Leader's Insight: Curing Grandiosity (Part 2)

Psychologist Milton Rokeach wrote a book called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. He described his attempts to treat three patients at a psychiatric hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who suffered from delusions of grandeur. Each believed he was unique among humankind; he had been called to save the world; he was the messiah. They were full-blown cases of grandiosity, in its pure form.

Rokeach found it difficult to break through, to help the patients accept the truth about their identity. So he decided to put the three into a little community, to see if rubbing against people who also claimed to be the messiah might dent their delusion. A kind of messianic, 12-step recovery group.

This led to some interesting conversations. One would claim, “I’m the messiah, the Son of God. I was sent here to save the earth.”

“How do you know?” Rokeach would ask.

“God told me.”

One of the other patients would counter, “I never told you any such thing.”

Every once in a while, one got a glimmer of reality—never deep or for long. Deeply ingrained was the messiah complex. But what progress Rokeach made was pretty much made by putting them together.

It’s a crazy idea, taking a group of deluded, would-be messiahs and putting them into a community to see if they could be cured. But it has been done before. “A reasoning arose among them as to who should be the greatest,” Luke tells us about Jesus’ followers.

You know who suffers from the messiah complex? Disciples and inmates. Everybody’s in the same asylum.

Grandiosity Buster #1: Honest Community Some time ago, I’d had a run of too much travel, too many meetings, too many talks. I was fatigued. One standing weekly commitment was to a friend, also involved in church work. I was complaining about my schedule, fishing for sympathy, when he surprised me by asking, “Why do you choose to live like this?”

The only honest answer was, more than anything else, I was running on grandiosity. I was afraid that if I said no to opportunities, they would stop coming; and if opportunities stopped coming, I would be less important; and if I were less important, that would be terrible.

Out of that conversation developed a small, “personal schedule group,” with a covenant that we would not take on any commitments without discussing them with each other and with our families. It meant giving each other permission to talk not only about our schedules, but also about the motives behind the schedules.

One reason I’m glad I’m part of a teaching team, rather than the sole teacher, is that it forces me to confront my hubris. Sometimes one of my friends will give a great message, and I’ll be tempted to compare myself to him. Then I see the absurdity: I’m jealous because he convinces people to die to themselves better than I do.

Sometimes I could use a little trip to Ypsilanti myself.

Grandiosity Buster #2: The Mundane Jesus invites us into ministry. But how do we keep ministry from becoming perverted into one more opportunity to establish who is the greatest, only now it is “Who is the greatest minister?”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, notes how everyone in the community will seek to establish spiritual superiority—the weak as well as the strong, the shy as well as the outgoing. Always the temptation involves the ancient argument: “There arose a reasoning among them …”

So Jesus takes a little child in his arms, and says: “Here’s your ministry. Give yourselves to those who can bring you no status or clout. Just help people. You need this little child. You need to help this little child, not just for her sake, but more for your sake. For if you don’t, your whole life will be thrown away on an idiotic contest to see who’s the greatest.”

In the church, this “non-strategic ministry of the mundane” means sometimes I must be interruptible for tasks not on my agenda. I need to be available to pray with troubled people whom I will not be able to cure and who have no ability to contribute to my success. Sometimes in meetings I need to remain silent even when I have a thought that might impress somebody. Sometimes I need not to seek out information, even when I could get it and it would make me feel part of the inner ring.

Sometimes, non-strategic ministry just involves following the rules everybody else follows. Muhammad (“I am the greatest”) Ali once allegedly refused to fasten his seatbelt on an airplane. After repeated requests from the flight attendent to buckle up, he finally said, “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” To which she is said to have replied, “Superman don’t need no airplane.”

The ministry of the mundane is primarily a ministry to me, a grandiosity-buster. Bonhoeffer writes that anyone who does not have time for this ministry of “active helpfulness” “is probably taking his own career too seriously.” A sobering thought, especially when you consider what Bonhoeffer accomplished in his career.

Grandiosity Buster #3: Bearing with Others I was in a prayer group once of about ten people, most of whom were involved in church ministry. The sole goal of our meetings was to learn from each other about our experiences in prayer during the past week. The leader of the group said we should set aside any tendency to evaluate people and their comments, and simply let God speak though them.

I realized that reflexively, I had started sizing up the group from our first meeting, putting people on a maturity continuum, ready to listen to those who seemed advanced and endure those who seemed behind. The leader’s one direction was a gentle indictment.

The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is learning to hear God speak through them. This means I’m called to free people from the mental prisons to which I consign them. Bearing with a person who criticizes (justly or unjustly, lovingly or spitefully) the way I teach. Bearing with the most difficult person of all, one in whom I see the struggles that rage inside of me.

Bearing with people does not necessarily mean becoming best friends. But it means learning to wish people well, releasing my right to hurt them back, coming to experience our common standing before the cross.

Grandiosity Buster #4: Truth, Justice, and the Jesus Way Fighting the subtle sin of grandiosity means learning from Jesus how to do ministry in a way that draws me toward him. For there was no grandiosity in Jesus at all. That’s one reason why people had such a hard time recognizing him.

The oldest Christological heresy—docetism—arose because people could not absorb the notion that God might enter into vulnerability and suffering. John says it is the spirit of antichrist that denies that Jesus came kata sarx—”in the flesh.” Jesus was no Superman. He did not defy his enemies, hands on his hips, bullets bouncing harmlessly off his chest. The whip drew real blood, the thorns pressed real flesh, the nails caused mind-numbing pain, the cross led to actual death. And through it all, he bore with people, forgave them, loved them to the end.

For God’s great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it, except one. And he was the Messiah.

John Ortberg is teaching pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California. A prolific author, he will be a featured speaker at the National Pastors Convention in San Diego, February 5-10.

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