Episode 40: Necessity of Ancient-Future Confession
Shouldn't be a leader without it
Episode 40
Necessity of Ancient-Future Confession — Shouldn't Be a Leader Without It
Show Notes
Justin and Amy Howard continue their ancient-future conversation on confession, turning to what it means for the formation of leaders. Drawing on Amy's Doctor of Ministry interviews with clergy across many traditions, they name a striking pattern: most pastors were never meaningfully confessed before they were ordained, and were never taught how to receive another's confession. With warmth and candor, they explore the loneliness and bondage this costs leaders and their churches, and they cast a hope-filled vision for a Christianity where it is safe to be known, healed, and set free. This is an invitation to trade survival for encounter, and to begin living a confessional life.
In This Episode
- Repentance has been preserved as an idea in much of the Protestant world, but confession as a shared practice has largely been lost, reducing sin to moral bookkeeping.
- Amy's clergy interviews reveal that most leaders never confessed aloud before ordination and were never trained in seminary to give or receive confession.
- Because seminary is often the final threshold of formation, ordination can be reduced to a degree, references, a psych eval, and a background check rather than genuine self-knowledge and healing.
- Unconfessed leaders are frequently destined for exile and abject loneliness, with a paycheck tied to their silence until a collapse forces the truth into the open.
- A 'first-step narrative' that traces the grace and pain of one's whole life could become a normal part of preparing people for baptism, confirmation, and ordination.
- Encounter, EncounterLife groups, spiritual direction, and the Trinitas formation program are offered as practical on-ramps to a lifestyle of knowing and being known.
- The goal is not merely admitting sin but confessing it, being met by grace, led into truth, renouncing what holds us, and being restored so our testimony carries authority to set others free.
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- Where in your own life have you kept 'repentance' as an idea while avoiding the practice of confessing out loud to another person? What has that cost you?
- The hosts describe leaders who are alienated from others, their spouses, and even themselves. Who are the safe people you can genuinely be known by, and if there are none, what first step could you take this week?
- What might it look like to write a 'first-step narrative' of your own life, tracing the grace of God and the pain, before your next transitional or leadership moment?
- Justin distinguishes between merely admitting something and truly confessing, renouncing, and being restored. Where have you settled for accountability that lacks 'teeth,' and what would restoration require instead?
- The episode warns that congregations often want their leaders to be God. How have you contributed to a culture of pretending, and how might you help make it safe to be human in your community?
- Jesus is pictured going to the highways to find people who want to feast. Are you living from a vantage point of encounter and freedom, or one of survival and loneliness — and what would it mean to accept the invitation to the banquet?
- If you wanted to bless a leader or begin a confessional lifestyle yourself, what concrete next step could you take (an Encounter, an EncounterLife group, a spiritual director, or a soul friendship built on the four R's)?
Full Transcript
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0:03Introduction and Welcome
Welcome to Between Heaven & Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard, and together we lead a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We are thrilled that you've joined us. In each episode, we'll explore what it means to follow Jesus by bringing heaven and earth together in your family and community. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and courageously join with Jesus in his great project of healing and restoration.
This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. Let's dive in.
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Right, right. So if you all remember the last episode, I was chided, castigated. Oh, no, I can't remember what it was. For eating. And I had to wait about 10 seconds while Amy finished eating for us to start this one. So I—at least I did it off the mic. That's true. I hadn't had lunch. I know. I do have a problem with listening to people chew. I think that's a thing. I hear you chewing on the microphone. Well, maybe you have it too. I don't know. There's a lot of sound blocking going on, so it's just very isolated. Just you that I'm hearing. Just the masticating, which is always a little bit true, because you're in my head. Yeah. Yeah, well, yes, that's true.
2:48Confession as Formation for Leadership
Well, okay, here we are. Confession as formation for leadership. So we're still on the ancient-future talk of confession. We touched on this at the end of our last episode, but I think this is where the conversation gets really important, because you've been interviewing clergy, and one of the themes that's come up is that many leaders have never really been confessed before they were ordained. Yeah. Yep. To me that's a striking and sobering pattern.
Yeah. The thing is, it makes sense, because I don't think the Protestant world for the most part has valued out-loud confession to another person. So I don't think so. It kind of makes sense that we haven't, really. Now, it doesn't make sense that we've devalued it so much, because it's so prominent in the Scriptures in a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, there's just a real—I mean, James is very direct in his exhortation. Right. But that's only for sick people. Yeah. It's also in John. First—I mean, it's really clear. Like, walk—it's in Peter. There's a real sense that if you're walking in the light, if you don't have anything to hide, you actually have real fellowship with one another. Yeah.
