It was surreal enough that a white-haired man would walk up to me at the crowded Michelle’s—ice-cream lovers’ cloud nine in Colorado Springs—get on one knee, look me in the eyes, and croon “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
The Elvis impersonator was not a waiter desperate for a tip.
He was none other than Larry Crabb, the popular Christian counselor whose books have sold in the millions. The author of Finding God (Zondervan, 1993), which left me in tears of repentance. The evangelical mystic, who—in the words of one of his best friends, Trip Moore—has the gift “to remain miserable in the midst of blessings.” The distinguished scholar in residence at Colorado Christian University.
As Crabb proceeded with his confident, testosterone-oozing, faithful Elvis impersonation—complete with swiveling hips—you’d think his personality just split. Later I learn that I’m one of his many victims: doing Elvis “to” people is a prank he plays on his colleagues, students, and even Christian cruise passengers.
Why would he do that? Brennan Manning, Catholic retreat director and author of The Wisdom of Tenderness (HarperCollins, 2002), who has been giving Crabb occasional spiritual direction for the last 14 years, offers a plausible reason: “Maybe he does it to disarm.”
Crabb’s interest in the “tragic artistry” of Elvis began in childhood. He’d stand for hours by the hi-fi and sing along with the King. “When I hear him, particularly in the spirituals, it feels like something wistful is coming out, something yearning, something longing,” he says.
Crabb looks at everyone with this kind of wonder. Beneath behavior he sees wounds. Beneath wounds he sees depravity. Beneath depravity he sees the gloriously volatile imago dei.
When he was only 6, Crabb watched his dad play doubles on a tennis court. As his father was cracking jokes relentlessly, the future author of Inside Out was studying more than the game. Dad, why are you so insecure? Crabb remembers thinking. Why don’t you just play tennis? Why are you trying so hard to be one of “the guys”? ‘Cause you didn’t have a father?
Crabb was having dinner recently at the home of his friend Bob Ingram. The friend began to convulse in a cough—he’s struggled with its sudden attacks for years—and bolted from the table. When Ingram returned from the bathroom, Crabb asked, “Have you ever considered what effect your cough has on your spiritual journey?”
“That moment, I was really angry at him,” Ingram told me. “I was having a hard time breathing. But later it caused me to be drawn to him. I want to know more about where his curiosity will lead me in my walk to something I think is a higher ground.”
Crabb’s chronic fascination with the unseen forces at work in people not only prompted him to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, but also eventually drove him into spiritual direction—deeper yet into the human soul. He turned his back on diagnostic counseling methods in order to care for people’s souls in an unpredictable, unprofessional, fickle, and, in his opinion, most useful context: caring relationships. He now believes that there’s no better psychotherapy than friendships fashioned after the everlasting friendship between Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Which brings us to Michelle’s. It’s a midweek ice-cream break for the 30 students taking Crabb’s weeklong course in spiritual direction. We’ve come to the manicured wilderness of the Glen Eyrie retreat center in the Springs to learn to “listen to the Spirit on behalf of one another.”
Waking Up the Giant
Wearing khaki pants and a knit shirt, Crabb is watching a tennis game on tv when I first meet him at the Glen. Crabb’s feet are bare. Somehow, they connote vulnerability—and a soul he would soon effortlessly bare. At 58, Crabb seems too mellow, too frank, too centered to dodge any questions.
“I can be very demanding of what a conversation should go like, how people should respond, what people should be thinking about,” he says. But this week, people are paying him to do just that.
Several years ago, when Crabb was reading Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (IVP, 1995) by Oxford University professor of historical theology Alister McGrath, a warning leapt off the page: “Evangelicalism is the slumbering giant of the world of spirituality. It needs to wake up.” At the time, Crabb was losing faith in what he had experienced as “the standard ‘evangelical’ means of spiritual growth.”
