David C. Wang is the Cliff and Joyce Penner Chair for the Formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders and is associate professor of psychology. A licensed psychologist, pastor, author, and speaker, his academic and applied work focuses on the holistic formation of Christian leaders. He is the editor of the Journal of Psychology and Theology and is pastor of spiritual formation at One Life City Church.
Aly Hawkins: It would be negligent to explore this issue’s theme of Christ’s hope and healing without also talking about wounds sustained in Christian spaces. It feels particularly significant today for the church to consider the features of contemporary evangelicalism that make spiritual trauma or “church hurt” more likely. Since much of your research focuses on best practices for forming spiritual maturity in Christian leaders, what connection do you see between a lack of maturity and the likelihood of abuse and/or trauma?
David Wang: Let me start by giving readers a feel for where I’m coming from personally. My findings highlight the unity and interrelatedness of spiritual maturity with our overall maturity as human beings. The latter may encompass our virtue and character dispositions, our capacity for intimate relationships, our self-awareness, insight, emotional regulation—essentially, our capacity to lead ourselves. While I wouldn’t suggest that being spiritually mature is exactly the same thing as emotional maturity, I certainly believe that emotional immaturity bears upon and has implications for our spiritual life.
Pete Scazzero, author of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, argues that churches too often tolerate emotional immaturity among their leadership. He shares some pertinent examples of beneath-the-surface emotional immaturity that can undermine discipleship and keep people from becoming spiritually mature. For example, you can be a gifted public speaker while at the same time being a detached spouse or angry parent at home behind closed doors. You may function in a leadership position but be unteachable, insecure, and defensive. You might quote the Bible accurately and easily and still be totally unaware of your emotional reactivity. And it’s certainly possible to lead people “for God” when your primary motive is an unhealthy need to be admired by others.
All these symptoms of immaturity create vulnerability to and a potential for “church hurt” within a church system. Adding to the spiritually corrosive dissonance between public acts of service and a darker private reality, emotionally immature leaders directly and indirectly contribute to relational conflict and then are ill-equipped to navigate and repair relational breaches when they occur.
AH: Why is that?
DW: The health and resilience of a leadership team, and of the church community it leads, depend on trust and mutuality, which are cultivated—that is, “earned”—over time and through healthy conflict. As conflicts are navigated well over the long haul, people feel safe to honestly share their thoughts and concerns without fear of retaliation or aggression, and this honest exchange facilitates greater insight and understanding between all parties. But emotional immaturity often sabotages this process of healthy conflict, making a leader react with avoidance, defensiveness, blame, and passive-aggression when conflicts arise. And when social power is combined with emotional immaturity, then intimidation, retaliation, manipulation, and exploitation become all too likely—often hidden behind a “Christian” veneer.
When it comes to the particular vulnerabilities of contemporary evangelicalism, I would suggest that one contributor is unintended excesses stemming from the church growth movement, which can create conditions that lead to church hurt. While the foundational principles of the church growth movement—understanding one’s local context and presenting the gospel in a culturally relevant way, gleaning insight from sociological research and trend analysis—continue to be sound, some adherents to the movement seem to have gone astray in recent years, relying on purely numeric measures of success driven by a series of oversimplified formulas based on social engineering. When numeric growth implicitly or explicitly becomes the measure of success, “reaching people for Christ” can be used to justify church systems that are destructive.
For example, a common strategy to drive numeric growth is to build an entire church system around a single celebrity figurehead who is a charismatic and gifted public speaker, who likes being the center of attention, and is able to draw in crowds. When a leader with these kinds of narcissistic tendencies is unleashed by rationalization—such as “God must be using him because so many people are being reached”—and a lack of accountability, it is a recipe for disaster.
AH: I’m sure most church leaders don’t intend to inflict spiritual trauma. And yet, if the epidemic of church hurt among my circles are any indication, it still happens with distressing regularity. So, what can churches do to prevent it? What qualities and practices are shared among faith communities where church hurt is rare?
DW: Because we are all broken human beings, conflict and hurt are inevitable and unavoidable. This is true not only in our family systems but in our church communities, as well. With that being said, there are several things that can help to minimize the kind of institutional, systemic hurt that is self-perpetuated and self-perpetuating.
First, resilient church systems deal with their problems. They don’t avoid them, sugarcoat them, or over spiritualize them. Taking a cue from Alcoholics Anonymous, the critical first step toward healing and change is admitting that we have a problem. Yet I’ve seen too many examples of churches struggling with a culture of niceness and passivity, where problems and conflicts that should be confronted are left alone in the hopes of keeping everyone happy and together. Research suggests that the number-one reason Christian leaders prematurely leave the ministry is because of unresolved conflict with other members of their ministry team. The mark of a healthy marriage or a health family, for example, isn’t the absence of conflict—the truth is, some couples don’t argue because they just don’t communicate—but rather a capacity to do conflict well: to share what needs to be shared, to hear what needs to be heard, and then to repair the misunderstandings and ruptures that have happened getting to this point.
Second, resilient church systems create space for both positive and negative emotions. Unfortunately, many evangelical churches struggle with triumphalism: a view of the Christian life in which we are to progress from victory to victory, where we sustain a disposition of perpetual joy, contentment, and peace at all times and never experience negative emotions such as sadness, fear, or anger. Speaking as both a pastor and a clinical psychologist, I’d call that toxic positivity with a Christian twist.
The fundamental problem with triumphalism is that it’s just not true. It’s theologically problematic and psychologically impossible. Even Jesus experienced negative emotions throughout his lifetime! Humans are literally not able to always experience positive emotions and never experience negative emotions. The goal, rather, is harmony between the two and congruence between our emotions and our circumstances.
Ecclesiastes 3 explains that there is a time for everything, a season for every activity and experience: a time to be born and a time to die, for example, as well as a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. God created negative emotions for a good purpose. There is so much for Christians to grieve in our own lives, in our communities, and in our world! Yet in toxic church systems, people are led to believe that if their feelings deviate in any way from perfect bliss and unending peace, there must be something wrong with them or something lacking with their faith—and that shame leads to church hurt.
Hurtful church systems stifle grief and seek to rewrite or ignore unpleasant history. Healthy, resilient church systems, on the other hand, do not see grief as a threat but rather as a pathway to wholeness and wisdom. They practice the deep, historic Christian tradition of grief and lament. The church I help to pastor, for example, convened a series of “lament panels” to bring the deeper, darker emotions of our community to the surface. Medical staff cried as they recounted their hardest days treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU, while other members of our community shared about feeling vulnerable in light of our country’s ongoing history of racialized violence.
Third, resilient church systems require and promote spiritual maturity in their leaders, who embody the likeness of Christ in real, rather than ideal, situations.
AH: What does that look like, exactly?
DW: Spiritually mature people possess a deep capacity for intimate relationships, not only with God but also with others—and especially with people who are different from them. They practice faith in the context of community, in an ongoing process of conversion centered on relationships with Christ and others. They are persons of faith, hope, and love, who embody the fruit of the Spirit. They manifest a spirit of docility to the working of the Holy Spirit, open to the process of formation even in the face of pain and difficulty. They are humble, maintaining a relatively low self-focus and a grounded perspective of themselves that acknowledges and accepts not only their mistakes, imperfections, and limitations but also their abilities and achievements. They know they are not omnicompetent and respect the boundaries of their capacity—and they invite others to fill in these gaps. They contribute to God’s redemptive work in the world by working toward social change in their community, for the liberation and justice of all peoples.
Spiritually mature people engage with reality. One of our recently published empirical studies found that prayer’s positive or negative mental health benefits are tied to one’s disposition toward experiential avoidance. That is, if you pray prayers of avoidance—like, “God just take this away”—then the practice of prayer can be associated with poorer mental health—and poorer spiritual health, I might add. But if you pray for strength and courage to face reality, no matter how difficult reality might be, the practice of prayer can be associated with positive mental health as well as deepening spiritual maturity.