It seems like we've preserved repentance as an idea, but in many Protestant spaces we've lost confession as a practice. And once that happens, I think sin often gets reduced to moral bookkeeping, instead of being understood as something that shapes us, isolates us, sometimes keeps us in bondage. Yeah. And then when someone does confess, you get the pearl-clutching and the exile and the—you get kicked out of community, or there's no mature response. Right. And there's no vibrant testimony. So what does the world care? You don't have a real solution for their sins. You just have "be good." Right? Yeah, yeah.
Because the reality is that we are learning how to participate in the divine nature. Right. We're learning how to live into the coming age. Yeah. We are learning how to be a small working model of new creation. And if we're not doing this, then how can we do that? But anyway, I'd love to know—what have you been hearing from clergy in these interviews that you've been conducting? This is for your Doctor of Ministry, which you are a candidate for—a Doctor of Ministry now. That's true. Which means you've done a lot of work, two or three years leading up to this point. Yeah.
I didn't—thank you so much for the amount of time that that has cost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're kind of—if I can't be renovating something, you kind of end up like a puppy eating the walls of a home when you don't have something interesting to keep your attention. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, or you just get melancholy. I really love having thoughts. Yeah, you do. Yeah. And being exposed to other people's thoughts. Well, you're an Enneagram 5, so that makes a lot of sense, with that little four-wing thing going on, which means you like all the special things. You like to be the special. It's very cute. I don't even know.
5:54What the Clergy Interviews Revealed
All right, so what have you been hearing from clergy in these interviews? Yeah. I mean, I want to say at first, my theory that I was testing out was partially—I thought, all right, I don't think there's a lot of confession happening outside of what Encounter is doing. And I was trying to guess why I thought that might be. And one of the things that I thought was, well, people have really thought theologically through why we aren't confessing to one another, and they've decided, well, we don't need to, because we're already forgiven, we're already saved. And so it's just an unnecessary layer of humiliation.
I think one of the things that stands out to me the most, that I'm finding, is pretty much nobody's given it that much thought. I'm trying to remember—I'm not sure that anyone I've spoken to to date, and I've just about finished my interviews—maybe one, maybe one person had a retreat-type setup at one point, and somebody for a class had to keep a journal where they confessed. And they were told, "No one's going to read it," but they needed to confess into this journal and hand it in, even though they were promised that no one would read it. So that was the closest thing in all of the interviews that I got to any of these pastors, in undergraduate or seminary, learning anything about confession. None of them learned anything—like, what do you do if someone confesses their sin to you? Theologically, why would we confess or not confess?
This is really interesting, because I was talking to an Anglo-Catholic priest. So this is a guy who's an Anglican. Yep. And he was an adult in seminary when he was confirmed as an Anglican. And before he was confirmed—not ordained, but confirmed—he was exhorted to (and this is by no means normal), he was exhorted to write a narrative of his life, up to this point, with the trauma, the pain, and basically making his confession like St. Augustine. To write his confession. Yeah. And then to make confession to one of the priests at the church.
I don't think it's nonexistent, and there's some really good literature out there. I mean, there's a book about making your confession in the Episcopal Church that I don't know how—if it gets used anymore, but it's out there. There's some good material about confessing. And I would say that my—like you, none—I don't have any. I did not interview any Anglo-Catholics. So I interviewed Baptists, and Four Cs, and Wesleyan, and a brewery—a neo-monastic community that has a brewery—and some Anglicans, but none, no Anglo-Catholics. I would say, out of the groups that I've interacted with over the years, the Anglo-Catholics seem to take confession, other than maybe Catholics themselves, the most seriously of the Protestant groups. And you always get some exceptions. Right. You get a really good priest who takes confession seriously, like, "You've got to do this," at least for the people that they're confirming.
9:18Seminary, Ordination, and the Missing Threshold
But the men and women that I talked to, who a lot of them had M.Divs from big-name places—none of them had had a class in which they themselves confessed, or where they learned how to handle confession if somebody else confessed. Did they have classes in healing and deliverance ministry? No, they did not. Some of the—one of the Assemblies guys may have, but it wasn't—no, actually I don't even think he did. Probably it was just exposure happening, and so it's something that you're supposed to intuit.
Now, why does that matter, that they didn't have it in seminary? Because the way we equip people for ministry is a little counterintuitive. We do it in academia. So we're not training pastors in the field necessarily. I mean, some places have apprenticeships or—but for the most part, the way we make pastors is seminary, or even their undergraduate degree, and then we ordain them. So we say, "Well, you have this degree, therefore you're qualified to be ordained," if a denomination thinks you're qualified—if the denomination, and the denominations have different standards. But most of the people I interviewed, their denomination didn't have a standard for confession.
