Sh*tty Minister’s Club with Lillian Daniel (#394)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Religion on the Mind

Episode: Sh*tty Minister’s Club with Lillian Daniel (#394)
Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest: Rev. Lillian Daniel
Date: April 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the professional and deeply personal journey of Rev. Lillian Daniel, focusing on her experience of being "defrocked" (removed from ministry) and her new book, Defrocked: Good News from a Bad Pastor for a Better Church. Through an honest, humorous, and unflinching conversation, Dan and Lillian examine the complexities of church accountability systems, the psychological and spiritual dynamics of ministry, and the lessons learned through failure and restoration. The dialogue moves from personal narrative to systemic critique, punctuated with wit and warmth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Lillian’s Background and Ministry Journey

• Early Obstacles to Ordination (05:00):
  Lillian describes being told she had “no gifts for parish ministry” by the Episcopal ordination process, prompting her to seek out other denominational paths.
• Finding the Right Church Fit (06:30):
  Her journey included a switch to the United Church of Christ (UCC), embracing its congregational model and independence.

  “Maybe you’re in the wrong church.” (Lillian Daniel, 06:37)

2. Path to Defrocking: The Ordeal Unpacked

• The Incident (13:00):
  Lillian received a registered letter alleging ministerial misconduct, revealing a long-past inappropriate relationship with a staff member, which set off a year-long, isolating removal from her ministry.
• On Self-Identification with Ministry (10:20, 31:00):
  Both Dan and Lillian candidly discuss the psychological drive to “save Christianity” and the unique pressures of clergy life.

  “I was under the delusion that it was my job to save Christianity.” (Lillian, 10:20)
  “It sounds like you think it’s your responsibility to save Christianity.” (Dan, relaying feedback from his therapist, 10:59)

3. Church Accountability & Abuse Systems

• Denominational Processes (16:55–18:50):
  Dan and Lillian compare structured denominational accountability (like the UCC’s) with the often ad hoc or absent processes of evangelical or “free market” churches.

  “There’s an inescapable quality that somebody who feels called by the creator of the universe experiences toward their job…” (Dan, 30:05)

• The Pendulum of Caution (18:20):
  Lillian notes that processes sometimes err on the side of hyper-vigilance—removing clergy even in the face of baseless accusations for the sake of safety and public trust.

4. The Lived Experience: Isolation, Shame, and Church Bureaucracy

• Silencing and Isolation (23:30–27:00):
  Lillian details the psychological and existential toll of the process: sudden social isolation, legalistic silencing, and the confusion of inconsistent committee procedures.

  “Often involves silencing and isolation for long periods of time. That was the piece of the story that was my sort of spiritual rock bottom, but also sort of rebirth…” (Lillian, 23:29)

• Lack of Process Transparency (22:43, 65:45):
  Not being able to explain herself resulted in rumors, misunderstandings, and surreal events (like receiving a “farewell scrapbook” via registered mail).

5. Boundaries, Burnout, and Ministerial Culture

• Over-identification and Boundary Erosion (40:33):
  Both speakers reflect on the dangers of making vocation a sole identity and the importance of pursuing activities (and communities) unrelated to their professional roles.

  "When you find yourself in your free time doing extra work that's related to your field...that's. That was me." (Lillian, 40:33)

• Ministry, Ego, and the Dinner Party Effect (31:34–37:29):
  The tendency for pastors and therapists to dominate social interactions is humorously dissected, underscoring the need for clergy to also be followers rather than constant leaders.

6. The Middle Path of Accountability

• Too Harsh, Too Lenient—And Getting it Right (69:23):
  The challenge of effective accountability is discussed, with Dan naming the perils of both witch hunts and superficial “restorations.” Both emphasize the need for processes that are neither punitive nor haphazard.

  "It should neither be a witch hunt nor should it be a superficial re-anointing in the spirit. Like, and so something in between has to happen." (Dan, 70:24)

7. Growth Through the “Sh*tty Minister’s Club”

• Peer Support and Institutional Ironies (74:16–82:21):
  Lillian finds solace and insight among other clergy who had, for various reasons, run afoul of church processes—her “Sh*tty Minister’s Club.” Through these informal networks, she learned about the unpredictability and human fallibility of church disciplinary systems.

  “Once you go through something like that, the other shady ministers find you and they tell you their experience.” (Lillian, 78:10)

8. Restoration and Doing Ministry Differently

• Transparency and the Role of Leadership (67:59–68:43):
  Returning to ministry in Iowa, Lillian’s new conference leader publicly shared her story with her new church, exemplifying what healthier disclosure can look like, and highlighting how process quality depends on leadership wisdom.
• Letting Go—Spiritual Rebirth (80:08):
  Rejecting institutional expectations and embracing anger, humor, and humility ultimately became the path to her “refrocking.”

  “It wasn’t until I stopped giving a frock that I got refrocked.” (Lillian, 80:58)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Institutional Fit:
  “Maybe you’re in the wrong church… That would cover a good 70% of what I have covered over hundreds of episodes.” (Dan & Lillian, 06:30–06:47)

• On Trying to Save Christianity:
  “I think for a moment there, I was suffering from grandiosity...that it was my job to save Christianity.” (Lillian, 10:20) “Dan, it sounds like you think it’s your responsibility to save Christianity.” (Dan’s classmate, 10:59)

• On Boundaries and Social Roles:
  “We get used to hearing the sound of our own voice … Never miss an opportunity to shut up. I wish more clergy and social workers and therapists and professors had heard that.” (Lillian, 35:38–37:29)

• On Shame, Guilt, and Growth:
  “My journey was over the last, like, decade to move from sort of secret shame to, like, more just, like, healthy guilt. … I should not have done that. And it caused harm to … waves of people that I didn’t think through. And that was selfish…” (Lillian, 48:53–50:06)

• On the ‘Club’ of Failed Clergy:
  “I decided, I called it the Shitty Ministers club. And it was like this secret society of people that you didn’t know about. And what I found out was like, once you go through something like that, the other shady ministers find you and they tell you their experience.” (Lillian, 78:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:38] — Welcome, reminiscing about past episodes
• [03:25] — Introduction of Lillian’s new book and story overview
• [05:00–06:47] — Early ministry setbacks and denominational fit
• [09:14–13:41] — The actual “defrocking” story begins
• [16:04–18:20] — Accountability structures in denominations
• [23:29–27:00] — Effects of isolation and legalistic processes
• [30:05–37:29] — Identity, boundaries, and job over-identification
• [44:04–54:00] — Shame, guilt, psycho-spiritual processing
• [61:34–66:39] — Surreal side-effects, communication breakdowns
• [67:59–68:43] — Restoration and leadership’s impact
• [74:16–82:21] — The “Shitty Minister’s Club,” peer support and lessons
• [80:58] — “It wasn't until I stopped giving a frock that I got refrocked.”

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Tone and Language

The tone is candid, witty, and self-reflective. Both Dan and Lillian approach heavy material with humor, sharing personal failings and epiphanies with vulnerability and a sense of camaraderie. Swearing and irreverence mix with theological and psychological insight, capturing the lived messiness of spiritual vocation.

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Summary Points for New Listeners

• The episode is an honest recounting of personal and institutional failure, and what it can teach us.
• Lillian’s story highlights the psychological dangers of clergy life: overidentification, grandiosity, and the fallout from boundary failures.
• The procedural inconsistencies and emotional costs of denominational discipline are sharply examined.
• Both host and guest emphasize the need for honest, restorative—not retributive—church processes.
• There’s space for humor, hope, and growth, even in the middle of pain and shame.
• The power of peer support (“the Shitty Minister’s Club”) is a key takeaway—no one is alone, even in failure.
• The episode is essential listening for anyone interested in ministry, church reform, spiritual harm, or the real-life complexities of religious leadership.

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Transcript

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[Dr. Dan Koch]

Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and I am here with really it's, it's been, it's been too long and I can't give a convincing reason why. Lillian, Daniel, welcome back Lillian.