“Daily devotions, no drinking, faithful church attendance, busyness with church programs, performance-oriented Sunday worship and preaching,” he says, didn’t lead him to “a dynamic enjoyment of God.” In fact, they seemed to be interfering. “I was finding water for my thirsty soul in classic Catholic writings.”
But reading McGrath gave him a renewed vigor to explore evangelical essentials. Soon, they became the building blocks in his uniquely evangelical basis for spiritual direction. These days, Crabb is tugging at the sleeve of the sleeping giant.
If you ask James Houston—founder of Regent College and one of Crabb’s mentors—he’ll tell you it’s time for this wake-up call. Like Crabb, Houston believes healing of non-organic disorders “should not be in the hands of specialists—it should be in the hands of the church.” Crabb now attends a Presbyterian church, but both he and Houston grew up in the Plymouth Brethren, which doesn’t have professional clergy and stresses the empowerment of laity. The two live to train laity.
Houston believes that too many evangelicals have sought God “through activism—programs, conferences, applying methods, or ministries.” People needing relational healing too often had to turn to psychotherapists. “The therapeutic revolution has been an indictment of the church,” he says.
True, evangelicals do sometimes err on the side of making faith into formulas. On the other hand, they’ve always exalted the importance of “a personal relationship” with God. Small groups are also an evangelical trademark. Perhaps both the love of relationships and its perversion (subjecting relationships to the methods Houston talks about) have readied evangelicals for spiritual direction. Houston cites one more influence: the recent renaissance of interest in Trinitarian spirituality.
Whatever the reason, programs in spiritual direction are popping up at many evangelical colleges. The first issue of a journal of spiritual formation called Conversations—a brainchild of Crabb and two other psychologists who moved into spiritual direction, David Benner and Gary Moon—came out this March. And Crabb—with his School of Spiritual Direction, SoulCare conferences (in which he teaches participants to “enter the battle for the souls” of those they love), and two books in the works on spiritual direction—is the evangelical savant of the hour.
His father played a key role in getting him to this point. The “austere,” open-minded yet conservative English immigrant taught Crabb how to doubt in the midst of believing. Crabb says the hard-working power-tool salesman was “honest enough to struggle and let me see it.”
When Crabb was 15, he heard his father offer assurance of salvation to his comatose father-in-law. On the way out, his dad said to his mom, “Soon your dad will be with the Lord.” But he added, “If it’s all true.”
Crabb ran up to his dad and asked, “What do you mean, ‘If’?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he replied. “Sometimes I wonder.” This event incited Crabb’s curiosity about how we know things are true; epistemology became his minor in graduate school.
The Unsightly Root of Sin
When his secular psychology professors derided his faith, Crabb found himself unable to offer an intelligent defense. Biblical teachings seemed “irrelevant to the problems I was getting to be familiar with—sexual abuse, dissociation, anxiety attacks, depression.” So he gave up Christianity for two years; he still went to church, but to question it, not to worship.
He was in private practice when, like many in his generation, he returned to the faith thanks to C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. Crabb’s eureka moment came at 2 a.m. as he sat on the back porch of his Florida home, reading Schaeffer. He woke his wife, exclaiming, as he recalls: “The deepest longings for significance and security going on inside my clients are needs that God actually intended to meet through the community of believers!” This led Crabb to merge psychology with theology, giving rise to his first book, Principles of Biblical Counseling (Zondervan, 1975) and then Effective Biblical Counseling (Zondervan, 1977). “I believe that God has ordained the local church to be his primary instrument to tend to his people’s aches and pains,” he wrote in the latter. His lifelong optimism about believers’ ability to heal souls by moving them toward God was germinating.
Crabb’s bestseller, Inside Out (NavPress, 1988), marked his first sharp departure from psychopathology. Real change is possible, Crabb wrote, but only from inside out. A look inside requires facing sin, an unmentionable in psychotherapy. Sin “is not what you do wrong—it’s looking at God and saying, ‘You’re not enough, and I’m going to find some way to make my life work without you!’ “
Ironically, as his book was gaining popularity among evangelicals, Crabb’s dream for their churches to “move people toward soul health” was floundering.