So it matters in the seminary, because they are oftentimes the final threshold of formation for pastors. So that's the last real opportunity that most pastors are going to have to be exposed to, like, "What do I need to know to be a good pastor?" Yeah. In order to get ordained, a lot of times you need your degree, you need some references, and then you need to take a psych eval and have a background check. Right. So if you're not mentally impaired in such a way that it would inhibit your ministry, and you haven't committed a crime that you've gotten caught for, that's all that anyone's going to know about you. I mean, my—I don't know about you, my psych eval was a questionnaire. Yeah, well, that's typically what a psych eval is, I think. I'm just saying, like, if I wasn't an honest person, that wouldn't have been a difficult rule to bend.
Now, the thing that was consistent among the interviewees was that they had all been to an Encounter. So they've been involved in our ministry—minus one. One is involved in the ministry; he's going to his first Encounter coming up soon. Okay. So they had never meaningfully confessed aloud at all before the first Encounter. Almost none of them. All right. And some had familiarity with formal liturgical confession, but not what we would call transformational confession. Right, right.
12:06The Bishop Who Won't Receive Confession
I actually spoke to one Anglican priest whose bishop told him he will not receive the confessions of his clergy, because he doesn't want to have to fire them for what they say. Wow. And if I could name how many problems there are with that statement—I'm sure that that makes perfect sense to that bishop who's out there somewhere, probably not listening to this. But that's a real problem. That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem for two big reasons—probably about a billion little reasons, but two big reasons. One, if your clergy are doing something that they should be fired for, the bishop should know. Yep. And that's a matter of being handled as a believer.
So that bishop really is putting themselves forward as a father in God. Right. If this is their problem to deal with, this is—like, you need—all right, what does healing look like for you? What does healing for your congregation look like in this situation? What does walking in the light look like? How is this impacting the people that you're with? Do you need to be fired? Do you need a sabbatical? So that's a massive act of passing the buck, as far as I'm concerned. That is an act of just not-courage.
So you end up with the possibility of perpetuating grave issues in a congregation and keeping everything silent. The flip side of that is you end up with massively isolated clergy, unnecessarily, who have real things to confess, but they're not necessarily fireable offenses, and they're alienated. So their bishop has imaginary thoughts about who his people are. Right. And so the people aren't really—their priests aren't really being shepherded, and the bishops aren't really doing their job. Right. I don't know how you can really do your job if you refuse to receive the confession of your priests. How are you really serving the body in that place?
Okay, so let's say that you are not in a hierarchical structure, like an episcopal structure with bishops, but you are the pastor of a church that functions more collegially, with a board of elders, or you have a district superintendent that you somehow answer to, or other pastors on your staff. How does that work? So I think we mentioned kind of at the beginning last time, and at the end, that I think that we're in a moment for re-envisioning this whole reality. Yeah. So I don't have an exact—like, what should this look like? I think we are in a moment for soberly considering, well, it's not this. There's a moment for us to creatively envision, in our own cultural expression, in our own denominational expression or non-denominational expression, how do we do this well?
And so I don't think that there's necessarily a "it should look like this," but I do know right now—I mean, that Anglican priest that I was talking to, the Anglicans are trying to rework what they call Title Four, as though they're going to solve all these problems with new policies. We're well acquainted with Title Four. Well, I'm just saying, how are you—I mean, if that's what's happening under the lid—yeah, not good. This is not—you're not going to solve that with a new safeguarding policy. Right. It's culture. It's culture. It's discipleship, it's formation. That's right. It's something that kind of needs to be worked into the whole ethos of a community in a different kind of way. Yeah, that's right.
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17:41The First-Step Narrative for Leaders
So before I get to the costs of a leader personally, I want to tell some more of these stories. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think—yeah, so I want you to tell more of the stories too, because I like stories. Everyone likes stories. But I think that, you know, when I was working in a Christian drug-and-alcohol rehab as a pastoral counselor—yeah, that was super eye-opening for me, because I got exposed to, you know, AA, Celebrate Recovery, NA (Narcotics Anonymous), Adult Children of Alcoholics—yes, ACOA—all that stuff. I mean, it was gold. I looked at that and I was like, "Oh my gosh, why isn't this normal?"
Now, I had been exposed to a lot of this, because I had already been reading, like, Pete Scazzero, and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Emotionally Healthy Church, all that stuff. I've been reading him for 20 years now—over 20 years. And so I had language, where I was like, "Oh, this is emotional maturity. This is healing. This is Christian discipleship." Like AA, the 12 steps, is Christian discipleship. It was actually written by Anglican priests, which I think is kind of funny. Wonderful.
