Lead Time
First Ever - Hot Topic Friday: Pastors Need to Understand Psychology.... with Bill and Kristi Gaultiere
Join us for our first ever HOT TOPIC FRIDAY discussion. Guests and I will debate 3 topics for 10 minutes each!! Come back Fridays for more engaging content modeling healthy debate!
Discover the crucial intersection of soul care and ministry leadership as we sit down with Bill and Kristi Gaultiere. Through their expert lens as psychologists with a passion for spiritual direction, we uncover the often-neglected truth that the health of a pastor's soul is intimately tied to the vitality of their ministry. Our candid discussion not only highlights the intellectual aspects of shepherding a congregation but also emphasizes the emotional, mental, and physical facets that contribute to a pastor's holistic well-being. The Gaultieres offer profound insights into why soul care isn't a luxury for pastors but a fundamental necessity to maintain the joy and authenticity of their calling.
Visit uniteleadership.org
Join us for our first ever HOT TOPIC FRIDAY discussion. Guests and I will debate 3 topics for 10 minutes each!! Come back Fridays for more engaging content modeling healthy debate!
Discover the crucial intersection of soul care and ministry leadership as we sit down with Bill and Kristi Gaultiere. Through their expert lens as psychologists with a passion for spiritual direction, we uncover the often-neglected truth that the health of a pastor's soul is intimately tied to the vitality of their ministry. Our candid discussion not only highlights the intellectual aspects of shepherding a congregation but also emphasizes the emotional, mental, and physical facets that contribute to a pastor's holistic well-being. The Gaultieres offer profound insights into why soul care isn't a luxury for pastors but a fundamental necessity to maintain the joy and authenticity of their calling.
Visit uniteleadership.org
This is Lead.
Speaker 2:Time. Welcome to the first ever Lead Time Hot Topic Friday. Today I get to hang out with longtime partners in the gospel, Bill and Christy Gaultier. Let me tell you a little bit about them. They've been on the American Reformation podcast just a few months ago. They're the authors of Journey of the Soul. They have a Jesus-centered emphasis on using the Enneagram and they are leaders of soul shepherding. Now, for the past gosh, almost 15 years, I think. You've both been about soul shepherding so exciting. They're both doctors of psychology with an emphasis on spiritual direction, and they have a brand new ministry called the Healthy Pastor Care Program. We're going to be talking about that a bit today. So how are you doing? Before we get into starting the clock here, Bill and Christy? You hanging in, Doing love and life. We are.
Speaker 3:And especially now, being with you and your lead time. Friends, this is a great place to be. Love talking with you, love what you're doing, connecting with the pastors and equipping them.
Speaker 4:Just got back from 10 days in Texas with pastors on retreat. Just so grateful to be able to pour into leaders who are so dedicated to Jesus and strengthening His bride.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we had 40 pastors and leaders on a 350 acre ranch.
Speaker 2:Come on how cool, is that Beautiful?
Speaker 3:quiet and amazing conversations and learning.
Speaker 2:That's in our Soul, shepherd.
Speaker 3:Institute yeah.
Speaker 2:Soul Shepherd. I can't wait to make that a priority here very, very soon for my wife and I. So good stuff. Well, let's dig in. So three topics. Here's the deal we got 10 minutes each and we're going to start the clock now. So tell us a little bit about yourself and why you started soul shepherding as a ministry for pastors and leaders. And the bigger question is why should pastors care about shepherding their soul at all? Now I'm going to play devil's advocate. Isn't ministry more about the head than it is a soul? I mean, I don't need to be pop-psychologized here, bill and Christy, my soul is just fine. Thank you very much. So what would you say to that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, we all have a soul. God breathed life into our soul and your soul is basically your personality, it's your character, and God's created us to have a living soul. That's flowing like living waters when it's healthy. But our souls get split by sin and stress and trauma and conflict and all kinds of things, and when our souls split, we're going in different directions and we're lacking in integrity. And a lot of times those issues don't show up early on, but they do show up over the long term and you know there's a lot of things that we could talk about on this. But the main thing I'd say is that when you're a pastor, what you're offering people in your sermons, in your leadership, in your counseling, your discipling, all of your ministry ultimately, what you're offering, of course, is Jesus, it's the gospel, it's the word of God, but all that's coming through you, your soul, and so if my soul is not healthy, then that's going to affect my sermon and my leadership and all the things about my ministry.