Relationship over Method
In an interview on national tv in the mid-1980s, Full Circle author David Mains asked him, “Isn’t your thinking about the church really a pipe dream?”
“I’m a little afraid it is,” Crabb answered.
“I was seeing good work happening in people’s lives in my and my colleagues’ offices that wasn’t happening in the church,” he says now. “That drove me nuts.”
Then, in 1988, Crabb was asked to leave Grace Theological Seminary in Indiana, where he taught biblical counseling. His kind of counseling wasn’t “biblical” enough for the seminary’s head (who is no longer in charge).
He must have taken “biblical” to mean the exhortation-responsibility model of counseling, Crabb says. “Meaning, ‘If you’re having an affair, I can show you a verse that says you shouldn’t, so stop it.’ ” Crabb’s position is, “Stop the affair, and now let’s deal with what led you in this terrible direction.”
After his fall from Grace, Crabb became intrigued by Australian theologian David Broughton Knox’s insistence that “the doctrine of the Trinity is the cornerstone of the Christian religion.” Then he heard Houston say that if the church recovers the doctrine of the Trinity, we may see the next Reformation.
Crabb mulled over these insights and “imported” the doctrine of the Trinity into human relationships: If we indeed bear the image of God, we bear the image of a community. “We were designed to exist in community, and there has to be a Trinitarian kind of relating possible,” he says. He calls it “pure other-centeredness.” Consider for example, the way the Father elevates the Son, Jesus establishes the authority of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit leads us to the Father.
“When I look back at my life, at the times that were most thrilling, most exquisitely delightful, they always were approximations of how the Trinity relates,” he says.
Crabb realized that the therapy enterprise, too, is built on relationships. “It’s not about what I do to people; it’s what I am with people,” he says, adding that much secular research, too, extols the therapist-client relationship over the therapist’s theoretical orientation (see “Therapy as Relationship,” p. 37).
This strengthened Crabb’s passion to return counseling to the hands of laity. And it led to a split in Crabb’s 20-year-long professional partnership with psychologist Dan Allender, who wanted to continue educating professional counselors. (Allender declined CT‘s request for an interview.) Crabb grieved the lost friendship, but couldn’t go against his belief that “the church, with all its warts and struggles and compromises and hypocrisy,” is still the place where God heals his people.
His next book, Connecting (Word, 1997), envisions healing communities, or spiritual friendships. To grow such communities, Crabb started New Way Ministries (the “new way” from Romans 7:6), which puts on the School of Spiritual Direction and SoulCare conferences. The ministry’s launching pad was Shattered Dreams (WaterBrook, 2001), Crabb’s book based on the journey of Naomi in the Book of Ruth. It came out during The Prayer of Jabez fever, and delivered an almost opposite message.
The message of Shattered Dreams was, in my interpretation, “God, I don’t like my territory, but it’s all I’ve got right now, so help me—and others through me—find you in it!”
Repenting from Good
Crabb’s most recent book, The Pressure’s Off! (WaterBrook, 2002), shrewdly identifies the subtle ways we fall into legalism.
Among the students in Crabb’s spiritual direction class was Dick King, a grandfatherly pastor from North Little Rock, Arkansas. For King, the most stunning insight in The Pressure’s Off! is the call to repent not just of evil, but also of good. “You have to repent from the whole Tree of Good and Evil. Only through Christ’s death for you do you return to the Tree of Life,” he says. “Not through your own goodness.”
We’re all tempted to expect God to do B if we do A, Crabb says. If we’ve been “good enough” in some area, surely God will be at least “good enough” back, no? Unless God surprises us with a grace or an ache, we count on methods to make life work. We want the general principles from the Book of Proverbs to work every time in every situation. We want our spouses, for example, to respond the way we want them to when we speak their “love language.”