But when I think about—oh, your phone is ringing—as I've been thinking about preparation for leadership, or even preparation for baptism, for adult baptism, preparation for confirmation, if you do that in your church, I really think that what they did in AA, in a residential, is they had something called a first-step narrative. The first step is, right, "I recognize my life was unmanageable, and I need God," basically. And I think that there is a place where we need to require people—we need to actually have some requirements around, I think, baptism, adult baptism, too. Agreed. Where a part of their adult preparation is to look at their whole life and to trace the grace of God through their life, and the pain. Right. And go to an Encounter, you know. Yes. Go to a therapist, whatever, start unpacking that stuff. Go to a prayer minister, a spiritual director, and begin to understand how the Gospel touches those places. Right, right.
And so I'm all about, man, before you get ordained, you need to go through a first-step narrative process where you write out your whole life story. Right. The good, the bad, and the ugly. That's right. Because I think not only—number one, I think not only does that help people not be controlled by their past pain later on and manifest it in unhealthy ways, but I think that it allows them to actually receive the moment of ordination, the moment of baptism, the moment of confirmation, whatever those transitional moments are, with so much grace and excitement, because it means so much more to them. That's a beautiful thought. You know, it's not just a stepping stone to the next thing.
So I think that needs to be part of every leadership piece. And I think it should be a course, if you're in traditional seminary, or some kind of leadership course. I think it actually needs to be something you take throughout the year. Right. This is just normal. And it has to be normal—it's going to become safe if we do it a little differently. So I don't think that you can—I don't know if you can require confession of your congregation. I don't know what that looks like. But what I do know is that pastors set the tone for their culture. Yeah.
And if pastors—I was talking to one of the interviews I was just doing, he was saying, "We as pastors have this pretend life that we live, and we get together at conferences." He said, in the conference that I'm a part of, everybody owns a motorcycle. Like, if you're cool, everybody's got it. You've driven it onto the stage at least once. Oh, my. He's like—and there's just a lot of posturing. There's a lot of hiddenness. There's a lot of, like, you've got to pretend to be somebody, and you make yourself look good, and you could be dying inside, and nobody's going to find out. And a lot of times these pastors only find solace, only get known, when the whole thing goes up in flames.
Right. And I think I'm jealous for maybe envisioning a new day where it doesn't have to go up in flames for these pastors to end their exile, where we haven't tied a paycheck to their silence and destined them for 40 years of exile, unless they have an affair, or unless they steal money, or unless all of their childhood pain erupts in bad management. And then maybe they'll get the opportunity to be known by a good therapist, or by a restoration process. But what would it be like if normal Christianity was being known, and they were setting the tone, they were living out of their testimony that was fairly fresh, and being known on a regular basis?
I mean, you were just talking about foot-washing. Oh, yeah. I mean, do you want to just take a moment for foot-washing? We can—we can make this into another episode if we want to do foot-washing now. Well, I mean, I thought that could be a separate episode. All right, we'll pause. We'll talk all about foot-washing in a minute. But it has everything to do with this lifestyle of healing and confession and freedom. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
23:12The Cost to the Leader: Exile and Loneliness
Well, why don't you—you know, what is the cost to the person, to the leader, personally, if there's no confession? Yeah. I mean, it's not normalized. Right. I mean, I think there's a certain amount of illusion, delusion, that the stuff that happened to me as a kid, the things that I've done, as long as I'm under the blood, it's not going to impact me. Right. But in reality, until those things have been healed—and James says stuff's healed when it's seen by safe people and brought to Jesus—they're still a part of the conversation in a meaningful way. And you can stuff them in the background. You can work out until you don't feel it anymore. You can eat until you feel like it goes away. You can drink until you don't have to think about it. You can have relationships, or success, or whatever that is, but you're not going to be a whole, integrated human unless you've visited some of those places of pain.
And so there's a serious cost to leaders, because they are destined for exile. Talking to these pastors, that was one of the key things that stood out to me so far—it has just been the abject loneliness. Yeah. The absolute loneliness of leadership. They're not known, really, by anybody. Yeah, right. Because it's not safe to be. Right. But you know, if you are the pastor of a church, who do you confess to? Because that person is the pastor of the church. I mean, you're asking me—come to an Encounter, that'll get you started. Okay, but that's one event. Yeah, I'm saying it'll get you started. I can't solve all of the problems for you. You do need that relationship, though.
