Dr. Larry Crabb has been a licensed psychotherapist for more than twenty-five years. He currently serves as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Colorado Christian University in Morrison, Colorado. He is the founder of New Way Ministries, which puts on his School of Spiritual Direction and SoulCare conferences. He has served on the faculty for Regent College, Grace Theological Seminary, Florida Atlantic University, and the University of Illinois. He has written more than a dozen books, including The Safest Place on Earth: Where People Connect and Are Changed Forever, Shattered Dreams: God’s Unexpected Path to Joy, Soul Talk: The Language God Longs for Us to Speak and his newly released The Papa Prayer: The Prayer You’ve Never Prayed. He currently resides in Colorado with his wife, Rachael.

EN: You had a private practice in Boca Raton, Florida for several years. What initially took you to Florida?
Larry: When I finished grad school I was offered a position at the University of Illinois. My mentor there was the director of the counseling center, a guy named Bill Gilbert. He was a thin, older gentleman. Whenever I would walk into one of his parties he would be drunk out of his mind. He’d say, ‘Here comes Crabb, he thinks I’m going to Hell. Tell me I’m going to Hell, Larry, tell all these people I’m going to Hell.’ He was just drunk. But when he was sober he was a brilliant psychologist, just brilliant. But when he was drunk he was crazy. But he was a real mentor of mine and he offered me a job at the University of Illinois to stay there and teach. His best friend was the dean at a state university in Florida. They were looking for a director of their counseling center and he recommended me for my first job out of grad school. So I became the Director of the Psychological Counseling Center at Florida Atlantic University.

EN: That’s amazing that you got a job like that right out of grad school.
Larry: It was kind of strange. So I took the job. The fellow who had been there before was a psychiatrist who had just come out as openly homosexual. This is before “days of liberty” so he was fired and I got his job. I was at the counseling center and taught at the psych department for about two years and then as my views on Christian counseling developed I didn’t feel comfortable in that setting so I quit and went into private practice where I could be free to do whatever I wanted to do, so I spent ten years in private practice.

EN: Doing Christian counseling or counseling in general?
Larry: Just typical psychologist stuff, although I was even then determined to make it as biblically consistent as I then understood. I was still in Boca Raton and stayed there for ten years. Then as my thinking developed, I thought that community was far more important than psychologists were acknowledging. And all I could do was offer a person an expensive hour. I thought it might be better to offer them real friendship. So I went to teach at a seminary and offered a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling. My vision there was to train people in the church how to talk to people instead of sending them away to a shrink or just telling them to shape up and pray. One of the key verses that influenced me was Jeremiah 6:14 (NIV):“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.” And that’s what I saw in so many churches all over the place. “Oh, here’s a Bible verse, oh, shape up and you wouldn’t have any problems.” You’ve got to start figuring out what’s going on in the soul and see how the Gospel applies. That’s what I spent ten years trying to do in the counseling program at Grace Seminary (in Winona Lake, IN). I left Indiana where I taught for about eight years and went to Denver, Colorado, where I am now. I took the counseling program to Colorado Christian University. About 6 years ago, I really decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my years thinking more about spiritual formation, spiritual community and spiritual direction rather than psycho-therapy and counseling.

EN: What inspired that shift?
Larry: Probably three things. One is a personal thing. I was doing well as a counseling professor, doing well as a counselor, was getting respect and all that but my understanding of it wasn’t doing for me what I thought it should. I didn’t know God very well. I could figure things out but I didn’t know how to draw closer to God. I started getting involved in spiritual formation literature. Began reading the old Catholics. I realized that there was a lot in those pieces of literature that I didn’t know about. That was about 10 years ago. I felt like I was coming home a little bit to explore the depths of the human soul.

EN: Like Richard Foster type stuff.
Larry: Yeah, it’s in that same category. I have a lot of appreciation for Richard Foster and for Dallas Willard. I think it was a really personal thing that I just wanted to do. I pretty much gave up on insight as producing the transformation that I really longed for. I had a greater interest in spiritual formation. It had to be union versus your insight.

EN: Union with God?
Larry: Yeah, the whole idea of purgation, illumination and union. I became aware of a tremendous hunger for knowing the Lord after being a Christian all my life. So that was a personal reason why I moved away from counseling to spiritual direction. The second and third reasons were more theological. I got very caught up in Trinitarian theology. That was kind of new for me. The very simple, basic thought that occurred to me is that if God exists eternally as a community of three persons, then we need to be relational. If that’s true, then the essence of doing or being used in somebody else’s life—to be an instrument of power and to be released and transformed, had to be done in a relational nature as opposed to an expert nature. I gave up the notion of my being an expert. I’ve come to believe there are no experts in the soul. There are experts in medicine, plumbing, electricity and physics. But there are no experts in the soul. Only elders and elderesses. That conception made more sense to me in spiritual direction than psycho-therapy. Instead of “Hey, I’m Dr. Crabb the expert and I’m going to do something to you,” I can say, “I am a fellow stumbler and we all work together.” The third reason was because of New Covenant theology.

