“Who You’re Becoming” with Chuck DeGroat

by on November 6, 2026

We have more resources than ever to understand ourselves. We can name our wounds, recognize our patterns, and talk about the ways our stories have shaped us. But does knowing more about ourselves necessarily mean we’re becoming more whole?

In this conversation, Dan and Rachael welcome Chuck DeGroat, therapist, professor, and author of “Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age.” 

Together, they explore the gap between what we know intellectually and what is actually taking root in our hearts, bodies, and relationships.

Drawing on neuroscience, the wisdom of the Christian contemplative tradition, and his own journey of transformation, Chuck invites us to consider what it really takes to grow in character and embrace a different kind of formation. 

In a world that seems to be pulling us in the opposite direction, we invite you to join us for this rich conversation about the slow, sometimes uncomfortable, and deeply hopeful work of becoming who we are meant to be.

Listener Resources:

About Our Guest:

Chuck DeGroat, PhD, LPC, is a follower of Jesus, a husband to Sara for 32 years, and father to two amazing daughters and two fantastic sons-in-law.

He serves as Professor of Counseling and Christian Spirituality and Founding Executive Director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Western Theological Seminary in Holland MI.  He is also a faculty member for the Soul Care Institute and founder of The Soul Care Collaborative, a resource for people to get care.

Chuck is a licensed therapist specializing in pastoral (and leadership) health, spiritual abuse and religious trauma, and navigating spiritual and emotional obstacles on the faith journey. He works not just with pastors, but with anyone longing for flourishing and wholeness in their lives.

He is also a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Church in America who pastored in Orlando and San Francisco before transitioning to training and forming pastors. He has decades of experience in training clergy in issues of abuse and trauma, conducting pastor and planter assessments, and facilitating church consultations and inquiries of abuse among pastors and within congregations.

Chuck DeGroat has written six books with his latest book, Who You’re Becoming, now available wherever books are sold.

Here are some of the spaces you can connect with Chuck:


About the Allender Center Podcast:

For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.

At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

To become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast, click here.

If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org


Episode Transcript 

Dan: Chuck DeGroat. I’m going to introduce you in a moment, but so delightful to have you with us.

Chuck: Well, I’m delighted to be with you both.

Dan: Every time you have a new book, it really feels like Christmas to me. It is one of those things where you go, I save what I think to be the best gift for last, and then open a bunch of other pointless underwear and shirts and so on and so forth, and then come to that moment where you open up what you hope to be the gift you’ve really asked for. And in this case, I didn’t know what to expect. We’ll talk about this beautiful book called Who You’re Becoming, and I had the pleasure of endorsing the book, and I referred to you as a heart doctor, a cardiologist of the soul. You really are. You’re a man who is so wise and so kind, but also so disruptive that you open up things in the human heart that I just always learn so much from you from every book that we’ve had. But I also loved what another endorser said, let me read it, “This book holds a mirror to our current age and invites us into the long journey from fragmentation to wholeness, from nervous system reactivity into being rooted and grounded in love.” That’s really well said.

Chuck: I recognize that endorsement.

Dan: Don’t you think that’s well said, Rachael?

Chuck: The very best endorsement I’ve ever received on anything that I’ve ever written. Yeah. Rachael.

Dan: What do you think? What do you think of that endorsement?

Rachael: Well, it’s one of my first ever endorsements. And what I can say is it’s a great gift and privilege to encounter a labor of love that feels like absolutely wholeheartedly I want to endorse this and I want to endorse it in a way that people actually get a taste of the riches that they are being invited to.

Dan: Well, a Distinguished Professor of Pastoral Care and Christian Spirituality at Western Theological Seminary in the remarkable Berg of Holland, Michigan, and the Executive Director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program. Look, your work, particularly with regard to narcissism, I think has been not just leading edge and looking at the reality of what happens in a lot of leadership settings, church and otherwise, but again, something of the more foundational understanding of how we are meant to become who we are in an age that has lauded and in some sense succumbed to narcissistic leadership and structure as power over presence and in many ways a sense of control rather than character. So when you begin to frame all that, I just want to simply say there is so, so much wisdom. And if there is a book for this era, this is unquestionably crucial for us to return to a topic that in some sense would’ve been much more available for folks 20, 30 years ago. But as Rachael and I were talking, she had this brilliant question that I want her to ponder.