Crabb’s students often nodded their heads in agreement as they noticed their own attempts at living by formulas. One student blurted out with a laugh in a prayer, “O God, I even want to be broken right!”
But Crabb steered us toward accepting our own incompetence. Early in the week, he lifted his head from the overhead projector where he drew a diagram picturing the initial stages of spiritual direction, and said, “Anybody feel inadequate?” Most of the students nodded their heads. “Anybody ready to get over it?” He paused. “Maybe it’s the embracing of inadequacy that releases the Spirit.”
At the end of Connecting, Crabb envisioned spiritual direction as “the art of discerning the deepest recesses of the soul with a sensitivity to what the Spirit is doing, accompanied by offering one’s presence to another.”
Instead of telling, he showed it to us at the Glen. He received permission from an older married woman, “Sally,” to talk with her each day in front of the class about her struggle with “emotional attachments to women.”
He treated her with a respect and curiosity that excluded voyeurism. Layer by layer, Sally allowed him to look within her. He rejoiced with her when she said her temptations are separate from who she is in Christ. He probed gently. When, in the tone of a mid-episode Colombo, he said, “There is a level of rest that is not yours,” she agreed, and let him take her, day by day, to this place of rest. “He could see straight through me,” Sally later told me. There were several breakthroughs in their conversations, and, as I hear, Sally’s marriage has since enjoyed an intimacy that wasn’t there before.
In all this, Crabb tried to retain perspective. After one conversation with Sally, Crabb turned to the class and said, “I’ve got to die to the idea that when she leaves here, she’s going to say, ‘That time with Larry meant the world!’ “
How do you heal a soul? It begins with something simple but rare in today’s information-deluged society: curiosity. This doesn’t mean listening skills, which Crabb refuses to teach. “Repeat what the person says,” he says mockingly. “Lean forward. Eye contact. I just despise that! Then I’m doing skills toward you, instead of being with you.”
For him, true curiosity is rooted in an awareness of the unseen world. No one is a mere mortal, he often repeats after C. S. Lewis. Nothing we do is mere. There is no mere chronic cough.
The flexible, cyclical model of spiritual direction that Crabb has developed is not a formula. It’s a rhythm that he’s observed in the pages of the Bible and in his directees. Condensed from Crabb’s manual, here are its ebbs and flows:
- Hell (despair at the realization of vanity): The directee descends into the living death of experiencing the lesser blessings and not the Blesser. The director helps the directee recognize this ugly reality. (In class, Crabb uses Ecclesiastes to illustrate this stage.)
- Purgatory (suffering): The directee detaches from idols and attaches to God. The director’s role is to point to hope in the midst of suffering. (To the directee, it “feels” like the Book of Job.)
- Heaven (the divine embrace): The directee moves toward God, and basks in his love. The director rejoices with the directee. (Crabb quotes from the Song of Songs to depict the directee’s state of heart.)
A concurrent cycle in spiritual formation begins with brokenness (hurt caused by your and others’ sin), which leads to repentance (a realization that God is not there to cooperate with your agenda), which leads to abandonment (you resist the temptation to escape or to curse God, instead abandoning yourself to him), which arouses confidence (the Spirit witnesses to your spirit that you belong to God, and that he is present even in your darkest night), which finally leads to release of what’s most alive within you (springs of Living Water).
Warm Kiss, Frigid Mother
Crabb insists that what’s going on inside directors determines the quality of conversation. Peering inside himself one morning, he tells us he had eaten six pieces of bacon at breakfast, four more than he usually allows himself. He realized that he overate because he was mad at someone. The confession gave his words power that morning.
As a teacher, Crabb is candid, agile, articulate, full of anecdotes. You’d never guess he used to stutter; he now talks fast, freely ad-libbing incisive remarks. The Scriptures’ authority gives his paradigm of direction evangelical legs. He easily quotes biblical passages from memory. You get the impression that Crabb eats, breathes, and oozes the Scriptures.
