The Controversy Over Empathy : Bill & Kristi Gaultiere

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends. I’m Jason Daye, the host of FrontStage BackStage. Each and every week, I have the opportunity and the privilege of sitting down with trusted ministry leaders, and we tackle a topic all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you thrive in both life and leadership. Now, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and drop your name in the comments below. We love getting to know our audience better. We’ll be praying for you and for your ministry. And whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe and to share. Now, I’m excited because this week I’m welcoming not just one but two amazing guests to the show. Bill and Kristi Gaultiere are an amazing couple who served for 30 years in ministry and counseling. Bill is a psychologist. Kristi is a marriage and family therapist. Together, they founded the ministry Soul Shepherding. They also host an amazing podcast called Soul Talks. They’ve written a number of books, and their latest is entitled Deeply Loved. At this time, I’d like to welcome Bill and Kristi to the show. Welcome.

Bill Gaultiere
Thank you, Jason. So good to be on with you and your audience on FrontStage BackStage. We love it.

Kristi Gaultiere
We love pastors and ministry leaders. We’re so grateful for you, your faithfulness to God, and His Kingdom.

Jason Daye
Amen. Super excited for this conversation, Bill and Kristi. And as we talk, whichever one wants to jump in and answer, feel free to do so. But, as we’re looking at this big idea of empathy, your latest book, Deeply Loved, really, is a book that dives into how we can better understand empathy, how we receive empathy, how we reflect empathy to others, and how that really guides us in our walk with God, not only in our own personal lives, but how we serve, and how we engage with others in the world around this idea of empathy. And so I think the best place to start is with a quick definition of empathy. When we’re talking of empathy, what exactly are we talking about?

Bill Gaultiere
Well, we define empathy as seeking to understand someone’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences in order to help them know that they are deeply loved by God because we’re all Christ ambassadors. That’s obvious, as pastors and church leaders. But the way that we listen, the way that we care, and the way that we guide people really does minister the presence of Christ to them.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, and I love how the definition is centered into this idea of God’s love because throughout the book, Deeply Loved, you tie empathy so tightly with God’s love. And I think that’s a critical understanding when we think of empathy. So, share with me just a little bit if you could, maybe for a 30,000-foot view, of this idea of how empathy is so deeply tied to God’s love?

Kristi Gaultiere
Well, it’s tied in many ways. One is just the way that we are made, biologically, neurologically wise. If you look at an infant, when they are born into this world, they need to know that they are loved. They need to develop a secure attachment, and the way that that’s done is by the parent attuning to them and having empathy for them and their needs. That’s to the point that they learn to be able to understand things like, What does this cry mean? Does this cry mean I’m scared? Does this cry mean I’m hungry? Does this cry mean I’m bored? Does this cry mean I’m angry? It’s through empathy for our baby that we actually foster that attachment. We show them that they’re loved. We show them that it’s safe for them, and we develop that relationship of love. We’re willing good for them. We’re seeking to understand what is going on for them, so that we can respond in a way that cares for them and loves them. This is a deep and core need that we are born with. And just from my story, Jason, in my own life, I found that I had a lot of trouble trusting God, obeying God, loving God, and feeling, receiving, and agreeing with His love because I had an empathy deficit. I didn’t understand God to be empathetic, to be caring, to be loving. And you know how you hear this adage, I don’t care what you know if I don’t know that you care? Well, unfortunately, that gets projected on God, too, and many of us don’t feel God’s care. And so, thankfully, God continued to pursue me with His love and His care, and empathy was so key in my being able to come to a relationship of trusting God’s goodness, His love, His rule in my life, personally, and I’ve seen this over and over with those that I’ve been so blessed to journey with as a therapist, as a spiritual director, as a coach, and even as a leader of our ministry, Soul Shepherding. It’s really key. It’s very different when people feel confident that you actually care about them.

Jason Daye
Absolutely. And I think it’s interesting, Kristi, that you mentioned some of the ways that maybe you grew up, or when you were younger and wrestling with that, and how we project that, obviously, to God. And we’ve all experienced that in our own lives, as pastors and ministry leaders, we’ve journeyed with people and tried to walk through those things. But this idea of empathy, I think, is significant in that it really can be an emotional barrier for us as we are seeking to live our lives in relationship with God and others. So, I’d love for you to share with us a little bit about these emotional barriers that empathy helps us overcome.

