How Narcissism in Christian Community Damages Spiritual Formation
Becoming a person of depth requires us to spend time exploring the hidden parts of the heart, particularly our ideas and desires. These often function like an operating system, quietly shaping our behavior, relationships, fears, attachments, and reactions without announcing themselves to our conscious minds.
Chuck DeGroat describes the human person this way:
“There is the public self we present to the world, the private self we share selectively with others, the blind self that is clear to others but which remains hidden to us, and the undiscovered self which, like the shadow, contains unseen and unconscious aspects of ourselves.”
Uncovering those hidden places is difficult enough under the best circumstances, which is why the inward journey is most wisely taken with Jesus and a small number of trustworthy companions. If people are going to explore their stories, wounds, desires, fears, failures, and hidden assumptions, they need an environment marked by patience, safety, honesty, compassion, and long-term presence.
Narcissism in Christian community threatens all of those conditions.
A narcissist may initially appear unusually safe, confident, generous, vulnerable, and supportive. Yet when usefulness declines, admiration fades, or control is threatened, that same person may distort reality, weaponize intimacy, recruit allies, and begin dismantling the identity and credibility of anyone who stands in the way.
I know this because I have spent much of my life learning the lesson the hard way.
My Long History With Narcissistic Leaders
I have always enjoyed competing and achieving, though my desire for approval has occasionally carried me into unhealthy relationships.
I have spent much of my career in executive roles in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and for years I was profoundly naive about certain leaders who radiated confidence, excellence, affection, and apparent vulnerability. I was drawn toward people who praised generously, expressed strong loyalty, and seemed deeply interested in my success.
Eventually, I began recognizing a repeating pattern.
I would be emotionally seduced by the compliments and affirmations of a boss, coworker, employee, pastor, or ministry leader, only to be rejected and vilified when my usefulness disappeared. If I made a mistake, ceased being helpful, disagreed with them, or was perceived as some kind of threat, the warmth vanished and the campaign of destruction began.
It is not that I made no mistakes, because I have made more than my share. The disturbing part was that I would suddenly become the villain in a movie in which I did not know I was starring.
Words were removed from context, conversations were rewritten, motives were assigned to me, and private information I had shared in confidence became ammunition. People who had once described me as loyal, gifted, and indispensable suddenly portrayed me as dangerous, unstable, dishonest, or ungrateful.
If you have experienced a close relationship with a narcissist, you may recognize the sensation of slowly losing confidence in your own mind. You begin questioning your decisions, memories, motives, relationships, and ability to understand reality.
The resulting uncertainty takes root in the heart. Identity becomes scrambled, judgment becomes cloudy, and the person who once seemed confident and capable becomes increasingly anxious and disoriented.
That confusion is not always an unfortunate side effect.
Sometimes, it is the objective.
Why Narcissism in Christian Community Is So Dangerous
Faith communities can become particularly attractive environments for narcissistic people because Christians are encouraged to be trusting, forgiving, open, loyal, vulnerable, and submissive to authority.
Those are good qualities when authority is healthy and relationships are reciprocal. In the hands of a manipulative leader, however, they become tools of control.
The language of faith can also conceal exploitation. Calls for unity may be used to silence questions. Forgiveness may be demanded before truth is acknowledged. Submission may be invoked to protect authority, and concern for the “mission” may become a reason to tolerate cruelty, secrecy, or abuse.
Chuck DeGroat writes:
“Spiritual and emotional abuse have much in common, but spiritual abuse bears a particularly sinister twist, as principles and maxims of faith are wielded as weapons of command and control, and faith leaders abuse their power for the sake of feeding their own unmet emotional needs.”
The danger is not simply that a narcissistic leader behaves badly. The deeper danger is that the leader may reshape the spiritual imagination of an entire community.
People begin associating God with control, shame, fear, instability, and conditional approval. They may continue attending services, studying Scripture, and participating in ministry while becoming less secure, less honest, less trusting, and less capable of love.
That is dark spiritual formation.
Recognizing the Narcissist
Definitions of narcissism vary, and we should be careful not to use the term as a casual label for everyone who is selfish, arrogant, immature, or difficult.
