Episode 344 - Brian Lee, "From Broken to Beloved: A Journey through Spiritual Healing"

Welcome to another episode of "Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick." Today, Michael is joined by Brian Lee, founder and director of Broken to Beloved, a ministry dedicated to providing practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse. 

In this heartfelt conversation, Brian shares his personal journey through repeated experiences of spiritual abuse and how these challenges birthed a passion for helping others reclaim their belovedness. Michael and Brian delve into the intricacies of spiritual abuse, the importance of cultivating humility and self-awareness in spiritual leadership, and the transformative power of naming and owning one’s story. They also discuss the innovative programs offered by Broken to Beloved, which include a book club, podcast, and an impactful eight-week cohort called "Through," designed to guide individuals in their healing journey. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on finding hope, healing, and wholeness in the aftermath of spiritual trauma. 

About Brian Lee

Brian Lee is a pastor, coach, and speaker. In his 20+ years of experience in vocational ministry, he experienced three instances of spiritual abuse and toxic leadership. After living with an identity of brokenness for too many years, he learned to recognize and embrace his belovedness.

In 2023, he founded Broken to Beloved, a nonprofit organization that exists to provide practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse and religious trauma.

He is a certified Trauma-Informed Coach (Centre for Healing) and holds a certification in Religious Trauma Studies from the Global Center for Religious Research.

Based in Richmond, VA, Brian loves to go on mini-adventures with his family, exploring their neighborhood, community, and city with his family. As a coffee snob and addict, he could always use another cup.

Transcript

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Hi, everybody. Welcome to the program. It's Michael, and today I am talking with a new friend, Brian Lee. Brian is the founder and the director, CEO, president and head guy and visionary of a ministry that in a very short time has been near and dear to my heart. So please welcome Brian Lee. Hi, Brian. Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's so good. We had a conversation several weeks ago just because I noticed what you were doing on social media. And I reached out. I think that's how it worked, was I reached out to you. Maybe you reached out to me, but. I think I reached out to you with your book. Yeah, we had this wonderful connection, and I just felt a sense of spiritual kinship and respect for you and your story. And my immediate thought was, that's a guy that I want to have on the podcast. And really, let me just tell people at the beginning, this is not a commercial for Brian's ministry, but it is an unpacking of what he's doing, because I believe that there is such a crucial need for the kind of healing that you offer. So let's start with. Let's talk first about what is Broken to Beloved. What are you guys all about? And then I want to hear about you. Yeah. Broken to Beloved is a 501c3 nonprofit. We just finished our first full year in operation last year. It was founded, I think, in October of 2023. So last year was very much a learn and observe kind of a year. We exist to provide really practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse. And so that's. That's our main focus is highlighting, spotlighting, and shining a light in really dark places inside the church and inside our faith communities that allow those things to be brought to the light and to help those people who have been affected and harmed or the friends and family of those who have been affected and harmed to find pathways towards recovery. And it comes out of my own personal story. I've experienced it three times. It came out of my own personal work with my own counselor. Lots and lots of books and research and reading and wondering, gosh, I wonder if this would be helpful to anyone else. So if you're comfortable talking about this, and then I guess I would say as a therapist, even if you're uncomfortable, would you step a little bit into that discomfort and just talk about what was the nature of that abuse, especially if it was three times and then back to back? Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to. I think nowadays you hear about spiritual abuse and the thing that most often comes to Mind is clergy sexual abuse. Yeah. Which is just awful and evil. And my experience was not that. And I think what's so difficult for people to name or recognize about spiritual abuse is that it tends to be kind of nebulous. There are a lot of definitions in a lot of really great books about it, but there's no real common language around it. And so when you think about emotional, physical, verbal, sexual abuse and then you spiritualize any of those things, that's spiritual abuse. When any kind of abuse happens in a spiritual context or environment, that's spiritual abuse. And for me, it was serving on staff at a Christian college at two different churches with really toxic, abusive leaders who really just had a high level of self unawareness, or you could say a low level of self awareness. And what I discovered was this pattern where when leaders are unaware of themselves, when they have a very low emotional intelligence, they leave a wake of destruction behind them. And I was caught in that wake. And so it was. It's the, it's the high demand, it's the expected loyalty or trust demanded trust. It's forced forgiveness. It's the over spiritualizing of language or of your work or of any of these things. And then it's spiritual bypassing, which is, oh well, it's not that bad. You just need to pray about it more. Or maybe it's because you're not as holy as you need to be. Right. And there are all these different things that happen within these contexts. They often come with a high level of control. Leaders who are trying to hold on to a sense