In this episode Gina Has a conversation with Bill & Kristi Gaultiere, doctors of psychology, 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
DONATE NOW to support the production of this podcast and other projects of Stockton Ministries.
Listen below to follow along starting at 14:18
The Stages of Growth
Gina:
There’s a depth and a completeness in how you minister side by side, and the book is a part of that. It’s not just a Bill Guiltier book, it’s a Bill and Christie book. So that whole 14 years was a part of the Lord bringing you guys back together side by side. So let’s talk about Journey of the Soul. We’re in a crazy time in our world. There’s a lot of disruption and disorientation right now.
If you go back to the Psalms, there is a theologian who separated David’s Psalms between orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. We are in disorientation in the world, but also in the church. A lot of things that we’ve constructed, are being deconstructed and reoriented. I think that Journey of the Soul is so critical for such a time as this.
You identify stages of spiritual growth that you’re calling “Christ stages”, where you recognize and articulate these different places on our spiritual journey that I think nobody has really put language to. I think this lack of recognizing those stages really leads to a lot of shame for myself.
If I am not in the stage that I think everybody else is in, and I feel like, “What’s wrong with me?” Or I lean into judgment of others, “What’s wrong with you? You should be here and you’re clearly not, so you need to read your Bible more.” So you know what I mean? That kind of thing. Can you unpack Journey of the Soul, and share the journey that brought you to writing it?
Bill:
Well, you’re right. It is funding the language. It came out of our experience including these years where I was wrestling through depression, and in a long wall and feeling far from God because I felt that He didn’t want my gift. But little by little over those years, a new sweetness developed in my intimacy with Jesus, and also with Christie, and with my friends and I learned a deeper way of being emotionally present in these moments of life with God and people.
What we came to call “The inner journey”, the “i” stage in the Christ stages, was my time at the wall, and that death to self and all that discombobulation and turbulence, which our whole world is going through. Certainly here in America, we seem to be at a collective wall, and also in our churches, with the pandemic, and the effects of this social unrest.
There’s just a lot of questions and a lot of stress and pain and it’s affecting us in our relationships with each other and with the Lord. So the wall, when you go through these trials… and we all have them… not every trial is a wall. When you really find yourself stuck and God seems to be far, or not blessing you, that’s a really hard time.
What tends to happen is when we hit that wall, we want to go back to the way things used to be. Like you were saying, if I just read my Bible more, and we try to go back to things that brought us consolation and not realizing that I’m in a different season now, I’m in a different stage. The Holy Spirit is doing a different kind of work for me. We need to understand those different stages and movements of grace in our life.
So I didn’t have the language as clear then as I do now, but the Lord was inviting me deeper into a new intimacy with Him that wasn’t based on my performance or my image or my accomplishments. I had the theology of that long before this through the experience of it. It took those years of relative quiet of not being so productive and so active, especially in a public way in my ministry, to cultivate that inner life.
I really can’t emphasize this enough. We do this in Journey of the Soul, we talk about the connection between our relationship with God and one another. We just can’t separate those. So even as I’m talking about intimacy with God, intertwined in that was my relationship with Christie and the conflicts and stresses that we needed to work through in learning how to be vulnerable with her, and with my friends.
The opposite of that vulnerability is what I was raised to practice, I would always put my best foot forward to make an impression. To bring my real self is so vulnerable. “Will you listen to me? Can we hang out? Can we take a walk? I need some prayer.” To be vulnerable in that way was huge for me. So learning to live that out in my human relationships was super important for me, and actually doing it with God, so it’s not just in my head.
Gina:
That vulnerability is risky. Depending on our history, we have to work through whether we see God as a safe place to be that vulnerable and be that intimate with Him, and then to see other people as a safe place. We’re in an epidemic right now, in my opinion, with people feeling like church is in a safe place, and that narrative is being propagated even more in the world right now because of events and everything like that.
So everybody, you need to get this book. If you’re a believer, if you are a leader, you really do. This is vital for the church because I see so many people that are just getting swept away by the rip current. One of the key tactics of the enemy, in that place of fearing vulnerability is to isolate us. That isolation takes us down such a scary spiral.
It’s in that isolation that the enemy starts telling you lies about God, “He doesn’t really care about you.” That isolation brings us to that most heartbreaking verse in the Bible in Genesis, after Adam and Eve commit the first sin, and God asks, “Where are you?” I don’t think it was a scolding. It was a heart broken question, “Where are you? Why did you choose distance?”