Bill Gaultiere
Yeah, well, in Soul Shepherding, we talk with pastors and leaders all the time, especially on our Soul Shepherding retreats that we do which are five days long and communities of about 50 leaders. And it comes up again and again in the lives of people that we’re working with that we struggle with self-criticism, with self-judgment, and with putting unrealistic expectations on ourselves. I mean, our call from God, our work as pastors and leaders, is so important, and we give so much of ourselves to it. But sometimes we add to that a lot of self-expectation and self-judgment, and so that affects us in some negative ways. It causes us to end up relying too much on our own strength. We end up overworking, internalizing stress, having ego needs, and all of that, rather than being abandoned to the Lord and being in the easy yoke of Jesus and really tuning into God’s presence and what God is doing, and then joining with that. So, it’s a big deal to be able to identify these patterns of unrealistic, unbiblical self-expectation and self-criticism, and empathy helps us do that. The empathy of the Lord, the empathy of maybe a spiritual director or coach that you’re working with, or a fellow pastor who listens prayerfully, who cares for you, helps us to get at these underlying ways that we’re talking to ourselves that are harmful.

Kristi Gaultiere
We treat ourselves the way we were treated, so very much I would treat myself as if I were just a brain on a stick. Just that I’ve got to think the right things about God. I’ve got to do the right things that he commands me to do. And my life was all about thinking and doing, and my relationship with God just became duty. I didn’t feel His love. I didn’t feel connected to him. And so that led me into a wall in my faith. It led me into a doubting. It led me into a crisis. And actually, we write about this in another book, we wrote Journey of the Soul. That wall ended up being a real grace because it brought me to the end of myself, and it brought me on a real search to do I really believe any of these things I profess and teach to believe, which was a great grace. But empathy was key in my receiving empathy for people whom I really loved and respected. We’ve been blessed to have been mentored by Dallas and Jane Willard, and that’s where they started with me at that time of crisis, right there with my need to experience God’s empathy, love, and care. Dallas and Jane are brilliant people. And I had followed them and learned from them and appreciated their teaching so much, but it was actually the way that they shared God’s empathetic love with me that really was reviving to my soul, my spirit, and my confidence and trust in Christ.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, and it’s interesting, Bill and Kristi, because you both kind of touch on this idea that there are a couple of different facets to empathy. One is self-empathy, what we’re dealing with ourselves, and the other is empathy toward others and how we’re relating to others. Can you walk us through kind of the difference between both of those pieces, and why both are incredibly important for our lives and for our ministries?

Bill Gaultiere
Yeah, this is a key distinctive for what we’re teaching. Because you are listening, you’d expect that a book on empathy would teach you about listening skills and how to be caring towards others, and we certainly do that. But we don’t start there. We start with the empathy of God and Jesus and the incarnation, and through the scriptures and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And God is a loving father, and we teach that empathy is a component of love, but in order to really trust and receive this deeper expression of God’s love that seeks to know us so intimately, and that’s where the empathy, the listening, comes in. We need to agree with it. We need to have faith. We need to have trust. We need to be thankful. And so we call that self-empathy. It doesn’t mean like self-help in terms of self-sufficiency. I just got everything I need if I just hug myself, take a bubble bath, and say nice things to myself so I feel better. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about agreeing with the grace of God in a particular aspect of God’s grace and God’s love, which is empathy, and it’s the way that we listen, the way that we care. Empathy is embedded in compassion. You can’t have healthy, effective, loving compassion without the empathy that seeks to truly understand what people are experiencing, their culture, their personality, their struggles, their needs, or feelings so that our care gives them dignity and true help.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. And, obviously, in ministry work, this is why we can see the importance and value of empathy. Because if we’re really going to be trying to serve others, really trying to understand others, we do have to move into this area of empathy. And I want to jump into something that’s a little fascinating to me, and that is how empathy became somewhat controversial in ministry, in the church world. It’s been kind of an amazing thing to see. Over recent history, there have been different influencers. There have been books that have been published and written speaking of empathy, labeling it as toxic, labeling it as a sin, and a variety of other things. So, I’d love to hear a bit, Bill and Kristi, because I’ve read your book. Everyone watching has not yet read your book, although I encourage them to grab it and read it. But in Deeply Loved, how do you respond to people who are setting up empathy as something that is toxic, something that is evil, or something that is even a sin? What’s your response?