of power or influence over other people. So you lose a sense of autonomy and agency in these kinds of environments where you're supposed to serve, quote, for the greater good, but really you're serving on behalf of the leader who wants to get their way. And so being thrown around in those kinds of environments, and I think the last one was just the worst because they presented themselves as a church of healing. You know, they say this is our reputation, we're known as a place of healing. So we would love for you to come. You've shared your story with us that you've been feel really broken. I would identify myself in interviews as damaged goods. And they said, we would love for you to just come and breathe and find a place to heal. And I thought that sounded so lovely, which is then what makes it so much worse when you show up in a place that you think is going to be safe and that is ultimately even more harmful and traumatizing. So it set me on A tailspin. I thought there were all kinds of things wrong with me through lots and lots of years of work with my own counselor. And again, finding that kind of stuff, found myself in a place where I had identified myself as broken for so long, for so many years, and then finally realizing that broken is something that happened to me. It doesn't have to be who I am, you know, and looking at the book covered behind you, Michael, your work with sacred attachment and the visual metaphor of Kintsugi of taking these broken pieces and rather than hiding those cracks, highlighting them and saying that no, actually your identity is beloved. And that when we bring together these broken pieces and mend them and not hide the cracks, but highlight them with gold, you become even more beloved because of the care that has been taken in that restorative work to bring those pieces together again. And that there is a way to recognize and reclaim your belovedness. And that's the kind of work that we're trying to do. I love that. And that's what's so near and dear to my heart. So, Brian, when you went to that church and you said, I'm damaged goods, and they said, that's who we are. That's. We're all about. We have that language. We're a healing space. Was that used against you when things turned difficult and the conflict started? Because I've seen that happen before. Well, you're damaged goods. You know, this is. This is you. A kind of pastoral gaslighting. Yeah. Yeah. And it would often present itself. It's very kind of insidious, isn't it? Because they sound like. And I think they truly believe they are being helpful. But it comes across like, oh, you're still not over that yet. Or are you still grieving that loss? You're not. You're not healed. You're not claiming the victory. You haven't moved on. And that's the way it would come up over and over again. And then it was the brokenness that was used against me for sure. And it gets weaponized. And I think even after I left, I had friends who were still there, and they would hear in staff meeting meetings of, well, when we replace this person, we're going to have a policy going forward that we're not going to hire broken people. We need whole people to come. And it was that kind of language that was shared that is just really hurtful. Yeah. And because I work with people after the collapse, I work with so many people that are the lead pastors, senior pastors, or other influencers in the organization that people who often think they're whole are actually some of the most broken people. Oh yeah, because the, that definition of wholeness is out of a lack of self awareness. Or as you said on your website, and I love this phrase, it's even stronger. Self ignorance. Yeah. You know, and ignorance implies that it's almost chosen like I'm choosing. I'm actually making a choice not to be self aware. Whereas just a lacking of self awareness is somebody's clueless and they've just never taken the look inside. So there's something more insidious about it. You know, going back to your list of things that are spiritual abuse, as you were reading that list, and this is a little bit of devil's advocate or gadfly, not to push against you, but thinking how listeners might be processing this, when you went down that list about, you know, emphasis on performance and production and high accountability and loyalty, my thought was, well, gosh, aren't, aren't those all things that are expected? And in, you know, any good job performance, if I work at ups, you know, they're gonna, I have to, you know, take a three minute break per the union, but then get right back to work and that kind of thing. But then you went to things like control and that's where it gets really funky. But there are ways where an overemphasis on production and performance and outcome can actually be abusive. Yeah, yeah, well, and that's it. It's where the emphasis and the priority become the value of excellence, which is a great thing. But when it becomes the thing that you're pursuing at the cost of volunteers, at the cost of your staff, at the cost of extra hours, because this program needs to look a specific way. Right. And you know, spiritual abuse isn't things like accountability. Accountability is good. But is it fair? Is it across the board or is it being targeted because someone spoke up or spoke out against a specific policy or a specific thing that happened? And these are the kinds of things that we look for because again, it's case by case. Some people can cry spiritual abuse when really it was just a camp being held accountable for something that they did or they said. But it's most often happening when there's a power differential or a dynamic at play and then something is done to defend the person or the institution rather than to listen to the voice of the victim or the survivor. Yeah. And that's so key to me is that it's self preservation of the institution or the organization, where ultimately the organization, institution is made up of people. And it's there to serve the people, but it becomes this protection in and of itself. And you know, we've seen over and over, and I think of Ravi Zacharias Ministries, and I'm not singling that out per se, but for a couple of years there seemed to be this sense of, you know, if we were to even consider the possibility that our beloved leader has done any of these things, then what are the implications on the ministry and the organization? Yeah. And, and, and then victims who are tragically then alone, vilified, made to look like perpetrators over and over again. Yeah. That is the unfortunate cycle that victims are often re traumatized because once they finally work up the courage, I mean, you know that when people come into your office, the courage that it takes to tell you their story and then the harm of being disbelieved or discounted or dismissed or, you know, any of these things often is a re traumatizing thing for them. And so it's no wonder that most people who survive these things choose not to say something about it because there's so much betrayal blindness involved. Right. Institutional blindness. I have so much invested. I've been here my whole life. This person has done so many good things for me. I can't afford to see them in a negative light because it would question, throw into question everything about me or everything about my faith or this community. So to a certain degree it's understandable why those things happen. And yet it is still wrong. Yeah. And just to refresh listeners minds, we're not just talking about churches, we're talking about parachurch ministries, which can be mission organizations, campus ministries. You said that you worked at a Christian college. And just recently I heard a story from somebody that I was working with who basically had been long term faithful employee at a major Christian university in another part of the country. And after over 20 years of faithful service, got a call at the end of the day and said, clear out your desk. And no reason given except for what appeared to be a difference in political orientation. And again, any organization is free to say that, you know, we want people with this particular worldview, but it wasn't about that. It was how this person was treated. And it was devastating and it was unjust and it was unfair. And my blood boiled for like that whole afternoon and I had to do some of my own work of coming back and kind of getting quiet and saying, okay, God, I'm surrendering this to you and help me to channel this energy in the right way. So you had church and experience at a Christian college. And my big question is, what did you begin to do to heal? And related to that is, how long did it take you after getting out of those organizations to say, oh, my gosh, I have experienced spiritual abuse versus well, that was a hard situation. Yeah, well, the first two were definitely just hard situations. And again, I left, never questioning the leaders or the institutions. The problem must have been me, right? I'm in enneagram1. So of course I think I'm the one who's wrong. And so what do I need to fix about this? And then by the time I got around to round three, it was, hold on, what's going on here? Right. And at the time, we had started seeing a counselor, or I had started seeing a counselor, and she was kind of the one who gave me that language for spiritual abuse. And as soon as I heard that phrase, all the light bulbs went off, and it's like, oh, my goodness, now I have a name for this thing. And so what that process looked like for me in terms of healing and time is. I mean, I left my last church in July of 2021. So it's been that long since I've been gone. And I had probably been wanting to leave for a good six months to a year before that decision was actually made. And it was all the internal wrestling with. But this is how I provide for my family. What do I do? I can't just quit and not have something else ready. I can't just leave. But also, my body is shutting down. I'm having panic attacks and blacking out in my office. This is not good for me. Right. And so through the work with my counselor and gaining language, gaining awareness to notice what was happening, learning about nervous system responses like fawning was a huge thing for me. I was like, once I learned that word and what it meant, I was like, oh, this is what I do all the time, and this is why I'm doing it. Take a minute. A lot of people, as our listeners, know about fight flight and freeze. But fawning is an idea that's talked about less and maybe a little newer. What did that look like for you? Yeah. So fight flight are the sympathetic responses when your system is activated and you've got all this energy, and then we've got the parasympathetic stuff when my body's like, I need to shut down because this is too much and I'm overwhelmed. So oftentimes we can fall into a shutdown response or there's this fawning Thing which I'm learning from Andy Colber was it's this advanced trauma response when fight doesn't work and flight doesn't work. So we move into this people pleasing thing. It's in order to survive. I can't escape this situation right now, so I'm going to slap a smile on my face and say, sure, I can do that thing for you. Yeah, absolutely, I'll take care of it. But everything inside my body is screaming, get out of here. Yeah. But for whatever reason that people pleasing thing kicks in and it's a survival mechanism that says, hey, we just got to get through this. You can't say no right now, so let's just, we'll just survive. And so for me, that's what it looked like over and over and over again. Was just slipping into this very. What's the word? Starts with a C. It's enneagram related ones, twos and sixes all to do it. We're dependent and we are compliant. It was a compliance and that's what it felt like for me. The fawning was a lot of compliance of I should just go do this thing because this is my boss or my pastor or my leader or whoever it is and I don't have the right or the agency to say no. Yeah. So a survival strategy kicks in and it's neurological. So again, to listeners, I want to say that you are all about helping and creating a safe space for people that have experienced hurt or harm. But one of the