Spiritual Stamina Begins with a God-Directed Life
Dean Trune discusses soul care, spiritual disciplines, self-awareness, and the importance of connecting deeply with God. In this interview, he explains how coaching can help believers learn from God and life rather than simply relying on their own knowledge, giftedness, or ministry success.
- Soul care begins with daily, one-on-one connection with God.
- Spiritual coaching helps people see life from God’s perspective.
- Ministry activity can feed the ego if it is not grounded in intimacy with God.
By Brad Dupray
After graduating from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s in engineering, Dean Trune was well prepared for a career at General Motors. After 12 years with GM, however, Dean’s heart turned to ministry and he became campus minister at Michigan State, where he served for the next 11 years. Since 1995, Dean has led Impact Ministries International (www.ImpactingTheWorld.com), establishing campus ministries around the world and conducting seminars to help people connect with God more intimately. Dean’s book, The Path to Passion, was recently released by Prayer Shop Publishing, the publishing arm of Harvest Prayer Ministries.
Photo Caption:
Dean Trune and his wife, Bonnie, have been married for 38 years and have two children and one grandchild.
Soul Care and Spiritual Disciplines
Would “spiritual disciplines” be synonymous with “soul care,” or are they simply preparatory for it?
We can have different motives for spending time with God, alone, one-on-one. Some of the motives, the right motive, is to become like him. The wrong motives would be to do it to have something to teach or to preach. When we talk about soul care, first of all we need to be connecting with God deeply—hanging out with him daily. As that gets in place, we start to see life from God’s perspective and not ours.
Shouldn’t a Christian naturally gravitate toward spiritual disciplines?
I think you have two types of people: those that know they need to go deeper with God and those that have no idea, because they’ve been relying on their own skill set, knowledge, and giftedness. They haven’t gotten to the point of being God-desperate.
How do you approach caring for the soul?
Our soul is made up of our mind, will, and emotions. Sometimes we connect with God intellectually, but we don’t connect emotionally or submissively with our will. That’s why I like coaching. It helps people connect to God with their own life.
Coaching, Awareness, and Character
What makes coaching such a distinctive approach?
There’s a distinction between counseling, coaching, and mentoring. With counseling we’re trying to repair something from the past in order to become healthy. With mentoring, I’m sharing with others what God has taught me and what I’m learning in life. Coaching takes us one step further. I’m trying to help people learn from God and learn from life, so they don’t need me.
So the coach ultimately is able to remove himself from the process.
I like people processing what God is teaching them and learning from it themselves. That way they don’t need to keep going back to an individual and saying, “What does that mean?” For instance, say I’m on staff and my responsibility is to oversee small groups. My small group leaders come to me and they have a problem and they want me to solve it. If I teach them to see it from God’s perspective, then next time they may not need to come back to me. They’re sorting out what God is doing in their own lives.
Are there signs to show someone that his soul is in need of care?
Our lack of character typically shows up privately first. We do things or think things privately that we shouldn’t be doing or thinking. The second place lack of character shows up is in our family, in nonpublic times, just family times. If we don’t learn to have character privately or with our family, sooner or later lack of character will show up publicly.
I’m sure there are a lot of Christians who think they “have it all together” when, in reality, they’ve got some real issues.
For those who don’t know they need to change or desire to change. we need to hang around and pick them up when they fail at family, or in ministry, or when they fail morally, or when they fail in relationships, because sooner or later they will fail. God cannot afford the risk of allowing us to succeed in ministry, or whatever, without him being the very center of it. That would further promote lack of soul care and lack of God-directedness.
That person has to discover his shortcomings at some point.
The key, I believe, to having an acute awareness of how we’re influencing our environment is having an excellent self-awareness. If a person struggles with awareness, he or she will not see how he is influencing his environment. He can be angry or rude or self-centered, and all of those things have negative impacts on his environment. Awareness is seeing what’s happening in my environment. Self-awareness is seeing what’s happening inside of me, and that’s where God has to have control.
So self-awareness is not necessarily self-centeredness.
I believe it’s a given that if I lack awareness, I’m in desperate need of self-awareness. Self-awareness is heightened by spending time one-on-one with God and allowing for feedback from people. When I have both of those in my life, my self-awareness really grows. You and I are going to make mistakes with people. We will; it’s a given. But strong awareness and self-awareness are not necessarily avoiding those mistakes, but allowing a process of healing to take place out of those mistakes.