I think that we are in a time of history that the enemy wants to take out as many as he possibly can. That place of isolation, discouragement, and disillusionment is just a prime territory for that to take place. What I love as well, is that you identify the different stages, but then you also identify roadblocks at each stage with each of these “Christ stages. There’s grace, there’s gifts that we have the opportunity to receive, but then there’s that roadblock and that temptation to have it be stolen. Kristi, will you talk a little bit about this?
The Christ Stages
Kristi:
Of course! You were talking about the journey in the Psalms from the orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. At some level we have that at every stage of our emotional and spiritual growth. And we’re not brilliant, we didn’t create these stages. These are well researched. We did several psychological theories, and even cognitive development on any human level of development and then spiritual development. They all fit.
Each of these models are validated. All we did is combine them all into one that really integrates the psychological and emotional truth with the spiritual truth because God created both. That’s why they’re true. Then we put them in a model that really helps people understand that. It really helps because it gives you a map for your journey where you are, and it helps you see where God is working in your story, and then His story.
Your story is part of his larger story. So it helps you find yourself in His story, and it helps you to understand others and where they are in His story, instead of judge them because they’re not where you are. But one of the things I want to say, is that in each of these stages, we’re going to experience times of desolation, times of grief, times of questioning, of doubt, times of temptation.
There’s temptation in each stage. Times of feeling judged and misunderstood by others. Times of feeling shame and lost to God. In every stage there’s some desolation that we’re going to experience. In every stage there’s a consolation, there’s that grace, there’s that gift. So it’s important to understand that there is this movement, and we talk about this in the book, this movement kind of our highs and our lows. Some stages have higher highs and lower lows.
Gina:
I think what’s of utmost importance is what you alluded to earlier when you were talking about temptation, to put our best foot forward and go, “I’m okay. I’m all good. I don’t need anything.” I think that’s such a huge trap in the church in general. We haven’t given ourselves or each other permission, we haven’t given our congregations permission to be in those different stages.
That forces everyone to just kind of try to be what they think they should be. The collateral damage of that and the pain and the trauma that that creates is devastating in the church. We have an opportunity for reorientation to reestablish those things. We did a couple of small group trials before the launch just to kind of get a field.
We’d let some pastors lead people through it. I spoke to one pastor who was just saying, how his group’s been together for 20 years, and that they have deep relationship. He said they hadn’t had a conversation this deep and this vulnerable ever before. The questions that we address, and people being able to identify with different stages and say,
“Oh my gosh, that’s me. That’s a thing. I can actually say that I feel isolated, or I feel shamed, or I’m dealing with these things.” To be able to give space to allow people to acknowledge that to themselves, to the Lord, and to one another, to receive empathy, to receive God’s presence in that place, that it’s okay.
Kristi:
We were desperate for it. That’s one of the reasons why we wrote this book. There were a lot of books we could have written. We were like, “Should we write a book on empathy?” That’s so powerful and important, but we wrote this book becauseI said to Bill, “This is the book I need to be able to hand people that I meet with that come to me for therapy and for spiritual direction.”
They come to me and they’re feeling so ashamed. They’re like, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, maybe I’m backsliding, but church just isn’t working for me anymore.” Or, “I’m leaving church and I’m not wanting to go back,” or, “I’m struggling with this, what do I do?” or, “Just reading the Bible isn’t working for me anymore. I’m not getting anything out of it. It’s dry.” and they’re ashamed about it.
They don’t have anybody to tell because if they tell anybody at their church they’re going to get judged. Or they’re going to get told a bunch of “should” that they feel like they can’t do. That’s like a heavy yolk. It’s that very thing because they’re not understanding that they need a safe place to have somebody who understands their experience in their walk with God, and in their relationship with God to have somebody who can hold that grace and that faith for them, to say that, “Even in your desolation right now, you’re not lost to God.”
This all fits and he’s doing a deep work and there’s opportunity when you hit the wall. In these first three stages, we call it: the first half of our journey. We tend to have of a lot of black and white thinking. There’s a lot of “should”, there is a lot of “earning mentality” and we still don’t get God’s love as unconditional. We’re still thinking we have to earn it, and that it’s conditional. We think, “We have to do the right thing, we have to be good.”
And we’re trying so hard, that we’re striving to serve God well, and sometimes we have to hit that wall and come to the end of ourselves before we really have the opportunity for God to meet us in some deeper areas that we were hiding from Him, or we’re hiding from ourselves, or hiding from others.
Check out the rest of this conversation:
Soul Care & How God Prepares a Minister
Check out the Dwell Meditations
