Stars: ★★★★★ (Study This Book)

Premise

This book is an examination of the ways that narcissism can play out in a church setting. The author, who was both a minister and a mental health professional, explains that narcissistic characteristics show up at unusually high rates among church leaders and even higher rates among church planters.  The author details the ways that narcissism interacts with the Enneagram and examines nine different faces that narcissism can have. 

This Review

My book reviews are often full of my personal thoughts on a book, but this author put my thoughts into words so well that this review is mostly a collection of impactful quotations from the book. I recommend reading the whole book, especially the Nine Faces of Narcissism, turning those faces back on ourselves rather than projecting them on others.

Loved

1. Self reflection of these systems and tendencies can be even more important than assigning the label to other people or other systems. If all your thoughts while reading these quotations are of another person, another system, another church, you might not be doing it right.
   • “I invite you to read these descriptions slowly and deliberately, not with an eye toward a quick means to pigeonhole another person, but with a humility that recognizes that each of us, regardless of whether we’re on the narcissistic spectrum or not, is both beautiful and broken, complex and unique.” 
   • “I wonder whether this book will be of any help, particularly if the reader remains unwilling to explore his or her own narcissism. How can we address the wounds in others if we are unwilling to address our own? Can we even begin to live into Paul’s vision of community if only some of us are the problem?” 
   • “I’ve often said that each of us is both beautiful and broken, hiding and hidden in Christ, knowable and utterly mysterious.”
     
2. A narcissistic church system will not automatically be fixed by removing a single person.
   • “Whole church systems and programs evolve within the waters of narcissism, and when it’s the water you swim in, it’s hard to see and even harder to confront.” 
   • “Those who ascend tend to collude with the system. Those who ultimately refuse to idealize the leader are chewed up and spit out. But because the mission is a seemingly spiritual one, the system goes unchallenged.” 
   • “When a church begins its process of recovery from narcissistic leadership, it is often addicted to old patterns and in need of new pathways. The new path is a cruciform one, requiring us to die to all of the old patterns that squelched life and sabotaged hope.”
   • “It’s essential for us to do the hard work of rooting out the internal and external systemic toxin of traumatic narcissism that remains. A wife can leave a narcissistic abuser. A church can fire a narcissistic pastor. But after this, the real work begins. As with individuals, churches must engage in a process of healing with awareness and intentionality.”
     
3. Many narcissistic church systems will use growth and baptisms as a cover for how well the church is doing.
   • “While anxious churches driven by narcissistic pastors may grow numerically, healthy churches flourish. Do not mistake numerical growth for flourishing.”
   • An excellent example of this is detailed in the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.
   • When you use Empire methods to build God’s Kingdom, you still end up with Empire.
     
4. The extent to which leaders are willing to hear and acknowledge dissent is an important indicator of the humility or lack thereof of these leaders. When shame, control, and fear are used as methods to keep followers in line, the whole system needs an overhaul.
   • “These three factors—structure, shame, and control—are key aspects of narcissistic systems.”  
   • “The lack of feedback, fear of disloyalty, and victim complex make it hard to engage, let alone change, this system.”
     
5. It is unacceptable to refuse to label spiritual abuse when we have seen it. Glossing over the truth with phrases like “unloving” or “anger issues” is a further affront to victims of this type of abuse.
   • “Spiritual and emotional abuse have much in common, but spiritual abuse bears a particularly sinister twist, as principles and maxims of faith are wielded as weapons of command and control, and faith leaders abuse their power for the sake of feeding their own unmet emotional needs. The victim feels just as perplexed and confused as one who has experienced emotional abuse but experiences it from a seemingly more authoritative source—a holy source.”
   • “Being wounded by a narcissistic pastor is a particularly painful trauma. Clergy hold a uniquely powerful role in our lives, and an experience of abuse (in whatever form) from a pastor or priest or ecclesial authority is a profound violation. Some will avoid acknowledging this trauma for months or years out of deference to a spiritual authority, second-guessing their own experience all the while. Others may acknowledge it but stew with rage and avoid the work of healing.”
   • “When pastors and churches deny the impact of emotional abuse, they retraumatize the victim. When we defer to suspicion of a victim and support of a potential abuser, we run the risk of doing irreparable harm. Victims may shut down or return to their abuser. They may blame themselves for being too much trouble.”
   • “While the trauma theorist Bessel van der Kolk argues that ‘emotional abuse . . . can be just as damaging as physical abuse and sexual molestation,’ women and men who experience this within churches can be portrayed as hypersensitive, prone to exaggeration, dishonest, delusional, and ultimately untrustworthy.”

Didn’t Love

“There are often no clear ecclesial pathways for confronting narcissism. As in each of the cases in this chapter, it’s not uncommon not only to miss that a pastor is diagnosably narcissistic but even to reward him.” 

As much as the first point instills a fear in me that these issues are not fixable, the author later tell us, “To be sure, the psychic wounds of someone with NPD are profound and their wall of armor is thick, but my deep conviction is that buried within the most well-defended person is light, glory, dignity, and beauty—the image of God.”

Lessons Learned

• “Jesus is the living antidote to narcissism. He enters into the waters of narcissism, suffers in the waters of narcissism, is crucified in the waters of narcissism, and yet rises through the waters to redeem and restore the entire cosmos.”
• “You don’t need a degree in organizational psychology to notice anxious systems and abusive dynamics. Each of us is gifted with an intuitive sense of right and wrong, health and unhealth. As God’s image bearers, we’re hardwired to recognize the scent of shalom and to wince at the smell of accusation and evil.”
• “Sometimes the wily narcissist is just spiritually nimble enough to convince the pastor that while there have been a few mistakes, it’s all very reconcilable. Well-meaning pastors who want to be helpful may inadvertently fall into the powerful trap of a narcissistic abuser, buying their pleas for grace, intentions to do better, or fauxnerable expressions of regret.”