differences between, and I'm putting this in quotes, merely being hurt or harmed in a religious institutional situation and trauma is that when it becomes physiological, when we go into that activation of the sympathetic or into the, the deactivation into the hypo arousal, which can be that freeze or the fawning. And so for you it was really obvious that this became physiological and suddenly there were, there were experiences and symptoms, you know, beyond your control. Yeah, yeah. And it was the noticing and naming of those things that gave me the tools to recognize. Oh, this is the thing I do all the time that means something is wrong. Right. So gaining the tools to notice what was happening in my body physiologically as I'm approaching these situations or as I'm having some kind of trauma response or trigger or activation to what is happening around me, to recognize, you know, maybe not in the moment, but later that day or a week later, it's like I just realized what happened in that meeting. Yeah, now I know what was happening in that. One on one, I was fawning or I was in this response. And because I now had a name for it, I knew what I could do about it. Now I had choices. I want to come back to something you said. You talked about at the beginning of our conversation, how churches have a value or whether it's written into their bylaws or not, of excellence. And years ago, I was talking with Bill Thrall, who's now in his mid-80s, and he wrote a book many, many years ago, I think, in 94, on Josie Bass, which was an academic, an exclusively academic publisher back then, called the Ascent of a Leader. And it was all about creating environments of safety and environments of grace. And it was a secular book. And then he and Bruce McNichol and John lynch went on to create True Face, which there was a book called True Face, which later became the Cure. And it's been a ministry that's widely touched people, but very much underground. You know, they've never been this big, sexy ministry. And I was talking to Bruce at a. At a conference in Kentucky, and I said, can I turn on the microphone? And he talked about how he would consult with churches and he would go in, and this was one of those things where he had been a pastor for 25 years, but also really savvy with corporations, and part of his gift was to kind of mess with organizations. And so he'd say, tell me what your core values are. And they would say things like, you know, influencing the kingdom, and then they'd eventually get to excellence, and then they'd kind of exhaust their list of values. And he'd say, I sure think excellence is a good thing, but why is humility not on your list of values? And then thinking about the passage that Paul talks about, about how we are called to boast in our weaknesses. So there's a lot of other people that have talked about this in a lot of different ways. But, you know, one of the antidotes to spiritual abuse, in addition to leaders doing their work dealing with narcissistic proclivities. And I just assume that anyone in an. In a role of influence and creating a big whatever has narcissistic tendencies. In other words, that you're putting yourself out there, that. That you're going to have to wrestle with public perception and being loved and adored and potential rejection and all of that. But what if organizations had humility? And the reason I'm bringing this up is that I am in a unique position where I work with many, many people that are victims of spiritual abuse, including sexual abuse at the hands of institutional leaders. But I also work with the leaders who come and say, here's what happened to me and I lost my church. And some of them say the perceptions and their side of the story, whether it's the elders that fired that person or whether it's someone accused them, it's two different stories. And I always come back to okay, so you've been falsely accused. Is your posture one of humility, curiosity, self exploration? How might I have misperceived the situation? How might I be blind? How might I not have self awareness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And that kind of humility just fosters safety and it fosters environments that Scott McKnight and Laura Barringer talk about in a church called Tove. Churches that are filled with goodness instead of simply bigness, productivity and attractive I'll just let you comment. Boy, yeah, I've worked in a lot of churches and excellence is almost always one of the high values. And I've come to really question that in the same way that you do. Because yes, excellence can be a wonderful thing. Again, as an enneagram one, it's what I strive for all the I don't strive for excellence. I strive for perfection to my downfall, right to my ultimate doom. And so I've learned to find and appreciate the beauty in all the imperfection that God intentionally created around me. And again, any of the things that we value can become idols if we pursue them to their own ends. If we miss the point of why we value these things, if they're not tied to a specific goal or mission of serving, discipling, following, whatever it is. And I think that we have created in our churches and parachurch ministries and faith environments this cult of excellence and cult of leadership. And I got pushback once in a call. I think it was just kind of a community call that I was hosting during our summit and someone said, do you mean a culture of leadership? I said, no, no, no. I mean a cult of leadership that there is this thing around charisma and personality and it's tied to this one person or voice. And I would say the same about excellence because becomes an idol when people pursue it too much. And I understand the point that we want to do things well, that we want to present God in a good light, that we want to do all these things. But God never asked for that. He doesn't need that. Right. God can protect himself, he can defend himself. He knows how to present himself. And he chose to come like one of us. And Jesus ended up Being the only one who could do it perfectly. But it looked really messy. You