Rachael: Well, it’s more probably a resonance that we’ve felt even because I’ve had your book in mind and as we’ve kicked off our program here, you kind of come out of the gate with this awareness or acknowledgement that we have more at our disposal to understand trauma, to understand how we’re shaped, but there is this kind of disconnect between the head knowledge and the heart transformation and that actually deepening and we’re seeing that. This is not a knock against anyone coming to do stuff with us, but we’re seeing it that people can talk very clearly about who they are, how they’ve been shaped, but they don’t want to get close to it in their bodies. And so what have you noticed? This came out of such a desire to bridge that gap. And so I just wanted to start there and say we’re like, yes, thank you for naming that and also take us into this work.

Chuck: Yeah. I mean, I’d love to hear from the two of you on this too. And particularly Dan, I was thinking about back in the late ’90s when I was a counseling student and MDiv student in Orlando, Florida, you came down and spoke and I was just beginning. And I think back then there was this hope that there’d be more resources developed, that you were writing of course, and some others were writing, but there was a hope that there would be more resources around emotional and spiritual health, spiritual practices, all these different kinds of things that have… I mean, we’ve seen a kind of resurgence of this, a surge in the first place, not even a resurgence. I mean, it’s just a proliferation of resources on the Enneagram, for instance. Everyone knows themselves and their dogs and their grandmas and they’re through the Enneagram now. And it just seems like whereas there was a day when pastors weren’t interested in this conversation, leaders weren’t interested in this conversation at all, now the ones I meet with, this is part of my curiosity for the two of you, now they will refer to their therapist and their Enneagram type and the work that they’ve done. They’ve got some of the lingo down. And yet I think the question that came up for me, and this was after writing the narcissism book and hoping, I mean, I had written something, but others were writing. And of course, Rachael, you’ve done some really great work on spiritual abuse. I mean, there have been some really good resources that have emerged over the last 10 years in this area, and yet there seems to have been a doubling down in ecclesial spaces and political spaces. And so my big wondering was, are we becoming, with all of these resources, are we becoming a people of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness? And I’m kind of afraid we’re not. And so that was it. And again, I’m thinking back to Dan, you coming out back then and the hope that there would be these resources. Here they are, and are we growing up? Are we maturing as a result of them?

Dan: Well, indeed. The interplay, one can presume that wisdom requires knowledge, but knowledge does not necessarily grow to be a form of wisdom. And so with proliferation, you can have access, but then the cost to your heart and mind and body to enter into wisdom. So even that as a beginning point, again, I want people to know about this book, but I also know that you have grown through, I mean, just the stories you tell regarding your own pursuit of knowledge, but indeed the disruption to begin to have to face the nature of your own heart and character. And I think that to me is one of those crucial categories. Do you tell the truth about the nature of your own heart, but also where it’s not a performative so-called authenticity. And even as you name certain forms of so-called authenticity that are actually contrary to the nature of what it means to grow in character, what have you seen for yourself? What have you seen for others in that process?

Chuck: Yeah. I often say that there’s no guarantee that suffering will mature you. Some people end up minimizing their suffering. Some people end up dramatizing their suffering and it does become performative. And we’re seeing that nowadays with, and this has been another change over the last 25, 30 years with social media, kinda the performance of vulnerability, what I call faux-nerability, F-A-U-X, in all the different spaces. And so yeah, I think it makes it complicated, especially when I’m… I’ve been doing work for about 15, 20 years now, assessing candidates for ministry, church planters, and it makes it complicated now when they can use language, when they can talk at some level about their sufferings. But it doesn’t take very long for you to sense that they haven’t been metabolized, they haven’t been digested and processed. They haven’t become wisdom as you’re talking about, Dan. And I think I noticed this when I was… Dan, you remember I was in San Francisco for about five years and I landed in the hospital in April of 2012 with what should have been a really simple gallbladder issue and surgery, which turned out to be a system that was septic. And so the question was, how does your system become septic? When I’m doing all the right things, I’m going to therapy, I’m engaging spiritual practices, I’m leading people into spiritual practices. And yet what I realized was that I had engaged these at a certain level, but they had not yet become embodied. And so what a way to launch embodiment ending up in a Mexican hospital where I’m there for a week and the only English channel is the NFL network and I can barely communicate with my doctors and I’m sort of just laying there unproductive and I love to be productive. I’m a starter, I’m an entrepreneur, I love to start things. And so that was my wake-up call, my invitation, because I think as you know, because you train therapists at Seattle School, I think we can do this. We can even do the work with a fair bit of head knowledge and avoid ourselves along the way. I think to some degree that’s what I was doing. I was performing vulnerability to some degree and it was a wake up and that’s one of the reasons I moved. I remember, Dan, you reached out to me over email asking back then, “Why in the world did you move from San Francisco of all places?” It was incredible. There were really good things. And that was one of the major reasons was that I had to face myself in a way that required me to take the road of downward mobility as Henri Nouwen puts it, and to become a junior professor at an unknown Midwestern regional seminary where I had zero responsibility and where I could really begin to dig in in a way that allowed me the time and space to grow up. And that’s when the ripening I think really began. I had a lot of head knowledge, had done a lot of work, but there was more to do.