Speaker 4:The other thing that I would say, tim, in response to your question about, you know, the head versus the heart, is that many times we think that our brain, our thinking, is where it's all at.
Speaker 4:But God created us as people that are feeling and emotional beings too, and both are a gift, and being healthy in our thought life, intellectually and in our emotions is really key and important. God cares about both our thoughts and our feelings. They're two-way street and when we are able to have authenticity in our relationship with God and with other people from a healthy place of emotional, iq, eq and IQ and balance there, there's so much more that God can do in us and through us. It fosters our intimacy with Him. It fosters our relational skills in ministry with other people when we're healthy emotionally as well as intellectually. So there's lots of reasons to care for every aspect of our soul, even physically. We have physical bodies that are a part of our soul. Our social relationships are part of our soul. So being healthy on every level is really important for us, both spiritually and in ministry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think sometimes unintentionally, Christians and Christian leaders, pastors et cetera can have this kind of dualist mentality and we kind of split the mind from the body. A book I recently just finished by John Surley you probably in your psychology journey Mind, language and Society, society, and there he's basically fighting dualism on the one extreme and then materialism on the other and kind of making the consciousness differentiation from the brain and to bring it into just everyday language. There is no difference, it's all of one thing right. And then we can get into right and left hand side of our brain and how it works on from the right to the left and the right hand side of the brain. The fuel of the right hand side of the brain is joy and the emotions and hopefully joy then fuels us to think the things of Christ, to set our mind above where Christ is.
Speaker 2:But I've been in the soul conversation. It should be so natural for us, but I don't. The ego. I think pastors live a lot of times thinking man, if I really exposed to anybody how worn out, how beat up, how much I'm pouring out and I'm just empty. I'm not living out of a cup that's just overflowing with love from the Holy Spirit surrounded by friends. If we just confessed that to one another and to trusted friends and guides, spiritual fathers and mothers. I think we need to reestablish that. Just pause right there the need for spiritual fathers and mothers, no matter where the pastor is on their journey. Anything more to add there? As people that tend for our soul and I love what you do, but I think it's more you're like serving your ministry serves as like a catalyst. Okay, what are the rhythms and habits that you're going to instill to surround yourself with someone who can care for your soul? Anything more to add there, bill Christie? Well, the heart of in soul shepherding is.
Speaker 3:Our staff talks with our staff of spiritual directors and coaches, talk with pastors every day, and pastors need a safe place, like you're saying, tim, where it's confidential and they can talk about what's really going on in their soul, their life, their leadership, their church, their family, their marriage, and know that they're going to be received with grace and prayerfulness and someone that believes in the Word of God with them will help them live into that, not only with their beliefs and their behaviors.
Speaker 3:Our beliefs and our behaviors are important, but sometimes we overrate them, as though we're a brain on a stick and it's just kind of all about. You know, believe the right thing, believe the right thing and then act it out. Do the right thing, be a good Christian, be a biblical Christian and all that we're missing the importance of our relationships and our habits and our emotions and our will center of our heart, and so all this is integrated together in our soul and you know, like you're saying, we're one being. We're not like a car engine that you can just. You know here's the carburetor, you know here's the fan, and you can kind of take it apart and put it in a different car or something. Of course, cars are more complicated than that now with all the technology, but people aren't like that. You know we're one person, so it all comes together when we're healthy in our soul.
Speaker 4:Well, tim, you asked us why we started Soul Shepherding, so let me answer that question too, because I think these questions tie together. Bill and I have been really blessed in our own journey to have opportunity to serve in the church. We love the church of Jesus Christ and so we started out our first year in marriage as college pastors at Omega Church. We went on to experience different ways of pastoring in churches, both in church plants and helping start a church plant and all that goes with that, with walking neighborhoods and inviting people and the setup and the teardown and building a team and some of the excitement of that, but the weariness and the exhaustion of all hands on deck all the time. We also were a part of a mega church building spiritual formation, pastor there and on the executive team there.
