In this episode Gina Has a conversation with Bill & Kristi Gaultiere, doctors of psychology, about how God prepared them to minister through surrender. Bill and Kristi are the spiritual directors and the founders of Soul Shepherding about their new book Journey of the Soul: A Practical Guide to Spiritual and Emotional Health. In their book, Bill & Kristi give language to the different stages of our emotional and spiritual growth, how they integrate and the roadblocks and invitations in each.
Check out resources for churches and small groups journeyofthesoul.org
Learn more about Bill & Kristi and their ministry soulshepherding.org
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Recognizing Pain
Gina:
My very special guests are Bill and Christie Gaultere. They are friends of mine. They are doctors of psychology, spiritual directors, and the founders of Soul Shepherding. Soul Shepherding provides care, training and resources to pastors and leaders and missionaries all over the world so that they can minister out of the overflow and have a healthy, vibrant, thriving relationship with Jesus in their life, work, and ministry.
They have a new book coming out, “Journey of the Soul: A Practical Guide to Emotional and Spiritual Health.” I’m so honored that they would take the time to come and have a conversation and talk about their journey and what brought them to writing this book.
I am excited for them to explain the tool that it is, and the help that it can bring to those of us in our different stages of our spiritual growth, as well as the roadblocks and the frustrations we can face, and then finally the reality that we’re not alone. Jesus is so present wherever you are, however close or far you feel from Him. He’s with you above, below and front, behind and on either side. Bill and Christie, welcome. Thank you for being here.
Bill:
It is great to be with you on your podcast. Thanks, Gina.
Gina:
There’s a lot going on. You have a book coming out in just a few weeks, which is all kinds of crazy.
Bill:
It’s crazy and it’s exciting.
Gina:
Before we talk about your book, I want to talk a little bit about when I first heard about you. I didn’t meet you for a long time, but I knew of you. I was on staff at a church, a local church where our pastor, who I got to work with pretty closely, just hit a wall, he was burned out. It’s a tragic and repeated tail in the church world, in that place of vulnerability and pain.
This isn’t to cast blame at all. The elders didn’t know how to respond to that. It was a typical church situation, where there were a lot of things that people were dissatisfied with the church. It was easy to place blame on his failures and faults, rather than leaving the 99 to care for the one. Fear comes up, and this need to protect the structures set in place.
In that, there is a lot of collateral damage, and you two came into that situation. That pastor and his wife were referred to you. Bill, you were there through some of those meetings, some of those hard conversations with elders. But you also were a critical part of facilitating reconciliation with those very same elders a couple of years later. So before I knew you and met you, I had incredible respect for you and was grateful for you.
I’ve been in ministry for a lot of years. I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve been in leadership, I’ve been in a lot of different places. I have a lot of friends and connections, and I’ve seen so much of that unhealth and unawareness and people’s presumptions and miscommunications and judgements collide and create so much hurt and trauma and pain, not only for leaders, but for others.
So to see you guys come in and have that voice, that care and compassion and empathy was so moving. You are the first people that I had seen in the church world that were advocating for relational health. You explained how interconnected spiritual and relational health are in the church. Then a few years later, I resigned from my position at the church.
The Lord led me out, and I had no idea what I was going to do next. Then someone brought us together. At that time, you were at a place when your ministry had grown exponentially far beyond what you expected or what you could handle.
So I actually have the privilege and honor to work with you and help with your ministry and your organization. Soul Shepherding ministers to pastors, leaders, and missionaries all over the world, you support, care for, train, and provide resources for them. So it’s awesome to be a part of that. Would you share your story a little bit. How did you get here? How did you come to carry this passion for leaders?
Bill:
We have experienced those things that you are describing in the church, and as therapists who were serving in the church, and then as a pastor on staff at the church experiencing problems with conflict and a lack of emotional relational health. Through our own story of learning and growth and working through issues in our life and hitting walls.
Then the other piece was being ministered to by Ray Ann Orland, who had a ministry to pastors, and couples. Seeing this couple give their lives to listening to and praying for and encouraging and serving and teaching pastors, the Lord just put it on my heart to do the same. What a great life that would be to work with the leaders, the people who are on mission for Jesus, but not taking care of their own soul. So in a nutshell, that’s what led us here.
Yielding to God
Kristi:
Well, and I think also, Bill, you’re a pretty driven “type A” leader, right? You’ve got a lot of great ideas and opportunities and gifts and a lot of zeal that you want to put to work for God and His kingdom. Yet, the Lord had to really take you out and teach you to sit at His feet and to be still, and to learn to be in His presence, and to make sure that your love for Him was first, and to die to selfish ambition and to yield all your ideas and your gifts to him, and really experience your own journey of humility.
It was a journey of being humbled, yielded, waiting on God and growing your roots really deep in the soil of God’s love, so that you were really healthy. That was part of the work that God did too in order to prepare you for this and that cost you a lot. There was a lot of tension between us in the midst of ministry.