Dan: Yeah. And again, I don’t know how to say it without almost asking the listener to join me on certain pages in your book, but the constitution, that kind of commitment to I cannot live the life that I’ve been living, but I’ve lived it well and I performed it well, and you were highly successful before, not to say you’re not now, but the reality is success began to blind and in some sense distract to the reality of who you wanted to become. And that’s one of the reasons why I just love the title of the book, Who You’re Becoming, because it implies you are. No matter what, you’re becoming someone, some element of that. And so to at least give a framework, what do you think is some of the central requirements, some of the central passages and transitions that you have gone through that you’ve put words to in this lovely book?

Chuck: Well, I’ll talk about where I start, and in many respects, this is where my own journey started too. One of the things you realize as you grow in this work and grow in success is that anxiety and shame don’t go away, and I thought they would. I thought as a 25-year-old in seminary that if I climbed the ladder to a place where I’d finally felt like I was a somebody, I wouldn’t be as anxious and ashamed. I was more anxious, I was more ashamed, and I was coping in ways. I became a workaholic and I was drinking way too much. I was doing the things that you do when you live in a great… I mean, San Francisco’s a playground. It’s a beautiful city with so much to do and great restaurants, cocktails, and there’s sort of a life that I was living there, but a way that I was avoiding my own shame and anxiety. So in the very first chapter, I talk about the conditions for deep character change, and where I begin is at the level of the nervous system and this posture of safety, because what I realized was that I was living in what I called it this in Healing What’s Within, in chronic sympathetic storm, which is to say a body in perpetual motion. That was the workaholism that was leading to burnout. That was work as hard as you can throughout the week and then crash on the weekends and calling it sanctification, calling it obedience, calling it faithfulness. I had to get off that hamster wheel, and that’s scary to do, by the way, because that in and of itself is uncomfortable and dysregulating. You’ve got to deal with all sorts of things around ego. But then I recognized through some of the work that I was doing that I’d been living in survival mode for a long, long time, and I had to find my way to a place of safety. It’s not altogether different than some of the men I work with on the narcissistic spectrum who’ve been braced and in fight mode for years, and they sit on that couch right over there, and maybe for the first time during one of my five-day intensives, a day two or day three, they begin to recognize that this is a safe enough place and Chuck isn’t going to come after me and he’s not going to destroy me. He’s not going to hurt me. He may actually love me. He may actually care. This may be safe enough for me to relax my defenses and be known. And that’s where the good work begins. In that space, that’s where you can begin to tell your story in earnest. Before that, you’re living like this. So that was the work that I needed to do after April 2012, and it was a hidden work. I didn’t talk about this much with folks. I wasn’t writing about it. I had to go into the desert myself with care, but find my way to that place that I call home with a capital H where I could breathe and where new habits, character might be talked about as habits that become automaticities. James K. A. Smith uses that language, and I like that a lot. That’s where new habits begin to develop, and that’s where love, joy, peace, patience, real love, joy, not performative love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness began to develop too.

Dan: You have that lovely phrase from James K.A. Smith of, “We become what we love,” and when movement, which is another word for control, becomes what we love, we don’t gain control, but we become imprisoned in our own demands. And that simple phrase you have, it’s engagement with connection, not perfection. A trillion of times I might know that, hear that, say that. There’s something about, again, engaging it in your body. So to begin from that neurological standpoint of what provided you a new grounding, it is holy and terrifying.