Bill Gaultiere
Yeah, well, we talk about the grit and grace of empathy. And in these books, these podcasts, they’re not really talking about biblical empathy. They’re not talking about empathy the way we are. What they’re talking about is fragilizing people or rescuing them, or just that people should be able to just do whatever they want, and that is a huge problem in our culture. And so basically, empathy, true biblical empathy, has been co-opted and distorted in our culture, so that people are saying, Look, I should be able to define my gender. I can do what I want, and it’s my truth, your truth, as though there are these separate bodies of truth. No, it’s God’s truth. And God’s truth is in His Word, and good science is consistent with scripture, and it’s revealing what is true. But we live in a world that doesn’t want biblical laws, standards, and morals, and doesn’t want to be under God’s authority, and so they’re co-opting empathy to mean, I’m just free to do whatever I want. You can’t say otherwise, and you can’t even believe otherwise, and if you do, you’re a bigot. So, these books are reacting to that, and a lot of this is playing out in the political sphere, that anybody who has boundaries is no longer empathetic because empathy is just nice. But what we teach in our book Deeply Loved is that our true empathy is always connected to what is actually true, and it’s connected to personal responsibility. So, we give sort of a formula for growth. Formula in quotes, but empathy plus truth plus responsibility equals growth. So it’s not real empathy if I’m not speaking the truth, and if it doesn’t help me take responsibility for my life and ownership for my life. So, some people mistake empathy as though it just means agreeing with whatever people feel, as though, well, that’s true and that’s right. Well, actually, sometimes, part of the confusion is that we use the word feel to refer to emotions, but then also perceptions. And emotions and perceptions are very different, because my emotions are about me, my perceptions are about you, and my emotions that are about me is an experience. Well, that’s true. I mean, it’s a subjective truth. My perceptions or my opinions, those may or may not be accurate. They may or may not be true. So when we’re giving empathy, we always want to listen to and understand the emotions, the needs, the experiences, and validate that personal, subjective truth, that experience that person is having, but we want to do that without agreeing with perceptions that are distorted and not in sync with what God has taught in the Bible, or not in sync with what’s happening in the world and other people. So we always want to help people. For instance, if we’re in a pastoral counseling situation or resolving a conflict on our staff or in our church, we want to help people speak from their personal experience. This is what I experienced. This is what my emotions were. This is what it’s like to be me. We want to understand that, but when they get into finger pointing, sharing opinions, perceptions about other people, we want to clarify and redirect them to speak about their own experience, what it’s like to be them and what they’re needing, and we want to care for them in that place, but we don’t want to over over like wrongly validate that when it’s about their perceptions of other people.

Kristi Gaultiere
I think it’s important, also, Jason, to realize that empathy without truth is inaccurate and truth without empathy is harsh, and then we say we need empathy plus truth plus responsibility. Well, responsibility without empathy becomes drudgery, empathy without responsibility is also too coddling, too fragilizing of people, and can lead to codependency, which we have a whole chapter on as well, because sometimes we avoid empathy because we don’t know how to give empathy for others without draining our own souls. So we have a whole chapter on that too, because that was something I had to learn because I had an empathy fatigue at one point. I didn’t have healthy boundaries. I was caring too much. I was merging too much, and I got to the point where I was so drained, I couldn’t continue to show up for people with empathy. So there’s a lot to learn about the kind of ministry that Jesus had with empathy and about God’s empathy for us. And it’s really important for us as pastors and as leaders because there are many people that have been turned off to God because of the way that we, in our times of fatigue or were over-boundaried and did not respond in cooperation with God’s love, and then times where we’ve taken it too far. We’ve gotten messianic. We’ve depended upon our own selves, our own love, our own empathy, to the point where it has been destructive to our own souls.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful. And I’d love to lean in just a little bit here, if we could, because everything has a pendulum, and shifts back and forth, back and forth, so we get to one extreme and get to the other extreme. So, very practically, can you help walk us through maybe some of the dangers of both extremes of empathy? So, one is not really empathetic much at all, like truth is important. This is what I only have so many days to live this life, and I’ve got the urgency, and I’m going to make sure everyone knows, bam, this is what you’ve got to do with your lives, type of attitude, right? So relation, we can think about that, especially in ministry. But then, as a pendulum swings to the other side, getting too caught up, leading to that empathy fatigue, those types of things. So what are the dangers, and how do we in ministry ensure that we’re not on one of those extremes?

