being demonized.” He believes that everyone in the church can and should be a chaplain, elaborating, “I think that all Christians should be able to operate in that way. Christianity has always existed in a pluralistic context. I think that’s what chaplains do—maintain Christian convictions in a pluralistic world and live in such a way that we invite others to participate in this fellowship with God and others. It shouldn’t be something so special and unique. All Christians should be able to live this way.”
In his work as both a hospital and hospice chaplain, Rafee Jajou seeks to carry the hope and peace of Christ as he journeys with patients in their seasons of suffering.