Get a spiritual director that can track with you over the long haul. Right. That can be a source. Begin to have some real friendships where you all have "the four hours." You know how I confess half the time? Chrissy—Chrissy Canterson. Yeah, yeah. Somewhere. Yeah, buddy. Or Ashley, or any of these other people, and we just live lifestyles where, like, "Hey, that's who I confess to." This is what I'm dealing with right now, to Chrissy. But I confess, like, she would listen. Her husband, she would hear. And it's not this big, formal—most of the time it's not this groundbreaking thing. No. It's a call that says, "Hey, I'm spinning out. I have a lot of anxiety here. I think I'm believing wrong things." Right. And we do it for one another. So it's not like, "Oh my gosh, I'm this huge burden for you, and you're this huge burden for me."
And Ashley Coleman—"When was the last time? Yes. Can you walk me through the four hours? I just want to say this out loud." Yeah. I mean, my best friends are the ones that—it's just normal. It's not a big deal. We don't do it in every conversation. We're not like, "Oh, my gosh, here's the thing." A conversation—we need to say the four R's. Most pastors don't have close friends. Yeah. Well, do you see that great meme? Especially middle-aged men. So that great meme that said, "Jesus's greatest miracle was having 12 close friends in his 30s." That's funny. No, that—well, it's not funny. It's actually really sad.
You know, I have a few friends that I know that I can confess to. They know everything. Yeah. And because I know what it is like to walk in the darkness, to not live honestly. Right. And I know way too many people in positions of power that do not live honestly, and they've never lived honestly. Yeah, that's right. And as a result, they've not lived honestly with their spouses. They've not lived honestly with their people. They don't have any good friends that really know. Right. Or themselves. Or themselves. So they're alienated from themselves too. Which means that they're very bad leaders. Right, right.
I confess—one of the—oh, sorry. Finish that thought. No, I'm sorry, I'm over—I think I have pneumonia. No. Jesus, help me. Maybe it's just the cashews you're eating. Maybe. Yeah, okay. But that's it. But you know, I think that if you're a leader, or you're a person who's like, "Man, I don't have friends. I don't even know what to do. I don't know who could do this for me"—I want to encourage you. If you've been to an Encounter, great. If you've unloaded some stuff, awesome. But this is an ongoing thing, and one of the things that we're passionate about is making this cultural. Making it cultural. Yeah.
27:24EncounterLife and Spiritual Direction
So after Encounters, we have something called EncounterLife. Yeah. Amy, can you just talk about EncounterLife real quick? It's a 12-week thing, and it is basically a crash course, I think, in beginning the journey of spiritual direction. Yeah. Of being—of living a confessional life and inviting Jesus into the soul. That's a really good way to describe it. So they're running groups, they're all online, they're four to eight people. I do groups with just pastors, and they are just four people. So you don't take more than four. We can take fewer, but not more. And you're right, it is kind of an entry level to spiritual direction, those first 12 weeks. They're different than spiritual direction in that they're guided. So you get some real tools under your belt for the journey, the long-haul journey of knowing and being known, being loved well by God, and carrying that love into your community, into your relationships.
But do you know, so many of those groups—I mean, they all start out a little awkward. Everyone dances around each other. By the eighth or ninth week, there's genuine grief if they end. And a lot of them become long-term spiritual direction groups. I have groups where people vacation together now. Yeah, they are each other's friends. They have texts. You can't—no one can maintain more than a few good friendships, but some people have none. Yeah. And I found that those EncounterLife groups, oftentimes across towns and states and even countries now, are forming safe community where it's okay to be known. And I'm not saying it's a matchmaking-for-friendship service, but I am saying we're seeing a lot of very sweet, long-term relationships come out of those places.
And the beautiful thing too, that you can do, and that people will do, is that after an EncounterLife group, 12 weeks, they'll go into an extended spiritual direction. That's right. Where you won't be meeting every week. You might meet once in a group, once every other week for a time, and then once a month, and it can be in a group or one-on-one. So if you go to youronelife.co and you're looking for a spiritual director, you can find one there. And these are people that have all been trained through Encounter Culture, that are being trained by Amy, who know how to do the stuff that we're talking about and create those cultures and communities. That's right.
And if you're a leader, be like, "Hey, I'm going to join this group for, you know, 12 weeks. Or I'm going to join this—I want to be in a spiritual direction group. Will you come and do this with me?" Yeah. And we're not going to drop you. So if in those 12 weeks you're like, "Man, this has become homey, and I found this is really good for my life," we regularly form spiritual direction groups out of those EncounterLife groups. We try to keep them together if it's possible, if they have critical mass. So you get to maintain those relationships. Right. And this is where you get to be known without judgment. That's right. And I think that they're super healing. I've just heard the pastors that have gone through this, and they're like, "Oh my gosh." Right. "I've never experienced anything like that. It was life-transforming." I wish we could get every pastor into one. Yeah. There's the opportunity to safely know and be known. Right. So you're not alone in that.