Bill Gaultiere
Yeah, well, if we’re preaching the truth and putting it in people’s faces with a finger pointed, it’s going to arm them with a natural defensiveness or resistance and a turn off. And so, in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles, we don’t see it that way. We see them with a heart of grace and gentleness, and seeking to restore people. And so, one example is Jesus with a woman caught in adultery, and you see his acceptance, his tenderness, his forgiveness, and then he does say, Go and sin no more. But you see how grace and truth are paired together there. And if you would only give the truth, that’s more difficult for people to receive. Now, we see him with the Pharisees, and it seems like he doesn’t have much empathy for them, but you have to look at the larger story of his history of relationship with them, and his heart that he shows for them. Some of Jesus’ best followers ended up being Pharisees. When you put it all together, he was very loving and gracious towards them, and then that needed to manifest in speaking the truth to them. So it’s the integration, even in our preaching, in our teaching, it’s going to be most effective if we are empathetic in terms of considering our audience and what their needs are. What are their prevailing general assumptions that are wrong? But then, stepping inside of that, well, why would they think that way and connect with them that way? Because when we teach as shepherds who really understand the struggles and needs that people have, it softens their hearts and opens them to receive the Word of God, and that’s so important. Like in the parable of the soils, we don’t want to foster our people having hard ground, hard hearts, because they’re feeling judged and criticized unnecessarily. So, the better we can listen and empathize as it relates to our ministry, even in teaching, it is going to be better received when we teach them the truth about things. And then on the other side, when we’re over-empathizing, or, really, I want to say, empathizing in the wrong way, that’s where we’re coddling people. We’re tiptoeing around things. We’re wanting to please people. We’re wanting to just always be nice and comforting, and we’re avoiding speaking the truth in love, and it’s a very important teaching in Ephesians 4:15, people need the truth. People don’t get well without the truth. And certainly, as pastors, in our ministries of teaching and discipling, we’re guiding people in God’s truth. So it is really the integration of the two that we’re after. And you see that in the scriptures, I read through the whole Bible. Many times I’ve read through the Bible in a year. And one year, I did it where every time I sensed the message of the Lord, the word of God communicating with grace to me, I highlighted that in a blue highlighter. And everywhere I sense God giving truth that was maybe confronted or giving me responsibility, I highlighted that in red, and then I just saw this balance of the blue and the red on all the pages, even within the same verses, oftentimes, how God integrates grace and truth continually. And so we are saying that empathy is a component of grace. It’s really not the whole thing. I mean, we need to be forgiven of our sins, that’s like a lot larger than empathy. But the truth is that receiving empathy helps us to confess our sins. So, that’s how it works.

Kristi Gaultiere
And also, I think we look at John’s admonition to us. We love because God first loved us, and one of the ways that we experience that love is through empathy, through that sense of understanding us. So we also say that we empathize because God first empathized with us. So, let’s look at God’s empathy. I mean, in the incarnation, God becoming man, coming to earth, willing to live and experience and suffer every testing, every trial, every pain, every temptation that we do, and yet not sinning. That is perfect empathy. And over and over again in Scripture, we see Jesus’s empathy for us, God’s empathy for us. We did a Bible study in the Gospels on Jesus’s emotions. We found 39 different emotions that Jesus felt in the Gospels. Jesus has empathy for us in our emotions, every one of those emotions. Whenever I’m struggling and I’m having a strong emotion, I can say, Okay, where did Jesus, where does God empathize with me in this emotion, in this struggle, or in this trial? And I can find it. It helps me to draw near to God. It helps me to open to His love, His presence, His grace, and power in my life, and helps me to cooperate and step into his love in those he’s called me to love with him. So it’s a great and powerful gift empathy is, and I think it’s very easy for us to overlook it and think, oh, that’s soft or that’s for weak people. Thankfully, with all the studies on emotional intelligence, we’ve seen that empathy is key to emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is key for our success and our thriving in our call. And then now some of the other studies that have been done around what makes successful teams, this is really relevant for us as leaders. I did a lot of research into this myself when we started Soul Shepherding, and now leading the organization with so many employees and so many different facets to it, and I found it really is true what the Aristotle study found that empathy is so key in leadership, because if our team members don’t feel like they can be heard, they can be understood, they can have a safe place to bring their ideas and their thoughts, and if they don’t feel like it’s going to be met, then they’re not going to be sought to be understood or listened to. Then it brings division. It brings competition. It brings conflict to teams.

