The Vision
To heal individuals, families, churches, and communities so they can do the greatest good at the deepest levels to promote the best possible outcomes.
The Problem
The church of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. But there is a problem. The church is becoming increasingly broken, bound, and ineffective.
Is it a funding issue? No.
The resources exist to fund every worthy ministry effort (once those with vision are connected to those with resources).
Is it a lack of programs? No.
Many excellent ministries and initiatives exist to benefit the needs both inside and outside the body of Christ.
Is it a lack of drive or passion? For some, it is, but many have a God-given calling and eagerness to address the real needs, and they are working hard to do so.
So, what is holding us back?
2 things:
1. So many Christians and ministry leaders are doing their best to address these pressing needs, but they are doing it from a wheelchair. They are serving, leading, and evangelizing, but from a place of unhealed relational brokenness. Their hearts, marriages, and families often limp along as they do their work for the Lord. God still uses these dear saints, but their unhealed wounds and lack of relational wholeness either hinder their ministry effectiveness or cause them to implode through some ethical or moral failure down the road.
2. Many in the evangelical church still focus on splashy programs, celebrity spokespeople, or large-scale events (all of which have their place), but fail to address the elephant in the room: the profound core brokenness that can’t be healed at a rally or an eight-week group.
The Answer
We need to reevaluate our approach to evangelism and discipleship, but many of us follow a model that says:
Get them saved, get them equipped, and get them busy.
Generations of doing it this way haven’t produced believers who are more solid and joyful. Quite the opposite: we’ve produced believers who are often indistinguishable from their pagan neighbors. And we aren’t talking about tattoos and piercings—we’re talking about believers (whether conservative or trendy) who embrace homosexuality, live-in relationships, pornography, materialism, and the general cynicism of our age. Even Christians who publicly repudiate these things often struggle with legalism, perfectionism, or addictions.
As stated earlier, we struggle with these things because there is sin in the heart. However, we also struggle because there is pain in the heart. We need to embrace a new model of discipleship that looks more like this:
Get them saved, get them equipped, and get them busy.
The healing that we need from adverse childhood experiences, neglect, and other trauma must be continual and intentional. Otherwise, we bring these wounds and deficits into our Christian experience and ministries. For some of us, these issues are deep and crippling (but outside of our conscious awareness). Yet their existence is proven by the dysfunctional behaviors that others experience when they interact with us.
Yes, sin is mixed in with this. However, an overemphasis on moral improvement at the expense of inner healing and personality development results in Christians who are capable and “good” but unable to be truly relational, free, and courageous in their intimate relationships (including with God).
The Dilemma
Many are sincerely attempting to address these problems. Depending on who we listen to, we are told the church needs:
- Revival
- Solid grounding in Scripture
- More effective discipleship programs
- Deliverance/inner healing
- Christian counseling/recovery
Different camps will emphasize two or three of these to the exclusion of the others. But even if we agree that all of these are crucial (and I do), we can still miss three key components:
Get them healed.
- Believers need to understand the brokenness that comes from their unique life experiences (generalities aren’t helpful). And they must undergo a healing experience in a one-on-one setting.
- Believers need to understand their emotional age (in different areas of their lives) and bring these underdeveloped ways of thinking and behaving closer to their chronological Age.
- And they must be taught how to interact in a way that is honest, loving, and fiercely geared toward the other’s flourishing. In short, they must commit to learning and applying Jesus’s own relating style first to themselves and then to everyone in the concentric circles around them.When believers experience some healing, have greater victory over compulsive behaviors, and make up some of their lost developmental ground, there is still important work to be done.
- They must be taught to abandon all relational dynamics influenced by family rules, cultural norms, pop psychology, religious cliches, and their own best Thinking.
More and more churches are hosting recovery groups (like Celebrate Recovery, Re:generation, Rooted, etc.). This is great. On top of that, many of the larger churches also have licensed therapists on staff or an entire counseling ministry filled with clinicians. These are all positive (and redemptive) approaches!
What I have found, however, is that many believers who take advantage of these resources still battle to find relational wholeness. The three key components (mentioned above) are only partially addressed (if at all).
