65. Ready for Spiritual Growth? How the Right Community Can Help Christian Physicians Get There, Fast

What if the breakthrough you've been praying for isn't another book, podcast, or course—but simply getting into the right room?

As physicians, we're conditioned to believe that more knowledge is the answer. But I've learned that some of the greatest transformations in my life didn't come from gaining more information. They came from being surrounded by people who challenged my thinking, stretched my faith, and expanded my vision of what God could do.

In this episode, I share one of the most significant turning points in my own journey—attending a conference where I knew almost no one, but where God radically shifted the direction of my life and ministry.

We'll talk about why the people and environments you intentionally place yourself in matter, how the right relationships accelerate growth, and why investing in yourself is often one of the greatest acts of stewardship God calls us to make.

If you've been sensing that God is inviting you into something deeper, this episode will encourage you to stop waiting and start stepping into the rooms where He can grow you.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why information alone rarely produces lasting transformation 
•  How the right community expands your vision and strengthens your faith 
•  Why leadership and spiritual growth happen best in relationships—not isolation 
•  How mentors, conferences, and intentional environments can accelerate your growth 
•  Practical questions to help you discern whether a room is the right one for your next season 

Sometimes the next step in your calling isn't learning something new.

It's simply having the courage to walk into the right room.

Resources & Links

Heal the Healers Physician & Healthcare Conference
📍 Boston | October 30–31, 2026
Learn more and register: https://healthehealersconference.com/boston2026

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If this episode encouraged you, would you take a minute to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with another Christian physician or healthcare professional? It helps us reach more clinicians who desire to integrate their faith and practice medicine with wisdom, excellence, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

God bless, and I'll see you next week.

Are you a Christian physician or healthcare professional longing for a deeper walk with God and a supportive community that truly gets it?

📍 Mark your calendar: October 30–31, Boston, MA
The Heal the Healers Physician & Healthcare Conference on Healing & Miracles

This is more than a conference—it’s a space to encounter God, be restored, and be equipped to live out your calling in medicine.

This event is for physicians and healthcare professionals!

Registration is NOW open. Sign up today. https://healthehealersconference.com/boston2026