That's a great question—like, how do I begin to confess? I mean, I would honestly—I know there aren't a lot of really safe places out there. Right. Encounter is a safe place. Come to an Encounter. We have people flying in from different states, coming in from all sorts of different places, to come and have the opportunity to begin a lifestyle. You can't go back, you can't fix the 30 years that you've done in isolation, but you can stop living that way now. Yeah. You don't have to keep going.
And if you're a parishioner, and you're like, "Man, I'd like to gift my leader with this"—gosh, what a gift. Direct him or her to encounterculturene.com and say, "Hey, you know what? I would love to gift this 12-week spiritual direction for you. Right. I'd love to send you to an Encounter." And by the way, we pay for pastors to go. We can't put you up—we don't have hotels or anything for anyone—but we will pay for pastors to go to an Encounter. And then after that, yeah, send them, get them a plane ticket and say, "I would love for you to come out and experience this." And then, yeah, if you're just dying for a way to bless your pastor, email us. Shoot us an email if you want to make it personal, if you have any questions. But, man, sign them up for—sponsor them to do a 12-week EncounterLife group. It's just pastors in the pastors' groups. Right. And they're not in the same town. No, no, they're from all over the place. Right. And it's with pastors that have all experienced an Encounter. Right. So that we've gotten the ball rolling, as it were.
Well, great. Well, that's our pitch for EncounterLife for pastors. And if you're not a leader, EncounterLife is amazing. Oh yeah. Yes. For everybody. So we were just talking about the cost to the leader, and the cost to the leader being alienation and loneliness, stuckness and bondage. I mean, the fact that there's no one in the threshold of ordination—so now your ordination, translate ordination to now, your paycheck's tied to your silence now, now to your being good. I mean, if you're a doctor, you can get divorced and still keep your job. And you may be able to do that in pastoral circles, but there are certain realities that you have to come face to face with. There are expectations for leadership that are reasonable. Right.
If the scaffolding for survival that you created as a kid, in your chaos, in abuse, in whatever—that will not, by the grace of God, he will not let that last your whole life, because he wants you to grow. Yes. Because he requires that you grow. And when you pray, "God, I want to know you. I want to grow," that means you can't live out of that scaffolding forever. And there's no threshold. What "no confession before ordination" means is now it's possible, unless you have a collapse, for no one to ever see—for no one to ever ask what happened to you as a kid, and for you to have the chance to talk about it and for it to become your testimony before it's your hidden past. Right, right.
And it becomes a testimony that now you have authority. That's right. To set other people free. To set other people free as a pastor, which is your calling. Right. I tell you what, your sermons are going to ring a lot less hollow if you're preaching from a vantage point of encounter and freedom than one of survival and loneliness. It's going to be—people know. They know it's different. Yeah. But man, leaders need to be loved tenderly, you know, gently. Yeah. And they need to be known without judgment. That's right. And so that's what we aim to do in our EncounterLife groups. So there it is.
34:26The Cost to the Church and a Hope-Filled Invitation
So we talked about the cost to the leader—what's the cost to the church? You know, if leaders don't live a lifestyle of confession, or if we don't make this a part of the formation of leaders in the church. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think leaders without a confessional life, if they haven't experienced freedom, they only have the imagination for Christianity that they know. So if they've never encountered a God who can set them genuinely free and make it safe to be a human and to take up space in the world as a human, it's going to be really difficult for them to lead other people into that. And so what they're going to lean into a lot of times is either emotionalism on the one hand, or a false-grace gospel. Like, "Everything's okay, you're okay, I'm okay, everything's fine."
Or—I mean, I say this is really common in New England—intellectualism. Yeah. A hyper-rational approach to Scripture. Right. So we're just going to solve all of our problems with the new Scripture verse. And I don't mean to say that in a way that—and a right theology, yeah—that somehow makes the Scriptures not the word of God and powerful. Like, truly, truly essential to life and godliness, and framing our reality. But God's not going to replace your need for community with reading the Bible. Yeah, he's not. He wouldn't do it at creation. He didn't do it then. And he's not going to replace your need to know and be known, even with himself. Yeah. He won't fix that with a Scripture verse, or even your private devotional life, because he made you for real fellowship.
I mean, in the garden, fellowship was safe enough that everyone was naked. And as soon as there was sin, people became unsafe in their vulnerability with one another. And what the church—the project of the church—is recreating, even better than if all the bad stuff had never happened, is the potentials of Eden. Yeah. A place where it is safe to be a human, to be known and to know. I'm not saying that it's a nudist colony. I'm just saying there's a real invitation to have a bigger thought as pastors about what Christianity is and what it means to be in community. Yeah.