In one intense moment, he closes his eyes tightly, blood rushes to his face, and he clasps his hands together. “Brokenness,” he says, “isn’t so much about how bad you’ve been hurt but how you’ve sinned in handling it.” He lifts his hands as he loosely quotes Hosea 7:13-14, imploring: “I long to redeem my people but they’re not crying out for me! They wail upon their beds! They do nothing more than hurting over their circumstances.”
He also recites insights from an eclectic group of thinkers he drew on to come up with his model of direction: Thomas Merton, Eugene Peterson, Francis Schaeffer, Henri Nouwen, Brennan Manning, John of the Cross, G. K. Chesterton, Michael Card, Peter Kreeft, Augustine, Copernicus, and James Houston.
Sometimes he comes to class purposely unprepared (not that it shows). “Repentance is idiosyncratic,” he says. About 14 years ago, he stopped working on the first five minutes of his speeches. He was spending too much time on them. The reason, he believed, was mainly his “need to impress people,” which traces back to his childhood.
He remembers watching The Life of Riley on TV when he was about 8. Feeling “good about being alive,” he walked over to his mother and planted a spontaneous kiss on her cheek. She nodded stiffly, as if acknowledging a stranger on the street, with a nervous dutifulness, and looked back at the tv.
“She never learned to express her tenderness,” he says.
“What did it do to you?” I ask.
“I think it strengthened my narcissism. It encouraged a grasping after affirmation, dependency on getting what I didn’t get from her.”
Merton vs. People
A presence in Crabb’s classroom that, like his candor, lends him credibility is his wife of 36 years, Rachel. The sanguine, chestnut-haired woman sat in on some of Crabb’s lectures and prepared care packages for his students. The two often hold hands and embrace one another with an obvious affection.
“I’m fortunate in that I’m married to a very godly man,” Rachel says when I sit down with them. “He’s the one who’s taught me the most about God.”
Larry chimes in unsolicited with a reality check: “I think I’m very hard to live with. I’m moody. I struggle a lot.”
“Larry is very thoughtful,” says Rachel. “Introspective. … We could not be more opposite.”
“She reads People, I read Merton,” says Larry, nodding.
“I’m upbeat, he’s not,” says Rachel.
A board member of Stonecraft Ministries’ Christian Women’s Club and author of a book on hospitality, Rachel loves to entertain. Larry, Houston says, “is a one-on-one person.”
“She’s into facts, I’m into what’s inside,” Crabb says. He initiates “relationship talk” more often than Rachel.
“There’s something in me that’s very needy, yearning, craving,” he says. “I want her to be curious about me in ways she isn’t always. I’m learning not to demand—to enjoy certain things and to hurt when I don’t get them, but not to demand.”
That’s a marked change, Rachel says. There was a time “when I had to be more like him and I wanted him more like me.” But on their 34th anniversary, the Crabbs had an epiphany: Their life goals don’t overlap much.
Says Larry, “I decided that since God made her this way and made me this way, why not just honor that?”
“At that point I felt you heard who I was,” Rachel says, turning to Larry. “And maybe for 34 years I wasn’t sure if you heard who I was.”
One of Crabb’s sons, Kep, has also attended the class on direction, while the other, Ken, intends to take it. By all accounts, Crabb is one of the few people on earth who deserves to wear one of those “The World’s Best Dad” T-shirts. Ken Crabb, 32, recalls his dad saying once that “his biggest mistake as a parent was that he spent too much time with us and made us feel too important. We felt very much the center of his attention.”
Over the years his dad “has mellowed and never answers the questions we haven’t asked,” he says. Not quite so when the boys were growing up. Now the butt of family jokes, mandatory family devotions commenced just after Crabb—the fastest eater in the family—had finished dinner. Crabb eagerly elucidated biblical passages for between 15 minutes and two hours. He drew diagrams—first on a chalkboard on wheels, later on an overhead projector he bought especially for the dining room table.
