The Pulpit Is Not
Always a Calling.
Sometimes It Is a
Wound Looking
for a Throne.

Before he was your pastor, he was somebody's kid. Maybe the kid who could not get the father's approval no matter how hard he tried. Maybe the one who was overlooked in his neighborhood, dismissed in school, or raised in a home where love was rationed according to performance. Maybe he grew up in a church where worth was measured by how much God was using you, and he watched, year after year, as God seemed to be using everyone else more than him. Whatever the specific geography of the wound, the lesson arrived early and lodged deep: ordinary is dangerous. Invisible is unbearable, the only safe version of yourself is the exceptional one.

That wound does not disappear when a person enters ministry. It finds its expression there, and in no other professional context does the wound find a more perfectly designed host than the church, where authority is framed as divine, where questioning leadership carries theological weight, and where a roomful of spiritually hungry people are already oriented toward believing that the person behind the pulpit was placed there by God.

This is the first article in a four-part series on the wound underneath the leadership that has left so many people hurt, confused, and unable to separate what happened in the building from the God the building claimed to represent. This series is not an indictment of every pastor. It is an examination of a specific dynamic, how unexamined pain finds its way to positions of spiritual power, and what it costs the people who were already there looking for something genuine.

The Numbers Nobody in the Church Wants to Talk About

30%of clergy may exhibit narcissistic personality traits, a rate significantly above the general population.Research by Barna Group found 90% of American pastors rated themselves excellent to above-average preachers and teachers. Separate clinical research found narcissistic personality disorder in pastoral ministry may be, in the words of researchers Ball and Puls, "a plague causing untold suffering to individuals and damage to the body of Christ.". Ball and Puls, licensed clinical research, 2017; Barna Group, 2000Share on

Those numbers deserve to sit for a moment, the instinctive response is predictable: "that seems too high," "those researchers must be hostile to the church," "there are good pastors too." That response is precisely what has allowed the problem to persist at scale, the research is not hostile to ministry. It is honest about what ministry selection, ministry culture, and ministry accountability structures produce when left unexamined.

The fact that narcissism runs high in pastoral contexts is not a coincidence. It is a predictable outcome of a system that consistently rewards the traits produced by certain wounds, calls those traits anointing, and then provides almost no structural accountability to test whether the anointing is actually serving the people it claims to be for.

Why the Pulpit Is Uniquely Attractive to the Unhealed

Every profession attracts certain personality configurations. Law attracts those drawn to argument and precision. Medicine attracts those drawn to problem-solving and mastery, the church attracts those drawn to meaning, community, and purpose, which is genuinely beautiful. It also, and this is the part that rarely gets named, attracts those for whom the specific architecture of pastoral authority offers something no other role can provide.