Speaker 4:And in the midst of all these experiences with church our church, in the role of pastor, we've come to experience incredible empathy for pastors. The expectations are crushing, having so many people who think they're your bosses and need to tell you how to do your job, the 24-7, constant access to you and feelings of entitlement that you should be there for the person in need at every moment and you can't have any of your own needs, the earnest desire to want to serve God well and really love and shepherd his people well, but the impossibilities to really be able to do meet everybody's expectations for you, all of your own expectations, and then on top of that we have an enemy who's out to take us out, and so we experience all kinds of division within the church. We've been in churches where there's been church splits. We've also been in churches where there's been mergers that have been successful and beautiful, I'm thankful to say.
Speaker 1:But you know, in the many different contexts.
Speaker 4:We've been through lots of pain and yet lots of testimony to God, still being at work in the midst of the mess, in the midst of the pain, and the Lord really called us. From our own experience and then from journeying as therapists in private practice at the same time part-time and private practice over 100,000 hours in the pool of pain. Between the two of us, we've learned from a lot of other people's experiences and listening to them, and that's why we started. Soul Shepherding was because we had learned so much and we wanted to begin to overflow it and make it accessible to pastors who are on the front lines in the kingdom of God and really need what we've learned.
Speaker 2:Well, we really do, and I will just say not, for we, I mean I do. I'll just. There's a lot that is going on right now. I'm coming off of a day yesterday that was probably a top 10, coming off of a day yesterday that was probably a top 10, probably top five busy, complex day from six 30 in the morning to eight 30 at night. It couldn't run like that every day. There's not a chance, uh, but but a meeting and the different head space, so you got to get in all the time. Um, if I ran on days like that and we're we got 10 seconds left on this first topic, if I ran on days like that and we got 10 seconds left on this first topic, if I ran like that, I would end up being one of these stats. So five, four, three, two, one All right, we're done with that one, because I don't want to be one of these stats that you have on your website.
Speaker 2:75% of pastors report being extremely stressed or highly stressed. 90% feel fatigued and worn out every week. 70% do not have someone they consider a close friend. That's remarkable. That's very sad. 90% say they have not received adequate training to meet demands of ministry. That necessitates ongoing training. This learner's mindset, to be sure. Ministry, that necessitates ongoing training. This learner's mindset, to be sure. New habits, closer, closer confidants and spiritual guides, and then 80% won't be in ministry. This is shocking 80% won't be in ministry 10 years later and a fraction make it a lifetime career Anything. So the second hot topic for today is talking about healthy pastor care. We have a lot of pastors listening. How can healthy pastor care help us and what are the get into the kind of chief characteristics of what it means, because we throw out that word healthy kind of ubiquitously. You know what are the chief characteristics of a healthy pastor. Start the clock now. Here we go.
Speaker 3:Characteristics of a healthy pastor. Start the clock now, here we go. Well, healthy pastor care is healthy as holy, and healthy is happy in the best sense of the word joy, the happiness of heaven. And so we mean that word to connect to functioning as God intended us to function. And so, yeah, I mean the stresses, I mean you're going through them.
Speaker 3:So, like the one on, 70% of pastors don't have a close friend. I mean, the shocking thing about that is every pastor I know has dozens or hundreds of friends. Right, that's all ministry is so much. It's built on friendship. That's what we do, that's how we do it. And yet who is a friend that keeps a confidence? That's not in my church, that's not on my board, that I can just, you know, like pastor to pastor. That's where it breaks down. It's because our whole life is so filled with relationships that are so meaningful and we're working together, we're going to church together, but there's some things I have to hold back there, and so pastors end up feeling like what is broken in them, or even just a spiritual dryness. We all go through seasons of spiritual dryness, but it kind of feels like you're not supposed to. If you're a pastor, you're always supposed to be excited about Jesus. You're always supposed to be on, you're always supposed to be ready, ready to pray, and you're the, you're the expert.
Speaker 2:Can I respond to that real quick? I just got out of a meeting today where one of our leaders says I could tell something was a little. You were like really contemplative yesterday and a little bit slower, and are you okay? And I was like I don't, I can't believe I was observed like that.
Speaker 3:Like they.
