Years ago a pastor began spiritual direction and counseling with me only to quickly end our sessions after I made a suggestion. He’d enjoyed an early morning CrossFit session and came in fired up - “God is calling me to plant churches across this region!” 1 I asked if we could listen, pray and discern over six months and then revisit this. That didn’t land well.

I’ve seen many, including myself, mistake the voice of God for a neurochemical cocktail. Activated sympathetic nervous systems produce fierce emotions. 2

Get ready for a thread.

One of the privileges of therapeutic work is being welcomed into the inner life and sacred story of another human being. Yet, when you engage the story-work with someone who is diagnosably narcissistic, (in much the same way as it works with an addict) 1 you enter through armored walls of certainty protecting cherished securities built on unstable truths. Folks like this don't simply "change their minds." There is a need for a radical, inner re-orientation, a re-Storying process that is destabilizing, that provokes resistance, 2

It’s challenging to do deep spiritually-formative and therapeutically-intensive work, especially for many of the people I’ve worked with navigating mid-life. Often sin has been reduced to behavior-management and many can’t see how it intersects with personality development or (1) participation in systems (family, cultural etc.) IF they open themselves to this, it’s massively disruptive. So some double-down. The curious ones are now asking huge questions about who they are, how they show up, what they’re complicit in. This is often accompanied by (2)

Thread: Around my work on narcissism in the church, I often get the question: What if I'm falsely accused? If you're a pastor, there will always be criticism, even accusations. Expect it. But get to know how you respond to these things. What happens in your body? Get a therapist! Healthy pastors remain curious and humble. Unhealthy pastors self-protect and blame-shift. It takes work to grow. So do the work. The work leads to wisdom. Some accusations are small, an email exchange about your heretical sermon! ;) Some are bigger. Some require outside wisdom.

Sat next to a woman on a plane who is done with church not because she is lazy or “spiritual but not religious“ but because a trusted pastor abused his power and hurt her and the system protected him while discarding her. It was hard for her hearing that I was a pastor. (1) I could sense it and named it, which put her at ease slightly, but being #TraumaInformed I asked if she would prefer that I be re-seated or trade with someone else. Even the Directv feed with news was disregulating for her. All she sees is Xns disregarding the powerless. (2)

Dear Enneagram Critics (Thread): I'm dumbfounded every time I hear about an anxious conservative response to the Enneagram as some kind of voodoo tool of the Devil. As if those of us who use it secretly have a nine-sided star tattooed on our backs... (next to the Celtic cross we mistakingly got around 1998, because everyone was doing it...oh, and the shalom tattoo we got in 2012). The Enneagram has people of all stripes talking about besetting sin patterns. Can you imagine that? It takes sin far more seriously...