Chuck DeGroat > Quotes

“In the upside-down economy of Jesus, those closest to the bottom are nearest to grace. Polished and put together, many of us live our lives without a real, palpable need for God. We preach grace. But we’re working really, really hard to avoid hitting bottom ourselves.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“You may be thinking I’ve gone over the edge here, finding addictions everywhere. But follow the trajectory of these simple daily attachments and you’ll find a need for security, for safety, for intimacy, for connection, for regularity, for productivity. Go a bit deeper and you’ll find that each of these things can even replace God, providing for my needs without consideration of my deep and desperate neediness as a human being. Each can be a way of coping, a reality-denying form of self-preservation that robs me of grace.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“To lead and lead well, you must necessarily come to the end of yourself (your false self!), and find that this is yet a beginning of a new life, a new kind of leadership, animated by God’s abiding Spirit in you. Living from your core, where the Spirit dwells, you can relinquish the need to fix, to control, and to conquer, and drink in God’s life, a life animated by peace, rest, wholeness, love, forgiveness, and surrender. It’s the good life.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“They enslave us with chains that are of our own making and yet that, paradoxically, are virtually beyond our control. Addiction also makes idolaters of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another.5”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“Though they cherished a belief that they were the only really honest church when it came to the seriousness of human sin, a supposed high-theology of individual sin masked the systemic sins of judgment, racism, misogyny, tribalism, passive-aggressive intimidation, arbitrary threats of discipline, and emotional and relational avoidance.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“I’ve most often seen bullies in nondenominational contexts, and many are the founders, planters, and entrepreneurs who guard their churches and organizations like the extensions of the narcissistic ego they are.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Not only can you expect your narcissistic friends, lovers, and family members to want you to be perfect, but you can anticipate that they’ll externalize their own feelings of weakness by laying them onto you. If your partner is concerned that he or she looks tired, stressed, or messy, these concerns will translate into criticisms of how unkempt and fatigued you look.”21”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Faced with the daunting prospect of moving forward, of embracing a life of greater flourishing, we find ourselves losing hope. The sex addict returns to his favorite pornographic sites. The workaholic returns to his busy schedule, knowing that his schedule kills any chance of intimacy with his wife or connection with his children. The angry wife defaults to her husband’s defensiveness, squelching his spirit. The abused woman returns to a relationship where she knows she’ll be used rather than loved. The religious addict defaults to her legalistic ways, judging others rather than embracing the love God has for her even in her failures. Over and over again, we choose to return to Egypt instead of daring to enter the promised land. We settle for less than the life for which God made us.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“Contradictions. Fauxnerable people are not consistent in their character. • Disclosures that focus on the past. “I struggled with porn” or “I was such a mess.” This isn’t vulnerability. Vulnerability is about showing up courageously in the present moment with how you are currently affecting someone or experiencing your inner life. • Staged fauxnerability. A fauxnerable pastor or leader may conjure up tears at will on stage but show little empathy or care face to face. • Victim mentality. The fauxnerable pastor may blame his staff, a bad system, or a needy spouse. • Lack of curiosity. Vulnerable people are curious. Fauxnerable people are defensive and reactive. • Oversharing. An emotional dump is not necessarily an act of vulnerability but may in fact be a way of using you to engender sympathy or to take their side. • Self-referencing. His fauxnerability is in service of his ego, not an expression of mutuality or connection.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Wholeness can also be described as soulfulness, a life that’s centered, passionately engaged, open, creative, connected, and propelled by a sense of mission. It is this kind of wholeness that leaders need to cultivate in themselves and in those under their leadership.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Ignoring you, the leader will draw in your peers, ingratiating them through approval and attention, all the while planting seeds of distrust about you. Too”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“They will often defer to the narcissist’s spiritual persona rather than her true character.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? What is it, then?” I sat anxiously on the edge of my chair, waiting for the monk’s sage advice. Brother Rast responded, “The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”5”
― Chuck DeGroat, Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion, and Healing the Divided Self

“sad abandonment of the humble way of Jesus shows up today in pastors of large and small churches,”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Those who are diagnosably narcissistic may be talented, charming, even inspiring, but they lack the capacity for self-awareness and self-evaluation, shunning humility for defensive self-protection. Christian psychologist Diane Langberg says of the narcissist, “He has many gifts but the gift of humility.”1”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Fauxnerability is a twisted form of vulnerability. It has the appearance of transparency but serves only to conceal one’s deepest struggles. A husband may talk generally about his sinfulness, but a significant addiction to pornography may be ignored.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“the mantra of a narcissistic spiritual leader is, “I am bigger, I am better, and I have no interest in understanding my impact on you except in so far”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is something far more serious, characterized by grandiosity, entitlement, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Bold love is courageously setting aside our personal agenda to move humbly into the world of others with their well-being in view, willing to risk further pain in our souls, in order to be an aroma of life to some and the aroma of death to others. Dan Allender”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“They are convincing. They are charming. They are certain. And tragically they are deemed credible.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“I saw that narcissistic traits were often presented as strengths. Narcissism can be interpreted as confidence, strong leadership, clear vision, a thick skin.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“We often talk about being “born again” as if we’ve left our past behind. But our past comes with us, often haunting us. Freedom’s trials can shatter our optimism, making us want to turn back to what was secure and familiar.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“My pastor has a stellar reputation. Everyone follows him on social media and thinks he’s so well-balanced on issues. But if I’m honest with you, he’s unpredictable, passive-aggressive, and incapable of having a real relationship. His public persona isn’t who he is in our office.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“When a system is not dominated by anxiety, everyone is free to speak truthfully, everyone is free to listen curiously.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Indirect intimidation often occurs through isolation.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Third, the leadership’s health must be assessed. I’m often amazed when I’m invited to help a church or staff or system to find that the senior leader wasn’t expecting to contribute anything other than his expert opinion of the problem. I remember asking one leader, “Are you willing to participate in the assessment as well?” His look of fear, rage, and puzzlement said it all. To his mind, I was not there to assess him but to solicit his omniscient perspective. Yet I’ve never seen systemic health emerge apart from the leader (or leaders) going on their own transformational journey”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance. Brené Brown”
― Chuck DeGroat, Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion, and Healing the Divided Self

“We pray not to recharge our batteries for the business of getting back to the concerns of daily life, but rather to be transformed by God so that the myths and fictions of our life might fall like broken shackles from our wrists.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion, and Healing the Divided Self

“We often say that the perpetrator was living a double life. I often call it the “quadruple life,” however. There is the public self we present to the world, the private self we share selectively with others, the blind self that is clear to others but which reminds hidden to us, and the undiscovered self which, like the shadow, contains unseen and unconscious aspects of ourselves.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

“we’re all susceptible to narcissistic behavior. There are times when we all feel superior. We lay in bed at night thinking we deserve more. We compare and compete.”
― Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse