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After spending 25 years with Young Life, Fil Anderson discovered he was too busy working for God to spend time with God. In his book, Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers, Anderson describes his situation as an airplane that from the ground looks fine as it flies across the sky, but is running out of fuel. At a conference, Anderson met Brennan Manning, who asked Anderson about the condition of his soul. Anderson realized he needed spend more time taking care of his spiritual life and less time running his ministry.

Anderson is now executive director of Journey Resources in Greensboro, NC. He offers spiritual direction and directs retreats and workshops around the country. Anderson is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and the Graduate Program in Spiritual Guidance at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Bethesda, Maryland.

What were you doing and what was happening that you didn't nourish your soul as you were trying to nourish the souls of others.

There's an old expression that perhaps you've heard, "You can't take someone to places you haven't been." I think it suggests that to be effective in ministry, to take people to God, you've got to be maintaining your own relationship. I believe there's a bit of truth in that, but I think it betrays the whole truth. I had known God, I'd had some kind of relationship with God, but there had never been a real deep intimacy. There certainly had not been an ongoing sense of connection with God. I prayed, I read the scriptures, I spent time with other believers, but those spiritual disciplines, as we call them, had become for me more a way of maintaining my ministry than my own soul's relationship with God. When I prayed it was usually ministry-related. When I read the scriptures it was usually looking for something to say.

Would you say that your condition really is probably the rule rather than the exception in Christian ministry today?

I hope that's not the case, but I suspect it is. I can remember before this encounter with Brennan being so ashamed and so afraid of what might happen if I was discovered. Naturally I never was looking for an opportunity to speak with anyone about the condition of my soul. But there's another old expression, "It takes a crook to catch one." And after I began to enter into this season of recovery, which I'm still in, I began to detect things in my conversation with others that led me to at least wonder, Are they suffering the same malady that I was suffering from?

The truth of the matter is great things can occur in spite of our own soul's condition. I remember the late Tom Skinner years ago saying, "Don't ever judge the condition of my soul by the quality of my preaching."

What were some of the symptoms that there was a problem underneath your success?

I saw that I was doing things for God rather than with God. I was always busy, never able to be still. In my case, working for God, but without a sense of God's nearness. I became aware of the fact that I know a lot of things about God, but it doesn't feel like a relationship.

You also talk about needing to overcome a life that made you sick. You say Americans all risk "death by meltdown." And you make reference to C.S. Lewis's Turkish Delight story. How is it that we're in a life that makes us sick?

We live in a toxic world, a world that is-is absolutely driven. And I think the damaging effect of living in the kind of society that we're living in that's filled with values and so much stress on achievement, can really work on our souls. And the truth of the matter is we all want approval. We all want recognition. God has all that we need to offer, but I believe it's very easy for us to get hooked by what the world is offering in that same vein.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48