Bill Gaultiere
And it shuts down creative thinking and problem-solving.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. Kristi, you kind of set me up there because I was thinking back to, and I’m not going to get the sentence exactly, but it was something along these lines, and I highlighted it when I was reading the book. But it was this idea that empathy is kind of a secret source to emotional intelligence, yet many people miss it, and that struck me, and it made me want to ask you the question, why is it that empathy is one of those things that we often miss?

Kristi Gaultiere
Yeah, well, a lot of it is because we haven’t experienced it. Maybe we haven’t received empathy from somebody else. Or if we have, we resisted it internally because of our own shame, or not wanting to be vulnerable, or because when we maybe were vulnerable and asked for empathy from somebody before, but they didn’t give it, and that was very painful as well. Maybe we haven’t learned to agree with God’s grace and His love, which we’re talking about as self-empathy or self-compassion. A lot of research on this and the importance of this to our own soul health and our own ability to be able to give empathy and agree with God’s empathy for us. So, we talk about that three-way empathy in our book, that we need to receive empathy from God. We need to agree with his empathy and His grace, and then we can overflow it generously in our lives and ministry to other people as we’re participating with him in that. But if we’re resisting it, then we’re going to have trouble valuing it, seeing the value of it. We’re going to have trouble participating with that form of love in the lives of others in ministry. So let me just give you an example from our marriage early on. I remember at one point I was sharing with Bill a pain, a grief. My grandma had died. I’d just gotten back from a mission trip. I was pretty stressed with a lot of responsibility in our ministry. And, Bill, you were giving me a lot of empathy at the time, but inside, I wasn’t receiving it, and I wasn’t agreeing with it, because inside I had all these tapes going, Oh, I’m just too sensitive. I shouldn’t be so emotional. Why am I weak right now? Why can’t I just step it up and be the leader that God’s called me to be? And, internally, all these things were resisting the very love and presence of God’s grace, attunement, love, and empathy to me in the moment that my soul was desperate for. I really needed some care at that time, and Bill, very gently in love, pointed that out to me. He said, Christy, you know it seems like you’re not able to agree with my love and my empathy for you right now. It seems like you’re resisting it. It seems like you must be going to these places of shame over having any needs right now. That was so helpful to me. It just opened this self-awareness to me that my being shut down to my own emotions, my own needs, my own appreciation of empathy. I was spoiling the empathy and the love he was giving me, and I was spoiling God’s love. And that was coming to me through him, streaming to me through him. And so paying attention to that resistance in myself has been so helpful to me in my intimacy with Jesus, in the health of my relationships with others, and in my own soul health, as I’ve learned to be able to cooperate and join God in His love and care for my soul, and then fill me to overflowing in that to cooperate and be a part of his love for others.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so helpful. I appreciate that, Kristi. For the pastor, the ministry leader who, Kristi, might struggle, as you just mentioned, or, Bill, there might be something where they might sit back and say, Well, I’m not just really that much of a empathetic person. I’ve never been empathetic. I’m not wired that way, or whatever it might be. What can they do practically to, I don’t know, increase that empathy muscle, or build up that empathy muscle because of the vital importance not only for themselves and their marriage or their family, but also the team they’re leading, and the ministry they’re doing, either at a local church or another ministry setting?