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Transcript

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You can read all the books, listen to podcasts like this, take courses, and still remain stuck at the same level. Because sometimes the breakthrough you need is not another piece of information. Sometimes you just need access, exposure, relationship, and the courage to get into a room where your vision can be expanded. Today, we're talking about why the right room of people can change the trajectory of your leadership, your faith, and even your calling Well, hello there and welcome back to another episode of the Christian Physician podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Inga Hoffmann, and happy to be back with you on another leadership topic for today. Before we begin, registration for the Heal the Healers Physician and Healthcare Conference in Boston is currently open, so please make sure you get registered below. The link is in the show notes. Go to healthehealersconference.com/boston2026 to we are bringing together incredible speakers. There will be Christian physicians, healthcare professionals from all sorts of areas of medicine, and we're bringing together physicians, scientists, theologians, ministry leaders into one room to explore healing and miracles with both spiritual openness, biblical integrity, and intellectual and scientific rigor. So if this piques your interest and you're like, "I need to be in the room. I need to be hanging out with people who love Jesus, who want to integrate faith and medicine more deeply," or just feeling like, "I actually need a place to just rest and receive and pour it into," then this is the place for you. I look forward to welcoming you there. It's gonna be amazing But today I wanna talk to you a little bit about what it actually means to get in the right room with the right people. And that is one of the key aspects how you can raise your leadership lit, which is the episode we talked about last time. So if you have not heard that, I encourage you after this one, jump back one episode and listen to the episode on the leadership lit, where I go a little bit into the principle of leadership development And I think it's really gonna help you. But one thing I just wanna share that getting in the right room with the right people is so incredible powerful. And one of the stories I might have shared before on this podcast is me going to a conference three years ago now about hosted by Ken Fish from Orbis Ministries, will also be speaking at the Heal the Healers Physician Conference. You get to hear him there. And I went to his conference in Nashville, Tennessee three years ago, and I just knew when I heard about it on his podcast, and he was completely new to me. I did not know Ken Fish. I've never really heard much about him. But I heard a podcast episode very much like this one. A friend said, "I think you should listen to this. I think you will like it. He has a big heart for physicians." I actually know this person through the John Maxwell leadership team, and he's a good friend, and he is a great connector. And he said, "Hey, Inga, I think you will enjoy this. Take a listen." And it was, in fact, an interview of Candy Gunter Brown, who will also be speaking at the conference. She's a professor of religious studies at Indiana University. And Ken Fish talking about healing and studying prayer and the incredible testimony and personal experience they had with Josh's healing, from a brain tumor. who will be also speaking at the conference, I know it's crazy in any case, I listened to the podcast and then I listened to a couple more and I was like, Wow, I need to be in the room." He, at the time, announced the first time he was hosting this conference called Fusion, exploring where prophecy and miracles converge, and it was just mind-blowing. The caliber of speakers was amazing, very much to what you will actually experience in Boston. And that experience changed the whole trajectory of my life. It was truly a God appointment. I was already increasingly more hungry for things of the Holy Spirit through my experience praying for a patient. But I just knew that intersection of these really amazing theologians and the kind of the twist of the science, how does that play into what we observe in nature and in science into our spiritual world. I was immediately intrigued. I listened to the podcast and I was like, "I have to be in the room no matter what." And I made that commitment the second I heard it. Once they opened registration, I was very keen to immediately come and register. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know any of the other speakers. I just needed to be in the room. And that is the kind of investment we sometimes make, and this is just one of many examples in my life. But I can tell you, once I was at that conference, the Holy Spirit touched me. I've never experienced the power of the Holy Spirit really just moving on me and the power of God. And a lot of gifts of the Holy Spirit got activated and never really turned off since. So it was an amazing experience, and much of my life accelerated in a whole new direction from there that I could have never imagined. And it was a room full of an atmosphere and as well as people that were hungry who grow deeper with the Lord. And that is a perfect example of you need to be in the right room with the right people in an environment conducive to your growth. If you're the only person in the room and the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. You want to be stretched by your surroundings. That does not mean you have to agree with everything everybody says, but that stretching actually sharpens your faith. Even if you disagree or you question something, that is good because then you can go back versus just putting in your whatever. Maybe sometimes we are like, "Oh, no, this is wrong. I've been taught this way in the Bible, and I'm just gonna shut it down." I used to be very much this way. Praise the Lord, He softened my heart. Now I'm like this is a little weird. I'm not sure I agree with that," but let's listen and also go back to scripture. And I think that's actually a key part to grow spiritually. You want to go back to source material, to the scriptures, for example. But in leadership, the same is true. You don't have to agree with everything, but if you don't challenge yourself to hear new ideas, you're always gonna stay in your same mud. It's just true because it's just more comfortable. So great example of being in the right room can really change and shift the trajectory of your life. I would not be doing this now hosting my own conferences mentoring Christian physicians prophesying over people, pouring into their lives without this encounter praying over people every Sunday, day in, day out. I love it. Anyways, you got the point. You have to get into environments. Even if you're an introvert, I'm not that extroverted, you might think. I like my peace and quiet. It really sparks something and pulls you into another level So you want to be in a