know, there was no glitz and glam to the way that he worked with and walked with his disciples or got down in the dirt, in the mud, in the boat, you know, whatever all of these things are. And so when I think about excellence in churches today, and I see you can feel it when you walk in, right, that this church values excellence. And it can become a point of pride. And sometimes it's a healthy pride of, look at this thing that we did. And then sometimes it just becomes really unhealthy when people aren't allowed to make mistakes. Right. This is where it starts to take that turn towards the abusive side when a mistake is made. And instead of grace, instead of. Yeah, no, totally, I get it. This was your first time trying it. Instead of that, it becomes this demand of, well, if you can't do it perfectly, if you can't do it with excellence, then you can't serve with this team. Yeah, yeah, Excellence. Excellence at the expense of people. Yeah. I talked with somebody many years ago before we started to have categories like this, and they were part of a nationally known megachurch, and they dreaded Monday mornings. You know, many churches have. Monday is closed. But this church was open. They were open seven days a week. And Monday morning, the first thing that people would do, they would be able to come in at 9 o'clock instead of earlier, and the senior pastor would have a clipboard and he would basically read off all the things that were wrong in the Sunday service and call people out by name. And it wasn't a sense of, hey, here's something that you need to work on. It's basically, you know, here's where you struck out, here's where you got thrown out at second base on this play. You know, here's where you basically suck. And people would leave there on Monday morning just demoralized and stirred up and probably very activated in their nervous systems. And if you stay in that environment for so long, you either get traumatized and have to get out of it, or you start to go, this is just the way it is. And in many cases, it's like, oh, this is what I experienced in my family. You know, I know this, I know this really well. This feels familiar. And then, yeah, they just try to perform harder. Not unlike Junior, you know, at. At age 15, saying, you know, I've got to get the highest score on my SAT and get into an Ivy League college in order to get affirmation. Even though. Even though they want to go to the community college, you know, and study being a cosmetologist or something that wouldn't be approved by the parents. Yeah, I mean, that was me. I was part of that culture. And it's so easy when you already have an inner critic that's yelling at you, hey, you messed this up. And then you hear someone else validate that. Yep, I knew that already. Thanks for pointing it out. And again, sometimes it comes from a place of good intentions, of I want us to be better, I want us to fix these things. And sometimes it just comes from a deep place of that. That pastor's own shame. Yeah. And so they need to take it out on someone else. And so it all comes leaking out sideways. And like you're saying it's a self flagellation that turns into this destruction of everyone else around them and people walk away demoralized, or people get in line and say, well, yeah, we do need to fix these things. And then they become complicit in that system, knowingly or unknowingly. Yeah, I'll go ahead and share a bias of mine and I don't want to get into pettiness or, you know, certainly name calling, because I'm not going to mention names. But I think there's also a growing trend for preachers and teachers that are the, quote, the person that's on the platform regularly to isolate themselves. And so I hear a lot about the pastor that is off campus or outside of the church, 40 hours a week studying, you know, diving deep into the word of God, maybe even creating content for their personal platform. And then they show up on Sunday with no shepherding, with no sense of congregational care, with no involvement whatsoever except to give orders and then to show up on that Monday morning meeting or whatever and basically say, here's how we have to make the service, I. E. Performance better. And to have a. A leader who is the face of the church, but who's utterly uninvolved. To me, that's very dangerous. Yes. And I think that's what Caitlin Beatty talks about in Celebrities for Jesus is exactly that kind of culture that we have enabled. We are all complicit in that kind of a culture when we continue, when we are part of a consumer culture. Right. And that, that is what we choose to attend, or that is what we choose to give to or prop up or click on, or like or follow or subscribe, all of these things. It enables that kind of culture to continue to grow. I've seen it. I've been part of it. I've been guilty of it. And it's. Until we're able to recognize the effects that that is having on those leaders to be isolated and without accountability, without community, without real care for themselves. And then what they're doing to their congregations or their communities, to also not receive that care or have any connection to this isolated face on a stage. Right. Or voice on a screen, it just does damage to the body of Christ that is supposed to be so integrated and so interconnected. Yeah. You know, this week, rather accidentally, I started rereading Eugene Peterson's book A Contemporary Pastor. And that book was foundational for so many people to begin to develop an interior life in the late 80s and 90s. It was before, you know, the message. And he said, as a pastor, there's three things that I want to do. I want to pray. And so, wow, imagine how novel that is for pastors to actually spend a significant portion of their time praying for their church, for their people. He said, the second thing I want to do is preach. And he communicated a gospel to the marginalized, to both people that were what he called bored insiders that had been around the church forever, but also the disenfranchised and the people outside of the church. And, you know, this can be glorified in a way that's