EN: Can you explain that a little bit?
Larry: There’s a radical difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. When Paul in Romans 7:6 (NIV) says, “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code” that grabbed me about eight or nine years ago. I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I began thinking about it. I thought, what is this new way that’s available because of Christ? And what I came to understand with the help of better thinkers than me is that the new covenant means at least four things and a whole lot more but at least four things. It means that I really do have a new purity. For example, when you’re in AA, nobody needs to stand up and say, “I’m George and I’m an alcoholic.” What you should say is, “I’m George, a beloved Christian who happens to struggle with alcohol.” There is also a new identity. That meant a whole lot to me because as a kid I had a problem with stuttering. I got over it in graduate school when I finally understood that I stuttered but that’s not central to me; that began my moving away from it. So, back to the four things of the new covenant. A new purity, a new identity, a new disposition. The new disposition of the new covenant is that I believe that in the core of my soul there’s an appetite for God that is stronger than an appetite for anything else. So counseling for me is nourishing that spiritual appetite. Hebrews 10:24 (NIV) says, “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds”. I think what that passage means is that when you and I talk, because you’re a Christian, I know that you have an appetite for God that’s stronger than anything else and conversation can actually nourish that appetite until it becomes functionally the ruling passion of your life. The last one is new power of the Holy Spirit.

EN: Can you explain New Way Ministries?
Larry: Let me explain it just briefly conceptionally and then organizationally. Conceptionally, everything I’ve said so far has to do with it. The central thing to me is that the most natural way for most of us to live when a problem comes up is that we feel that we need to figure out what we must do to solve our problem. The presupposition beneath that is if I get it right, life will work. If I raise my kids right, they’ll be godly. If I love my wife right, we’ll have a good marriage. If I exercise properly, I’ll be healthy, if I pray enough, I’ll have a good ministry. That’s a very linear thinking. A leads to B, and I don’t think that’s the way that God works at all. I think that’s the old way of the written code. The new way to live, the new way of the Spirit, is that no matter what happens, even things I can’t control, I can draw near God. Most Christians yawn when they hear that. And yet it’s often the most exciting opportunity of the world. A better hope is introduced by which we draw near to God. When I got cancer nine years ago my concern wasn’t what did I do to get cancer, rather it was how do I draw near God? Of course I’ll get the best surgeons I can get but the core issue is, can I draw near to God even in the middle of this? Even on more obvious levels, when I have disagreements with my wife, how do I get near God when I’m disappointed in my relationship? I want to see Christians talking to each other in ways that stir up the Spirit within us—that’s what I call “Soul Talk.” In order to work with that we, at New Way Ministries, have two major elements. Currently we have a weekend conference that I lead. I talk from 9-4:30pm. We move from how we are self-obsessed to God-obsessed. We help each other on that path. Then I offer a one-week school of spiritual direction where I take only 30 people and we spend a very intensive week concentrating on spiritual direction. We study spiritual direction but even more we learn deep things about ourselves and God that allow us to be drawn into communion with the Trinity.

EN: Do you have any conferences that directly target youth?
Larry: No, but I’d love to. Our thinking is certainly accessible to late teens and early twenties.

EN: What were you really excited about when you were young?
Larry: I was never a kind of kid that wondered how a radio worked and took it apart. To this day I’m anti-mechanical. I don’t like it. I don’t like doing it. I considered medical school and thought, “No, you need to know how things work.” But from the time I was little, mystery fascinated me. I remember as a 10-year-old kid I’d go out in the summer nights and I’d lie on the grass and look at the stars and I would say, “I don’t get it, what is going on?” The world is so much bigger than me going into the fourth grade. From the time I was little, that sort of mystery grabbed me. I think I’ve just been wired by God to have this incredible curiosity to wonder, “Why the heck do people behave the way they do?” When I first began counseling, I didn’t feel judgmental, I just felt curious, curious as to why people behaved the way they did. Why would a guy sexually like guys? Why would a girl not eat? Something is going on here. Even as a kid I could see that. I could see insecurities in my father. I could see my father, a very good man, a very strong man, but I could see his insecurities when he would awkwardly tell jokes to fit in. As a six-year-old kid I hated that. I thought, “Why are you doing that?” I like the mysteries of the soul, the mysteries of male and female. I mean, that’s a big deal to me. People are different. What’s it all about? I think from the time I was a kid I was curious about these kinds of things. Math, chemistry, I didn’t like it. I didn’t care about it. I liked literature. I still enjoy reading a lot. I went into journalism because I like words, I like to write. But I didn’t know what to do with a journalism major because I didn’t want to be a journalist. I remember by the end of my freshmen year I thought, hypnosis is interesting. So then I majored in psychology. After a B.S. in Psych I didn’t know what to do. I never thought ahead. Somebody said that you go to graduate school. So, I did. And I went to the University of Illinois. If I ever write my autobiography, I’m going to call it “Sovereign Stumbling”—I stumbled, God was sovereign. He led me to where He wanted me to go.

EN: What is one thing that you would still like to accomplish?
Larry: The thing I like the best is to teach the Bible. I’m just an old-fashioned Bible teacher. But I would love to think that before I die I would have six DVDs, half an hour each on every book of the Bible. It wouldn’t be a scholarly exegesis. It would be pulling nuggets out of each book and getting people to think about why God wanted to include this and what the implications are.

EN: Did you ever know that you would be famous?
Larry: I’m still surprised when people come up to me and say that they’ve read my book. I just don’t understand it. Because I know what I’m like and I think, wow, people actually read it? I never thought I’d be a writer. I like words but I never thought I’d be a writer. The way I started was when I was in Grad school. I gave up Christianity for about two years in grad school. And then when I came back, in my third or fourth year in grad school I wrote an article for myself. A friend of mine dared me to send it to Christianity Today and it got published. I got my first check for $60. I was very surprised.

EN: Do you have a group of supporters or encouragers?
Larry: My wife, Rachael, is my number one supporter. She’s a great encourager. I have a good friend from Canada who knows everything about me. We (Rachael and I) have a spiritual formation group. I’m the leader of the spiritual formation group but there are many times when I come to them and say that I’m not ready to lead. I’ve got nothing. And they’re there for me. As are several other close friends.

Posted: March 5, 2007
*This interview first appeared in Encounter Monthly Journal, May 2006