conference, in a training environment, maybe in a mentorship relationship or in a ministry environment, or perhaps in a leadership training that exposes you to something that you have not experienced before, so you can not only learn new information, but also gain different experiences that you can just grow in and evaluate. Now, when I say experience, let me just be very clear. I am not like faith is all just fuzzy feathers and experiences. And I wanna be very clear, we are not chasing after experiences. I don't chase after experiences. I want more of Jesus. But Jesus is also, and the Holy Spirit is a person, there is an experiential part to it, so I don't wanna ignore that. But I also wanna make clear I'm not an experience chaser that is after flashy things and productions and certainly not, I don't wanna get off track. Our modern Western church picture of, "I don't wanna experience. It needs to be great concert with lighting and smoke machine." No. I can do very much without that. In fact, I find that quite annoying. So you wanna be environments where you're not just receiving information, but what you-- where you see people ahead of you and you're like, "Wow, there's so much more possible in my, in, in my career development or in my leadership abilities or in my faith," that really not only just inspire you, because if you get inspiration and information, that's not helpful. You want to really apply that and actually use that to put it into action and grow. And oftentimes when we are in these different spaces where we find new connections, friendships, that kind of thing new relationships get formed. From that, sometimes opportunities emerge that you would have never had before. Same was true for me for that very conference. Actually, the people that prayed over me, there was a bunch of people that prayed during an exercise. I had no idea who was praying over me. Is now my mentor for over, over two years and has poured into me, and I'm so grateful for my good friend Justin Allen, who has been just a wonderful mentor and coach to me. So that would have never happened if he hadn't shown up. I would have never known who he was, and I sought him out later. Some of the most important shifts in our lives happen because we didn't discover one perfect book or one thing. It usually happens when we enter rooms or relationships with people already living at a different level that you want to step into whether it's in your professional career or in leadership or even in ministry. So you wanna expose yourself to that in order to encourage your growth. So let me just share a couple quick principles about this. Number one, being in the right room will expand what you believe is possible. I already alluded to this, but basically expectations are shaped by what we see. Like in a mentorship relationship, for example, in, let's say, in an academic job in a hospital you have mentors that are ahead of you and you hope m- maybe for the ones that you really admire, "One day I want to grow into that kind of role." That's an expectation that was shaped by what you have repetitively seen by the people in front of you. That obviously goes in positive as well as in negative ways. And we wanna focus on the positive here The other part is when you're in a room with different people with different thought processes you it broadens your horizon, right? When you're in a room with the same people that think the same way, you will be never challenged, and our vision tends to be small. That's why it's great to switch institutions after a while. Not hopping around from job to job, but it's actually very refreshing to go to a new place and see, oh, you can do things a little differently, and it still works. Very eye-opening experience, but I digress. And then you want to be exposed to people that just carry different experiences. Perhaps they have they're just encouraging in their faith. They have incredible wisdom that really is very helpful to you. You see the fruit of their walk with the Lord in their life that expands your own walk with the life. These are the kind of things we're looking for when we're on the right room. For example, it could be like, "Oh, I'm getting inspired. That person is praying for patients. I can do that too." Maybe you're gonna meet at this conference, you will have the opportunity to meet theologians, scientists, physicians, et cetera who are serious scholars who take spiritual questions seriously. So that's amazing. But they also love science. You want to see that modeled for yourself, right? Maybe you see modeled a courageous leader that is just carrying himself or herself with just amazing leadership capabilities and maybe is a wonderful vision caster. You can learn from those people, and being around people is amazing. And also, like a conference like Heal the Healers, you wanna be around people who expect God to actually move and still do something today. I'm all for that because this isn't a dusty old book, the Bible, that we just get information on. We want to have transformation, and I wholeheartedly believe the Lord is still moving today, and I want to be in a company of people that don't treat the Bible as theological intellectual property only, but that actually live it out and that have something to show for it, and that also expect God to still show up and move not only in their lives, but in their communities, et cetera. Proverbs says, right? "Walk with the wise and become wise." You want to be around people with wisdom Because who we are around shapes who we become. Jim Rohn always said this when I first got into personal development over a decade ago. One of the first courses I took was an old teaching class, a collection of Jim Rohn. He long passed away, was a personal development really guru, and the father of modern-day personal development, many say. And he always said, "You are the average of the five people around you." So if they are below average or just average, that's what you will be. So you want to have people around you that are walking in a space w- where they are ahead of you to stretch you and to grow And then point number two, the right room gives you more than just content and information. So books, online courses, et cetera, can provide you incredible information. And getting information is so much easier today than it was ever before. So that's so easy. In fact, if all you need is information you probably have access to that already, right? You have a library card or an internet access, or now you have AI or ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you use, and getting information at a split second is super simple. So if that's all you needed, you would be already done, and you would already be where you wanted to be. But that alone doesn't help. You have to have more than content and information. Growth requires conversations. It requires being able to ask questions and process. It requires relational trust and relationship and connection with others. That's really important And that's true, like for our conference as well. We have incredible keynote speakers. Like