Peter Scazzero, author of The Emotionally Healthy Church (Zondervan 2003), and his assistant Dan Shin came to Champaign-Urbana this week.
On Wednesday Scazzero lead 165 local pastor and campus ministers in a six-and-a-half-hour seminar on the principles of emotional health from his book. As he talked, he added a 7th principle that he says he has discovered since writing the book.
To be an emotionally healthy and maturing disciple, Scazzero said you must have these 7 principles in your life:
1. You must be willing to look deeply inside yourself.
2. You must work at breaking the power of the past.
3. You must live in brokenness and vulnerability.
4. You must learn to receive the gifts of limits.
5. You must embrace grief and loss.
6. You must make incarnation your model for loving well.
7. You must drink from the contemplative tradition of silence, solitude, Sabbath and spiritual direction.
Jim Egli, our community pastor for small groups, asked me to lead a Sunday morning class in October and November on Emotional health. I am looking forward to it and will use a lot of Scazerro’s stuff.
That class begins Oct. 17. Watch for the announcements.
And now, just for your own emotional health, try this exercise that Scazzero had us do on Wednesday. Using a piece of paper and pen, try and answer these 4 questions: (1) What are you mad about today? (2) What are you scared about? (3) What are you sad about? (4) What are you glad about?
In fact, these are emotions are going on inside of us all the time. But we tend to ignore them. And when we do, Scazzero says our Christian maturity takes a hit. Indeed, we must tend to our emotions!
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