All of us struggle with self-interest. All of us crave admiration at times, defend ourselves, fail to listen, and hurt people.
Narcissism becomes something more pervasive. It is often marked by an excessive focus on the self, a strong need for admiration, entitlement, exploitation, a lack of empathy, and a pattern of protecting self-image at the expense of other people.
Chuck DeGroat defines the narcissist as:
“…someone who has been robbed of a God-given desire to live for and love others. Instead, he is turned inward and enamored by his own image. A narcissist, in other words, is a self-worshipper, numb to his or her deepest desire to love and be loved by God.”
Jim Wilder adds:
“Narcissists can affirm whatever makes them look good. With their brains in non-relational mode, narcissists do not share the pain others feel and so have no guilt and will justify whatever it takes to make others lose. Narcissists punish rather than love those who do not treat the narcissist right.”
The irony is that narcissism often grows from profound insecurity. The confident exterior may conceal a fragile and fearful inner life that depends upon admiration, control, and the maintenance of a carefully managed image.
Grandiose and Covert Narcissism
When people hear the word narcissist, they often imagine an obviously arrogant politician, celebrity, executive, or public figure. This is sometimes called grandiose narcissism and may involve open condescension, entitlement, dominance, and visible obsession with power or status.
Covert narcissists are much more difficult to recognize.
Most of the narcissists I have known fit this category. They can be quiet, winsome, soft-spoken, apparently sincere, and highly skilled at presenting themselves as humble, wounded, generous, or deeply spiritual.
They pray, sing worship songs, quote Scripture, support causes, and speak movingly about grace. They may appear compassionate, empathetic, and vulnerable, while also being gifted communicators who lead with intelligence, humor, and conviction.
Debbe Mirza writes:
“Covert narcissists will often have careers that are impressive. They can be pastors, spiritual leaders, therapists, and heads of nonprofit organizations. They can be politicians who are charming, look you right in the eye, and really seem to care.”
She continues by noting that covert narcissists often know how to appear humble and empathetic because they understand that open arrogance would damage the admiration and trust they desire.
The covert narcissist may remain hidden for years beneath a soft, relational exterior. The underlying pattern becomes clearer only when someone challenges the image, questions the authority, withdraws admiration, or ceases to be useful.
Then the person who seemed warm and gracious may suddenly become punishing, vindictive, or cruel.
Love Bombing, Gaslighting, and Flying Monkeys
The language used to describe narcissistic relationships is unusually vivid because the behavior itself can be so disorienting.
Love bombing describes the intense praise, affection, attention, and idealization that may occur early in the relationship. The narcissist makes the other person feel uniquely valued, chosen, trusted, and essential.
Gaslighting involves repeated efforts to make someone question their perceptions, memory, judgment, or sanity. Events are denied, conversations are rewritten, and obvious behavior is reframed until the victim begins to distrust their own experience.
Projection occurs when the narcissist attributes their own motives, behaviors, or failures to someone else. The manipulative person accuses others of manipulation, the dishonest person alleges dishonesty, and the controlling person claims to be controlled.
Flying monkeys are loyal followers who protect the narcissist, repeat the preferred narrative, attack perceived threats, and provide cover for behavior they may not fully understand.
These tactics can be especially effective in Christian settings because they are wrapped in spiritual language. A leader may claim divine guidance, request prayer, appeal to unity, invoke forgiveness, and portray every challenge as persecution.
The Pastor and His Flying Monkeys
Years ago, I served a large-church pastor who regularly displayed many of these patterns. He was profoundly insecure, though that insecurity was hidden beneath spiritual authority, charisma, and institutional success.
His elder board provided a vivid example of the “flying monkey” phenomenon. While the pastor bullied, distorted, blamed, and projected, the governing board shielded him.
To confront him honestly might have threatened the church’s reputation, finances, attendance, and stability. Other pastors and staff cycled through the institution with alarming frequency, yet the pattern was continually rationalized because the church was growing and people were “getting saved.”