“Dad had very firm boundaries that our whining about things did not change, ever,” Ken says. When Kep was going through adolescent rebellion, he was asked to leave Taylor University. At that point, Crabb told him he had to pay his own way through life. Christmas in 1988—the first one without Kep, who didn’t have the money to fly home—was painful. “I remember the three of us sitting in the family room that Christmas morning crying,” Ken says. Today, Kep credits his father’s tough love and grace for his return to the faith.
The students I met at the Glen are equally adoring. They told me they were moved by his teaching, and won over by his gentleness, hugs, lightheartedness, and “astounding realness,” as student Debbie Carsten put it.
Crabb has several mentors like that, too. Manning and Crabb see each other once a year, at best. When they do, they follow a spontaneously begun ritual. “As soon as we spot one another,” says Manning, “we both jump up and down, run to one another, and kiss one another on the lips.”
“Why do you do that?” I ask Manning.
“It’s the sheer delight in seeing one another,” he says. “When you see two men in public doing that, there’s often only one conclusion. But he’s so secure in his identity that we can throw caution to the wind. If anybody’s got a problem with that, then it’s their problem.”
Where Freud and the Bible Agree
What Crabb gives up in vulnerability toward people, he reclaims in control over his personal space. His desk has to be clean and tidy, or he can’t work. The same goes for Crabb’s immaculate black Infiniti QX4. He cleans his suv at least twice a week. “I keep my towel in the back, and when I come out of the car wash, I stop and dry it all off because the driers never do an adequate job.”
“I know, it’s a control issue,” Crabb says, grinning and shrugging his shoulders. “And since I don’t believe in pathology, I think it’s fine.”
Crabb is impatient with psychology’s tendency to reduce everything to a diagnosis. “If Jeremiah lived today, he’d be diagnosed as bipolar,” he says in class, then pauses and looks at his students pleadingly. “What if it’s a journey?”
But the buzz that Crabb would advise professional Christian counselors to close shop and begin giving spiritual direction isn’t true. “I don’t think it’s going to work very well until the day the Lord comes back,” he says. “I’m just grateful for anybody who has a good conversation with somebody. If that happens in a therapy setting, for $100 an hour, that’s fine.”
The advice he’d like to pass along to Christian counselors is that they refrain from helping their counselees adjust to this world. He’d like them to recognize that “what lies at the root of a person’s non-organic struggles” is the lack of experienced communion with God. He hopes that Christian therapists will “pour out of their souls the reality of their communion with God in a way that gives the counselees a taste and directs them toward wanting that above all other treasures.”
Crabb has always had his critics. Martin and Deidre Bobgan, whose writings reprove various Christian psychologists, devoted a book to Crabb’s “psychoheresy”—Larry Crabb’s Gospel (EastGate, 1998). In it, they argue that Crabb has psychologized the gospel. In Crabb’s teaching, they write, “The gospel becomes the good news that Jesus meets the needs/longings/passions which motivate all behavior from the unconscious. Sin becomes wrong strategies for meeting the needs/longings/passions.”
Their criticisms—and those of other counselors, such as Jay Adams—inspired Joe Palmer, a student at Phoenix Seminary, to write a dissertation defending Crabb. “[W]hen we speak of human needs, our terms will have to be, by the focus of the topic, ‘man-centered,’ ” Palmer writes. “Either way, we are talking about the real and felt needs of human beings. Christ died to meet these needs.”