not exactly fair sometimes. But his church Never grew above 250 people over 29 years. But he said, the third thing I want to do pastorally is listen to. Listen deeply to the stories and the lives of the people that God has entrusted me that show up week after week, or maybe they come once to make myself available. That included doing hospital visits. And granted, when you have a church of 250 people, you have more accessibility to that. But all that to say that I. I get frightened of churches where there is not a pastor that has a contemplative life, and a pastor that may be a step beyond self awareness has actually developed an interior life. There's so many leaders I work with who, through no judgment, they say, I don't know God. I can preach the word and I can get people to go, wow, that was a dynamic sermon. And I have a growing platform, but I don't think I really know God. Yeah. It is a unfortunate side effect of the church culture we've created today. And one of the occupational hazards of professional ministry. Right. I've been pastoring for over 20 years, and when you're in the position for that long, inevitably you end up in the place where you say that line, where I Don't. I don't know if I know God. Yeah. I've been leading these services and singing these songs for all this time, and I don't even know if I believe what I'm singing right now. Right. I don't know what's happening. I have no connection to this God that I pretend to worship. And it's at that point you come to a really critical juncture of, do I want to sit with that tension and discomfort and explore it, or do I just want to keep pretending? And I think there are too many pastors or church leaders today who are unwilling to sit with. Or they think they do have that contemplative life because they do spend hours in prayer or in the Word and often tend to pride themselves on that. Right. They talk about how much time they spend doing those things, but you don't see the fruit of it in their lives because for them, it's become another checklist item. Yeah. It's become another duty or a thing to do, not an actual connection with God. Yeah. And. And many times when people are talking about how much time they pray or spend in the Word or with God, that could be for all the wrong reasons. And I, as much as anyone can, can name drop or talk about that kind of thing. But. But it should give us pause. It should make us go, huh? Before we shift gears to talk about the real specifics of what your ministry Broken to Beloved offers, I just want to say, if you have listened to the last 20 minutes of this conversation, it may sound like we're railing on pastors. I was a pastor. I was a youth pastor. I've been an ordained Minister for almost 30 years. I love the church. I'm a member of a local church. I love my pastor. I do happen to be part of a very small congregation of less than 100 people. My wife and I are the youngest people there, and on any given Sunday, there's a lot of walkers and oxygen tanks. But I love my local church, and it's become an essential part of my life. So pastors are doing one of the hardest jobs out there. And perhaps at the top of the list of the job description should be their own soul care and the development of their own interior life. And having been an elder at a large Presbyterian church, I think there's kind of this assumption that if somebody got a seminary degree and if they have experience in a church, then surely they have an interior life and they have a deep relationship with God. But there's this cruel joke built into ministry that the More successful you become, the more demanding your job becomes and the easier it is to just show up and to traffic in unlived truth, as one of my friends says. Yeah, I think it has become a trap of ministry that we somehow slide into this mindset that we are supposed to know everything as pastors. And I think what I'm learning is, like you in the therapeutic community or like doctors in the medical community, there is a very clear limitation of competence. And I know if something is within my field or outside of my field, and if it's outside, I'm going to refer you to someone else. And for some reason in the church and in faith and in pastors and ministry, they haven't accepted that, right? Oh, someone's dealing with a mental health issue right now. Someone's having a physical issue. Well, for some reason, we've been taught to believe that spirituality and the Bible and prayer are going to be the answers to all of those things. Period, end of sentence. So we can pray all of these things away, or I can scripture all of these things away, or I can preach all of these things away instead of saying, that sounds like something really serious. Can I pray for you? And also, have you been to the doctor, or are you seeing a therapist? Instead of trying to do this pastoral counseling thing where they often do more harm or in abusive situations, a couple comes forward and a wife is accusing her husband of physical or sexual abuse in the marriage. And the pastor says, well, you are married, and so you have to stay that way, so you should. You need to figure it out and submit to your husband. Right. And we have too many situations like that where pastors are unwilling or unable to just confess that they don't have all the answers and that they're in over their head to say, you know, I don't know, that's a really great question, or that sounds like a really hard thing you're going through. And instead of responding with compassion, they put on this thing that, again, usually comes from that deep sense of shame of I should know this thing. And they make up an answer that sounds spiritual. And I don't want to come across as railing against pastors either, because I've been a pastor, I'm an ordained minister, I appreciate the local church that I'm part of and all of these things. And. And I. The reason I do the work I'm doing is because I believe in the church. Yes. Because I still believe in the work of God and the redemption of our lives. And what I want more than anything, part of the reason that, you