A beautiful model of engaging—rather than avoiding—reality is Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. As Jesus looks ahead to the events that will ultimately lead to his death on the cross, he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26:39). Here, Jesus is facing his inner reality of preferring an alternative to the cross. And yet, he ends his prayer by accepting the reality that the way of the cross is nonetheless set before him. This same principle applies to church leaders: Are your prayers a means of avoiding reality or a means of receiving supernatural courage to face reality—whether that be the reality of yourself, of others, and/or of the world—no matter how painful or difficult it might be?
AH: In addition to your academic work, you’re also a pastor. How do you personally help people in your church who have been spiritually traumatized? What are some steps that a spiritually mature leader can take to help parishioners heal from past church hurt?
DW: I serve as the pastor of spiritual formation at One Life City Church in Fullerton, California. We function as an experimental laboratory of sorts, exploring new ways of accompanying each other through life. One of our church values is the idea that “formation is slow-cooked.” We take a “long” approach not only to the healing of trauma—which is everywhere in our community, from youth to adults—but to discipleship overall. I love Eugene Peterson’s description of discipleship as “a long obedience in the same direction,” and the same is true when it comes to helping people recover from spiritual trauma. We’re not looking for that one key insight or that one perfectly timed Bible verse or that one breakthrough moment where we magically usher in a new season of healing and freedom. Healing, like spiritual formation, happens at the speed of life. We can’t rush it, but we can resist it, slowing the process down or even grinding it to a halt.
The substance and work of trauma recovery is actually quite mundane. It’s showing up consistently. It’s reaching out to others and finding a way to trust people again, a little bit at a time. It’s cultivating safety in the community, both physically and emotionally, and that requires boundaries and honest conversations about our limitations (even about our inability to help). It’s asking people how they are doing and really meaning it, and doing that over and over again for a long time. It’s earning the trust that’s necessary for someone to share their pain with us.
Robert Stolorow defines trauma as what happens when “intense emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.” There are profound implications here for churches that want to become that relational home. Beyond the basics of ensuring the safety of all children and securing the church premises, church policy should reflect the reality that trauma is present not only within the congregation but within the leadership as well. Provisions for the ongoing sustainability and well-being of the pastoral staff (regular breaks and vacations, professional boundaries that protect the personal and family life of the leadership, etc.) should be formally codified and communicated.
Teaching ministries can normalize trauma by highlighting it in the biblical narrative and in our lives today. Preaching should avoid triumphalist language and convey the reality that our spiritual life, as well as our recovery process, is a journey that will not end until Christ returns. Be careful not to implicitly or explicitly convey an oversimplified framework for healing—“Trust in Jesus and all your pain will magically disappear,” for example. Find ways to celebrate when God answers prayers for healing without stigmatizing those who have prayed and are still waiting.
Next, broaden the emotional palette of worship. Glenn Pemberton notes that less than five percent of the most popular worship songs sung in American churches can be classified as songs of lament, compared with at least half of the Bible’s Psalms. Create space within the worship service for grief and lament. It’s perfectly fine for some songs to end on a hopeful note and for others to finish without a happy ending—just like many of the Psalms.
One of the foundational principles that undergirds my work as both a pastor and a clinical psychologist is that emotional pain tends to resist efforts to be “fixed.” However, if we are able to form trusting, attuned relationships with one another that make space for emotional pain to be seen and held, we help to build each other’s capacity to hold our own pain and incorporate it into our story. And in so doing, we point each other to Christ, the wounded healer, who suffered and died on the cross to redeem humankind, and who is and will be the ultimate relational home in which all of our emotional pain will be held now and forevermore. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb 4:15).
Aly Hawkins is editorial director & senior writer at Fuller. Find more of her work at thewritingvicar.com.