Does self-awareness lead to God-awareness?
God-awareness allows me to see my environment in how I can make the greatest impact for him. An example is Romans 8:28, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (New American Standard Bible). It does not say God does all things for the good. It’s for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. So despite our mistakes, God can do good things if we love him and respond to his call. Humility will lead me to intimacy with God if I’m intentional. Pride will build distance between me and God.
Ministry, Ego, and Spiritual Stamina
How do ministers keep their souls in tune with God?
They need to be connecting with God consistently—regularly. I think that’s one of the hardest things for people in ministry to do. Ministry is an activity that can feed our egos—we can get a lot of positive feedback from ministry. We can also have success in ministry, overall. So given the opportunity to spend time in ministry or to spend time with God, we’ll typically choose ministry because it does good things for us.
Caring for the ego rather than caring for the soul.
If we attempt to minister out of our own strength or our own wisdom, I think the best we can get is mediocrity. God has something a whole lot better than mediocrity for us. He has to be infused in our soul for us to be most effective in our impact. I think many people’s drug of choice is the praise of men, and that’s all ego-driven, not God-driven. As I travel around the country doing ministry, sometimes I’m really disappointed in the character of spiritual leaders, because they’ve made it all about themselves. That’s not a big group, but it is a substantial group.
How does someone prepare for the day when “sorrows like sea billows roll?”
We need to see life from God’s perspective. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to character recently. Our culture doesn’t encourage us to improve our character. Our culture encourages us to have knowledge. Maybe it was different decades ago, but typically young people don’t learn character. Our educational system is based on having the right answer. As a result we have a tendency to grow up self-centered, self-sufficient, self-dependent. Our character needs to be like that of Jesus, which is totally opposite—God-centered, God-dependent, self-sacrificing. We know how to teach knowledge. We don’t know how to teach character.
So would you say soul-care coaching is not so much about learning the rules and regulations?
It’s about perspective. When it comes to soul care, sometimes we have to make that shift to character, as opposed to knowledge. That helps us to see God’s perspective. If I only have my perspective, then it’s all about me—what I can do in my ministry, my family, my community, my church—and it’s not about what God can do through me.
Prayer, Drought, and Passion for God
How does a Christian overcome being bored by prayer or study of the Word? Is that a sign of larger problems?
First of all, that’s an indication that God is trying to get your attention, because God is not dull, he’s not boring, and he’s not quiet. Typically, that person will need outside help. That’s where accountability, encouragement, and support come into play.
How does a person build spiritual stamina?
I would say it requires intentionality. Sometimes as Christians we’re not very intentional. We just kind of float along doing what seems to work and really depend upon ourselves to get through situations. In order for me to spend time with God, I have to be very intentional about it or it won’t happen. I can’t squeeze God into my busy schedule. I have to build my schedule around my relationship with God. That works. That’s the growing, active, dynamic thing—my relationship with God. I minister out of my relationship with God, not out of a lack of relationship.
Have you had times of spiritual drought?
Sure. Everybody hits periods of drought. That’s when I have to start asking myself the good questions, the wise questions. For instance, what have I been doing with God that now has become routine? Or, where am I taking shortcuts in this relationship with God? In what area of my life am I experiencing disobedience? There are a hundred questions! I think one of the problems, from personal experience and my coaching experience, is that we’re just not very reflective of what’s going on inside of us. We’re just trying to do damage control.
What is the opposite of damage control?
Passion for God. Just passion. I encourage the people I coach to take a personal retreat day, at least one a month. I encourage them to take their Bible and journal and connect with God and reflect. I don’t want them to take someone else’s book. Just a Bible and journal. Invariably, people will say, “That was incredible! This is what God communicated to me!” I think our droughts are mainly generated by lack of hearing God, or at least communicating with him. Spiritual drought ought to be a red flag that we’re not doing well at soul care.
How about someone who has distanced himself from God because he feels he has been hurt by God for some reason?
I think that’s something we need to talk to God about, because if I believe I’ve been hurt by God, then I have my perspective and not his. If Joseph, in the Old Testament, developed a bitter spirit toward God because of being sold into slavery, and then being imprisoned even though he was innocent, God would never have been able to teach him the character he needed to be second in command of all of Egypt. My identified hurt typically means I’m seeing life from my perspective, not God’s—and that’s pride.
Brad Dupray is senior vice president, ministry development, with Church Development Fund, Irvine, California.