The visible success of the institution became more important than the health of the people inside it.
This is one reason narcissism can survive for so long in churches. The narcissistic leader may be talented, persuasive, productive, and apparently indispensable. Those who benefit from the institution fear the cost of truth.
The community may therefore protect the very person harming its soul.
Other Narcissists I Have Known
One megachurch pastor launched a full investigation into another nonprofit organization after someone associated with that group confronted and embarrassed him in his sanctuary. He repeatedly trespassed on their property, attacked their leaders publicly, and spent extraordinary time and effort trying to damage their reputation.
The conflict was not really about doctrine, ethics, or the good of the church. It was about saving face.
Another Christian business leader was generous with compliments, praise, attention, and encouragement until someone was no longer useful or became a perceived threat. Then he quietly worked behind the scenes to remove them, isolate them, or destroy their credibility.
Another generally charming pastor used his pulpit to attack people in his congregation who had legitimate concerns about the church’s behavior. He avoided naming them directly, but conveniently explained that the Lord had “laid certain things on his heart” that happened to discredit his critics.
Meanwhile, people unaffected by the behavior praised these leaders for biblical knowledge, communication skill, business success, compassion, vision, and apparent spiritual maturity.
As Wilder observes, churches can be remarkably poor at recognizing personality disorders and may even interpret certain disordered traits as desirable leadership qualities.
Narcissists in Small Formative Communities
Narcissism is harmful in any organization, but it becomes particularly dangerous inside a small community organized around vulnerability, intimacy, and spiritual formation.
A genuinely formative community invites people to know God, others, and themselves more deeply. Members share stories, wounds, fears, desires, failures, questions, and hidden places of the heart.
This kind of intimacy is precisely what makes the community powerful, and it is also what makes the presence of a narcissist so dangerous.
Private information may later be weaponized. Vulnerability may be interpreted as weakness. Disagreement may be punished. The narcissist may manipulate relationships, divide members, recruit allies, control the narrative, and slowly replace communal trust with anxiety.
A community intended to help people become more like Jesus can become an environment of dark formation.
People learn to hide, perform, flatter, comply, and distrust themselves. The very practices intended to produce honesty and freedom become instruments of control.
Why Narcissism Opposes Spiritual Formation
Narcissism and genuine spiritual formation move in opposite directions.
Deep discipleship requires increasing honesty, humility, repentance, empathy, mutuality, and openness to being known. The narcissistic pattern depends upon image management, self-justification, control, and protection from exposure.
The goal of spiritual formation is to become more capable of seeking the good of others. The narcissistic person generally seeks their own good and interprets other people according to usefulness, loyalty, or threat.
The formative question is not merely whether someone knows Scripture, attends church, prays, serves, or speaks persuasively about Jesus. The more revealing question is whether that person increasingly seeks the goodness of the people around them.
Just because someone studies the Bible, leads worship, takes mission trips, preaches, or prays publicly does not mean they are good for our souls.
Jesus Himself did not relate to everyone in the same way. He disclosed Himself to some, remained guarded with others, answered some questions directly, and responded to others indirectly.
He was tender and compassionate toward many while remaining blunt, cautious, or distant with people whose intentions were corrupt.
Jesus is the most relationally shrewd person in history.
Becoming like Him includes learning when to trust, when to confront, when to remain, and when to walk away.
Who Seeks Our Goodness?
One of the most important questions in any formative relationship is whether the other person genuinely seeks our good.
When hearts have been wounded, information alone rarely produces healing. We may understand intellectually why we should trust, forgive, rest, or feel safe, yet the heart often requires repeated experiences of love, honesty, protection, and presence.
God frequently allows us to experience His safety through people who seek our goodness without attempting to control us.
Narcissistic people move in the opposite direction. Their primary concern is often their image, comfort, control, reputation, success, or emotional needs.
If someone threatens those things, the narcissist may withdraw affection, distort reality, punish, isolate, or destroy.
Sometimes the damage happens in one swift event. More often, it occurs through a thousand cuts over years of praise, withdrawal, confusion, reconciliation, hope, and renewed injury.