The inquiry about the interior world—our thoughts, needs, feelings, desires, motivations—is “not psychotherapeutic, but biblical, and psychotherapists happen to have it right,” Crabb says. Look at Proverbs 20:5, Hebrews 4:12, or Matthew 23, Crabb says, “where the Lord’s talking to Pharisees, and saying, ‘You blind Pharisees! Why don’t you clean the inside of the cup as opposed to just keeping the outside looking good?’ “
In my conversations with Christian counselors, many dismissed the Bobgans’ concerns. Still, Gene A. Sale, associate professor of psychology at Palm Beach Atlantic College, who says his views are more similar to Crabb’s than dissimilar, believes that the majority of professionals in the counseling field think that Crabb has adopted “somewhat of an extreme position.”
He disagrees with Crabb’s assertion in The Safest Place on Earth (Word, 1999) that psychology should play “neither an authoritative nor supplemental role” in the church’s provision of soul care.
Says Sale, “Will psychotherapy ever provide spiritual healing for the core of the person? The answer is no. Can psychotherapy assist in symptom reduction? I believe it can.”
Crabb’s reply suggests that the disagreement may be semantic. Psychology is not supplemental, but catalytic, he says, “in helping us think through flesh dynamics like dissociation, self-deception, and denial.” He concedes that in attaining the “lesser goal of symptom relief,” psychology can help.
It’s just that Crabb was born to meet the higher goal: to dust off the reflection of Christ in people, and let it take them to its source. Ron Pagé, a student I met at the School of Spiritual Direction, recently gave me a glimpse of how Crabb does it.
The Therapy of Love
During a conference a few years ago, Pagé let Crabb in on disillusionment he was feeling with life, marriage, and ministry. “I was a stewing pot of anger and brokenness,” he says. “Somehow, Larry saw something of what God was doing in the midst of the mess that uplifted his own tired heart as he affirmed the way I was letting the Scriptures cut so deep.
“The next day, the conference over, he waded through the waves of people in the hotel lobby, put his hands on my shoulders, and said: ‘I want you to know that I believe in you.’
“I wanted to hit him,” Pagé continues. “Never has a man touched my soul so deeply and stirred up so much pain and longing. Yet I know God better today as a result of his entering into my life and touching places I had kept so closely guarded. Though a mentor, he has a way of making me feel like a peer, a fellow sojourner.”
This may be because Crabb really is a fellow pilgrim.
He told his class about a time when he confessed to Manning his struggle with deep bitterness.
Hearing Crabb’s admission, Manning began to cry.
“My first reaction was, I have got to help him now!” Crabb later told us. He asked Manning, “Why are you crying?”
“Oh, Larry, every time I’m with you, I’m so drawn to Jesus,” Crabb quoted Manning in an aching, warm voice.
“Why?”
“You just hate everything that gets between you and your Lord.”
“Then, I was open to exploring the ugliness.”
Upon hearing this, so were Crabb’s apprentices in spiritual direction. We felt safe with Crabb because he roused the Spirit-bequeathed love we had for Christ, which lay beneath our sin and shame. That love—by God—does conquer all.
Agnieszka Tennant is an associate editor of Christianity Today.
Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere
A ready-to-download Bible Study on this article is available at ChristianBibleStudies.com. These unique Bible studies use articles from current issues of Christianity Today to prompt thought-provoking discussions in adult Sunday school classes or small groups.
Larry Crabb’s books, including Finding God, Basic Principles of Biblical Counseling, Effective Biblical Counseling, The Safest Place on Earth, Connecting, The Pressure’s Off, and Inside Out, are available at Christianbook.com.
The website for Crabb’s New Way Ministries has more on its mission and philosophy of ministry.
Articles about or featuring Larry Crabb in Christianity Today sister publication Leadership Journal include:
Rocked, Shattered, and Battered Larry Crabb says sometimes brokenness is better than being fixed. (Fall 2001)
Where Healing Belongs Psychologist Larry Crabb wants to return soul care to the local church. (Spring 2001)
Measuring What Matters How do you gauge if your people are getting stronger? (Spring 2000)
In December, Christianity Today featured an article on spiritual directing, “Three Temptations of Spiritual Formation.”