Rachael: Well, one of the things I love that you’ve done in this book is weaving the therapeutic, the neuroscience of the body and the nervous system with ancient… Maybe not ancient, but ancient practices of the church mothers and fathers, and especially in how you reframe even how they would’ve understood integration and integrity as wholeness, not just… For so many of us who I think have been formed in the epitome of narcissistic spiritual formation, which makes it all just about your moral behavior and capacity, and integrity is seen as is performing, performing things right as opposed to becoming more whole. I love that phrase where these parts of us are more automatic as opposed to, oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. And I just was curious for you how that connection to reminding us, hey, this isn’t just new lingo or a new understanding of being human. We’ve had access to these things. Why do you think it got lost along the way, and how did you encounter these spiritual practices that made these deep connections for you?

Chuck: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that piece of it. I love that it’s there. Rachael, the women throughout church history, they’re the real badasses. They’re the ones who… I mean, I always say, I like to be provocative and say that St. Teresa of Avila is my favorite 16th century reformer, a thousand miles south of Luther and Calvin down in Spain, taking on the men of the inquisition and really inviting people to a journey of wholeheartedness through the interior castle, this new way into the heart, and this deep interiority that in the midst of… There was, let’s just call it sanctioned abuse in 16th century Spain, and for her to say, there is a space within me that I need to guard and I need to grow into and ripen into, and that’s where Jesus lives, and it’s just so great. And then whatever the men went after her, she’d just be like, I’m just a woman. I don’t know anything. Leave me alone. She’s fantastic. But yeah, no, actually real quick, I’ll just say this for me goes back almost 30 years now. When I traveled over to England in the summer of 1997, I was looking to do a PhD in New Testament and the guy named Richard Bauckam, if you’re familiar with that name out at St. Andrew’s. I had a class with a guy named Alistair McGrath. I hadn’t started my counseling work yet, and I was this kid who was like, “Can we just get to the theology?” And then he’s talking about his life, and he’s introducing me to contemplatives and mystics and women in the tradition and Catholics, all these things that as a good reformed 26-year-old, I’m not allowed to read these people or these things, and yet Alistair McGrath is giving me permission to. And so I’d sit by candlelight at night, literally, in my little apartment in Oxford and read St. Teresa and Lady Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. And so in some ways, my own counseling journey began there. It’s not like I found my way there afterwards. It began… That’s what opened my heart and gave my heart permission to explore these things, which is… Thanks for asking that question because I don’t get to talk about that stuff much, and that’s the stuff that editors like to get rid of in the book because it’s too obscure.

Dan: Well, but it’s also what created that spark that may have been occluded by a whole lot of other, shall we say, enterprises, but there was something within you that you could not turn from and was a resource, a place of life in the midst of that season in which your own performative success was snuffing out what had come to be alive within you. So the price for you of writing this book, and I think a lot of times people know that writing is difficult, and yet the price here is forming within yourself a construct and a way of thinking that you probably had not framed quite in the way that you did. And in that, look, every page is worth the purchase of this book, but what I’ll say is page 147, not that you would know that because you probably have no clue what I’m referring to…

Chuck: Oh yeah, definitely page 147, that’s worth the price of the book.

Dan: It is. Thank you for confirming. It is where you lay out this map. I’ve had people do that to me and it’s ridiculous, but I’m telling you that page 147, it holds this map where you’re looking at the complexity of Fowler and the developmental. Okay.

Chuck: Yes, I’m with you.

Dan: You know what I’m referring? Yeah. I can’t help but ask, how did you come to that? Because it is in and of itself an integration and a holding of the complexity of so much of your thought, but also the way of linking your heart and mind to so many different ways. So.

Chuck: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, going way back, the basic frame was there from Walter Brueggeman’s work, orientation, disorientation, reorientation, being the way the Psalms are framed. And so every story… And Dan, your writing has taught me this, and I laid that out, I think, to some degree in the first book I ever wrote called Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places. And so that was the pattern, an 11-day journey that takes 40 years, and that sounds like all of our lives, right? It just takes a long time. The really fascinating thing is that there are more contemporary writings on that developmental journey. Folks like James Fowler, you just mentioned him, who talks about these different stages of the spiritual life, The Critical Journey, Janet Hagberg’s work where she talks about the stages of the spiritual life and the wall that we hit, that wall that represents the disorientation of our lives. For me, this goes back to St. Theresa of Avila. I was reading that, and because I had gotten that early orientation to contemplative spirituality and Theresa, I was like, “Well, that was all there.” In fact, that’s not just there in St. Theresa of Avila, that’s there throughout the Christian tradition, this journey that we’ve got to go on that feels like a roller coaster, feels… Well, it’s the journey that Sam and Frodo went on. We have got to leave the shire to grow up. We’ve got to leave that place of safety, that place where we’re held, and we’ve got to go out into the world. Every child must grow up. They begin to walk and they take their first steps and they fall down. We’ve got to go on this journey. It’s a necessary journey. And what’s beautiful is that the tradition sort of holds space for this at St. Teresa. I put seven Cs to her seven dwellings of the interior castle because I used to be a pastor and that’s what we do.

Rachael: Alliteration, it’s really powerful.

Chuck: Yeah.

Dan: But it stays with you. I’m sorry.

Chuck: It stays with you, right? And there’s this early journey of curiosity and commitment that leads to control, which is where I think a lot of us are, a lot of our churches are, this stage of the spiritual journey where we feel like we figured it out, and that’s the arrival stage for a lot of us. This is where we get stuck. This is where we plant our flags. This is where we launch our movements and our church plants and our tribes. This is where a lot of us are today amidst all the polarization. But she says the journey will take you deeper if you allow it to. You’re simply going to encounter life, and it will take you there if you allow a disappointment, difficulty, diagnoses, all the things that happen, which leads to crisis, the kind of crisis that can grow us up. But for a lot of us, I mean, you know the stories of people who face crisis and they double down, they pull back, and they don’t mature through it. But if we allow it, St. Theresa is so beautiful. She switches metaphors almost every chapter. She didn’t have a good editor back in the day, and she loves a good metaphor, and the metaphor of caterpillar to butterfly through the chrysalis, that’s the journey we need to go on to become whole. And so she sees this journey to wholeness that requires this necessary chrysalis, this transformation through suffering that allows us to live to communion and union with God and with others. And we don’t become too heavily minded to be of no earthly good for St. Teresa. You become more earthy, more humble, more raw, more playful, more joyous, more of a servant to other… You just become a more human being. And so it’s all there five centuries ago, before James Fowler, before Janet Hagberg. And you probably hear a little bit of the enthusiasm in my voice. Why have we ignored this 16th century reformer for Luther and Calvin and others? Yeah, I think there’s a lot of goodness there.

Dan: Yeah. Well, and go back to that question of why have we lost character? Why have we lost in so many ways this call to the interior that is not mere diagnosis of pathology or of Enneagram? Again, I love the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs. There’s nothing ill that keeps us inherently from being able to do that kind of interior work. But when you are sitting with your students or with clients, what is the war that we need to engage for ourselves to do the work you’re talking about?

Chuck: Well, I mean, I think this is where, and I talk about this a lot in the last book too. I think this is where, as you’ve taught us, Dan, and as you both talk about often here, this is where we continue to do our own work. And that work includes, of course, looking at our own stories, but what our own stories reveal is the states that we’re in. And what I mean by that is that when I’m coming in the morning and I’m about to sit with a couple for three hours. For one of these intensives, how am I showing up? Am I anchored in that place that I call home, that place where we’re rooted and grounded in love, that place where we experience the still waters and the green pastures? Or am I, because of my story and how it shows up in my body, pulled into fight, flight, fawn? And that actually gets in the way of good work with our clients. Our clients need us to be connected. And so part of my work is to turn off the radio. If your car still has a radio, take out the cassette, put it on the passenger seat, and simply pay attention to what’s happening within me. Where am I pulled? How am I distracted? And how am I being invited home to that centered place, that grounded place, that rooted place? And I think that’s the war because we’re pulled all the time in different directions. All it takes for me is one negative comment on Facebook, for instance, that I look at before I sit down with my clients and I must be doing this wrong. I must be bad. I must be… All the things, all the places we tend to go. And so what’s the work that we’re invited to, to orient ourselves, find our way back home so that we can show up well for our clients? Because as you both know, a co-regulated therapist allows for that regulation to happen with quiet. I think particularly the narcissistic men that I’ve worked with, when they sense that I’m grounded, they’re moved to a place of groundedness themselves. But when they sense that I got a little fight in me, well, they’ll pull back. And then that oppositional energy shows up in the room and we’re suddenly in conflict with one another. And so it’s really important, particularly in the work that we do, particularly with clients with complex trauma. And I really do believe that some of the personalities I talk about, not least narcissism emerge out of stories of trauma. It’s really important that we’re grounded.

