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Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them.

My experience as a pastor is lots of people have really toxic, dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head, images of a God who's not good.

I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.

A spiritual person is also in touch with his or her own reality, feelings and thoughts, and the reality of the people around him or her, not projecting on them.

If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.

If you're going to counsel people - and that's all my ministry is, it's a counseling ministry more than anything else - people have to believe that they can trust you and that they can listen to you, that you're going to try to help them and not just politically try to convert them to your views.

When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.

From the beginning, this has been a faith-based ministry.

I guess any time you believe in God you've got to be considered a spiritual person. That would make me a spiritual person. But I don't really know what that means.

The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.