The Colorado sunshine bathes red rock formations on the slopes surrounding Larry Crabb’s house. Outside the living room window, shaggy deer nose sparse bits of grass. “Donkey deer,” Crabb explains. “On the East coast, deer are very attractive. These are not the most attractive deer. They’re probably eating my flowers right now.”
They are.
One ugly deer peers in the window as the popular conference speaker, psychotherapist, and professor listens to a quote from one of his 16 books, a hopeful hypothesis about the church, The Safest Place on Earth:
‘Brokenness is the release of spiritual power and the revealing of hidden idolatry. It’s the most underrated virtue in the Christian community. —Larry Crabb’
“A spiritual community consists of people who have the integrity to come clean. It is comprised of those who own their shortcomings and failures because they hate them more than they hate the shortcomings and failures of others, who therefore discover that a well of pure water flows beneath their most fetid corruption.”
Leadership: Have you seen such a place?
Larry Crabb: When Philip Yancey read the book, his comment to me was “It seems to me you’ve written about a place you’ve never seen but hope you will someday.”
I’ve now seen it in a church we helped start back in Indiana. They are an incredible community of people who live in an ongoing brokenness with joy. And my wife and I are now in a spiritual formation group we started over two years ago with three other couples. We’re close to it. I think in twenty years I’ll still tell you we’re close to it. Spiritual community is like a good marriage. It’s good, but never ideal. We’re getting closer to it.
Spiritual community as you describe it seems to be a place where we can be honest about our sins and open about our weakness. How does that include pastors?
I think the missing element in most pastors’ lives is community. Pastors spend time in the Word. They’re willing to spend time on their knees. At least some are not that willing to open up their hearts to another brother or sister and say, “Can you help me discern?”
Discern what?
Impotence, inability, that there’s nothing of eternal value I can do apart from the Spirit.
‘Everything is usable by God to help me enter into deeper relationship with him. If that is not the first thing, then whatever is first is an idol. —Larry Crabb’
On one level, brokenness is simply the release of spiritual power, the Spirit doing his thing and power coming out. It only happens through brokenness, which I think is the most underrated virtue in the Christian community today. But beyond the release of power, there’s this deep understanding of our weakness.
Strength, then, is not a virtue to be cultivated. It is a reality to be released. It’s something that is already there. It gets released increasingly over the course of your lifetime as brokenness becomes more complete.
Has that been your experience?
That’s my testimony. Brokenness wasn’t much a part of my life until the last few years. And it feels like it’s an increasing thing. But I don’t find brokenness to be a morbid thing at all. There’s something alive in me that brokenness has simply surfaced.
The first of Luther’s 95 Theses was about brokenness, that Jesus willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance. In other words, brokenness is the ongoing, lifelong reality. It isn’t something you get past. It’s a continually deepening revelation of your own impotence without the Spirit. That’s why you meet people in their eighties, godly men and women, who say, “I think I’m just beginning to grasp the gospel.”
What do we discover when we are being broken?
Hidden idolatry.
About a month ago I was reading through Ephesians. I had decided to seize a free day for a brief spiritual retreat. I was reading Ephesians through for the fourth or fifth time when I began getting some clear thoughts I hadn’t seen before. I was thinking, This will work for my next book. This will work for the conference I’m doing in a couple of weeks.
I began writing these things down when, it was one of those mystical moments, I could sense the Lord saying to me, This is just between you and me. I’m not asking you to use this for your purposes. I’m asking you to just enjoy the food I’m giving you. I had to put down my pen. I felt like an alcoholic must feel putting down his drink. I had discovered my own idolatry. Rich thoughts from God had become something I could use in a way to accomplish my agenda. They were my idol.
How do you learn to recognize your own hidden idolatries?
First, be aware of the category. If you don’t know hidden idolatry exists, you’ll never see it.
Second, have a couple of close spiritual friends who will say, “You drive me crazy with this. Can I talk with you about this?” One of my best friends often says this to me. One strength of mine is good preparation when I speak, but my weakness, one friend points out, is in over-preparing. “Go see a movie,” he told me once when I planned to spend an afternoon reviewing notes for a presentation. “It’s the most spiritual thing you can do today.”
Michael Card, the songwriter, told me the biggest thing he learned from counseling was that his gift was not his identity. That he can sing and strum his guitar and create music is not his identity. “If it is, I am an idolator,” he said.
For many pastors, their gift is their identity; their strength is their weakness, their idol.
In his last sermon, one of my mentors who was on the faculty at Masters Seminary, told the students, “The greatest impediment to your spiritual intimacy is your giftedness. Because you are gifted, you are going to be able to make life work in the church without ever knowing God well.”
How do you embrace this impotence, rather than despair of it?
It’s pride that keeps us from going all the way into brokenness, stopping at the level of despair rather than getting to the bottom where we find not despair but hope. There’s a line in C.S. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed, on the death of his wife, that stands out for me: “You never know how much you believe in the strength of the rope until you’re hanging by it over a cliff.” I think brokenness is one of the most joyful realities in the Christian life. It lets you discover that the rope holds. The rope is God.
Weakness is so opposite of our culture today. Even ministry is about progress and success.
A pastor said to me, “I had been so busy managing everything at my church that I had never allowed myself to feel the profound level of emptiness that was in my soul. My spiritual dryness kept me working 80 hours a week so I wouldn’t feel the emptiness that I’m feeling now. It’s overwhelming.”
