More on Emotional Health

I liked Scazzero’s book on Emotional health so much, I decided to review it for my Friday religion column. Here’s the column:

Don Follis 6/25/04 religion column: “Churches can learn to be emotionally healthy”

My uncle was a pastor with incredible people skills. Everyone liked him. Unhappily, he blew through pastoral jobs, most lasting just a couple of years. Some time in the mid-1970s he landed a job managing a beautiful church camp with terrific facilities and a fat budget. A new and spacious two-story manager’s house sat beside a lake surrounded with trees.

But after a few years that job, too, went sour. This time, however, my aunt moved out. She’d had enough. His great people skills she admired. But his inattention to her had reached the last straw, and they separated in 1980. They remain married but live apart to this day.

That sad story is not so unusual among pastors. It’s not that my uncle didn’t love God. He did. He read the Bible and prayed, but he never paid much attention to his emotional health.

He’s not alone. New York City pastor Peter Scazzero has written a captivating book called “The Emotionally Healthy Church – A Strategy for Discipleship that actually Changes Lives” (Zondervan 2003). Scazzero tells the story of how his church, New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York, had it all: powerful teaching, dynamic ministries, an impressive growth rate and a vision to do great things for God.

The New Life Church just began 1987 but experienced remarkable growth. By the mid-1990s, however, things were about to boil over. Scazzero was soon to be faced with issues in his church and himself that went deeper than he could ever have imagined. A self-confessed workaholic, Scazzero now admits the church he founded was his lover. He gave her all his time.

One Saturday, Scazzero’s wife could take no more. Very calmly she said, “Pete, I’m leaving the church … I’m not doing it anymore. This church is no longer life for me. It is death. … Pete, I love you, but I’m leaving the church. I no longer respect your leadership.”

Scazzero was shocked, embarrassed and humiliated. He had to tell his leaders that his wife had quit. He remembers praying in desperation, “Becoming a pastor was the worst decision I’ve ever made.” Scazzero and his wife got into counseling and fought to save their marriage, which they did. And Scazzero never did leave his job as Pastor of New Life Fellowship, but he did enter into a several-year period of being brutally honest with his wife, himself and his church.

Scazzero now sees that the unhealthy style he modeled was repeated in the church. “Despite our great emphasis and efforts invested in small-group leadership training, we did not understand the indispensable place of emotional components to foster spiritual maturity,” he writes.

Until he began addressing issues beneath the surface of his life and that of his church, Scazzero realized the neither he nor the church would ever be emotionally healthy. Scazzero now sees that emotional health and spiritual health are inseparable. One cannot be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature, even if you’re a great Bible student and powerful speaker like Scazzero.

Over the years Scazzero and the New Life Church have come to embrace six principles of emotional health. Each principle is described and analyzed in depth throughout Scazzero’s book.
First, they have learned to look beneath the surface, understanding that personal and church life is like an iceberg. Much of it lies beneath the surface.

Second, they have worked hard to break the power of the past, believing the past always effects the present. Third, Scazzero and his church came to realize that emotionally healthy churches live and lead out of brokenness and vulnerability. In other words, kingdom leadership is from the bottom up.
Next, it became obvious to Scazzero and his leadership team that they could not do it all. They began to see that emotionally healthy people understand the limits God has given them.

After Scazzero spent many years in the ministry covering his losses and mistakes, he came to finally understand that a fifth component of a healthy church was to allow himself and his church the freedom to embrace grief as a way to become more like God. It’s healthy to experience sorrow and grieve.
Finally, Scazzero embraced Jesus’ incarnational model where Jesus entered another’s world, still held on to his personhood and willingly accepted the tension of hanging between two worlds.

Reading Scazzero’s book is a wake up call. He’s both a realist and an emotionally healthy leader. He’ll make you squarely face your stuff. Believe me, you’ll change.