The Damage to Identity
An essential part of becoming a deep disciple is not merely knowing our identity in God but experiencing it.
We may affirm that we are sons and daughters of the King while still suffering from deep anxiety, confusion, shame, or uncertainty about who we are. That disintegration is an invitation into greater peace and stability.
Narcissistic relationships interfere with this process because the narcissist depends upon a confused and unstable victim.
A person who possesses secure identity, clear agency, healthy boundaries, and relational discernment is much more difficult to control.
The narcissistic relationship therefore tends to undermine those qualities. The victim becomes increasingly dependent upon the narcissist’s version of reality, approval, interpretation, and judgment.
The longer the pattern continues, the more difficult it becomes to remember who one was before the relationship began.
What Do I Do?
People who recognize themselves in narcissistic relationships often ask the same question I once asked: “What do I do?”
The question itself is significant because it may indicate that the person has begun recognizing the distortion.
Many victims no longer identify the behavior as abusive. The manipulation has become normal, and some victims even idolize the person harming them. The narcissist has gained enough control that the victim interprets domination as love, loyalty, spiritual authority, or responsibility.
There is no single answer for every relationship.
A marriage, family, workplace, church, friendship, and small formative community each involve different responsibilities, risks, and practical considerations.
The central goal, however, is the restoration of agency.
A human being is intended to become free enough to offer themselves voluntarily in love, not to be coerced, controlled, confused, or absorbed into another person’s identity.
Leaving May Be the Most Loving Response
There are times when the wisest response is to leave.
Jesus never commands us to surrender agency to an abusive person, nor did He allow every person unlimited access to Him. Loving another person as ourselves does not require remaining in a relationship that destroys truth, safety, identity, or freedom.
Sometimes, the best way to seek the narcissist’s good and protect our own hearts is to stop participating in the relationship.
That may mean leaving a church, resigning from an organization, ending a friendship, creating significant distance from a relative, or refusing further private contact.
In severe situations, especially those involving threats, violence, coercive control, or abuse, professional and legal guidance may be necessary.
Distance is not always hatred, bitterness, revenge, or unforgiveness.
Sometimes, it is wisdom.
Staying Requires Relational Shrewdness
There are other circumstances in which a person may prayerfully choose to remain in limited relationship with someone who has narcissistic tendencies.
If so, remaining does not mean returning to naivety.
It may require clear boundaries, reduced access, greater transparency with trusted outsiders, refusal to engage in private arguments, and a willingness to document important conversations.
The goal is to seek the other person’s good without sacrificing identity, reality, agency, or safety.
Trying to convince a narcissist that they are a narcissist is rarely helpful. Psychologist Mark Ettensohn warns that negative confrontation can reinforce the narcissist’s belief that they are being attacked or victimized.
That does not mean remaining silent about harmful behavior. It means addressing behavior clearly and wisely without expecting a label to produce repentance.
Can Narcissists Change?
Many people believe narcissism is untreatable and that the only reasonable response is permanent separation.
That may be the wisest conclusion in many relationships, particularly when the narcissist refuses responsibility and continues causing harm.
Still, transformation is not impossible.
Jim Wilder writes:
“Transformation is never as clear as when a predator becomes a protector or an enemy becomes a friend. Many saints began life as narcissistic sociopaths. These individuals were deadly or pleasure-seeking, self-justified and hardened.”
He points to Paul, Augustine, Ignatius, Francis, and John Newton as examples of people whose lives once caused tremendous harm before becoming oriented toward love, repentance, and service.
The possibility of transformation does not obligate a victim to remain nearby while waiting for it.
Hope for another person’s healing and the decision to maintain distance can coexist.
The Role of a Healthy Community
Victims of narcissistic abuse are often best helped by entering a small community of people who seek their good and help restore their relationship with reality.
Whether the person remains in the narcissistic relationship or leaves it, they need companions who believe them, listen carefully, resist manipulation, and remain present over time.
The heart may need repeated experiences of safety before trust becomes possible again.