He went back to his church and confessed his brokenness, an emptiness that all that church activity could not begin to fill. He preached the sermon of his life, another friend told me.
When I admit, In my weakness I can do nothing to fill my emptiness, there is opportunity for the Spirit to move us into closer relationship with himself.
In the current interest in spiritual disciplines, is there an effort to make spiritual health systematic and manageable?
That’s a subtle danger—that they become another technique. The demand for a system that can be managed is probably at the core of what it means to be unbroken. When somebody says, “What do I do to make this happen?” I think that’s a cry of the person’s heart, but it’s not the deepest cry. There are lots of things that can be managed, but at the deepest level of spiritual growth, I don’t think it can be managed.
I was challenged on this by Brennan Manning. We were speaking together at a pastors’ conference. I asked him where he was headed when it was over.
“I’m going on a seven-day silent retreat,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. I had never done a seven-day silent retreat. I couched it in delicate language, but I said, “What do you get out of this? Are you a different person because you’re doing this?”
He was bewildered. “I never thought of what I’d get out of it,” he said.
“Then why—”
“I just figured God likes it when I show up,” he concluded.
That was a paradigm shift for me. Here was a man whose focus was simply on union with God. When you’re older and your children want to come home to spend time with you, it feels kind of nice. Maybe God feels the same way.
I meet pastors who are frantically trying to put into place the next system that will make it all come together—for themselves and for the church. C. S. Lewis said, “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.”
We have so many things to handle in ministry. How do we sift it down to the “first things.”
Our first thing is union with God, the enjoyment of God as my supreme treasure. (I’m indebted to John Piper for this answer.) No matter what happens in my life—whether the church falls apart or gives me a million bucks and a year-long sabbatical, if my teenage daughter gets pregnant or my kids become missionaries—everything is usable by God for me to enter into deeper relationship with him. If that is not the first thing, then whatever is first is an idol.
I was talking with a pastor whose two older children’s actions were breaking his heart. He said, “Tell me how to respond biblically so I can win them back.” That’s a second thing question—completely legitimate, and it deserves an answer, but it’s second place.
The first place question is “What does it mean in the middle of this heartbreak for me to draw closer to the Lord for his pleasure?”
Pastors aren’t alone in putting second things first. How do we make this a priority in our spiritual communities?
In the church context, pastors are in a tough position because of the expectations of members, of the board, and expectations of what successful pastoral work looks like. It’s usually about goals with visible results—getting someone over addiction, making a marriage better, building a church to double its size.
A good friend, Jim Kallam, who pastors Church at Charlotte [North Carolina], tells how several years ago as the church was growing, the elders said to him, “Let’s get a building program going.”
Jim could feel that this was the next thing he wanted to give his soul to. He thought, We’re growing, we could get a capital campaign going, we could be one of the primary churches in Charlotte. Then something in him was broken by the idolatry of that. He just relaxed and said, “Let’s not rush here. Let’s make sure our hearts are right before God.” And he felt content that if this building project never happened, he would be okay with that.
After prayer and time, they built. But it was second thing, second place.
How can we be broken before our people in such a way that they don’t lose trust or confidence?
Don’t start in the pulpit. That’s not the place to start. And it’s not about “vulnerability,” a term that comes out of the therapeutic culture. The assumption is that if you’re open about your pain, that’s the essence of healing. I don’t agree with that. “Authenticity” is a much better word. Authenticity says, Here’s where I am in my journey to knowing God better, as opposed to vulnerability, which is Here’s where I am hurting most. Vulnerability can be narcissistic.
Where can we be honest about our weakness?
Nobody should ever go to the grave with secrets—but it happens with 99 percent of people. There should be somebody in my life from whom I’ve hidden nothing. In many cases, it may not be my spouse. It may be a friend, a spiritual director, a pastor, somebody who knows my worst. That’s the first level.
The second level is a small group. In my case, it’s our spiritual formation group of four couples. There I don’t need be to be a star or a leader. I’m just another pilgrim with a bunch of struggling pilgrims.
With those pieces in place, a pastor will not feel the compulsion to hide or to reveal, because it’s already taken care of before he gets in his pulpit. Then he’s able to live out of his brokenness for the sake of his congregation and not for his own healing.
Your model community appreciates open, caring interaction, where people “have the integrity to come clean.” Can this be taught?
It starts with a recognition of impoverished theology. Eugene Peterson was scheduled to appear at a conference on spiritual formation. I phoned him to ask what he would speak on. “Our Trinitarian theology in the evangelical church is thin,” he said.
Until it gets thicker, we’re not going to make much progress in this whole area of spiritual formation. God is in eternal community, a radically other-centered relationship where the Father is always saying, Isn’t my Son something?! The Son’s always saying, Look at the Father. And the Spirit is always saying, Look at Jesus.
Until we start pondering the mystery of the Trinity, we won’t have a clue that we’re a million miles from it in terms of community. People need to be overwhelmed by the Trinitarian community.
How do you put that in practical terms?
Are you familiar with the word perichoresis? It’s a word fourth-century monks came up with to help laymen think about the Trinity: peri meaning “around” and choreticcoming from “choreography.” It’s “dancing around.” When Peterson teaches the Trinity, he says to visualize the Trinity having a square dance. Can you hear the rhythm of the Spirit and enter the dance?
It think it means God is having a good time. When we understand community like that, we will realize we’re missing something here.
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