Minding the Maturity Gap: The Soul of Hope for Ministry Leaders

By Robyn Florian

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Ephesians 4:14–16)

“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3b–5)

In Part 1 of this mini-series, I invited us, as Christians called to advance God’s kingdom on earth, “to embark on the wilderness way from immaturity to maturity, from brokenness to wholeness, from surviving to thriving, from languishing to flourishing.”

It is a way I call hope, light-seeking hope, birthed from life-saving faith and raised up for love-sustaining joy, peace, and other fruits of the Spirit … a new pattern to restory our destoried stories based on noological processes (encouraging us toward an earned secure attachment to God), neuroplastic principles (equipping believers for affective abiding), and narrative practices (embodying agency as God’s powerful presence in culture).

Curt Thompson addresses a pressing and prevalent concern impacting culture, the church, and, most critical to both, the character of its leaders. He presents a wicked problem, “evil wields shame to destroy us” (“The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves”). Shame destories — dismembers and disorders — God’s story of beauty and goodness in our lives. James K.A. Smith proposes a novel solution, “God restores us by restorying us,” re-membering and reordering our loves with “counter-liturgies” through processes, principles and practices “that are loaded with the gospel and indexed to God and His kingdom” (“You Are What You Love”). We need a new way of hope; a new pattern to restory destoried stories.

The Journey: From Immaturity to Maturity

This deep, reparative exilic-return-to-exodus wilderness walk with God holds wide implications for the church. The first exodus saw God’s people journey from rescue to restoration, akin to justification, but the exilic return to exodus, on the heels of Babylonian captivity and biblical correction, saw God’s people embark on a reparative way from reconciliation to resilience. This deeper work of soul repair — emotionally and relationally — reflects the work of sanctification.

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 “Paul asserted the formation of a spiritual mindedness has the capacity to transform the whole self, soul (psyche) and body (soma).”

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John David Walt refers to a “second-half-of-the-gospel” journey. I’ve wondered if it’s accurate to classify a first-half-of-the-gospel journey as one that reckons with sin, death, and hopelessness and a second-half-of-the-gospel journey as one that reckons with shame, pain, and brokenness.

Founders of the “Three Viennese Schools of Psychotherapy,” psychologists Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Viktor Frankl offer us some landmarks of maturity. Based on Frankl’s summarization of these three schools, I present them to you as:

• will to pleasure and merriment (childlike maturity; Freud), driven by an unconscious, involuntary capitulation of responsible behaviors in order to avoid repressed pain and suffering resulting in meaninglessness;
• will to power and money (adolescent maturity; Adler), driven by a subconscious, instinctive effort to capably overcome suppressed inferiority and weakness resulting in means; and
• will to purpose and meaning (adult maturity; Frankl), driven by a conscious, intentional capacity to process brokenness resulting in meaningfulness.

Based on these three schools of psychotherapeutic thought, I noticed how the journey from immaturity to maturity moves from unconscious to conscious, from involuntary to intentional, from capitulation to capacity, and from repressed to processed.

It’s Romans 12:2, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The Greek word for mind in this verse, noos, conveys intuitive meaning-making and the capacity for understanding. Frankl approached the noos mind as “suprahuman” (thus “noological” processes that base themselves in spiritual formation). Paul asserted the formation of a spiritual mindedness has the capacity to transform the whole self, soul (psyche) and body (soma).

Soul Care and Holiness

I drive an orange Kia Soul. As the director for Alumni Relations at Greenville University, with school colors of orange and black (and a little bit of ivy green), my car literally drives my calling to soul care and, in particular, the care of alumni souls. I align with Paul (and Henri Nouwen) on the definition of the self as spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma), and with Ignatius of Loyola in his definition of the soul as thoughts, emotions, and desires. It is only in the context of a spiritual soil that our thoughts, emotions, and desires conform and reform to those of Christ’s for the purpose of transformational and transcendent living in the Spirit.

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 “Our soul debris needs sifting in order for the Spirit of God to flow more freely through us to others in need of His outpouring, infilling, overflowing work.”

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Pete Scazzero links spiritual transformation with emotional repair: “Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.” He suggests emotional healing requires “under the waterline” work —attuning to the 90% of the iceberg we can’t see under the surface.

If spiritual direction reinforces the foundation for our hope as faith in God’s outpouring “withness,” soul care — tending to the health and healing of the mind’s thoughts, emotions, and desires — proves the under-the-waterline foundry of hope “wilderness” experience between slavery and freedom, brokenness and wholeness, surviving and thriving, languishing and flourishing. This is the way the infilling grace and truth of Jesus prepare us as an overflowing fountain of hope, facilitated by ministry supervision that “witnesses” to the love of God in the world, through the presence, power, and providence of the Holy Spirit.

In the Wesleyan world, we call it holiness, and it is an essential and critical way forward from immaturity to maturity for those entrusted with the care of God’s people. It is the way of light-seeking hope through soul care, emotionally and relationally, grounded in the spiritual and made manifest in the physical. Our soul debris needs sifting in order for the Spirit of God to flow more freely through us to others in need of His outpouring, infilling, overflowing work.

In a future article, we’ll examine a specific way of hope — one of hope-brained restory in which Walt’s “second-half-of-the-gospel” exploration of sanctification provides a helpful series of milestones on the journey.

This 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (spirit/soul/soma) journey of engaging the wholeheartedness of our “self” with God through reconciliation, repair and resilience invites us to shift our mindset from a left-brained spiritual checklist of “rules” — often referred to as “read,” “pray,” “meet” and “serve” — to whole-brained/co-brained (with God and others) lifestyle of spiritual rhythms. From a place of faith in God’s “revelation” of truth in His Word and for the promise of God’s fruitful “demonstration” of love in the world, God invites us to hope, to reprocess our individual stories with Him through prayerful “consecration” and to repurpose our stories with others in the church through “proclamation.” Likened to John Wesley’s “therapeutic means of grace,” these spiritual rhythms position us before God to reinterpret our disgrace and restory meaningful lives.

Stay tuned and stay the course. As Beth Moore says, “We witness to God’s withness,” and I add, “experienced expressly in the wilderness.”

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