know, half of our mission has to do with safeguarding is if pastors would become more curious, if they would become more open, if they would look into what does soul care for me look like? What does it look like to have this contemplative life that allows me to examine what is going on in me? Because you can't pour out of an empty vessel. Right. And so what does it look like to feel full? Because I don't know. The last time I felt that way. Yeah. Categories as simple as that. Empty, weary. It may not be that I lost my faith and I'm an agnostic, although I know people in that situation. But that idea of emptiness. Yeah, I think that that's. I think that there is an. Forgive the buzzwords, but they're really. I was thinking the same exact words. There is an epidemic of Christian leaders who are empty, whose inner experience in their inner world, which then impacts their closest relationships with spouse, children, friends, or the absence of them. There's an emptiness there. And the gospel, and this is what this whole podcast is about, was never meant to be, essentially about just praying a prayer so that we get to heaven. The gospel is meant to. To make us whole, to take the emptiness, and to bring something substantial inside. Not always fullness, but some presence of something. So I'm so glad that you brought that up. I also want to playfully push back and say, you said you're not a pastor anymore, but let me use the D word, dude. Brother, you are a pastor. And you may not be at a church, but you are a shepherd. And I don't think a pastor can be a pastor if he's not doing at least 1% of shepherding. But your website says that the Broken Beloved is a space for the broken and the hurting. And the church is nothing if not a space. Right. It's a physical space that we go to. But you've created an online digital space that then invites people into relationship in cohorts, in communities, in the coaching that you're doing in the virtual programs, like your summit through your podcast, you are as much a shepherd as the leader of the biggest mega church. And if a lot of those leaders aren't shepherding at all, then you've excelled what they're doing. So just receive that. That's why I'm so drawn to your ministry, is that you're not just a creator of a program. And because you're a 501C3, you're obviously not doing it just to get rich, because my ministry is certainly not as well, but you're doing it because you have a shepherd's heart and you're shepherding men and women on a path to be able to move forward. Thank you. That is very kind and I will receive it. So tell me about your programs. You. You even have a book club that you do. And I mean, there's so much creativity and so many different access points for people to join what you're doing and, and what I love about that is that somebody may not be ready to call up and say, because you're a trauma informed coach and you're trained and certified as a coach, they may not be ready to say, hey, I'm going to jump in and tell the story. But they might go, oh, that book that you have every month and this book in particular that you're doing, I am really interested in that because maybe my story is in that. So tell me about the book club. Tell me about whatever else you want to highlight about how people can access this healing through broken to beloved. Sure. The book club was born out of a desire to foster continued community because we are an online space. And the first kind of entry point, I guess you could say, is social media. It's Instagram, which is where I'm usually the most active. And most active even is an exaggeration because I don't love social media. It takes a lot of energy for me to post things on there, but it's where you would find the most information. And I thought, boy, wouldn't it be nice if we could keep having conversations about this kind of stuff. I am a voracious learner. I love reading things and often quote other books or people. And so I thought, what if I could just share what I'm reading and we can all hang out and talk about it together? So that's what the book club is. It's just a monthly membership thing. I think it's seven bucks a month. It's not much, but we have an online platform. We do virtual reading sessions together. So people from all over the country and world show up to say, this month we are reading Becoming the Pastor's Wife by Beth Alison Barr. What does it look like to examine a complementarian theology through a historical lens of women who served in scripture and in medieval history? And in today, we just finished reading I've Got Questions by Aaron Moon. And just this journey of our heritage, of asking questions of God and what is the process of. Maybe not deconstruction is a hard word for some people, but disentangling from beliefs that we previously held. We read, you know, Chuck de Groat, healing what's within. Dr. Allison Cook. I shouldn't feel this way. And so we just work through books like that together. We meet every other week to talk about where we are in the book and what's going on. People are able to online every, chat together every day and keep up with each other. And then once we're done with the book, we finish one every two months. We have the author come in and we get to talk to them about it, which is a lot of fun. So that's something that's ongoing. The most probably impactful program that we offer is our through cohort, and it's called through because that's the only way. You can't, you can't go over, around or under your trauma. You've just got to get through it. You've got to find a way through. And so it's an eight week program that we offer that enables you to find a way to own and tell your own story. Because when you experience abuse and trauma, more often than not the story gets told for you and usually by your abuser. So what does it look like? I mean, how many churches, how many staff members and pastors have had the experience of standing up on a Sunday morning and the pastor says, hey, we just want to thank pastor so and so for their service. God is calling them into a new season. Can we just show them our