[Lillian Daniel]

Good to be back with you.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Five years ago in May of 2021, one of the sort of all time popular episodes under you have permission. The old name like it remained kind of a top 10 top 15 out of 300 episode. We called it the most and least plausible Christian claims and that was a pre generation gap culture hour. Tony Jones joined you. You guys are lifelong besties and so it's great to have you back.

[Lillian Daniel]

That was a fun one. I remember that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That's a fun one. We got a lot of laughs in on that one if I recall correctly. And also it had some real heart to it. First of all, Tony now especially regular listeners know he's sort of taken the grumpus, you know, Persona that's like his role and to force him to talk about, you know, that it is really plausible that something really special is going on with Jesus of Nazareth. I just like making him like affirm some things that he really found valuable in the church. I know. Of course he does, but, you know, it's just. It's funny to force him to be that way.

[Lillian Daniel]

He came out and spoke to us in my new job here, so I'm in Michigan as a conference minister overseeing our churches out here in Michigan. But we had Tony come out and do a thing on his book, the God of Wild Places. It was great. Yeah, it was really fun.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, speaking of books, you have a book that is out in April. It's called Defrocked Good News from a Bad Pastor for a Better Church. And I think maybe the simplest way to say it is since you were last here five years ago, you have been through a bit of an ordeal.

[Lillian Daniel]

Well, so not so much five years ago, but I guess, you know, the. The book is a story about something that I experienced over 10 years ago.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Oh, okay. Yeah, I got the timeline. Okay.

[Lillian Daniel]

But. But it's one of those things, stories in life that you don't go around telling everybody about necessarily.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right, right.

[Lillian Daniel]

And so it's been something that I've. As a writer, I write about everything, and a lot of that doesn't deserve to be read by anybody. But I'm always, you know, journaling, writing, whatever. It's my form of prayer. So I had another book come out, like, since I went through that experience that wasn't about it, but I've been basically trying to figure out how to talk about that or whether it's worth talking about for the last 11 years.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, give us just, like the very basic Cliffs Notes of that story. You know, I'm not a. I'm not like a true crime podcast or like a, you know, kind of gossip heavy. Get into all the details, but what are the broad strokes of that story that we can then pull from?

[Lillian Daniel]

So I've been a minister pretty much, you know, my whole adult life, and one of those people who went to dentist school just a couple years out of college. I would have gone straight away, but I was turned down by the ordination people and told I had no gifts for ministry. I was initially in the Episcopal Church. I grew up overseas. And so my family, we went to Anglican churches overseas where they spoke English. And I came back to the States and I was a religion major in college. And I had, like, an inkling of a call, and I went back to the interim minister at my Episcopal Church in D.C. and said, I've applied to div. Schools. I think I might have some inkling of calls. But bear in mind, I'd never met a woman minister. You know, I was going on the hunch they existed. And anyway, long story short, they said, you've done everything wrong. You shouldn't have applied. You know, you have to go through a whole process, psychological testing, blah, blah, blah. And so I canceled going to school, entered into the process, and then they turned me down and said I had no gifts for parish industry whatsoever. She is ended up going to work for a nonprofit. There's people, the nonprofit who've been praying for me, a bunch of black Baptists, divinity students from Howard, and they were graduating from divinity school. And so they said, you know, we think you're meant to go to div school anyway. Obviously, I told them my whole story, and I said, but my church told me not to. I have no gifts for ministry. And they said, maybe you're in the wrong church. And that was the first, you know, I'd ever sort of thought about that. You know how it is when you grow up in one church? You think the whole world is that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean, honestly, the original you have permission podcast could have maybe just been titled maybe you're in the wrong church.

[Lillian Daniel]

Maybe you're in the wrong church. Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That would cover a good 70% of what I have covered over hundreds of episodes.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, absolutely. So eventually I discovered the ucc, the United Church Christ, or in my case, it was really historic Congregational churches in New England. You know, the people came over, the pilgrims and all that. And I sort of fell in love with that denomination. So I, unlike many of your guests or listeners, am not a former evangelical or fundamentalist. Yeah, you know, I've not experienced that. And, you know, in the Episcopal Church, I mean, we weren't, you know, exactly being. Having doctrine forced down us, other than sort of like key table manners and things like that. But the ucc,

[Dr. Dan Koch]

how to impress at a white shoe law firm. Job interview, but not penal substitutionary atonement.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, right. How to make lukewarm tea. How to cut the crust off the sandwiches. All the things you learn in the Episcopal Church. How to be wealthier than the average American Christian.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. How to move in elite circles, but not so much worried about.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Atonement.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So, I mean, I'm joking. I literally, I am an Episcopal attendee now, so that I'm. I'm. I'm ribbing my own here.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yes, I love it. I love the Episcopal Church too. I was really happy as a member of the Episcopal Church. Looking back, I think I would not have made a great Episcopal Minister because it is a very hierarchical system and I love the independence of the system I'm in. But as I said, this will get to this topic of the book. So I become a minister, I serve various churches, I become an author, I write books about why people should go to church. I write books about this, you know, when Spiritual but Not Religious Is Not Enough. Or the book that came out most recently. Tired of apologizing for a church I don't Belong to, which could have been called maybe youe're in the Wrong Church. Right, yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And yeah, there we go. This should just be a section at Barnes and Noble, just a little mini section. Maybe you're in the wrong church. Send people straight there. Okay, okay.

[Lillian Daniel]

Right next to the bigger section, which is maybe you're really special in your religious beliefs. Terminally unique.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, no, the much larger section is, lo and behold, you were born into exactly the right church. That's 80% of the books. And then 20% could be maybe you're at the wrong church.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, no. So anyway, so I, I'm in the ucc. I have this, you know, kind of successful on paper, on, on appearance level, career in the ministry, but also I think spiritually and deeply meaningful edifying experience as a pastor. And, and then it's. I've been in there like 20 years or so and at that point I'm in a large suburban church in Chicago and it's a multi staff church, kind of your tall steeple church, if you will. And I had been there for 10 years and I had gone through a divorce, sadly. So it was just going through the things of life, becoming an empty nester, all the things. Owning a home I could no longer afford. You know, four blocks down the street from the church that kind of functioned like a parsonage. And I was writing these, these books that were doing. While I was being invited to speak. I think for a moment there I was suffering from grandiosity. Many moments, including I was under sort of the delusion that it was my job to save Christianity.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, really quick. I don't know, you must have never heard me say this. I don't know how you would have, but I literally had. I've told this story a few times, I'll keep it brief, but in grad school for psychology, one of the evenings in class we were supposed to do like a mock little mini session with each other. And I asked my classmate Alexia, I was like, hey, can I just like tell you what's really going on? And like, whatever. She's like, sure, So I just sort of spilled, you know, 15 minutes or whatever of stuff. And she comes back with me. Dan. I was podcasting at this time. She says, dan, it sounds like you think it's your responsibility to save Christianity.

[Lillian Daniel]

Oh, my gosh. I didn't know that that was your job, too. It's just me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Who knew. If only we had been able to be synergistic. We were at cross purposes, Lillian.

[Lillian Daniel]

Somebody else was on it. I could have relaxed and not gone down my type a rabbit hole. Midlife crisis. Like, if I'd known you were going to do that for me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

If you knew that I was going to take the baton from you and just sort of ease your life. Let the men handle this, Lillian. We've got it, you know.

[Lillian Daniel]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, let the deconstructing, like, wounded whatever you are, handle it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

How are you the one narcissistic, wounded, deconstructing white men handle it? But that was like a major.

[Lillian Daniel]

I wasn't even my job. I wasn't even injured.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That was a huge moment for me. That was, like, massive freedom came from that. It's just funny that it's just literally the same wording that you use.