Speaker 2:You're being watched like all the time and if something is slightly out of character, wait what's? And at least his brother on our team kind of cared enough to say, hey, are you okay? And I was able to say no, it was just a really really long day. But yeah, just the amount of time you're spent as an example, a witness, and this is where it can get really messy. Jesus is guy, you know, 24, seven. So pastors can't do that, pastors can't say that. Look at that face, look at you, know it's.
Speaker 3:It's really quite, quite fascinating quite overwhelming At the same time. The beauty of what we get to do and the great stress is that it's it's coming out of our relationship with God. It's all about God, and so the wonderful thing about that is, I mean, we get to carry the name of Jesus and we're Christ's ambassadors and we get to be involved in work that is life-changing and meaningful, and in many ways our own devotional life integrates with our ministry, and so there's friendship integrating with our work. It's just so many wonderful things about that. But then there are expectations and pressures and it's a fishbowl. Everybody's looking at you to sort of draw on their emotional well-being and their confidence and kind of the mood, and so you can sort of never get away from that.
Speaker 2:Anything more there. Christy yeah get away from that. Anything more there, christy.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, you know the other thing is we so often are so busy for God that we don't even have time for God, or we are so busy being shepherds we forget we're sheep and we need to be able to have time and space to nurture our own intimacy with Jesus for our own sake. So often it's tempting as pastors to go to the Word for what we're going to serve somebody else and forget that we're often starving ourselves, and oftentimes our habits, our disciplines can become so familiar that we start to kind of take them for granted or we start to fall asleep to our own needs. Spiritually, we start to forget to let ourselves receive first, and to be able to minister out of the overflow is what God really intends for us, and that's something that we find is so easy as pastors. To neglect our own intimacy with Jesus, our own relationship with Jesus. Even as leaders.
Speaker 4:We often talk to our staff about the importance of when we take action. We need to take time then to reflect on our action and learn from it, but we need that personally too, in our lives it. But we need that personally too, in our lives Times to personally reflect on our own actions and stirrings in our soul and to take those to Jesus, but also to an ambassador of Jesus. We say a pastor. Who doesn't have a pastor to care for their own soul is a fool. Has a fool for a pastor.
Speaker 3:If you think you can pastor your own self, you know that's what we try to do. We know the Bible, we know so many things about pastoral ministry. We've been helpful to other people in discipleship and care. So then we try to do it self-care, self-pastoring and it doesn't work.
Speaker 2:It doesn't work. Now we need others. You talked about habits there, briefly, Christy, and how, if I'm summarizing it correctly, how some habits can become too habitual. That sounds funny. But what are some of those habits? You're like, wow, if you haven't considered these things, these soul care habits, what are some of those? And maybe the question should frame up this way what are a lot of the soul care habits that a lot of pastors are simply overlooking and could instill and see a lot of health?
Speaker 3:Well, in healthy pastor care we emphasize two main ones. First one is going on retreat and with a community of pastors, missionaries, leaders, we mentor you on retreat and so we have about 40 of us together for five days and for five days we disconnect and we have conversational lessons. We have a time of solitude and silence. We're in a beautiful place, everybody unplugs from their work and their normal responsibilities, they get enough sleep, they get great food. They're in a beautiful place and we learn how to do the deeper soul work and we lead people in scripture, meditation, in prayer experiences. We provide spiritual direction, groups and individual spiritual direction. So the Soul Shepherding Institute retreats are one emphasis in the Healthy Pastor Care program.
Speaker 3:That going away on retreat and also normally the way we think about that is either we're going on a retreat where we're, like you know, doing fun things playing volleyball and having worship services and that's a wonderful thing to do but we're talking about a spiritual retreat. That's a soul retreat that's going deep into how am I really feeling on the inside. Soul retreat that's going deep into how am I really feeling on the inside, how's it really going and praying through those things and being mentored in that and so learning how to do that. That's a rhythm of life that we all, it's a habit that we want to have. We're going away on retreat and that we need that to include some solitude and silence time. So we teach people how to do that and how to integrate disciplines like scripture, meditation, journaling with that. We have a number of, because we have a psychology background, so we bring in self-assessments just to check the engine lights and on the dashboard, on our soul, how am I really doing?
Speaker 3:And then the second thing, which is included in our institute retreats, but it's individual spiritual direction or coaching. I mean, you know, because we can talk about the spiritual disciplines you know, from Lectio Divina to fasting, to worship, ministry, to service to Sabbath yeah, all kinds of spiritual disciplines are important. But these are the two that we would say. If we could only pick two that are probably fresh and new and going to be impactful, it would be a spiritual retreat that includes solitude and silence, with the mentoring in that, and then it would be meeting with a spiritual director or coach, where it's confidential and it's about you. You don't have to be on, you don't have to like your church, you don't have to be in a good mood. You don't have to be ready to pray, and you don't have to be ready to pray and you didn't have to like God. I mean, whatever you're going through, you can be honest about it, and someone's going to listen and pray and guide you through that.
Speaker 2:What percentage of pastors do you think have a rhythm of doing both of those things in the broader American church?
Speaker 3:I'd say less than 10%.
Speaker 2:I don't know that's good, so I don't know that's good, so I don't think it's good If someone doesn't want to do retreat, because I think it's a different thing, what you're talking about. Everybody goes on vacation. Well, hopefully, pastors take vacation. They should get away with their family and do all those types of things, but soul care requires wounds being kind of dug at a little bit, and I'm just going to speak from a male perspective. We don't like to go there generally as much. Anything more to add, though, to maybe like help me see how Jesus did retreat and how he opened himself up and was vulnerable. Maybe that would be a great place to end this second topic.
Speaker 3:Well, he went away to lonely places. We read repeatedly in the scripture. He took his closest leaders and friends, peter James and John, away. Apart from the 12, let alone the 120 or whatever the number of his close followers was, included women. He went deeper with those friends, deeper in prayer. The most prominent example of his vulnerability is the Garden of Gethsemane. Is the Garden of Gethsemane, deeply wrestling in prayer around the cross? And I think a way to understand that is spiritual warfare. And he's spiritually going to the cross before he goes physically and he's preparing to take on the sins of the whole human race and it's an enormous stress on him. So we read about the anxiety, the fear, even sinkhole of despair is the way the message puts it, that he's plunging into and wrestling within himself and that's with his friends, his leading disciples, peter James and John, right there.
Speaker 4:I would also say his wilderness experience of 40 days in the wilderness. I think that he was really experiencing. I don't think that was just all a testing and temptation time. I think there was times of him really leaning into the Father. I think there were times of him processing his call. I think there were probably times of him even grieving leaving his family in Nazareth. There was a lot for him to process. In that I think we see Jesus also receiving hospitality and ministry to his soul from other people, like his baptism from John the Baptist, or receiving hospitality from Mary and Martha and Lazarus in their home, support from Joanna and others. So I think Jesus really did care for his soul, receive care from other people, from God through other people, and he asked in the Garden of Gethsemane to be prayed for, pray for me. He knew he needed to be ministered to, that he couldn't just lone ranger it.
Speaker 3:That's a marvel. We're talking about the Son of God, but he's also fully human, so we're looking at Jesus as a human being and his faith in God as Father.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we went over by a minute 15, but I wasn't going to cut off Jesus talk. There's no way to put 10 minutes on Jesus, come on man. So all right. Last last topic here, 10 minutes. Start the clock. Now, here we go. Adam's our producer. So, adam, maybe you're doing something creative that I'm not seeing right now. I rock on baby, here we go, adam's our producer. So, adam, maybe you're doing something creative that I'm not seeing right now Rock on baby, here we go. So one of the things I really appreciate about Soul Shepherding and your Healthy Pastor Care program is that you integrate Jesus-centered psychology into spiritual formation and ministry. So tell us why understanding psychology is important for pastors. And again, devil's advocate just a bit Isn't digging into psychology a secular endeavor, not a spiritual, theological endeavor? What would you say to that?
Speaker 3:Bill Christie, you know one of the things that we like to say is that Jesus, our Lord and savior, is the master psychologist and he's named the wonderful counselor in the prophecy in Isaiah. Two words, wonderful counselor. We like to put them together and it's an awesome thing. The wisdom and intelligence of Jesus and Paul comes along and is, humanly speaking, after Jesus, probably the best. There's a lot of psychology in Paul.