Jessica and I both understand how difficult it can be to avoid permanent cynicism after narcissistic abuse. Once trust has been weaponized, it is tempting to assume that everyone is dangerous.
A healthy community does not rush that healing. It offers patience, truth, affection, and consistency while the person slowly recovers agency and identity.
This is one reason presence is essential to spiritual formation. The victim does not merely need advice about healing. They need to experience people who genuinely seek their goodness and continue showing up.
Healthy Groups and Narcissistic Behavior
Wilder suggests that properly formed groups may sometimes create an environment in which narcissistic behavior is challenged and gradually reshaped.
He writes:
“When a group begins to exchange healthy shame messages, correct self-justification, and love their enemies, isolated narcissists will learn a better way or leave.”
A healthy group does not flatter, enable, shame, or protect the narcissist. It names reality, maintains boundaries, distributes power, and refuses to reward manipulation.
Such a community may help a narcissistic person experience empathy, accountability, confession, repair, and mutuality. It may also cause the person to leave when control is no longer available.
Either outcome protects the group.
The important point is that no single victim should carry responsibility for transforming a narcissist. That work, if it occurs, requires truth, community, accountability, professional wisdom, and the person’s own willingness to change.
Loving the Narcissist Without Losing Ourselves
By definition, someone who consistently refuses to seek our good behaves as an enemy.
Narcissists therefore often become our enemies, even when they are relatives, pastors, colleagues, friends, or spouses. Jesus commands us to love our enemies, which raises an extraordinarily difficult question.
How do we love the narcissist while also loving ourselves?
Love does not mean compliance, access, trust, closeness, or the absence of consequences. It does not require pretending that abuse is harmless or that repentance has occurred when it has not.
Sometimes love means remaining present with firm boundaries. Sometimes it means confrontation. Sometimes it means refusing to cooperate with deception.
Sometimes, the most loving response is never speaking to the person again.
The form love takes must be shaped by wisdom, truth, agency, and the actual good of everyone involved.
Narcissism and the Formation Gap
Narcissism also reveals why the five elements of formation require careful stewardship.
Time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction are powerful because they shape human beings deeply. In healthy ecosystems, they produce trust, identity, love, freedom, and belonging.
In destructive ecosystems, the same elements can be used to manipulate, isolate, indoctrinate, and control.
This is why the Formation Gap cannot be resolved merely by creating more intimate communities. Those communities must also be healthy, accountable, relationally wise, and resistant to concentrated power.
Intimacy without safety can become exploitation.
Community without accountability can become a cult.
Instruction without humility can become domination.
Time without freedom can become captivity.
The elements themselves are morally neutral. The character of the people stewarding them matters enormously.
Becoming Relationally Shrewd
To become more like Jesus is to become increasingly relationally shrewd.
That means developing the ability to recognize character, motives, power, danger, sincerity, and repentance without becoming cynical or suspicious of everyone.
Jesus was neither naive nor hardened.
He loved freely, but He did not entrust Himself indiscriminately. He welcomed the vulnerable, confronted predators, avoided traps, asked difficult questions, and sometimes withdrew.
We need the same combination of compassion and discernment.
People recovering from narcissistic abuse may swing between trust and suspicion, closeness and isolation, hope and cynicism. Healing often involves learning that boundaries and love are not enemies.
The goal is not to become incapable of trust.
It is to become wiser about where trust belongs.
The Invitation to Freedom
The ultimate goal is not simply escape from a harmful person.
It is the recovery of freedom, identity, reality, and the capacity to love.
Narcissistic abuse often narrows life until everything revolves around the narcissist’s moods, needs, approval, and reactions. Jesus invites us back into a larger world, one rooted in His presence, delight, truth, and care.
That journey usually requires time, trusted relationships, honest storytelling, grief, boundaries, and the slow recovery of the self that became obscured.
If you have experienced narcissism in Christian community, the harm was real even if others did not recognize it. Spiritual language does not sanctify manipulation, and institutional success does not excuse abuse.
Jesus does not ask us to surrender our souls to someone else’s insecurity.
He invites us to become free, whole, relationally wise people who can love others without disappearing.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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