[Lillian Daniel]

That is hilarious. That is hilarious. No, I mean, I think I was trying to balance it all and all the things. Anyway, it was kind of like professional and vocational crisis waiting to happen. So it's Palm Sunday, what, 12 years ago, and I've got this beautiful house four blocks away from my church in this kind of affluent suburb. Too expensive a house. It's now, like, half empty of furniture, because if you go through a divorce, that's what happens. And I've got this mom's group, small group meeting at my house, and we had started small group ministries in the church, and this one met at my house. And they were mostly like younger moms who maybe had some flexibility around time or work or whatnot. And, you know, my kids were launched by then, and so that was not the stage I was at. But anyway, this group was. Had become very dear to me. And you know how you share things in small groups. And they would just come into the house and make coffee and take it over. And that's how my house functioned, like a parsonage, you know. And at the end of this very beautiful meeting, a registered letter was delivered to my house, and I signed for it and said, I'll read this after they go. So when they left, I opened it, and I had charges brought against me for misconduct as a minister. And my heart stopped and I trying to decipher this letter and it was outlining this sort of very mysterious process I was about to go into. And it would end up going on for about a year of not being a minister, you know, essentially being defrocked or on the way out. And then after that, you know, I came back from it. Right. But it was a thing that had happened to me and I thought, what do I do with this experience?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. So I want to briefly do the sort of spiritual abuse angle here because I think where it is most interesting is actually at this point in the story, this sort of very basic point, which is, you know, just. Just to refresh your memory, Lillian, that's my. That's my research area. I've developed a scale for measuring spiritual harm and abuse and, and common side effects or symptoms from it. And a lot of denominations, a lot of Christian churches in the merit in America and worldwide have no such process. Like, there wouldn't be no letter, right? There would not be a registered letter from the denominational headquarters. It would just be like either the somebody who, like whoever happens to have power at like your non denominational church, like that might be the board of elders. It might just be you, the head pastor. And so maybe you don't have to do shit about it. You know, you receive the complaints and throw the complaints in the trash yourself. Like, there's all kinds of these versions and I wish I sort of knew by the numbers because, you know, Southern Baptist Convention is a massive denomination that has some processes for things like this, but there are tons of less regulated denominations. And one of the sort of sticky things with spiritual abuse is that in a lot of religious settings there's just sort of no recourse. The way that there is, if your doctor fucks up, you can sue them for malpractice. If I fuck up as your therapist, you can submit a complaint to the ethics board and I can have my license looked at. Like in a lot of these cases, there are things. In your case, in that denomination, there was a process by which this could happen. But before we sort of get into that process, I just am thinking about all the times where there is no such process and essentially whatever accountability leadership feels like they'd like to give or feel sufficiently pressured to give. So I know that you didn't have that experience on the other end and you weren't raised in those kinds of church environments that had that. So that's probably not so much your circles and experience within American Christianity, but it is kind of where my mind first Went just having studied spiritual abuse, I want to get your take on that.

[Lillian Daniel]

And actually, no, I think don't assume that mainline Christian denominations are that different. I think Christianity, at least in this country and North America, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth in terms of how we handle things like this. And the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Right. Was so massive. And what we all learned from that was the terrible wrong that was done by a denomination that has structure for this. Right, right. But that there were times where they would simply move a guy around or take somebody who is a danger to vulnerable people and move them somewhere else since we've been under the rug, even while they did have processes, probably where they were dealing with people in. In better ways than that. Of course.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

But the Catholic scandal was not just a Catholic scandal, as you well know. And I always want to point that out that Protestants have their stories too, including Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans. It's not just the cry and televangelist, you know, or the guy getting caught in the men's room, you know. You know, there's cases everywhere. So we all swing back and forth with a pendulum. So now you've. I think we've seen, for example, the Catholic Church try to do better on this and have processes and procedures. Right. So in our denomination, I know we were guilty in the past of moving guys around. And I say guys because it was mostly guys who were the clergy at that time. Right. So my denomination, the United Church Price, which is similar to Presbyterian or others in that we're not hierarchical, like, we don't have a strong bishop role who can move clergy around. And we're similar to other denominations like that. That's sort of a free market system with restraints and paperwork and all that. But in our tradition that correction work is done by a committee. And that's actually the case now with most church structures, I think in this country is it's kind of a combination of you might have denominational staff and then you'd have a. Probably some kind of committee that's made up of volunteers who are clergy and members of churches.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.

[Lillian Daniel]

And who have come on to do. And at the moment I went through what I went through, I think the pendulum had corrected to the far end of caution. And so what they would do is say if this charge is true, you know, could this person be a danger to people in the church? If so, guilty or innocent, like, we will pull you out so that we're not recreating the abuses of the past.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.

[Lillian Daniel]

And so There, there was a hyper vigilance in that time. And it was a vigilance that I intellectually and personally agreed with. You know, I understood it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

So. Yeah, yeah. So there's structure. Right. But it's still. It's generally boils down to it's a bunch of volunteers trying to make a

[Dr. Dan Koch]

decision that makes perfect sense to me. And that's probably what mostly happens in individual cases. My mind goes to though, a guy like Mark Driscoll who, because he was unaffiliated with any particular denomination, he, you know, his church explodes. He sort of like becomes infamous, you know, plagiarism scandal, like workplace scandals, reports of him earning half a million to a million dollars a year. And then, you know, he just sort of moves to Arizona and starts another one. And like, it's smaller for a while and maybe it's still smaller, but now he's figured out, oh, I can be like a MAGA guy. It's not just that he doesn't have a denominational affiliation. It's also that people who like him probably don't care whether or not he has a denominational affiliation, that like, there's just no analog to what you went through or a licensure board or anything like that. And he. The only real check on his power is like sort of democratic. It's just like people refusing to go. But one thing we know now is like, you know, the fastest way to get famous in America really is to become like a shit poster of one sort or another and just rile people up. And you can get quite famous quite quickly if you're a good communicator anyway, that just to say like, yes, that makes sense at the. More the local micro level that the actual people going through these things are usually local volunteers or maybe like, yeah, deacons or elders or some sort of vestry group. But like there are also these larger currents around celebrity and stuff that are not as relevant to your case.

[Lillian Daniel]

Well, but they function still. Like these things still function. Right. And so his case is interesting. I mean, in many ways, like what was his misconduct? It's was kind of being an. Right, yeah. You know, it, it's not quite as like delineated like you, you did this. But I think that's an unfolding area of exploration and I think there are things that one can do that make you an asshole in the ministry that don't necessarily mean you should be thrown in jail or never allowed to preach to other who relate to you and think you're great.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, that's Right. I mean, there was the quarter million dollars in church funds for New York Times, but I mean, there's a couple things that were more tangible and, like, specific plagiarism stuff. But. But, yeah, he didn't. As far as we know, he didn't, like, sleep with congregants or there wasn't, like, a big sort of sex scandal type of a thing. He's just. Yeah, he's just like a real asshole of a dude who, you know, sounds like he's maybe was extremely hurt as a kid and has not healed and is sort of, you know, jumping around and so. Okay. But I. Yeah. Okay. So back. Okay, so back to your. I don't want to give too. I don't want to give too many minutes of this episode to Driscoll. So back to your story. So, you know, I. I know we don't. You don't spend. You don't do a lot of detail on the actual, like, what actually happened between you and the other person. Can you give us just, like, the. The headline there so that we have some sense of what we're talking about?

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, And. And thank you for prefacing that. So I don't say a lot about it, not because I'm not willing to face up to what I did, but just because they're places where my story intersects with other people's story.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Totally. Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

But basically, the letter, you know, and the gist of it that I realized, or the thing that I thought, oh, no, I know what I did wrong was that like a year and a half before getting the letter, I had had an inappropriate relationship with somebody, and it was somebody who had been on our staff, and I was the head of staff.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

That's just wrong. You know, at many levels now that it was something that had happened, like, a year and a half ago. Big mistake. File it away under things you never thought you would be stupid enough to do.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And then you.

[Lillian Daniel]

You do and. And immediately knew it was problematic. You know, I was like, okay, hold me kind of. I can't do that again.

[Commercial Announcer]

Right.

[Lillian Daniel]

And I thought that was over and past and. But it had come up. Right. So then I get this letter, and it's literally right before Palm Sunday. And so the letter says, we're pulling you out of the church, because, remember, I talked about the pendulum swing. So the idea there would be, like, if I were a predator, then there was going to be 10 people coming forward from this church. That would give them the opportunity. You would tell the church, we pull Lillian out. If anybody's you know, got anything they want to tell us? And so in my mind I thought, okay, it'll be a couple weeks, but then I'll get to come back and have a conversation. And maybe the conversation is, I'm so sorry I broke your trust and I understand that I should leave. But, you know, I imagined that I would get back and talk to the church. And what's interesting about this story is that I never got to. Because when you do have systems in place around this, a lot of our systems are highly legalistic and often involves silencing and isolation for long periods of time. And that was the piece of the story that like was my sort of spiritual rock bottom, but also sort of rebirth was to suddenly be not only just without a job and without a sort of grown up career role, right. But one in which, like my life was so infinite, confused. And you know, I didn't have the good boundaries. Like, my house functioned like an extension of the church and I had meetings there and you know, all the things. And then to suddenly be cut off from that. And I thought, okay, it'll be a couple few weeks, but then we'll get to do that work. And what happens is you go into a process where, because it is run by volunteers or just human beings, right? They're, they're inconsistent. It's unclear. And so the result was I was just alone and I was in fear of reaching out to people. And when I did, if it got back to the powers that be, that was sort of used against you. And so when you are in an employee, right. Of the church, there's no labor laws for church workers. And so, you know, yeah, if somebody can get people to listen to them in a religious organization, like that can be a thing.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But.

[Lillian Daniel]

And you know, everybody, like a lot of people have said who've later heard this race, you know, why do you get a lawyer? Why didn't you? It doesn't matter. Like, I was trying to be a part of this particular body of Christ and they hold the rule book and the cards. And so I had to participate in that process. And the process was a very strange one. So, you know, and so there were times where I thought, I don't understand the process, all kinds of things along the way. And the bigger story, right, is not really like, I'm not trying to write about the process per se, but more like what happened to me as a human being who preached the gospel was trying to save Christianity. And yet, you know, I had a life that was overly involved with my work. And my identity was overly involved in it.

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[Lillian Daniel]

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[Lillian Daniel]

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[Dr. Dan Koch]

So you mentioned boundaries and yeah, being kind of overly identified with the work. I mean so let's start with over identification with the work. And this actually has come up in my sort of psychology of religion research myself and in stuff that I find interesting in other people's research is that there is a kind of a, there's an inescapable quality that somebody who feels called by the creator of the universe experiences toward their job, their day job that most people don't experience. Like that, that is a, that is a psychologically unique aspect of a ministry professional. You know, like I, I, I have a version of that as a therapist, but it's more vague. You know, it's more like really, it's more like I feel like doing therapy and working in psychology is probably the best, but just at minimum a very good way of me to go about loving my neighbor in a way and sort of helping in a way that I feel kind of particularly called to do. But it's not the same as like I feel called to preach in this pulpit and to interpret the word of God for people. Right. It's different. It's an order of magnitude lower intensity than I would imagine most ministers feel to just because of, it's kind of tied in.

[Lillian Daniel]

Well for a long time like when I was getting trained as a minister, people were using the metaphor of the therapist to match ministry, which I think is stupid by the way. I think it's not a helpful metaphor because we're not a psychologist. We meet with a lot more than, you know, six people in a day. Right. Like we, we have a public role. It's almost like you could mix in a counselor role with like a principal of a high school, you know, it's that public element where people bring their projections to and their feelings, you know. And so like the church I was in, you know, it was like a 1400 member church in a town with 20,000 people. So chances are that like 1 out of 17 people on the street went to my church, you know, it's that kind of thing. And I had sort of a public role outside of that. So yeah, there's, there's all that stuff. But also, I think it's not that different. We, we all have the noble part of our calling, whatever it is. Like I want to be a counselor, you know, for this reason. And then we have the part that like needs to pay the bills or has a prurient interest in weird stories or whatever. Our thing is, you know, we bring some nonsense to it also. And I think one of the things I look back on and see is, and I always notice this in people, is people who play a leadership role in their work life, like, should always have opportunities to be part of things where they're not in a leadership role or, you know, where there's more reciprocality or even that they're on the receiving end. And you see this though, with a lot of clergy. And I would say actually with a lot of shrinks, too often, like at a dinner party or a social event, they can't stay out of their own career Persona. And all of a sudden like, you know, the conversation, the dinner party, even if everyone else comes from a different place, is going to end up being about the shrinks work or the minister's work.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Like, I'm sorry, Lillian, we're out of time. We gotta hitting too close to home. We gotta wrap this up. Oh, right, no, yeah. I mean, well, okay, so first of all, I hardcore identify with that. And that's like, really, it's good for me to hear you kind of mention that. I will say there's an interesting thing about having gotten a doctorate as opposed to a master's, not in terms of clinical skill, but in terms of public perception. And that is something that they kind of prepared us for in grad school was like, look, it's like what, 1% or something of 1.6% of the American population has a doctorate of some sort. And the one that you're gonna have is one in an area that most people have some kind of interest or stake in, you know, and what is yours in Psychology. It's in counseling psychology. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Just meaning like, you know, people are interested in that, they find it relevant. It's not dissimilar to being a medical doctor in that sense. But medicine is like, it's a bit more siloed, I think from like dinner party conversation. Right. For instance. So there is like this weird balance that I am. I'm also very new to actually having the doctorate, having been conferred like six months ago. But like there is a weird balance there where it's like you both want to take that seriously. Because, you know, if I am walking around town and like I live in a smaller city now and like, or even just in some sort of public forum where I do feel some sort of need to be like, to be able to turn on that professionalism if it is in service of something.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, quit doing that, Dan. It's not healthy. Check yourself.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean, no, I just mean like there's a way of taking the mantle seriously, I guess is what I'm trying to say that I think is good. And then there's a self important version of it which you were getting at,

[Lillian Daniel]

which is not good or it's just like sloppiness. Right. So I believe that I'm kind of a Calvinist theologically. Like I, I have no trouble believing in original sin because like have you met a toddler? You know, I get it, right. I think we have a selfishness capacity within ourselves and we are sort of self serving creatures capable of incredible beautiful goodness and sacrificial love and all things. But I think those of us in the quote unquote helping professions or things like that, where people might actually be interested at a dinner party, like if you're a roofer, people ask you a few questions, but like it's, you know, they're going to ask you questions like as a counselor or whatnot. And I just, I think we, we get used to hearing the sound of our own voice or the fact that people like pay to listen to you and pay 100% and we forget like how weird we are then socially and you know, we're just used to holding forth. And it's like when I lived in Iowa, it's like I learned this. They'd always used to say, like, never miss an opportunity to shut up. I wish more clergy and social workers and therapists and professors at horse. Oh my gosh, professors. You know, somebody asked them one question and they go on for 45 minutes and it's like, please, they were just being polite to you. But There is that like you just exist in a weird world and if. Then you work in that world where you have this strange interaction with people that's freighted and then you're busy or you don't have time to go out and be a participant where you're not in charge, you just get weird and then the society plays into it because they do want to ask you about Hannibal Lecter or their. Their cousin who's on the treadmill naked at 3am what do you think of that, doctor? You know, it's. You're going to get those questions.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. And so that does bring us back to boundaries in a way. And I think like one thing that I notice is having grown up and maybe in my younger years felt more of a casual. Like I'm thinking about when I was in the band in my 20s. So I have a very casual job. It is a high profile job amongst my circles. Right.

[Lillian Daniel]

It's like you got paid for being in the band.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I did it full time for seven years. I didn't save any money in that time. No.

[Lillian Daniel]

But I mean that's.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I came out with like 2,500 bucks in my bank at the end of it. Yeah, I bought my wife a ring and that was a wrap. But like I did do it for a living. And you know, in my 20s, amongst the type of people that I was friends with, which were all people who had been in bands that was like very prestigious, but it was casual and it was like very flexible hours other than your set time. And so I got used to being available for people kind of in the way that pastors are available to people and the way that I saw my dad be available to people. He was a therapist and really I think some of my worst habits around this stuff I can draw directly to him.

[Lillian Daniel]

So your dad was a minister or a therapist?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, a therapist, yeah. For like 40 years. Yeah. And I didn't follow in his footsteps. I didn't even go to grad school till my mid-30s. I had not thought I would do that. But I did end up following in his footsteps and I do think a lot about where I've seen flaws in him and where I see them in myself. And I think that I have a bit more perspective than him on this. But that he really preferred, has always preferred to be the authority in the room. And I recognize that in myself. Absolutely. But where it gets a little tricky is the professionalism of it, especially with the doctorate. It's like I am also a little uncomfortable with how much money I charge. And so it's like part of it is like, I want to also make whatever I happen to know sort of available to people. And I actually think, speaking of boundaries, doing the podcast is actually a very good boundaried way of doing that. Here I am speaking to people. This is free. You can listen to it if you want. And you know, some of them are a little bit, you know, you pay six bucks a month or whatever if you want all the stuff, but that's still much, much cheaper than therapy and that, you know, it pays editing and stuff like that. But like, it's the in person stuff that is squishier, actually. But I notice, like, yeah, I have that pull toward being like maximally conversationally available. And so I wanted to get to boundaries with your story. Like, what's your version of that? You said I didn't have good boundaries. Can you flesh that out a little bit in the broad strokes, not with respect to this particular complaint, but just that overall.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. So when you find yourself in your free time doing extra work that's related to your field of work, which I kind of heard you just describe. Right. That's. That was me. So when people said, like, what are your hobbies? You know, it was writing books about Christianity or, you know, what do you do with your time off as a pastor? Right. Well, it was a big church. It was growing. We were growing in staff, you know, and I was getting all these invitations. The classic thing is like, if you say yes to something, what are you going to say no to? I didn't do that. I just kept saying yes as if it was magical thinking. And I was like, I'll do the speaking engagements on my vacation time. I don't want my church to feel like writing this book has taken me away from them. But I am trying to save Christianity because I didn't know Dan was on it and, you know, all the things. Right. And so what do you do for your hobby? Right. So I used to, as we have talked about, I used to play in a band also and came out of the DC post punk scene and.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Which is just the absolute coolest thing about you, I'm sorry to say. I like everything else that you've done, but thank you. That is just for me. For my little punk rocker, California Kid Heart. The fact that you are open for Fugazi is like, that's it. That's just number one.

[Lillian Daniel]

We open for Fugazi. We all flew for you.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

There's nothing you can say today that will be more impressive to Me than that.

[Lillian Daniel]

So now, yeah, all the listeners are like, oh, please tell us the name of the band. Oh, why? Because our music is coming out on Spotify. No. So the band was called Geek, but in the band, the point is. This has a point. In the band, I played the bass. This was before going to Da Vinci school. So I ended up. Our band broke up because I went to dip school, which is a great punk rock story. But so I played the bass in the band and I loved that role. And sometimes I would write a song, sometimes I would sing it. But I loved the role of the. The bass player, that supporting role. It was fun. It just like did my heart good. Right. And I think of the lead singer role. Judy who, she was so, so perfect for that role. Right. I think when you are a minister or a senior minister, you have the lead singer role.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right?

[Lillian Daniel]

Right. And I think inside me there's somebody who really wants to be the bass player. So that was a piece of. It was like my life as an introvert was played on a stage that rewards being an extrovert, being the lead singer, being out, you know, and so. And writing was like my spiritual discipline, if you will. But I'm writing about the church I'm writing about, you know, so it's like too much having to do with. With that. And then, you know, when you have a family or kids or whatever, that can help. But again, this is classic. My kids were going out of the house. So then you look around, you say, what is my life like? What do I have going on? And then you go through divorce. How am I going to meet people? Like, what's going to. Maybe I'll just work all the time. Oh, great. Now I've screwed up and had a relationship in the workplace, you know, it's. It's not. I wish it were a deeper and more unusual story, but I was just stupid, you know, And I wasn't doing the things that I. If you'd asked me to give advice about somebody else, I would have said the right things.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, that's something that I have become very interested in and probably proportionally interested in it as my own sort of clinical work sort of not solidifies, but comes into clearer focus. I sort of have my ways of thinking about problems across different clients and I have my kind of ways of thinking about what healing looks like. And, you know, I'm coming out of the more educational phase of this and into the like, sort of proper career phase of it where my own approach is taking shape. And. And so it's funny because to the extent that my sort of advice, you know, I don't give a lot of straightforward advice. That's not very good therapeutic work. But my conceptualization.

[Lillian Daniel]

I always wish therapists would give you more straightforward advice.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, the reason that we don't is that it kind of doesn't work. Like we would if it. Believe me, Lillian, oh, we fucking would. If we thought it would work, it would be much easier for us, too. But it doesn't work.

[Lillian Daniel]

I went back to my therapist, by the way, and I said, like, hey, back when I screwed up, like, why didn't you come down on me like a ton of bricks? Because of course, I went to my therapist and said what I'd done, you know, and she, like, I was like, I don't remember you acting like this was as problematic as you should have or whatever. And she said something to that effect, which I think is kind of a CYA response. But, you know, she was a great therapist and is a great therapist. No, what she said, I want to give her voice here. She said, we are trained to kind of understand what you are available to hear at the time.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So that's one way of describing it, is that our job is to make some sort of tentative. Come to some tentative conclusions about where our client is. I think the more the sort of arguably or supposedly kind of safer overall approach is to just whenever possible, sort of lead your, you know, lead the horse to water, but only. But don't try and make it drink. You know, kind of a thing like asking questions. That as much as possible, the client is doing their own reasoning because that will just make that reasoning stick better.

[Lillian Daniel]

That's very Rogerian. That's very like Carl Rogers.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

It is very Carl Rogers. I mean, I think that almost all therapists have been sort of these days, like, almost all the training approaches would

[Lillian Daniel]

include something like that, which is like the reflective listening. You know, like, you sound angry.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Although I'm talking more about Socratic questioning, where you're like, you're asking questions, but the client is making the connections. So, like, for instance, I might think, oh, there's a real strong correlation between what you just said and what you accused your mom of last session. And so I could just say that, but it would be better for me to be like, do you see any connections between this thing and the thing we talked about with your mom last week? And then, like, see if they will make the connection, because if they will make it, then it will stick better.

[Lillian Daniel]

Right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But that's not Quite the same as, like, what you're talking about, where if a real ethical or moral failure has occurred, I think that therapists these days, speaking of pendulums, probably swing too far away from calling that out, with the caveat being that it would be something that you are fairly confident would fit within your client's own values. You're not imposing your values, but even your client's values. And one reason I feel especially drawn to existential therapy is that it brings some of those teeth back, and it does so by asking hard questions about reality.

[Lillian Daniel]

Like, what's an existential therapy question? Give me an example.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Something like, you know, maybe with regard to your trying to do everything, you know, so this is pre inappropriate relationship, a question might be something like, is it possible to do all the things that you just described? Yeah, you know, like. And then you could say, yes, but I'm getting you to think about it, you know, like, is that. Are there enough hours in the week for what you've been describing to me?

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Or, you know, later on, you know, you could ask, like, is there something that you need to take responsibility for that you're not taking responsibility for? Yeah, those kinds of topics and routes, I think, kind of bring some of those teeth back from maybe a bit of a swing too far. I'm getting very kind of inside baseball.

[Lillian Daniel]

I had to hear, though, that there's therapists who would say that, like, I. I like that because, yeah, I think, you know, what we hear so much about now is like, oh, shame is so terrible. And, you know, every. You should be vulnerable. And then whatever your vulnerability is, should be celebrated and loved on and, you know, all the things. And I, for me, like, part of my journey with this was. Was wrapping my head around the things that I had done wrong and that I should feel ashamed of. And, you know, I know that illogical shame, you know, that shame that just weighs you down and goes nowhere. You know, like, I'm all for that. That's not good. But, like, a reaction to your own life and your own behavior where you're like, oh, I should have done that. And in some ways, my journey was over the last, like, decade was to move from sort of secret shame to, like, more just, like, healthy guilt. Like, yeah, that's something I was guilty of. Like, I should not have done that. And it caused harm to. In sort of waves of people that I. I didn't think through. And that was selfish. You know, that was wrong.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Most therapists today would. Would be able to delineate between shame, which is you know, about your whole self versus guilt, which is about particular choices or actions in practice. I do think it's hard to hold your client's feet to the fire at all around guilt, and in some ways goes against some of the impulse. Even sort of like, personality types of people who are nurturing and want to become therapists. And, like, if I were in charge of a training program, I would probably, like, make sure we're emphasizing that. The other thing, though, that I think is less clear to the general public is that it is important to go beyond the guilt and to understand the mechanics. So, like, when I was kind of doing something like that, when I asked you about the boundaries, like, in what way did you not have boundaries? Because if you understand what was going on, what needs were being met, where it's much, much easier to not do it again. And so you do want that healthy guilt. You want adequate, accurate guilt that is proportional to what you did, but you don't want to be so overcome by that that you can't pull out the blueprint and rewrite it for the future.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. And you don't want the world to define you as the worst thing you did, and you don't want to define yourself that way. And I think there is a way in which, like, people like to latch onto things, you know, but. But one of the learnings for me when I went through my thing was, you know, we all have that stuff that we wake up in the middle of the night and we're afraid, like, if this happened to me, I couldn't go on. And I don't know, it might be like, if. If my person left me or if I lost my job or if. Yeah, you know, this happened or that happened. And so I end up, like, it wasn't that I hadn't suffered before I went through this. I. I had. You know, I'm an only child. I lost my parents young. You know, I'd gone through stuff. Right. But at that particular moment, it was like the role, right, of this vocation, this calling, and also to be a rare woman leading large churches and having a role in the public religious discourse that was different from other Christian women writers. You know, I mean, I've always come at it, right, from a leadership perspective. It's not, you know, so then to think, like, yeah, if I. If I lost that, but also that grandiose sense of I'm carrying this role for, like, everybody else because of the prejudices and the sexism in the system. You know, like, I've got to work Harder. I've got to be better. My kids, you know, have to show their extra love, you know, to show that this didn't take a toll. Like, you know, there's that stuff.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean, is this what people describe as the, like, lean in, like, you can have it all moment in sort of women's leadership and stuff? Or is this. Is this aligning with that period of American culture that's possible.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. I don't know. I didn't read that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I think of that as like kind of 2000s. Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

So this. Yeah, this would have been, you know, much later than that. But in some ways, though, in interesting ways, like, my story presses up against me, too. So that was part of the cultural ethos also, was like to take these. These things very seriously. Or more seriously. Right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Believe victims, these kinds of way, like catching stuff. Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

And it is interesting that the way a lot of denominations today do handle these cases is there's some committee. Right. And there is a sense that, like, ministers know each other and within denominations, you know, we have connection. So when one of your own messes up, it's hard to be objective about that person. Right, sure. But Dan's great guy and, yeah, he's a great doctor. He's helped. And so what they do often is there's some version of this where somebody writes up what they call a blind case study or something like this where they say they change the genders and the names and all that, and they say, here's the complaint. Person A said this about person B, and if this happened, would this person be a dangerous written. I believe that in my case, nobody could have imagined hearing that case study, who it was on the other side of it. I think there was. And the power dynamics associated with that. And so then all of a sudden you're being pulled out like Harvey Weinstein or that's kind of heaven forbid that's what's going on here. Right. But. But then it was like it didn't correct itself. There was no moment where it's like, okay, now that we know you're not a serial predator, how are we going to deal with you? Because what happens is these various committees and stuff, they're all sort of learning as they go, because pray to God they don't have to do a million of these all the time. And so it's often the same committee that deals with ordination and who should get ordained and who shouldn't. And so the rules change, the membership changes. In my own experience, I had multiple meetings with these committees where it'd be a different cast of characters each time and they would have different agendas and they would want to prosecute things in a different way. And these were the safeguards that were built in so that it would force you to deal with things. And also, I think we haven't figured out how to do this yet.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, I mean, I can't help but think about our mutual friend Tony Jones, who was doxxed and had psychiatric reports leaked as part of this kind of activist group on behalf of his ex wife. And we've talked about that a little bit on the podcast. I don't know how we don't go into the details very often, but what was really helpful for me, like, so when I first met Tony and liked him and wanted to bring him on the pod, I was aware that there had been this controversy. And so I was like, well, it's my job to do some due diligence on that. And for a while it was like hard to get my mind around it. And I was like, okay, well on what basis do I adjudicate this and everything? What was convenient for me and Tony for me, and then in general was I was able to actually read the psychological report because I was in grad school and was doing sort of like mock assessments like this one. And I was actually able to see immediately that the person who had posted it misinterpreted it in a major way and then described, oh, this says Tony has an Axis 2 personality disorder, which is not what it had said. And that's terms that are not used anymore. And so that was in part why it was easy to spot that for me. But that wouldn't be obvious for any just good intentioned reader. The second thing was that they had gone through divorce court in Minnesota and the judge had seen all the data, in fact, more data than I was gonna see. And that judge had granted Tony full custody of the kids. And I knew enough to know that dads don't get full custody very often, no matter what state it is. Moms get full custody much more often than dads. There's generally a, a bias towards motherhood for, again, like intellectually reasons I totally understand. And then I was able to go, oh, okay, all right, so I can, I'm good, I can move on here. But how often is there not something like that that is like so firm? Like, that's a fairly concrete finding on which I could say this is enough for me, you know.

[Lillian Daniel]

But what's interesting is that, you know, there's other people out there who could read the same document or get that information. And that wasn't enough for them totally. Because, you know, once something like this starts for a person, there are ways in which then, like, okay, if you're on trial for being a bad person, sort of in whatever terms, right?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

Then we're going to analyze everything and then anybody who ever has had a beef with you or any meeting where you lost your temper and didn't behave like a kind person or whatever, you know, like. But also what happens is you are under this incredible stress of going through some kind of a process, Right. Whether it's a public one or a structured one or whatever, that you then respond like the human being you are, which for most of us is to freak out and go to whatever place we go to and stress. And then there's at least, I think in church processes, there becomes a moment where you're on trial for how you are dealing with being on trial.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yes.

[Lillian Daniel]

And that was the piece of this that I did not excel at. I sort of trusted the process. I thought at some point it's going to make sense. And then if it didn't, and I was isolated and I wasn't able. So in my case, they actually told me I wasn't allowed to talk to anybody in the church while this was going on. Which makes sense, you know, for a while. Right. Or the person who brought the concern or any of my staff and stuff. But it was also, they told me I couldn't speak to other clergy and I couldn't do any writing or speaking on any topic because they said you are under a process of where you're reviewing whether you're fit to be a minister. And everything you write and do in some ways relates to the church. So by writing and doing anything, you are breaking the rules of your suspension we put you under. Which I actually think that's very unfair to tell anybody. As part of a process, you cannot speak or write. Right. But they held the cards and I could have walked away. Nobody was going to put me in jail. Right. But. But instead, like, I think what I did was I stayed in the process, but I reacted against it. And then there's also a sense that when you're working with volunteers and stuff and different people are coming in and out, you're kind of retried. So I went through that experience too, and I got like re defrocked again, you know, because people didn't like my attitude at a certain point. And I look back and think, yeah, I was hostile toward the process after a While. Because I was separated from the body of Christ for the first time in my life. And some of it was just sheer loneliness and paranoia and fear. And the few people I could talk to, I was afraid they'd rat me out because some of them at the beginning did say, oh, they must have, you know, because the committee said, oh, we heard you email to me. So, you know. And these, like, looking back, are normal responses to stress.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

But it gets really strange, especially when you live next door to the church.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. That's a weird sort of geographical angle to it, too, that, like, you're right there, literally. Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

And looking back, like, I wish I had just gotten out of town, but I kept thinking the process was not going to keep going on. And I did think that at some point there would be a reconciliation whether I stayed the minister or not. That wasn't the question, but just some. And so I didn't want it to look like I'm going on a vacation. Totally, you know, during this. Right. But at the same time, what I did was I sort of put myself in house arrest. And then your mind really gets weird. And, you know, the church had. One of the things I was a great champion of always at my churches was getting our sermons and worship services online way before other people were doing it. So we had this incredible system set up, unfortunately. So here I am, like, under house rest in a house down the street, not talk to anybody for months and months. And then on Sundays, my entertainment was to watch the service go on and to hear the things that were being said about me or, you know, the weird prayers like that were being given and things like that, and to know that, like, some of that stuff wasn't true or just to empathize with the people who were going through it, but just it was so surreal. And like, one of the strangest things was that at one point they announced in the church newsletter, which of course I read, like, more seriously than scripture at that point, you know, I thought that was my job, was to read Exegete. Yeah. The church newsletter. But. But, you know, they. They did this goodbye ceremony for me. They announced that they just let her. Like, I'm not allowed to go to a goodbye ceremony. And I was like, what is this? And sure enough, I wasn't invited to it. So it ended up later I found out from some people in the church, they thought it was some sort of farewell or something. And. But. So I watch it on the screen and it's this surreal thing where it's as if I'm there, but I'm not there. And there's this weird sermon being given about, like, the good points of my life and the bad things, you know, but. But also, like, trying to sort of celebrate my ministry there. And then there's this presentation of this giant scrapbook, which then the ministers are, like, praying over it, and they tell everybody, this scrapbook with your cards and notes in it is going to go to Lillian. And I'm like, what scrapbook? You know, and I'm looking at this thing, and then, you know, the service ends. It just was the weirdest, strangest thing. And then I'm like, well, when am I getting the scrapbook? And I don't. You know, it's like, well, are they going to walk it up after church? Like, we'll be on my front porch. And it comes, like, a week and a half later by registered mail. Like, so they couldn't even, like, leave it outside my house. And they open up this scrapbook. And it's just so weird because these are people who, for months and months and months have not been told what was going on with me. We're just told I was in this process so people could think, you know,

[Commercial Announcer]

I had a drug problem.

[Lillian Daniel]

I had, you know, all kinds of things. And so then to read these weird notes that people have written me in this scrapbook, and at that point, I just threw it back in the box. Like, I. I felt like throwing up, you know, and it was like, that was. That was sort of the worst of all. And I think that's a learning for the church. And for me, you know, again, was that fake stuff doesn't fly, and people don't fall for it. People fell for it and showed up some, you know, but it's weird. And then all the stuff they're saying about Lillian's getting this loving scrapbook, I didn't have it delivered by registered mail. Like, it just was. So it was just an interesting example, and I couldn't respond. And normally, I'm used to, like, if I see unfairness or I think somebody's not, I can respond and be articulate. You can't do that in this. Anything you respond is held against you in a secret process.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, it's basically anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, but.

[Lillian Daniel]

But in a secret process. Yeah, it's something that you could read later.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. So. So what happens is, like, people are like, what did Lilian do? And I was like, tell the church. Tell them. Like, you know.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

And they but they didn't get told. And so it was all this stuff where they. And denominations. This is kind of what they do. They'll list these things in the ordination vows that if you had done this, you broke these rules. But when you read all these rules, it's very alarming. And it sounds like somebody who's incredibly

[Dr. Dan Koch]

toxic because one thing might relate to four or five different rules in some way or other. And so they put all five of them in there and it's like, oh, they were doing that and that and that and that and that. But it might have been one thing, right?

[Lillian Daniel]

Like there's even like something in there. It's about taking care of yourself and being faithful in like your family life and whatnot. So that gets listed, you know, and it's like it made it sound like I had hurt my children or something.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

You know, that's what is so strange. And I think that had the church just been told the truth from the get go, and I think that would have been so much healthier. And so I end up like fast forward, right? I end up going through this program of growth. I'm assigned to do these different Sisypian tasks, like, you know, spirit restriction, psychological assessment, all the things. And I end up coming eventually. This is all kind of part of the story, but eventually I discern. I do think I have a call to ministry again once I'm sort of refrocked. That empowers me, but I've got to do it differently. And how do I do that? And so that's a little bit of the story. But I end up deciding sort of on a whim, the Holy Spirit, whatnot, but that I'm going to go and pastor a church in Iowa. And no, I didn't really know very much about Iowa and. But part of it was that the conference minister there, the kind of bishop person, had been kind to me. And one of the things I learned was, like, when you go through an isolating time, you remember very clearly who is kind, who ignores you, like all the things. And so I decided that if I was going to be minister again, I would only do it in his conference because he was this year, which is looking back, it's not logical, but it's how you operate, right?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

It felt safe.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah, I guess so, but. But the truth is I was right about him. So he then went to the church that was bringing me, and before I got there, he gave a sermon there where later I found out he told them everything I had done wrong, what I gone through to. In my program of what the process had been.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

And so by the time I got there, this new church knew pretty much all the facts about me that the previous church has still to this day never heard and would never know. So it was like. And that was just this sort of surreal moment for me where I thought, okay, we could have procedures, but who's leading them makes a key difference.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, the last thing, I just feel like I need to reflect what I imagine listeners who do come from more kind of evangelical backgrounds often think and feel around stories like this. I just like, I can't count on my fingers and toes how many stories I've seen of evangelical ministers being caught doing things and then going through a like six week program of repentance and renewal and like talk about meaningless bullshit spiritualese, you know, Christianese spiritual bypassing language.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. Because they're just fighting for their survival and everything is.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. And also a lot of those churches will just view, well, this guy stands up for the God's truth in a culture that caves to truth as like just more important, frankly. And then throw in whatever else you want about patriarchy and.

[Lillian Daniel]

And if he's a guy and then he cries, that's like, you know, gold medal.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. And you know, sometimes you get the background stories, people will go on the record, you know, the wives or kids, or occasionally it makes it into a prime docu series or something. But like, we just. I feel like in terms of stories, I am inundated with stories where effectively there just was not enough accountability and not enough genuine process of change. And so I just noticed that like, this is a hard topic to. To find a middle path on, but it also sort of obviously requires a middle path. Like, not that I totally know what exactly that would constitute in each case, but it's just, it should neither be a witch hunt nor should it be a superficial re. Anointing in the spirit. Like, and so something in between has to happen. And yeah, I mean, one takeaway from this is just like, this is just a really hard process to get right. There's a lot of ins and outs, a lot of potential for harm. There's ethical questions about what to communicate and not communicate that you've also thought about with the book. Like, how much do I say, how do I protect confidentiality? All these things. It's just like so fraught. And that's before people are worried about actually getting sued, which is then it's other. And the bigger churches, that's like probably their main priority. That seems to be the case, certainly SBC Southern Baptists seem to be just trying to not get sued. Fuckers.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So, like, I don't know. That's just kind of like. I just feel like I have to get that out there because that's in me. I, like, love hearing your story. And I'm also like, all these fuckers obviously feeling strongly.

[Lillian Daniel]

Well. And so. Yeah. And there are ways in which, like, yeah, my. The harshness of my penalty was pretty different. I mean, in some ways. Right. Like, and I. I'm not poor me in any way. But I'm just saying there is an irregularity to these processes because human beings are involved in them.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

And also, it's kind of like, you know, when you. When you're planning a wedding and you get through the wedding to the end of it, you're like, okay, that's how I plan a wedding. Now I know everything. Pray to God I don't ever have to do it again. That's what I would say about a fitness review is like, once you go through it, you're like, okay, here's what I. How I should have handled that. Here's where I went wrong.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Like, but hopefully it never happens again. You don't get to really.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. But pray to God, like, I don't have to use that skill set, but I will tell you so. So one of the amazing things that happened in this year was, you know, you're isolated, you're alone, and all my friends were churchy clergy types. So that was the big thing was like, I didn't have, like, a whole slew of other people where I could say, never mind, I'm going to go hang out with my punk rock music friends, you know?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right. I was thinking about that earlier, too. Yeah. That sort of the background you had set up was like, oh, wow, you were really kind of social connection wise, community wise. You were, like, sort of maximally poorly set up to have a year where you couldn't talk to any of those people.

[Lillian Daniel]

Right. And, you know, throw the divorce in them.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Like, you know, classic kids out of the house and like, so all of those normal kind of standard other places to be with other people and connect with them and.

[Lillian Daniel]

Right, right. And like a lot of clergy, I was living in a place I would not have chosen to live. I was there because of the call to serve the church.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

But it was, you know, it's a very affluent clergy.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And humanities professors.

[Lillian Daniel]

Right. Like, yeah, but it was. Well, humanities professors can't afford to live near the schools they teach at. But clergy are extremely.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

They have it even worse. Yeah, yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

But, yeah, you know, like, it was like. Like that was not my be all goal to live in that place. Like, I actually think that environment, that type A environment didn't play to my better angels. It just brought out, like, my type aness, you know?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

Which was part of the move to Iowa. It was magical thinking, you know, like, oh, this is a high stress, you know, type A community. I could sell this as if there's no type A farmers living in Iowa. Or you don't.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Anyway, you should have gone. Like, you should have taken a job in Venice beach, la. Or like, you know, or like Humboldt, California. Then maybe you might have. Everyone's stoned. That's the only way.

[Lillian Daniel]

Or like Sedona, you know, like, yeah,

[Dr. Dan Koch]

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

No, no. And it ended up. Actually, the truth is, like, it was great to get a shift in perspective. And I loved my church, and I would end that time there. And I was there for a long time, almost seven years. So obviously it was a great place to be, you know. But this is a good story. So one thing that happened is, you know, I'm out there alone and I get this call from or Zmail from this guy, a minister I knew not very well. And he's like, hey, I'm wondering if something's going on with you. And what's amazing is I got very few of those, you know. So, like, you know, and he said, I wonder if it could be something like this. He word it in such a way where I was like, oh, my gosh, you know, does he know? And how does he know? And this. And he said. I said, what's going on? What do you know? You know, like. And he said, well, maybe we can meet for lunch. I have a friend who may have gone through something like this. And I'll tell you in person. So he has this meat for lunch at this mall that's like two hours away, so no one will see us. And we're at like some cheesecake scout factory or something, like, you know, hiding.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And he was hiding behind the oversized menus.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yes. And he was like a large church pastor who was near retirement. Anyway, fast forward, he ends up. I'm like, where's your friend? And he's like, I'm the friend. I'm the friend who went through it. And he tells me this story where he went through a fitness. And in his case, he truly did nothing wrong. So it was a terrible situation where it really was a conflicted family thing. And and the courts, you know, found in his favor and all the things. And still, it was a horrible process. But he was having lunch with me to tell me, here are the weird things that are going to happen to you because, like, I believe you're a good person. And by then I said, you know, like, oh, my gosh, here's what I did wrong, you know, And I was like, what the hell did you do wrong? And it wasn't anything, you know, like in his case. And so his was much clearer, sort of like, thing. But he said stuff like when you go for the psychological assessment, they're going to make you wait for like, 10 minutes, and that's part of it. Like, they're going to see how you react if you, like, freak out or something.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I've not been taught that.

[Lillian Daniel]

Come on.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, no, I didn't. That's.

[Lillian Daniel]

You're just not giving away the secrets.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, I don't have. I don't know. There are. No, there are. There are things that most of the measures, the bigger measures will have ways of kind of telling if people are malingering, if they're lying or assessing the likelihood of that. But this kind of like, they make you wait, marshmallow experiment thing, that's the first time I've heard it.

[Lillian Daniel]

Okay, you're covering up for your guild.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, I didn't really go that track. I did some training, and mostly I've done autism assessments and stuff, which is a little bit different. But I have administered some of those personality tests and stuff that I think that you probably got. And my one comment on that stuff is, I am sure that the sort of. We're gonna put you through an assessment process with a psychologist or whatever that that can be done in sort of bad faith ways or good faith ways that it could be sort of interpreted more or less within the framework of which the interpretation is most solid. So that's something that you're always very careful about, is like, here's what this is saying. Here's what it is not saying. Careful assessors will be good about that.

[Lillian Daniel]

I actually had a great experience with the assessment. I was nervous about it, but it was the same. People do assessments for people getting ordained. So you're doing the questions that are trying to rule out whether you're delusional. For example.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Lillian Daniel]

Do you believe all the songs in the radio are about your personal life and things like that?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. And you do. You don't want people like that becoming pastors.

[Lillian Daniel]

Yeah. So, you know. No, but it was actually. No. And actually like the individual counselors, like we had deep conversations around shame and guilt. And by then I'd been in this process for many months. And actually the outcome that they had was their write up. They said that I was ready to return to ministry, you know, that here are the things we had identified, you know. But it actually was a very humane process. I'm liking that it was. But what was interesting is then I came back to a committee with a different configuration of people and they had all these strange rules. Like they would never let you have a paper copy of anything, so nobody got to read the psychological assessment. And like then people could say, well it said this. And I was like, no it didn't. It said said this. And they were like. And I was like, but I have a copy, I can show it to you. And they're like, no, you can't bring paper. And they would shred things in front of you. It was just a very strange, you know, experience. And that that was where though the other ministers. So it wasn't just the one. Then I heard from several and so I, I decided, I called it the Shitty Ministers club. And it was like this secret society of people that you didn't know about. And what I found out was like, once you go through something like that, the other shady ministers find you and they tell you their experience. But I would say, you probably know a lot of people have gone through a process like this and odds are they've quit in the middle of it. Because honestly, I think a lot of these processes are designed with that in mind, is to get you to remove yourself from the system. And that's considered the easiest. So a lot of these retirements or people who move on and to my mind that is sort of heartbreaking. Like I think, you know, you want but, but you can see, you know, but you can also see why like a sociopathic predator would also quit the system because they wouldn't want to go get psychologically assessed and they wouldn't want to see a spiritual director. And you know, part of the thing that was interesting was even when I was in like a terrible frame of mind because I was ticked off at a certain, at certain point, I get ticked off in the process, right? I go through like all the different things. At a certain point I get, just get ticked off. It's unfair and, and I do things that probably don't help my case, but I felt like whatever I did, it wasn't going to work. And so, you know, I, I see that I got defrocked and Then it wasn't until I stopped giving a frock that I got refrocked. Right? And that's pithy. It is. But it's like, honestly, Jesus says something about that you gotta lose the thing, right? Before you get to have it. And so I really had to get angry at a certain point. And I was signing off emails to the chair of the committee saying, peace be with you and the horse you rode in on. And, you know, I look back and I see there are things I didn't do to help my kids.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I'm. I'm rewarding in. I'm rewarding your bad behavior later with my laughter.

[Lillian Daniel]

I mean, like, it's right, but. But, you know, so you look back and a lot of this story, believe it or not, the book is funny because I was an idiot. You know, different ways, hubristically or just not getting it and things like that. And then the shitty Ministers Club characters, you know, it's these people who are helping each other out. And none of them was, like, truly a creepy person, right? But there were people who were like, watch out. This is what's going to happen. This will seem weird, you know, and when you're forced to do these, like, spiritual growth programs, I don't think that's a good way to get people to go to spiritual direction. And what's amazing is the Holy Spirit can work through it Anyway, so, like, I was forced to see a spiritual director. I didn't want to go. I was like, I don't care what she looks like or says. I'm going to hate her. And she's an angel, right? Like, literally is a person who embodies divine love from the minute I see her. So there's, like, ways in which we get worked on despite our attitude, even.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well said, Lillian. Thank you so much for coming back. It's been too long. We'll have to have you on in less than five years from now. And, yeah, thanks for sharing all of this. Just a fascinating set of overlapping topics for me. And, yeah, it just was a pleasure.

[Lillian Daniel]

You are welcome. And, you know, it's. It's been a fun conversation, especially to

[Dr. Dan Koch]

have it with a shrink, the professional shrink. All right, well, everybody, that again, that book defrocked Good News from a Bad Pastor for a Better Church by Lillian Daniel. That's out early April 2026. And we'll see you later.

[Lillian Daniel]

All.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.