So best-case scenario, it just produces, you know, intellectualism or false grace. Worst case is pastors who are still acting out of their bondage, or who are poised to, and who are a ticking time bomb. Yeah. So that, for congregations, that's a real doozy. That's a real mess. Yeah. And leaders are very good at looking good. They are. And congregations—we've talked about this in the past—are really good at wanting their leaders to be God. And so if your leader has it all together, well, therefore, so should you.
I used to love it when our kids would be loud in church. I mean, I didn't love it, but there was a sense where I could almost feel the other parents in church sighing with relief, like, "Okay." I used to want to make a T-shirt like, "The Howards: Keeping the Bar Low Since 2007." There is a sense where you're like, "Oh, man, they've got it together, they look like they—" and it's an illusion. Yeah. Yeah.
So did you ask any questions around whether pastors ever confess to one another? Yeah. And the ones who didn't have, you know, like a directed confession exposure—unfortunately, there just aren't a lot of other tools out there. So I'm not trying to just brag up directed confession. I'm saying there's just—it seems like there's just a real lack of great tools. I mean, Anglicans have the tools still. None of them were—what does it look like? Well, some of it was kind of, "We all—oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we all do that too. Yeah, brother, I've got you. Yep." There was a sense of accountability. That word came up a lot. And that can be really good, if accountability is like, "I'm holding you accountable to who you really are," and there's hope in the middle of that.
But if you're stuck in sexual sin, yeah, and you're in bondage, just holding you accountable is kind of weak sauce. Yeah. And a bunch of y'all that kind of deal with all the same things, standing in the same puddle, kind of splashing around a little bit and saying, "Yeah, it's good to know that everybody else does this too. Oops. You know, let's form a group around this." There's a lot of that kind of thing. That's weak sauce. It's not—their experience of it was, "It's nice to not be alone." Yeah. But it lacked a lot of power. There was no teeth. There was no teeth in it. Yeah.
You know, it's like—the church doesn't really need spaces where leaders can admit things. The church needs spaces where leaders can confess, and then be met by grace, led into truth, renounce what's held them, and be restored. Yes. So just admitting it—I mean, that's a big deal. That's awesome. And the Lord is so kind and generous. You know, I think a lot of times there is real power in just saying it out loud. That's not—but those extra steps of, "Now renounce it out loud, now I'm going to help you carry this to the wounded side of Jesus"—there's power there now.
You know, what do you say to leaders that are like, "Wow, this is—man, this is really intense." Yeah. You know, it just sounds—living in 2026 with the internets. Well, that's true. But see, it's hard. It's hard to do that when we are obsessed in a codependent way with the way people feel, with other people, you know, or how we think that maybe they're going to feel if we talk about these subjects. So in a previous church that we were in, it's very hard to talk about topics that people in the congregation struggle with. But then there's a whole group of codependents who are like, "Oh, you can't talk about that, because someone might be offended, and you might—"
Now obviously there's a way to approach it and to talk about it, which we always did, which was grace-filled and is all about the hope of the Gospel to redeem every story. Every part matters. Jesus doesn't waste an ounce of your pain. He will not waste an ounce of your pain. But I feel like there are some—or I know this, just being around that—there are some leaders in the body who would prefer that this not be talked about, because of the discomfort it might bring. You know, "Oh, well, take it easy on him or her, because da, da, da, da." Oh man, yes, absolutely. Let's be gentle. But goodness gracious, the Gospel is the hope of salvation, is the hope of healing.
I tell you something—kind of, maybe this is going to sound hard, because one of the other things that some of these pastors have said, as I've been interviewing them, has been, "This is like the Christianity that I dreamed of living, and now it's being actualized." Wow. "Like, I'm really watching people encounter the God that I found, and that I know, and that I love." So I want to say, on the one hand, I think that that's just a small imagination, from lack of experience. But if you're really a hindrance—I mean, Jesus had some pretty strong words for people that kept people from having access to him. Yeah. I mean, "You travel the seas to make a single convert, and you make them twice the son of hell as you are." Right.
And that may just be lack of imagination. You may have never seen the possibilities. And I think there's all the hope in the world in that place—those are the unconfessed, though. But there is a way in which the message will go out with or without you. Jesus is committed to his name being great everywhere. From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, his name will be known, and it will be great across the earth. And I think there's kind of a "virgins with their oil" dynamic, where when the party starts, will you be there? Like, will you get to participate? Are you going to live the life that you longed to when you got into this gig?