Bill Gaultiere
Well, this is my story, Jason. I’m a thinker and a doer, and was raised in football field and baseball field. And both my grandparents and my dad worked in the steel mills in Chicago, and so all firstborn men. And so I was raised to be tough. You fall, you get tackled, you get a bleed, you rub dirt on it, and you go forward. And so, to me, empathy was really just like listening skills, something that I should do. And I was actually studying psychology as a call to understand people and relationships and be more helpful to people, but I wasn’t aware of my own emotions, and the Lord met me in that journey through one of my professors who I really admired because she was a Christian counselor. Not only was she smart and studied and had her degrees about Christian psychology, but she was doing it practically. She was helping people. So when I met with her, I said to her, So tell me, what’s it like to be a Christian counselor. I want to learn from you, and I want to learn how to be more helpful to people. And she said, Oh, Bill, we can get to that later. Let’s talk about you. How are you? How are you feeling? And, Jason, I’m like looking over my shoulder, like, how am I feeling? I don’t know. How are you feeling? I didn’t know how I was feeling. I was always oriented around helping other people and being the strong one, being the leader, being the teacher, giving advice, and this sort of a thing. And so what happened was, over the weeks, as I met with her, she kept leaning in with a gentleness and with a soft heart to understand me and to care for me. And because she felt my emotions before I did, I began to learn the language of emotions. So she would say, I just talked about what I was doing and what I was thinking because that was my world. And she would say, Well, it sounds like maybe you’re feeling stressed. And I’d go, Yeah, I guess I am. She’d say, Well, tell me more about that. And what are you feeling in your body there? Well kind of tightness in my chest, and I have a little kind of queasy in my stomach. And she’d go, That sounds like anxiety. Maybe you’re feeling anxious. And so I was learning the language of emotions. I was learning to feel my own emotions. And then what I found was that I had so much more tenderness, gentleness, sensitivity, and compassion for other people. I learned to be a lot slower to give all my advice and all the truth that I had to share, but to listen and to draw people out, because I learned to feel my emotions, and that helped me feel their emotions. And so, receiving empathy, the big point here is that receiving empathy helped me be better at giving empathy, which helped me be a better teacher, a better discipler of other people. And so all my relationships opened up greater intimacy, including with God. Some of us, we’ve been around the block for some years as Christians, and we struggle because it’s like we’ve kind of been there, done that, and we sort of, like, we know the doctrines, we know the Scripture. We’ve been through it many times. And so, if we’re really honest, we might say we start to get a little bored, or feel a little empty, or there’s this kind of continual sense of distance, and we don’t know what to do about that. Well, some people who are more in spiritual formation circles, they will say, I met a dark night of the soul and, well, maybe, but here’s what I have found in these situations, that the dryness, the distance, is that there’s a lack of awareness and experience of the emotional component of life and relationships, and when people learn to receive empathy and to feel their emotions, that now their Bible reading comes alive, and all their relationships with others become more more connected. They’re more gentle, more understanding, and more patient. And so then, the people who we’re teaching, discipling, working with, and developing in leadership, they’re able to benefit so much more from what we have to offer. So, the practical tip there is to get with somebody who is good at listening and empathy, who is aware of their emotions, who has been through some difficulties in life, has been able to get help through that, and come out the other side. So, maybe it’s meeting with a spiritual director. We have 50 spiritual directors and coaches on our staff at Soul Shepherding who have all been trained in our whole Soul Shepherding program, and they’re great at empathy. They’re great at listening prayerfully and guiding people through the discipleship process and their growth. But we need to be receiving God’s empathy through other people, which we believe is part of why Jesus taught us in his new commandment to love one another. Because if we only have me and Jesus, and that’s where I go for all my safety and all my needs for grace, forgiveness, and empathy, and I never talked to anybody else about it, it’s not going to be enough. I mean, Jesus is enough. He’s the Son of God, He’s the Savior, he’s the Lord. But I get messed up on that. And so God’s Word teaches us that we work out our lives, not only privately with God, but also in relationship with others that we can trust. And so by getting into these safe relationships, maybe as pastor to pastor, but as I learned to receive empathy, it’s going to change everything in my relationships and my ministry, because now I’m going to be developing that emotional intelligence that is so, so powerful. So what I had to do was I just had to put it into my calendar because I didn’t know what I felt. I didn’t know what I needed. And I was slowly learning that this takes some time. Because I would put my meeting with my counselor in the early years, and then was with my spiritual director, and then with soul friends, just putting that in my calendar so that now, when somebody asks me, How are you feeling? I know what I’m feeling, and that helps me so much in my discipleship, my leadership, and all my relationships of love.