Speaker 3:You read Philippians, for instance, philippians 4, and how he talks about anxiety and joy and contentment, words that are often misunderstood and stripped of the psychological insight that's there, because he's not telling us you know, do not be anxious, doesn't have a period at the end of it. It's not like don't feel anxious. That would be a contradiction to other teachings in the Bible. So these are examples of psychology when we're dealing with anxiety and contentment and joy and, of course, our relationships and healthy relationships. And the Bible is all about love, love for others, loving one another, and we can't do that very well if we don't understand our own selves. We can't do that very well if we don't understand our own selves and of course, that starts with our sin, our brokenness, but it's also our stress and our trauma and our emotions and our unmet needs, and the Bible speaks to these things when you have eyes to see it and a heart to feel it. And so psychology has just come along really the last century and increasingly in recent decades to give us more words to understand these things and ways to get at that in order to be, when we talk about being healthy, what we're talking about is so that we can be more loving.
Speaker 3:This is not like a self-infatuation here or you know, taking lots of bubble baths or I'm just going to take care of myself and get what I want. I mean, it's not at all about that. It's about being Jesus followers. It's about sharing the gospel, it's about being more loving. But the instrument that I bring into all my ministry is me, it's my soul.
Speaker 3:And if my soul is depressed, anxious, overstressed, having trauma reactions, dealing with an addiction in a massively unresolved conflict situation with a family member or friend or a church member, that's going to affect how I share the gospel, how I listen to people, how I lead, and so we don't want to just be shoving that stuff down into our unconscious mind as though out of sight is out of mind, it just goes into our body, makes us sick and other people feel it, they see it and it diminishes our effectiveness. So we need to watch that stuff. So that's our specialty is putting words to those things and knowing the nuances of how that can work out into a relationship. And that's how we train our spiritual directors to really be attentive to what's under the surface and care for people there.
Speaker 4:Also, jesus is such a great example for us and he in psychology, you know, there's a whole line of positive psychology and that really integrates very well as well with our faith and the scripture as well, as Jesus' commandments and his instructions often are brilliant psychology, because he's the author of our soul. He created us. He understands human behavior better than anybody else. We like to draw that out.
Speaker 4:We've done a lot of Bible studies on Jesus's teachings on the soul that are profound psychological truth. And you know, not all truth is in the Bible. The Bible is all truth but not all truth is in the Bible. The Bible is all truth but not all truth is in the Bible. So God's given us a lot of truth in different areas of study like physics and science and psychology. So we, you know we don't swallow it all. We really chew the meat and spit out the bones. But there's a lot of help that God has given us through the truth of psychology and it integrates really well with spiritual formation, which is our development in Christlikeness. And so we're looking at our development from our whole person, every aspect of our soul. Again, we all have received a formation and many of us have received a malformation and in Christ we get a reformation.
Speaker 2:You guys could be authors or speakers or something like teach people this stuff. This is really good, this is so good. So you said positive psychology. There's something to be learned from positive psychology. There's some authors and books, resources.
Speaker 2:I'll commend Journey of the Soul, to be quite honest. But, folks, because I'm right there with you, I've been trained theologically. I've read the, obviously, scriptures, the Lutheran confessions, all sorts of like practical ministry books. But I'm in a space right now where, well, you saw this John Surley book, definitely a secular book, it's not a, it's not a Jesus book, but it's giving me more words to kind of understand my soul and speak the word which is Jesus is the word. So speak words of love and care and affirmation and meaning and purpose and significance to folks that I'm caring for.