1. 01It converts the need to be exceptional into a job requirementThe wounded person who spent their childhood learning that ordinary was dangerous does not simply decide one day to stop needing to be exceptional, that need becomes a driver, and in most professional contexts, the need to be exceptional is one motivating force among many, constrained by peers, performance reviews, market feedback, and institutional checks, in pastoral ministry, the need to be exceptional becomes the job description, the pastor is supposed to hear from God. Supposed to have vision others cannot see. Supposed to stand in the gap between the congregation and eternity, the role itself requires and rewards the very exceptionalism that the wound demands. For the person carrying that wound, ministry does not feel like a choice. It feels like the first context that has ever made complete sense of who they need to be.
2. 02It provides an audience that is theologically conditioned to followIn most leadership contexts, authority is earned, challenged, and negotiated, in pastoral ministry, authority arrives pre-loaded, the congregation has been formed, often since childhood, with a theological framework that says leadership in the church deserves deference. "Touch not God's anointed." "Obey those who have the rule over you." "Submit to your spiritual covering." These are not neutral phrases. They are a psychological architecture that the wounded leader does not have to build. It was already there when they arrived, the wound that needs people to follow has found a room where following is a virtue.
3. 03It wraps authority in language that makes questioning feel like faithlessnessNo other professional context has access to this particular tool, the lawyer whose judgment is questioned does not get to frame that questioning as a spiritual attack, the CEO whose decisions are challenged does not get to tell the board that their challenge is evidence of their unbelief, the pastor does, and the wounded leader, the one whose internal architecture cannot tolerate criticism without experiencing it as a threat to the self. Finds in this framework an almost perfect protection. Every question becomes a test of loyalty. Every concern becomes evidence of a hard heart, the wound has not just found a throne. It has found a throne that God is supposed to be defending.
4. 04It offers relational access to people at their most vulnerablePeople come to church carrying the weight of their lives. Their marriages, their grief, their fear, their questions about meaning and mortality. They come in a posture of need and openness that they rarely bring into other relational contexts. For the pastor with a genuine calling and a healthy interior life, this vulnerability is a sacred trust. It is the raw material of genuine care. For the pastor whose wound needs people to need them, this vulnerability is something else entirely. It is a source of supply, the pastoral role provides a steady stream of people who are already emotionally open, already oriented toward the pastor as a figure of significance, and already disposed to believe that what the pastor offers them is from God.
5. 05It operates with almost no structural accountabilityThe research on narcissistic leadership consistently finds that the wound flourishes where accountability is absent, and American pastoral culture, particularly in independent and nondenominational contexts. Has built an accountability vacuum of extraordinary depth. Elder boards that are appointed by the pastor and loyal to him. Financial structures with minimal oversight. Cultures where raising a concern about leadership is the fastest way to be marked as divisive, the wound that needs protection from scrutiny has found, in many churches, an environment that provides that protection not just culturally but structurally. Nobody is required to check, and so nobody does. Until the damage is already done.

What the Calling Actually Requires

None of this means that wounded people should not enter ministry. It means that every person who enters ministry should be required to examine what is driving them there, that is not a disqualification process. It is a formation process, and its absence is arguably the most significant gap in how the church prepares its leaders.

Research Finding

"Christian ministry can be a magnet for narcissistic personalities. For who else would want to speak on behalf of God every week? Driven out of insecurity and anxiety, pastors begin to see themselves not as humble shepherds of God's people, but as God's human agent of proclamation. Hiddenness is the breeding ground for narcissism."

Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church, Western Theological Seminary, 2020.Share on

DeGroat's clinical observation cuts to the center of the problem, the wound does not announce itself. It disguises itself as conviction. As passion. As a burning sense of divine appointment, and the systems that are supposed to evaluate fitness for ministry. Seminaries, ordination councils, hiring committees. Are almost entirely focused on theological competence and communication skill. They are almost entirely unequipped to ask the question that matters most: what is this person's relationship to their own interior life? What happens when they are questioned? When they fail? When they are not the most important person in the room?

The Kingdom framework that grounds all of my work on connection and difference is clear on one thing about authority: it is always in service of the flourishing of the people in its domain, the Genesis mandate establishes this as the foundational design, the image-bearer exercises dominion not for their own benefit but as a steward of what God has entrusted to them, a leader whose authority is primarily organized around the management of their own wound is not exercising Kingdom authority. They are using Kingdom language to serve a deeply personal need, and the people sitting in the pews, the ones who came looking for something real. Are paying for it.

The Word "Sometimes" Is Doing Important Work Here

"The pulpit is not always a wound looking for a throne, but it is sometimes, and the sometimes is happening at a rate and at a scale that the church has not yet found the courage to fully confront, because confronting it would require looking honestly at the systems that made it possible."

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There are pastors who entered ministry genuinely, who have done the interior work, who lead with accountability and humility and genuine care for the people in their charge. This series is not about them. It is about the pattern that runs alongside them, that uses the same language, occupies the same role, and produces a fundamentally different outcome for the people it claims to serve.

The person reading this who has been hurt by a leader in the church deserves to know that what happened to them was not random and was not their fault. It was the predictable outcome of a wound finding the context it needed to express itself, in a system that mistook the expression for a gift and the people harmed by it for collateral damage in a great work.

The wound was real, the pain behind the leadership was real, and the harm that pain produced in your life was also real. Understanding why the wound found the pulpit does not make that harm less serious. It makes it more legible, and legible wounds can finally begin to heal.