We had to learn how to navigate both of our different ideas about ministry, and our experiences with that, and then navigate family and our relationship. Then even before that in college, we were both called to study psychology in order to understand the Soul, and to understand what it’s like to have health in our relationship with God, others, and ourselves.
Gina:
This is all so critical to ministry and life. I grew up in a church denomination, back in the eighties and the nineties, where psychology was considered really horrible, and even evil. There was spiritual health, but that was reduced to “You’re saved. Are you reading the Bible? Are you praying? Get over yourself.” So that alone caused a lot of damage and a lot of hurt.
But Christy, you just said a mouthful right there. The journey that you had to learn together, how to surrender everything, and really sit at the feet of Jesus, and your identity and your worth and your value being placed solely and completely in His love for you, in who you are as His kids. Because you can’t minister to leaders and pastors or anybody and lead them to that place, if you can’t get to that place first yourself. How was that for you?
Bill:
There’s two sides of the story. One side is, it was really depressing because I lost my outward identity. I had written three books before I was 30 and was speaking places, and in the media I was on the path to reach my dream and be a best selling Christian author and speaker and Christian psychologist guru. That’s what I wanted.
As Christie said, that was causing a lot of friction between us. Because I had a full-time practice as a therapist and a co-director of a day hospital clinic. I had my hands full with that as a young psychologist. Then I’m writing books on the side, and then we have two little kids. So there was a lot on me. But when Lord led me to lay that down, I knew it was a good thing. I knew it was the Lord. I knew that for sure my marriage and family were way more important to me.
But even knowing the rightness of it, and having a strong sense that this was what God wanted, and God was pleased with my obedience in this, I lost that outward identity and sense of significance. Since I was a teenager, the thing I wanted most to do with my life was to write. I wanted to write for Jesus, and I wanted to help people.
I wanted to use words to help people experience God’s presence and to grow as Christians spiritually and emotionally. So when the Lord spoke to my heart in a very deep and personal way, and effectively said, “I don’t want that. I want you. I want your heart.” I just said, “Yes Lord, I won’t write or speak again unless You tell me to, because I know you do this out of love for me and Christy”.
I knew it was the Lord. So I knew it was good and I had peace about it. I walked out that path, days, weeks, months, years, 14 years. In the early years, that part of my life was very depressed. Yeah. It was confusing. Part of me understood. I knew I was too ambitious. I knew there was probably some ego in here, but mostly I felt like, “I want to do this for God. Why can’t I do this and be a good husband and father?”
I thought I was a pretty good husband and father while I was writing, but I also knew there was friction with Christie. So it was confusing to me. I didn’t have the language back then that I eventually had when we wrote Journey of the Soul. I didn’t have the understanding of the stages of faith, and emotional spiritual growth, which we call “The Christ stages.”
I was learning some things from psychology about development and stages of growth, and I was learning models of stages of faith, but it was all new and I was trying to put it all together and integrate it. I hadn’t identified it for myself. So spiritually I felt pretty lost and dry, and I felt like God was far, and I struggled with jealousy when colleagues of mine were writing books and speaking and God was using them.
There was a lot of spiritual warfare. Satan would harass me and attack me with things like, “Why didn’t you write that book?” And, “God doesn’t trust you. You’re no good. You don’t have anything to say. You’re on the shelf.” So I was just battling a lot of demons there for some years.
Gina:
What was going on with you during this time Kristi?
Kristi:
Well, I was feeling guilty because I had actually asked him to lay down writing the books to be more present with me and the kids. So I saw the sacrifice that it was, I saw the death of self that it was, and I felt shame over that, like I destroyed his dream and his career, and I was in the way of that. We wanted different things, so I felt very guilty.
Then I remember it wasn’t long after seeing him suffering so much, that I was like, “Okay, Lord, you can have him back. Bless him. Give him his books.” And then I got impatient with God. I was kind of like, “Lord, why aren’t you blessing him? He is keeping his dream at the altar. You’re supposed to resurrect it!” So then I went into kind of my own wrestling with God over that and my own crisis.
Kind of like, “Well, don’t you love Bill? Well if you love Bill, wouldn’t you bless him in this way? Why are you doing this? This kind of seems like a waste now. I know the value that’s in him. I know what he knows. I know the gifts you’ve given him and I want others to benefit.” And I’m feeling kind of selfish because other people aren’t getting to benefit. So I had my own wrestle there as well.
Gina:
I think it is important to note too, that partnership in marriage and in calling as well. I think before that 14 years, it was Bill’s ambition, and Bill’s call, which was separate from Christie’s call. They weren’t integrated. One thing that’s so significant and I think really causes a lot of damage in marriages is that lack of understanding, or that presumption of the man is called to something and the wife is just kind of dragged behind.
There is this lack of understanding of partnership. If Bill is called, then you’re both called to something. If Christie is called, you’re both called. There’s that unification and you’re something together that you aren’t a part. Even the journey I’ve been on with you, it’s been so beautiful to see the impact of who you are together.
Check out the rest of this conversation:
Journey of the Soul & Soul Care
Check out the Dwell Meditations