Speaker 2:You know, and I don't, a lot of folks in our tribe I'm a member of the Lutheran Church, missouri Synod like are very dogmatic and I only take in these things and I feel like, wow, the world is so big and God speaks through a variety of different people, whether they realize they're his ambassador and we should be wise. But it gets to. I think of the first as second part of life. On the first part of life, it's ego getting built up. Second half of life, it's like, oh my gosh, there's so many things I need to learn and so many people. Life is like a big adventure now of discovery, and so anything to add toward just that mentality of no, you have to only stay here, because I think that's one of the big complaints that can be made about you're taking things that are secular and you're trying to shove them into the church. I don't think that's true at all. But any response to that and even some next steps for folks to say, I'd like to explore maybe positive psychology a bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, anything that for Christy and me and all the soul shepherding, anything that we learn from psychology or anywhere else in the world, we always go back to the Bible and it's got to be consistent with God's word and it's got to lead people to Jesus. And so, yeah, all truth is God's truth, like Christy said, but not all truth is in the Bible, but the Bible is all true and any truth is going to be consistent. Any truth from science is going to be consistent with the Bible. And so I mean that's the Bible is the book of our life and we believe that and we follow the scripture wholeheartedly. But I mean it comes down to some simple things that you certainly can get from the Bible what I'm going to say now. But there's a lot of psychology behind what I'm going to say and it's in our book Journey to the Soul. The subtitle on that is a practical guide to emotional and spiritual growth, and so we're trying to make things really practical and so we talk about the Christ stages of faith, using that model, with Christ as an acronym, and this has been researched. There's some science about this, there's some spiritual studies, cognitive development, moral development, faith development, spiritual growth, psychosocial development, integrating some different models of how we grow and how we develop as people, and then distilling that down into the Christ model of confidence in Christ, help and discipleship, responsibilities in ministry hitting a wall somewhere in there, but almost for sure in the middle, more than once, probably different places. And then the inner journey, spirit-led ministry, transforming union C-H-R-I-S-T, and so getting names for things. And so you talked about the first half and the second half, and the wall in the middle is dividing that.
Speaker 3:The first half is pastors and just as Christians, we're learning to live and serve for God and we want to do that all our lives. That's so important. Christine mentioned this earlier. But we come to a point where doing everything for God, while it's essential, it's like not sufficient, and so something that comes in that we've known and probably had some experience with but we lose touch with, and that's the with God life.
Speaker 3:And so in the second half of life we learn a lot more about the with God life, in a deeper intimacy with God, and in this part is real, real critical to the second half. It's integrating the with God life with the for God life, or use different words, it's integrating contemplation or quiet prayer, intimacy with God, integrating that with ministry, responsibility, service mission, ministry, so that while we're doing our work of pastoring and shepherding, there is this with God, and so I'm not dependent on my own self, my own ego, but on the Spirit with me. And you know, we know this theologically early on as pastors. But learning how to live into that operationally, that's a challenge, and so psychology just gives us some assistance with understanding these things and then bringing about that integration.
Speaker 4:The Bible has a lot to say on things like anxiety and depression and grief and forgiveness. These are psychological subjects and Scripture and God, not surprisingly has so much good truth to teach us about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're spiritual subjects, but then they can be looked at from a psychological angle, or they're psychological subjects and they can be looked at from a spiritual angle. So we like to see those as two sides of the same coin, in a way.
Speaker 2:We're at time that flew, that was so much fun and stop it right now. Adam, I think I went over on a couple of them, but nonetheless, you guys are a gift to the body of Christ. If you're listening and you want to connect to Bill and Christy and their work, pick Up Journey of the Soul that was our first experience with your work and then hit up soul shepherdingorg and then a healthy pastor, healthy dash pastor, dash care. If you want to go directly to their site where you're, you're going to find give the three kind of. You talked about retreats, but there are some other spiritual direction kind of packages that you can offer there. Feel free, the clock has stopped.
Speaker 2:We got all the, we got all the time in the world now. So we're, we're good.
Speaker 3:There's three pathways for healthy pastor care. We give you a discount on three different bundles of services so you can come to our institute retreats Best thing we do and you get two in one year at a discount. You can schedule the spiritual director and you get 12 sessions, one a month. The package gives it a discount. Same thing for leadership coaching, and so this is for the pastor, the church staff, pastor spouse.
Speaker 2:Pastor and spouse too.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's so, so good. And man, I know I want to talk about pastors and their wives and all that, but next time we'll have you back.
Speaker 1:This has been so much fun.
Speaker 2:The first ever Hot Topic, friday on Lead Time Sharing, is caring Like, subscribe, comment wherever it is you take it in. We promise to have longer form podcasts on Tuesdays moving forward, a shorter one here on Fridays and if you don't listen to American Reformation, a lot of great content there coming out on Wednesdays. Thank you so much, bill and Christy. If people want to connect with you directly, how can they do so?
Speaker 3:Just go to socialheaveningorg, click the contact button and ask for Bill and Christy, and we'll get that.
Speaker 2:There it is. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day. This is Lead Time, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.