appreciation? And no one knows the rest of the story of why that all happened. And it's painted as a beautiful thing and it very rarely is. Yes. And so what does it look like to reclaim and write your own story in your word and then to have them believed by a community of people who are there with you? So we do that work together. We offer really clear definitions again to name what you've experienced. So what does spiritual abuse mean? What does it look like? What is trauma and what are the effects it has on your body? What is gaslighting, deconstruction, narcissism, spiritual bypassing and giving people the language and the tools to name what has happened to them. Because we can't heal from what we can't name. And so once we've done that, we move through this liminal space of I'm not where I was anymore and I'm certainly not where I'm going yet, but I'm in this weird, untethered middle ground and what do I do here and what is God trying to tell me? From there, we move into breath practices and mindfulness. To grow in that self awareness of, hey, I'm having a moment and I'm feeling overwhelmed. How do I regulate my own body so I can come back to the present moment and notice what's happening? We look at, we go really deep and nerdy into the nervous system and polyvagal theory to recognize and again, name and attune to what is happening in my body. So I recognize why my body is doing these fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses. So instead of a normal cycle of shame and shutdown, I can approach it with curiosity and compassion to say, oh, this is what's happening. Why is this happening? Why is this event so hard for me right now? Or why does this relationship feel so fraught? And from there we wrap things up with being able to recognize and reclaim our belovedness. And so we just wrapped up a cohort. We've now led 101 people through it in the last couple of years, which I'm really excited about. And it's been probably the most impactful thing that we do. You can always sign up for the wait list on our website and you'll hear about the next time we open up. The other one is the annual summit is one of my favorite things that I do is in January, in recognition of Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month, which is actually a real thing, we host an annual summit and we have 15, 20 different speakers, authors, experts, therapists, pastors who talk about this thing. And the whole point is to answer the question, what now? Because a lot of the books that I read offered really good definitions. They offered validating stories. So I didn't feel alone or crazy. But I often finished books and said, yeah, but what do I do now? Like, what? But I'm still stuck, right? But I'm still carrying all this stuff. What do I do? So the whole point of the summit is to offer really practical steps of here's something you can actually do. And then we also have our own weekly podcast where I host a lot of those kinds of conversations with different people who are saying, hey, what does it look like to walk through this deconstruction process but not leave everything taken apart, but look like, how do I build something back together again? Yeah. Or a conversation with Scott McKnight about, you know, he's a New Testament scholar and Matthew is his favorite gospel. Let's talk about Matthew 18, enforced forgiveness. What is Jesus actually saying from a theological Bible in the Greek point of view, what does forced forgiveness look like when it's not a peer to peer relationship, but there's a power Differential here. Scott is such a gift to the church of the body of Christ. He really is. And it's conversations like that that are approached. You know, one of our values at Broken to Beloved is curiosity over certainty that I want to approach things with a big question mark rather than a period. I'm not going to make declarative statements that say, well, this is what we think, or this is what we believe it's going to be. Tell me more about that. Where is that coming from? And so that's the kind of work that we want to do through the summit, through the cohort, through the book club, through different things like that. We offered our first live event last fall for safeguarding in churches for pastors and church leaders. And then we had a gathering for the survivors to say, hey, if you're looking for resources, here's a day that we're going to do that. So we're in the planning stages of another one for the fall. But you can find that all the information is on our website for what we're offering, and just glad to share it with you. And that website is broken to beloved.org yes, Brian, I. I just want to affirm all that you're doing, how you're doing it. My hope is that it grows. My hope is that you have to add a whole bunch of staff soon because, you know, when you said wait list, that's because the quality of what you're doing certainly stands out. But also the need is so great and people are so desperate. I love how you put words to the fact that there are many, many words to describing the problem, especially around deconstruction, but nobody's talking about reconstruction. A lot of those books I've discovered are biblical categories, propositions, and truth of what to believe more. And you just need to have this correct framework. And. And that's a spiritual bypass. It is, because it doesn't take you to the inside. One of my favorite descriptions for the calling that I have, it's a phrase that I've not been able to track down exactly who said it, but it's a. It's a quote that said, what we need today are more shepherds of being, not shepherds of doing, but shepherds of being. And I. I like to see myself as somebody that is tending to and nurturing and trying to protect people's deep being, the inmost being that scripture talks about. And I'm so grateful for how you are doing that, for how you're. You're a shepherd of being, for being so articulate. About your mission so clear about the call of what you're doing. And for all of this conversation today, I'm just so grateful. So thanks for joining us. Thanks so much, Michael.