Maybe you never did. Maybe you've never known it could be that amazing to watch your parishioners get set free, and to live a life where the power of the Gospel is being made known and manifest in the lives of your congregants, and in their friends and their children and whatever. Maybe you've never heard about that. But that parable of the ten virgins is sobering. There's just this sense that, you know, some of them had oil, in that they were encountering the Holy Spirit. They had a relationship with God that was vibrant. It wasn't just "pray and read your Bible." In this example, it's like, "Oh, I've been set free. I am being set free." So that when God moves, you have a part to play. You're not just watching the bridegroom show up from a distance. You get to be in the middle of it all.
I mean, people come to Encounter—that's one of the things that they're like, "Oh my gosh, it's just so amazing to be in the middle of—" I mean, they say "revival." I'm like, "This is just Christianity." Yeah. And long-term Christianity is not always as explosive as an Encounter is. That's absolutely true. And nor should it be. Mm. But there should be the real being-set-free and being-healed as a part. And I just—you can miss out. Sure. It's possible to miss out. And it's possible that a bunch of upstart, you know, former addicts are gonna have a message. Come on.
Because he sends the message out to the ones that belong in the kingdom first. And if they turn him down to eating at the banquet—and if the banquet is set, and you don't want to eat at it, and you don't want anybody else to eat at it either—he's going to go to the highways and find people that want to eat at his table, that will want to feast. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Come on. I want to feast in this age. Amen. Amen. I love that. Was that too intense? No, no, no, no. It's impassioned. It's truth. It is. I think it's hope-filled.
And that's what we want to leave you with today—that, you know, God is doing something, I think, really phenomenal. You know, I'm kind of a Christian news junkie, so I'm watching the stuff that's happening everywhere, and there's bad news—yes—but there's really good news. Yeah. Not only is the Lord moving among younger generations, but even the way that we prepare leaders, I think the church is waking up to the fact that the way we've prepared leaders is not working. We need to reconsider how we do this. And we're not talking just about mainline churches, or evangelical seminaries. I'm talking everybody—Pentecostals, charismatics. They've all had their own kind of traumas around great leaders who have fallen, you know. And there are a number of reasons why that happens, but I think that we're really taking a long, hard look at how we form leaders to be godly, to be faithful and fruitful, to know themselves so that they might know God.
Come on. That's what St. Augustine said. And I think that that is the journey. That is the journey into godliness—it is self-knowledge, and to have the tools to encounter the love of God in the places of lack, deficiency, pain. Yeah. And I hope nothing that I just said sounds hopeless. No, there's a way forward in the love of God. And this also isn't a moment to be like, "Well, my pastor doesn't live like that. What a toad." You don't know that. You don't know. You absolutely don't know. And it is a really great opportunity and invitation to begin to pray. Yes. Yeah. Amen.
And you just start doing it yourself. That's right. You start doing yourself, a confessional lifestyle. You don't worry about your pastor, unless you want to give him or her the gift of joining an EncounterLife group. That's right. That's right. Just go do the stuff. Just go do the stuff yourself. Find someone that's been to Encounter, or maybe they're not, and you're just like, "Hey, I want to do this confessional thing, the four R's. Will you help me with this?" Right. "I want to know and be known. I want a soul friend." Yeah. Find a spiritual director—youronelife.co, we'll get you a great spiritual director there.
But we should also say that, you know, if you're interested in developing this kind of culture—you're a small-group leader, you're a leader, you're an influencer—Amy has, along with a good friend, created something called the Trinitas Spiritual Direction Formation program. And this is a two-year journey where you will basically be rooted and established in Scripture, in the ancient traditions of the church, in contemplative prayer, and in the presence of the Spirit, the saturation of the presence of the Spirit of God. And so it's fully three streams—Evangelical, Catholic, charismatic. And the approach is very unique from any other spiritual direction course I would say that I have seen.
And so you can learn more about that at encounterculturene.com, because they are now accepting applicants for the first round of Trinitas Spiritual Direction Formation. That's right. So if you are a small-group leader, a leader, an influencer, and you want to learn how to be a soul-care ninja who can discern spirits, who can flow in the Spirit, who's rooted in the great tradition of the church and in Scripture—man, this is your thing. Yeah. So you can visit that online at encounterculturene.com and look for Trinitas.
All right, well, great to have this conversation. And I think we're going to wrap up next week with, what role should directive confession play in the church? So how do we actually do that? Some kind of nuts and bolts. So I'm looking forward to that conversation. All right, peace. Bye.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven & Earth. We hope that you were stirred to curiosity and courage as we explored bringing heaven and earth together right where you are. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life, and responding in obedience to his good leadership. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and questions with us on our Facebook page or by email: podcast@encounterculturene.com. Your support helps us reach more people who are eager to join Jesus in his great project of restoration. Also, check out our website, encounterculturene.com, for upcoming events and equipping opportunities for you and your church. Until next time, may you find joy living in between heaven and earth, and the courage to bring them together wherever you go.