From Broken Foundation to Life Changer: How Lori Hommer Built a Counseling Ministry on Identity in Christ

The Night Everything Broke Open

It started with a television program about end times prophecy. Lori Hommer, a wife and mother in her late thirties, watched it during a spring break vacation in 1997 and came completely undone. Everyone else in the room moved on. She could not.

"I went into like a full blown depression from it," she recalls. "I was just sure that the world was going to come to an end, that I was going to go to hell, my kids were going to go to hell." She had lived outside of faith for two decades as an adult, and the weight of that came crashing down all at once.

What followed was a string of God-orchestrated moments — a Pentecostal housekeeper who invited her to a series of revival meetings, an altar call on the fourth night that she almost didn't attend, and eventually a handwritten letter from motivational speaker Zig Ziglar that somehow settled what weeks of spiritual turmoil could not. "All of a sudden I was fine," she says simply. "It was God."

That 1997 conversion launched Lori into a life she never saw coming — and a calling that has quietly transformed hundreds of people in the decades since.

A Calling She Couldn't Escape

Lori describes herself as someone who has always risen to leadership, even when she wasn't looking for it. Student council as a kid. Faculty committees in college. And after her conversion, course after course at her church, Point of Grace, devouring everything available about faith, healing, and Scripture.

"In my makeup, I'm a student," she says. "That was my way of taking it in."

By the early 2000s, she was already being assigned as a Stephen minister to women in the church before she had even completed her degree. She completed her master's in Christian counseling in 2008 and launched Life Changers Counseling the same year. She also joined the church staff as a counseling pastor, serving women who needed someone safe to talk to — someone who understood both faith and the complexity of real life.

"The church is typically pastored by men. And in my own personal journey of healing, I felt it was important for women to have women to talk to about some of their struggles."

Her practice grew beyond women to marriages, families, and men. She served on staff until retiring from that role in 2019, while keeping Life Changers Counseling active. Today she takes appointments on her own schedule, conducts virtual sessions, serves on her church's elder board, and leads women's ministry — still showing up wherever the need exists.

The One Problem Underneath Every Problem

Ask Lori what she sees most in her counseling office, and she doesn't hesitate. Over seventeen years of practice, she has developed what she calls an inner mantra — a framework that shapes how she approaches every client.

"Everyone really has the same problem. It's just how they're dealing with that problem that's different. And that is their identity in Christ is not solid."

Whether someone struggles with anxiety, broken relationships, destructive patterns, or a life that simply feels off-balance, Lori traces the root to the same place. A shaky sense of who they are in Christ. Everything else — the behavior, the coping, the crisis — flows from that unstable foundation.

"You can change your behavior," she says, "but that doesn't change what you believe about yourself." This is why she finds secular behavior-modification approaches incomplete. They address the symptom without touching the source.

Her work integrates tools like Theophostic Prayer Ministry, which she describes as healing prayer that brings Christ into past memories so people can receive truth and healing from trauma. She is also trained in the Steps to Freedom in Christ, developed by Neil T. Anderson, and has walked dozens — if not hundreds — of people through that process. Scripture is not background music in her sessions. It is the medicine.

She points to the words of Jesus in John 8:32 — "the truth will set you free" — as the operating principle of everything she does. "If you can get truth into them, that can change where their focus is going."

The Danger of Leading Alone

Lori is candid about the weight of leadership. She has carried it most of her life, and she knows both its gift and its cost.

"Leadership is a burden that certain people carry," she says. "You're called to rise above certain situations and be the one that people look to for sound wisdom, advice, discernment. It isn't always that fun."

But the greatest danger she has witnessed — in leaders inside and outside the church — is not the burden itself. It is the isolation that often comes with it. The tendency to believe that, because you are responsible, you must go it alone.

"You have got to have someone else connected with what you do, however that looks. Because if you don't, you're gonna fall flat on your face."

Her advice for emerging Christian leaders is direct: find a good mentor, plant yourself in a healthy church body, and refuse to be a lone ranger. She credits the pastors and community around her — people who prayed with her, held her accountable, and showed up when the work was hard — as essential to everything she built.

She also warns against the ego that can quietly derail even gifted leaders. "We have to be very careful of our own egos," she says. "I've seen it happen in the church community, where the ego won. And it's not usually a good ending."

A Foundation That Actually Holds

Lori's life verse is Ephesians 2:10 — "We are God's masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." She found it during a season when she struggled to understand where she fit. A tomboy who never quite belonged with the girls. A blended family navigating real heartbreak. A woman who came to Christ at nearly forty with a complicated past.

That verse reframed everything. "I was supposed to be this way," she says. The things that once felt like liabilities became the very tools God used to build her empathy, her resilience, and her ability to sit with people in their darkest places.

She still loves what she does. "When I'm doing it, it's like — yeah, this is what I'm supposed to be doing."

That quiet certainty is perhaps the most powerful thing Lori Hommer models for Christian leaders: not that the path will be easy, but that when you build on the right foundation — identity in Christ, community, and surrender to calling — the work carries its own confirmation.

As she puts it, borrowing the language of an old hymn she has come to love: "We have to be built on the solid rock. Everything else is sinking sand."

What to Do This Week

If Lori's story surfaces something in you, here are three places to start:

Examine your foundation. Ask yourself honestly: Is my identity rooted in Christ, or in my performance, my role, or others' approval? Spend time this week in Ephesians 2:10 and let it speak directly to that question.

Name your lone-ranger tendency. Most leaders default to isolation under pressure. Who in your life holds you accountable, prays with you regularly, and speaks truth into your work? If no one comes to mind, that is your next assignment.

Consider what trauma or false belief might still be shaping your decisions. Lori describes counseling as a mining expedition — digging to find where things first went sideways. That work is worth doing, whether with a counselor, a trusted mentor, or in honest prayer.