David C. Wang is the Cliff and Joyce Penner Chair for the Formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders and is associate professor of psychology. A licensed psychologist, pastor, author, and speaker, his academic and applied work focuses on the holistic formation of Christian leaders. He is the editor of the Journal of Psychology and Theology and is pastor of spiritual formation at One Life City Church.
Aly Hawkins: It would be negligent to explore this issue’s theme of Christ’s hope and healing without also talking about wounds sustained in Christian spaces. It feels particularly significant today for the church to consider the features of contemporary evangelicalism that make spiritual trauma or “church hurt” more likely. Since much of your research focuses on best practices for forming spiritual maturity in Christian leaders, what connection do you see between a lack of maturity and the likelihood of abuse and/or trauma?
David Wang: Let me start by giving readers a feel for where I’m coming from personally. My findings highlight the unity and interrelatedness of spiritual maturity with our overall maturity as human beings. The latter may encompass our virtue and character dispositions, our capacity for intimate relationships, our self-awareness, insight, emotional regulation—essentially, our capacity to lead ourselves. While I wouldn’t suggest that being spiritually mature is exactly the same thing as emotional maturity, I certainly believe that emotional immaturity bears upon and has implications for our spiritual life.
Pete Scazzero, author of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, argues that churches too often tolerate emotional immaturity among their leadership. He shares some pertinent examples of beneath-the-surface emotional immaturity that can undermine discipleship and keep people from becoming spiritually mature. For example, you can be a gifted public speaker while at the same time being a detached spouse or angry parent at home behind closed doors. You may function in a leadership position but be unteachable, insecure, and defensive. You might quote the Bible accurately and easily and still be totally unaware of your emotional reactivity. And it’s certainly possible to lead people “for God” when your primary motive is an unhealthy need to be admired by others.
All these symptoms of immaturity create vulnerability to and a potential for “church hurt” within a church system. Adding to the spiritually corrosive dissonance between public acts of service and a darker private reality, emotionally immature leaders directly and indirectly contribute to relational conflict and then are ill-equipped to navigate and repair relational breaches when they occur.
AH: Why is that?
DW: The health and resilience of a leadership team, and of the church community it leads, depend on trust and mutuality, which are cultivated—that is, “earned”—over time and through healthy conflict. As conflicts are navigated well over the long haul, people feel safe to honestly share their thoughts and concerns without fear of retaliation or aggression, and this honest exchange facilitates greater insight and understanding between all parties. But emotional immaturity often sabotages this process of healthy conflict, making a leader react with avoidance, defensiveness, blame, and passive-aggression when conflicts arise. And when social power is combined with emotional immaturity, then intimidation, retaliation, manipulation, and exploitation become all too likely—often hidden behind a “Christian” veneer.
When it comes to the particular vulnerabilities of contemporary evangelicalism, I would suggest that one contributor is unintended excesses stemming from the church growth movement, which can create conditions that lead to church hurt. While the foundational principles of the church growth movement—understanding one’s local context and presenting the gospel in a culturally relevant way, gleaning insight from sociological research and trend analysis—continue to be sound, some adherents to the movement seem to have gone astray in recent years, relying on purely numeric measures of success driven by a series of oversimplified formulas based on social engineering. When numeric growth implicitly or explicitly becomes the measure of success, “reaching people for Christ” can be used to justify church systems that are destructive.
For example, a common strategy to drive numeric growth is to build an entire church system around a single celebrity figurehead who is a charismatic and gifted public speaker, who likes being the center of attention, and is able to draw in crowds. When a leader with these kinds of narcissistic tendencies is unleashed by rationalization—such as “God must be using him because so many people are being reached”—and a lack of accountability, it is a recipe for disaster.
AH: I’m sure most church leaders don’t intend to inflict spiritual trauma. And yet, if the epidemic of church hurt among my circles are any indication, it still happens with distressing regularity. So, what can churches do to prevent it? What qualities and practices are shared among faith communities where church hurt is rare?
DW: Because we are all broken human beings, conflict and hurt are inevitable and unavoidable. This is true not only in our family systems but in our church communities, as well. With that being said, there are several things that can help to minimize the kind of institutional, systemic hurt that is self-perpetuated and self-perpetuating.
First, resilient church systems deal with their problems. They don’t avoid them, sugarcoat them, or over spiritualize them. Taking a cue from Alcoholics Anonymous, the critical first step toward healing and change is admitting that we have a problem. Yet I’ve seen too many examples of churches struggling with a culture of niceness and passivity, where problems and conflicts that should be confronted are left alone in the hopes of keeping everyone happy and together. Research suggests that the number-one reason Christian leaders prematurely leave the ministry is because of unresolved conflict with other members of their ministry team. The mark of a healthy marriage or a health family, for example, isn’t the absence of conflict—the truth is, some couples don’t argue because they just don’t communicate—but rather a capacity to do conflict well: to share what needs to be shared, to hear what needs to be heard, and then to repair the misunderstandings and ruptures that have happened getting to this point.
Second, resilient church systems create space for both positive and negative emotions. Unfortunately, many evangelical churches struggle with triumphalism: a view of the Christian life in which we are to progress from victory to victory, where we sustain a disposition of perpetual joy, contentment, and peace at all times and never experience negative emotions such as sadness, fear, or anger. Speaking as both a pastor and a clinical psychologist, I’d call that toxic positivity with a Christian twist.
The fundamental problem with triumphalism is that it’s just not true. It’s theologically problematic and psychologically impossible. Even Jesus experienced negative emotions throughout his lifetime! Humans are literally not able to always experience positive emotions and never experience negative emotions. The goal, rather, is harmony between the two and congruence between our emotions and our circumstances.
Ecclesiastes 3 explains that there is a time for everything, a season for every activity and experience: a time to be born and a time to die, for example, as well as a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. God created negative emotions for a good purpose. There is so much for Christians to grieve in our own lives, in our communities, and in our world! Yet in toxic church systems, people are led to believe that if their feelings deviate in any way from perfect bliss and unending peace, there must be something wrong with them or something lacking with their faith—and that shame leads to church hurt.
Hurtful church systems stifle grief and seek to rewrite or ignore unpleasant history. Healthy, resilient church systems, on the other hand, do not see grief as a threat but rather as a pathway to wholeness and wisdom. They practice the deep, historic Christian tradition of grief and lament. The church I help to pastor, for example, convened a series of “lament panels” to bring the deeper, darker emotions of our community to the surface. Medical staff cried as they recounted their hardest days treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU, while other members of our community shared about feeling vulnerable in light of our country’s ongoing history of racialized violence.
Third, resilient church systems require and promote spiritual maturity in their leaders, who embody the likeness of Christ in real, rather than ideal, situations.
AH: What does that look like, exactly?
DW: Spiritually mature people possess a deep capacity for intimate relationships, not only with God but also with others—and especially with people who are different from them. They practice faith in the context of community, in an ongoing process of conversion centered on relationships with Christ and others. They are persons of faith, hope, and love, who embody the fruit of the Spirit. They manifest a spirit of docility to the working of the Holy Spirit, open to the process of formation even in the face of pain and difficulty. They are humble, maintaining a relatively low self-focus and a grounded perspective of themselves that acknowledges and accepts not only their mistakes, imperfections, and limitations but also their abilities and achievements. They know they are not omnicompetent and respect the boundaries of their capacity—and they invite others to fill in these gaps. They contribute to God’s redemptive work in the world by working toward social change in their community, for the liberation and justice of all peoples.
Spiritually mature people engage with reality. One of our recently published empirical studies found that prayer’s positive or negative mental health benefits are tied to one’s disposition toward experiential avoidance. That is, if you pray prayers of avoidance—like, “God just take this away”—then the practice of prayer can be associated with poorer mental health—and poorer spiritual health, I might add. But if you pray for strength and courage to face reality, no matter how difficult reality might be, the practice of prayer can be associated with positive mental health as well as deepening spiritual maturity.
A beautiful model of engaging—rather than avoiding—reality is Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. As Jesus looks ahead to the events that will ultimately lead to his death on the cross, he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26:39). Here, Jesus is facing his inner reality of preferring an alternative to the cross. And yet, he ends his prayer by accepting the reality that the way of the cross is nonetheless set before him. This same principle applies to church leaders: Are your prayers a means of avoiding reality or a means of receiving supernatural courage to face reality—whether that be the reality of yourself, of others, and/or of the world—no matter how painful or difficult it might be?
AH: In addition to your academic work, you’re also a pastor. How do you personally help people in your church who have been spiritually traumatized? What are some steps that a spiritually mature leader can take to help parishioners heal from past church hurt?
DW: I serve as the pastor of spiritual formation at One Life City Church in Fullerton, California. We function as an experimental laboratory of sorts, exploring new ways of accompanying each other through life. One of our church values is the idea that “formation is slow-cooked.” We take a “long” approach not only to the healing of trauma—which is everywhere in our community, from youth to adults—but to discipleship overall. I love Eugene Peterson’s description of discipleship as “a long obedience in the same direction,” and the same is true when it comes to helping people recover from spiritual trauma. We’re not looking for that one key insight or that one perfectly timed Bible verse or that one breakthrough moment where we magically usher in a new season of healing and freedom. Healing, like spiritual formation, happens at the speed of life. We can’t rush it, but we can resist it, slowing the process down or even grinding it to a halt.
The substance and work of trauma recovery is actually quite mundane. It’s showing up consistently. It’s reaching out to others and finding a way to trust people again, a little bit at a time. It’s cultivating safety in the community, both physically and emotionally, and that requires boundaries and honest conversations about our limitations (even about our inability to help). It’s asking people how they are doing and really meaning it, and doing that over and over again for a long time. It’s earning the trust that’s necessary for someone to share their pain with us.
Robert Stolorow defines trauma as what happens when “intense emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.” There are profound implications here for churches that want to become that relational home. Beyond the basics of ensuring the safety of all children and securing the church premises, church policy should reflect the reality that trauma is present not only within the congregation but within the leadership as well. Provisions for the ongoing sustainability and well-being of the pastoral staff (regular breaks and vacations, professional boundaries that protect the personal and family life of the leadership, etc.) should be formally codified and communicated.
Teaching ministries can normalize trauma by highlighting it in the biblical narrative and in our lives today. Preaching should avoid triumphalist language and convey the reality that our spiritual life, as well as our recovery process, is a journey that will not end until Christ returns. Be careful not to implicitly or explicitly convey an oversimplified framework for healing—“Trust in Jesus and all your pain will magically disappear,” for example. Find ways to celebrate when God answers prayers for healing without stigmatizing those who have prayed and are still waiting.
Next, broaden the emotional palette of worship. Glenn Pemberton notes that less than five percent of the most popular worship songs sung in American churches can be classified as songs of lament, compared with at least half of the Bible’s Psalms. Create space within the worship service for grief and lament. It’s perfectly fine for some songs to end on a hopeful note and for others to finish without a happy ending—just like many of the Psalms.
One of the foundational principles that undergirds my work as both a pastor and a clinical psychologist is that emotional pain tends to resist efforts to be “fixed.” However, if we are able to form trusting, attuned relationships with one another that make space for emotional pain to be seen and held, we help to build each other’s capacity to hold our own pain and incorporate it into our story. And in so doing, we point each other to Christ, the wounded healer, who suffered and died on the cross to redeem humankind, and who is and will be the ultimate relational home in which all of our emotional pain will be held now and forevermore. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb 4:15).
Aly Hawkins is editorial director & senior writer at Fuller. Find more of her work at thewritingvicar.com.
Brad Strawn, chief of spiritual formation and integration, and Amy Drennan, executive director of vocation formation, share lessons on embodied formation as they reflect on a Fuller group’s pilgrimage along Spain’s Camino de Santiago.