people are literally-- I had a friend recently tell me "I have so many people that are not in medicine ask me if they can come," because they look at the speakers list and they are like, Oh my, I need to be in the room." But it is, it is for healthcare professionals. That's the heart behind it. But so the keynote speakers are amazing. You will learn from them. You will be blown away, no question. But most memorable moments don't come just from a keynote or talk. They come from hallway conversations, connections you made at a conference somebody prayed over you from the ministry time or in worship. And for me, it was a activation demonstration at a conference that had... was not information. It was a demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit, and the rest is history for me. That's really what we are after But I also wanna say this just briefly to touch upon that when you are eager to grow and you get in the right room access to just the right network, the right people, connection, et cetera, can accelerate your learning curve for sure. That's the whole point. It accelerates your growth. But there is still work to do on our part. It is something we have to participate in. And then number three, getting into the right room requires intentional investment. I touched upon this a little bit last time. If you want to grow as a leader, you will have to invest in yourself, in time, in money, in relationship, in pouring your heart out. There is just no other way. Let me be very clear about that. That is just reality, and I think it's important because if we are not willing to invest in ourselves, in time, finances, relational equity, meaning we are vulnerable, we are entering relationship with others, guess what? If we're not willing to do that for ourselves, why would we expect other people to do that? And honestly, I would even stretch it as far as that maybe even God is looking for actually somebody who's invested. We might be reluctant like Moses was, right? We might feel ill-equipped, that's even better. The Lord specializes in that. But He does want our yes and our obedience, and that is an investment. That's a vulnerability even. So you have to invest in yourself. And oftentimes that means, like my example from the beginning, you have to choose the room before you know exactly what you will receive. When I signed up for that first conference with Ken Fish three years ago, I had no idea what I would get. I just knew I had to be in the room. I had no idea what I will receive, what I'm even signing up for, but I booked my hotel, I booked my flight, I paid the fee, and I was like, "I have to be there," and I just felt that tug. And I had to arrange my schedule to be there. My husband had to take care of the kids. He is amazing that way. That's often how it works. It will be inconvenient. It will be a sacrifice in time, finances, et cetera. And like I mentioned last time, we're very easy and quick to invest in, let's say, professional development like in our specialty, for example, right? CME, that kind of thing. But we're often hesitant to invest in ourselves. If the institution pays for it, great. But if I have to pay for it, eh, I'm not gonna do it. And I would honestly say that is a mistake, and I actually tell this to my coaching clients a lot of times. When I started leadership coaching, meaning I trained I took vacation to go to leadership training. Every time I went to the John Maxwell leadership event they happened twice a year. I volunteered there. I paid a lot of money. I actually took vacation because I wanted to be in the room and learn. Nobody paid for it other than me. And you know what? I think there was great power in that because nobody else can take credit for it later. The institution could never come back and say we allowed her to do that." No. It was my vacation time. It was my money. So I think that's actually very, very powerful. I also know that when we do that, we have a lot more skin in the game if we actually invest in ourselves versus asking others to pay the way for us So how do you discern to be in the right room? What the right room is for you? I would just ask myself, does this align with where God is leading me? Is there fruit of what those people are doing that are in the room? Are they qualified? But then it's simple things. I think for the most part, I went along with, that tug on my heart that just like instant knowing, like with that Fusion conference three years ago. I was like, I listened to ten seconds what he had to say, and I instantly knew I had to be in the room. But yeah. And I encourage you, if you feel that tug like I need to be at Heal the Healers, make the jump, register and figure it out later. Don't let that opportunity pass up. And if you're looking for credentials you will be hard-pressed to find more credentials than we have at that conference. Basically everybody has a bunch of letters behind their name. However, I wanna caution you, don't think we will have just intellectual conversations. You will meet the Lord in such powerful ways, so I hope you will be in the room and come And the biggest part about when you are in rooms where people are eager to grow, whether it's professional, personal, or in your faith it's just the connections and encouraging one another, and that's a beautiful thing. And, community in a age of AI and increasing disconnect, we are starving for that. You want to be in front of a real person. You wanna talk to a real human being, not to a stupid ChatGPT that gives you a five-second not even five-second, that gives you a split-second answer. You want to go through the growing pains of holding a conversation and have-- actually have to think a little bit versus somebody spits out something at you right away. Anyway, I'm going on a detour. I'm just hoping that this blessed you, encouraged you. Go and get in the right rooms, wherever they might be. I hope one of those rooms for you this year will be the Heal the Healers conference in Boston. Again, dates October thirtieth and thirty-first. Cause I know this, you can listen to a hundred more podcast episodes with me and the best theologians. You can stack up all the books and read them all, and of course, read your Bible. But that alone won't cut it. I'm telling you, you have to be in rooms where you can grow in community. That's what church is, the body of Christ. You should be in a local community, in a local church, in a small group, whatever it is. You can be in mentorship groups. If you seek one of those for Christian physicians, come reach out. That's what I do every week. I train and equip Christian physicians. But and then get into conferences. They're usually great way to just give you a boost and spark another level of growth. So with that, next week we're gonna talk about how to know whether you need a mentor or a coach for your professional or your spiritual life, or just simply need a community to support you, and where to find those things, because they are not the same thing. So I hope that served you. God bless you, and talk to you next week. Bye.