Processing their brokenness. Some believers have looked at their unique brokenness in one-on-one relationships with a pastor, church counselor, or accountability person/sponsor. These approaches can be life-changing, but they also suffer from inherent weaknesses. Even if the pastoral or counseling staff is outstanding (and offers free sessions), many churches have a strict five-to-ten session limit. This makes financial sense, but deep human brokenness cannot be adequately addressed in five sessions.
There may be gifted sponsors or mentors in the church's recovery groups who offer encouragement, accountability, and twelve-step work, but these one-on-one relationships are limited by time, a focus on curriculum, and the relative health of the sponsor. The individual’s unique brokenness can get missed by meetings that are more generally focused or teaching-heavy.
Whether pastoral, clinical, or grassroots, the focus is often on sobriety, behavior modification, or the alleviation of painful symptoms. These are helpful; however, they can fail to address the specific trauma, conditioning, or relational needs that drive the individual’s addictions, immaturity, or coping mechanisms.
Addressing their emotional age. There is often an ignorance about the emotional age of adults. A forty-year-old man, for instance, may not have experienced the paternal nurture required to build a healthy adult. He may not have progressed past age five or ten in his ability to self-soothe, deal with stress, or exercise personal agency. He has no idea that he is dealing with arrested development. He mistakenly believes he is just stupid, sinful, or “fine the way he is.”
When others tell him he needs to “grow up,” they are absolutely right. But this is often done in a shaming manner. It also implies that he needs to take his ten-year-old self and magically think and behave like a mature forty-year-old. There is no such thing as instant maturity. We become mature by seeing where we are stuck and moving to the next developmental level.
The ten-year-old boy in a forty-year-old body cannot magically skip the maturation process. He must grow (in those areas where he is stunted) through the normal experiences of learning to function at a twelve-year-old level, a sixteen-year-old level, a twenty-one-year-old level, and so on.
A Tested Model
In my work with broken people, I have utilized the typical approaches advocated by many pastors and clinicians. All of these had value but failed to produce the overflowing life Jesus promises. In my frustration, I’ve cried out to God and gone back over the Scriptures with a fine-toothed comb. Out of this years-long, trial-and-error process, I have discovered what works and what doesn’t.
As my team and I applied these Spirit-taught truths to our counseling work, we saw people experience deep healing and transformation. We’ve sharpened these skills over forty years and found—to our surprise—that what we were learning to do had always been taught in Scripture.
Sadly, we had missed it because we read our Bibles through a superficial or religious lens that obscured these amazing truths. We didn’t stumble onto something new (it just seemed new to us!). The Spirit of God simply showed us what was always there, hidden beneath our cultural and religious distortions. Over the years, we have taught these truths to individuals, churches, and national audiences (and through our books and presence on the internet—to an international audience).
Our teaching about core healing and growth into Christlikeness is powerful and effective. But it’s not popular. While many whack at the branches, we have uncovered the roots and applied the healing graces of Jesus. This is messy, time-consuming work, and has to be walked out with individuals. How can a pastor do this with his people? He can’t. And neither can the pastoral staff. Every member of the body of Christ has to participate in discipling others into this Wholeness.
So many rank-and-file Christians would love to have this kind of impact on those around them.
But they can’t because they are still broken in these areas and haven’t been taught how to walk in relational life (or how to impart it to others). So they continue referring to the “experts” to do the lion's share of the work. This has never been the biblical model of Christ’s body!
I advocate for a grassroots movement that equips every believer to carry out the evangelistic and healing work of the church. It takes lots of time, can’t be taught in a brief seminar, and must be transmitted from one individual to another. We have seen that it is doable, but not for those who want a quick fix, a program, or something that makes leaders look smart. Leaders have to be willing to create space for their people to learn these things and then get out of their way.
Will “laypeople” make mistakes and get it wrong? Yes, they will. But we have to get over our fear of making mistakes (because we will, no matter how careful we are). We can no longer teach orthodoxy (as crucial as that is) without modeling orthopraxy. Quite frankly, it doesn’t honor God when our doctrine is straight but our lives are a mess.
My book The Relational Revolution is a blueprint for how to do this. But we must have those who embody this message and serve as a living template for others. It is my passion to equip believers (from the pastor to the janitor) to live this out in a way that is irresistible to the jaded world around us.