Kristi Gaultiere
And then, also, Jason, just for your listeners and for the pastors and leaders on this call in our book. We give lots and lots of tools for this. These are things that we found that have been so helpful to us, for those that we journey with, and those we train as well. So one of the things would be, we have an empathy prayer to help you be able to connect with God’s empathy through prayer and to receive and to agree with his empathy for you in prayer. We have over 100 scriptures on empathy in the book that we’re referencing because many of us, when we’re reading scripture, we’re missing God’s empathy. We’re not seeing it there, but it is there. So we wanted to be able to point that out as well. We have many different empathy exercises, ways, and journaling practices. We have ways of having soul talks with empathy. We have different ways that you can grow all with very practical tools that we provide for those to help you connect with Jesus and his emotions, help you receive and agree with his empathy and grace, and then also to be able to bring it practically into relationships in ways that are easy to remember and easy ways to join Jesus’s empathy for the person you’re sitting with.

Jason Daye
Yeah. That’s one thing I appreciated about Deeply Loved, your book, is it wasn’t just theoretical talking about things to think about, but you have exercises throughout and you have questions, too, that you can journal or talk through with someone else, that kind of helps you put all of these different elements into practice. Absolutely incredible resource there. As we’re winding down this conversation, I want to give both you, Bill, and you, Kristi, an opportunity. You have the eyes and years of pastors and ministry leaders serving on the front lines of ministry. What words of encouragement do you have for them?

Bill Gaultiere
I want to say to you that you are a hero. You have responded to the call of God, to pastor, to shepherd, to lead others to Jesus, and the hope of the world is Jesus through you. But, so often, in your daily life and work, and especially in this world we live in today, you don’t feel like a hero. You feel judged, insignificant, and like you’re not seen, but the Lord sees you, and you are deeply loved. And we so much want you to know that not only like in the doctrinal sense of Yeah, God has unconditional love for me, but in your personal experiential self, through your relationships, even if you’re meditating on Scripture.

Kristi Gaultiere
And then also, I would say, thank you for co-suffering with Jesus. We know many of you. Leadership is lonely. Jesus knew that type of loneliness from other humans who didn’t understand him, his mission, and the sacrifice he was making. And I think staring in the suffering with Jesus, and that you get criticized, you have people who have expectations of you that are so unfair and impossible for you to meet. And Jesus sees those, and he cares about that, and he appreciates your sacrifice and your faithfulness to him. And then also, I think, just that he wants you to care for your soul. Your church, your organization, doesn’t have a soul, and it will eat your soul. And God doesn’t want that. He wants you to learn from him, to come to Him, to put yourself in a place where you can receive his love into the depths of your soul.

Jason Daye
Amen. Great encouragement. Thank you both. Really appreciate you being with us here on FrontStage BackStage. For those of you who are watching or listening, for every single episode, we create a toolkit that complements the conversation we just had. You can find that for this episode and each episode of PastorServe.org/network. In there, you’ll find a number of resources, including links to Deeply Loved, Bill and Kristi’s newest book, that we’ve been talking about today. You’ll also find a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, which pulls insights out of this conversation we just shared together, and also has questions for you to reflect on personally, and also work through with your ministry team at your local church or ministry. So be sure to check that out at PastorServe.org/network. Bill and Kristi, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for making time to hang out with us here on FrontStage BackStage today.

Bill Gaultiere
Jason, thanks for having us and for all of you who are listening, pastoring, and leading. Thank you for your work. We would love to meet you sometime. We invite you to come on a retreat with us at Soul Shepherding. You can learn about those retreats. We do 8 per year for leaders, 50 leaders in the room at beautiful places. And you can learn about that at SoulShepherding.org, and it’d be great to be in person with you sometime.

Jason Daye
Excellent. We’ll have links to those retreats in the toolkit, along with links to Deeply Loved, their newest book. So be sure to check that out. awesome. Well, God bless you. Thank you so much.

Jason Daye
Here at PastorServe, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.