Dan: Well, the cost for you to be grounded is in some ways massive intrigue that shows itself through envy. And that is you have what I want, but I don’t want to actually walk the path that you have troughed. So give me a quicker route. Give me one that bears a little more certainty, but damn you for being centered. Is that fair? Is that a fair…

Chuck: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s fair. One of the things I talk about in the book is that we’re today prone to shortcuts. And I think a lot of these things that we’ve named Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, even the work, the counseling that I’ve done for some have become quick shortcuts, the book that I’ve read. I read Bold Love. I’ve read Healing Path. I’ve read Wounded Heart. Come on, man. I’ve done my work. And so there’s a mastery even of the lingo, some certainty about where I am, who I am, what I’ve done that masks as vulnerability at times. I mean, it can be tougher to tease this out with some of my clients who are really good, really articulate, really good at what they do and how they show up with a kind of faux curiosity. But they want the quick path. They want the, hey, how long will this take? Can we be done and can you write the letter to my elder board after our five-day intensive that clears me? The number of times I get that kind of ask…

Rachael: And I think that’s why I actually love the tagline of your book because this language of the slow and courageous work of cultivating character in a narcissistic age, and I think that crux is very real. I was thinking about when I first started, I went to Seattle School to help people and I had my first attempt at being helpful. And my whole identity was on, I might not be a lot of things, but I’m helpful, totally failed in a practicum setting. I mean, I thought it felt like I was going to die and then language of codependency and do you want to be curious about your story? I do remember how relieving it felt to start having more understanding of who I had become and why, but that awareness did not lead to… I remember that feeling of fury and futility of like, okay, I know these things about myself, but I’m still making… And then I went through transformative processes and then here I am looping back again to this place of codependency. I’m making very complex things very simple, but I also was 24 and I didn’t have a family and I was going to grad school to discern vocation. And how do we help people settle into the slow work when I know for many people it’s ego, but then it’s jobs, it’s when so much is on the line and also in a world on fire where we feel like, well, I have to get back out there and yeah, I might be harming people, but I’m needed. I’m aware it’s such a… Slow work doesn’t match with the way our world is structured, especially our church structure.

Chuck: That’s why, I mean, I think this is more than, hey, we just need to do therapy a little better or a little differently or whatever it might be that’s more individualistic. I think we’re in a major reckoning. Phyllis Tickle, as you know, I quote her early on.

Rachael: I love Phyllis Tickle.

Chuck: Great book back in what, 2008, something like that, The Great Emergence. So good. She says every 500 years there’s this rummage sale within the church and I think we’re there again. So what that means is that at the level, not just at the level of individual work in counseling or discipleship or what program we implement at the church, the level of institutions and denominations and movements, there is this massive reckoning. I think the challenging thing with that is that there is a doubling down right now. Five or 10 years ago, the hope was that with that, there would be significant questions asked within the context of institutions and denominations. By the way, I’ve got some, I’m sure you do too, really hopeful stories of pastors and denominational leaders and CEOs and nonprofit leaders who have engaged the reckoning at that more systemic level, which you know is multidimensional. It includes the work we’re talking about, but I think it includes anti-racist training and all sorts of things. But I think there’s a doubling down right now. So this is what makes it challenging. But go back to, I don’t know what chapter it is because I don’t remember these things, but chapter four maybe or something where I talk about the four… In the old tradition, in ancient traditions, the Indigenous tradition, there’s a writer that talks about the four core pillars of change, of deep change: safety, an elder, a community and a sacred story. And what I’ve found is that as I’ve been teaching a bit on that, there’s some intrigue. What are the basics that we need to get back to? How do we hold people well? How do we elder them through the eldering of wise people and how do we identify wise people and who do we call wise people? So that’s the old question. How do we nurture communities where people are invited into the depths of their own lives and the depths of their own stories in a way that is safe and paced? And are we living in a sacred story? A lot of our churches, there is no cruciform or sacred story. It’s an up and to the right story of winning or performing or succeeding. I do think with every reformation, institutions die, particular ways of seeing the world and engaging the world necessarily die. We’ve been talking about some of this over the last 10, 15 years, some call it deconstruction, but there’s a real resistance to this and I’m not entirely sure. I think this isn’t nailing the 95 thesis to the castle doors at Wittenberg like Luther did. I actually think that we’re in an extended reckoning right now. This isn’t a one or two year massive overhaul. I wonder what some of what we’re reckoning with in the world of AI and technology is going to do around this. So there are lots of interacting pieces that I think are leading to this larger reckoning that I hope will lead us to a new simplicity, back to safety, back to eldering, back to community, back to a sacred story, micro communities of people gathering to live in the story with one another.

Dan: Well, it’s a brilliant point that you’re making because in some sense of the word, this book is a 99 thesis nailed to the door of Wittenbrook because it is asking each of us to reconsider how caught we are in the current pace, movement, noise and insanity and that stepping back from into a more counter-cultural, like do you really need to have your children virtually in age 12 in a professional sports preparation where the likelihood of them even getting a college degree on the basis of it is very small, let alone making it into the pros. The countercultural call to character ought not be anything other than the basic bread and wine of what it is that we live with our relationship with Jesus. Yet in our day, this is the kind of book that I would view as the absolute brilliant opportunity for small groups for not just individual readers, but for people to have two or three people to say, “Is it true?” And it is. And if it is, how am I compromising my own movement of life and joy by being caught in the noise and the rush of the pace of life as it is? So in that frame, I think what you have done is exactly that. You’ve nailed an important realm into the wall.

Chuck: Yeah. And that’ll be costly, right? I mean, for individuals, as we know in our counseling work, it’s really costly when people make those kinds of changes. But for churches, when you work with pastors to take their churches in new directions for denominations, thankfully there are some courageous folks doing it nowadays, but we’ll see how it all emerges. But thanks. I mean, to call this the 95 thesis, I’ll just take my book and nail it to my door after this. See everyone. Dan, says it is going to start a reformation.

Dan: Well, I thought it was 99, but it is 95.

Chuck: 95. Yeah, whatever. I mean,

Dan: But I added four more that I thought Luther really just didn’t think through well enough.

Rachael: There was something I wanted to just express gratitude for, and I’m probably curious about. You wrote a lot of poetry in this book, and poetry is its own… I’m probably more of a prose person. I want to be a poet. I’m married to a poet. And it is its own labor of integration, I guess I would say, or wholeheartedness. So I’m just curious about, is that something you’ve done a lot in the past? Where did that come from?

Chuck: It’s something I’m most embarrassed by and self-conscious about for sure, because I’m much more comfortable with prose, and it felt to me at some point along the way that I needed to shift it from that more left brain to something more right brained. It just felt like at the end of a couple of chapters in the very beginning of writing the book that it deserves something more that looked a little bit like a blessing. And then I was on sabbatical last fall, and so creative space is open when you’ve just got more time and you’re out in the woods or wherever you are. I mean, I was in some really beautiful places where poetry just came. So thanks for saying that. And again, that’s the part that I’m like, oh gosh, I hope real poets don’t read that. It’s just so bad. But it was a stretch for me and it’s something I want to continue to stretch into.

Dan: Well, we’re coming to an end, so I won’t focus and confront your contempt other than to say it is glorious and a gift. And in some sense, it’s a resounding movement of your growing character that you’re willing to tap into the portions of your life that have been, in some sense, ignored or denied. One of the things that I especially… I’m so glad, Rachael, you brought that up. Sue Cunningham, who is a dear friend.

Chuck: She’s great.

Dan: I think your next major move is not just to be on her podcast Living Poetry, but actually read your poetry. Would you be open to that?

Chuck: She came and did a retreat for our faculty here and invited us in over three unhurried days into poetry. I think actually that was part of it for me was this open spaces that I need to continue to live into this. So that would be so beautiful.

Dan: Well, it is, shall we say, a gift to all of us that you have chosen to become the person that you are and will be. And in that process, the gift of the book, let alone the poetry, and particularly page 146, is a sweet gift.

Chuck: Well, you two are part of it. Thank you. Thank you for the words that you put in. I was looking for the page. I was going to say that was my favorite page, but thanks for the words that you shared too. You’ve both been a part of my journey.

Dan: An honor and honor. So thank you. We’ll look forward to the next book next time, if not before.