Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

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In today's podcast episode, Geri and I share our history with this powerful tool and how it helped us name the reality of our past to catalyze the transforming work of Jesus in our lives and leadership. Don't miss this one! Without this skill, church teams remain silenced - unable to speak truth and creating the conditions for an environment of frustration, resentment, and judgement. This takes great intentionality and is something I have learned over time and through a lot of mistakes. Emotionally healthy culture and team building is quite distinct in at least four ways. First, we’re deeply concerned for people’s personal spiritual formation and not simply their work performance. We’re asking questions about people’s inner lives with Christ and resourcing them regularly. While it is called a “Commission,” it is also a commandment. We searched through EHS but did not find any reference to the Great Commission. We are not surprised that there is no reference to the Great Commission, because EHS is a psychologically self-oriented book that encourages readers to focus on self. In this revised bestselling book, Peter Scazzero outlines a roadmap for discipleship with Jesus that is powerfully transformative. He unveils what's wrong with our current definition of "spiritual growth" and offers not only a model of spirituality that actually works, but seven steps to change that will help you experience authentic faith and hunger for God.

To achieve the state of emptiness, they employ a “mantra,” a word repeated over and over to focus the mind while striving to go deep within oneself. The effects are a hypnotic like state: concentration upon one thing, disengagement from other stimuli, a high degree of openness to suggestion, a psychological and physiological state that externally resembles sleep, but in which consciousness is interiorized and the mind subject to suggestion. Scazzero says that his way to Emotionally Healthy Spirituality is a painful process, which requires much hard work: And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith. Emotionally unhealthy leaders do not practice Sabbath—a weekly, twenty-four-hour period in which they cease all work and rest, delight in God’s gifts, and enjoy life with him. They might view Sabbath observance as irrelevant, optional, or even a burdensome legalism that belongs to an ancient past. Or they may make no distinction between the biblical practice of Sabbath and a day off, using “Sabbath” time for the unpaid work of life, such as paying bills, grocery shopping, and errands. If they practice Sabbath at all, they do so inconsistently, believing they need to first finish all their work or work hard enough to “earn” the right to rest. In over four decades of leadership, I've come to the conclusion that one of the biggest gaps in our leadership training comes down to one essential skill...Pete majored in English and History at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) as well as Secondary Education. After teaching high-school English, he joined the staff of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) for three years – working at Rutgers University and other schools in New Jersey/New York, focusing on launching new Christian fellowships and mobilizing students for evangelism. Lastly, Scazzero, as noted already, undermines the authority of Scripture. His constant comments in the vein of ‘Bible studies are not enough’ are compounded by his minimal use of Scripture in the book overall. He quotes much more extensively from popular culture (novels/ films etc) and personal experience than from scripture. A typical line of argument is as follows: Thirdly, time, energy and money is invested in your team’s personal development. In other words, we’re not simply talking about the work itself, but them. A number of general observations may be drawn by way of conclusion. First, the book is preoccupied with man. It does not present to us the great Sovereign God of the Universe who holds our lives in his hands and who purposes good for us in every detail. The focus is largely upon being self-fulfilled, happy, “whole” and true to ourselves. By focusing on self and our past, the process of “maturity” for the Christian becomes largely one of self-effort. Little place is given to the Holy Spirit and the sovereign working of God in our lives. My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this , that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Silence, appropriate body posture and above all, emptying the mind through repetition prayer – have been the practices of mystics in all the great world religions. And they form the basis on which most modern spiritual directors guide those who want to draw near to God…Silence is the language God speaks…says Thomas Keating who taught “centering prayer” to more than 31,000 last year. “Keating suggests that those who pray repeat some ‘sacred word’ like God or Jesus.” (Newsweek, January 6, 1992, “Talking to God” p. 44). The God Who is [Already] There

For the first 17 years of my Christian life, my emotional life was completely divorced from my spiritual life. Or so I thought. My inner world was not in sync with my exterior behaviour. The Bible has a word for this gap, a word that Jesus repeatedly used toward religious leaders: hypocrisy…. What is particularly frightening is that this ‘playacting’ is often taught and expected in our churches. The result is that huge numbers of people are totally unaware of the dichotomy between their exterior and interior worlds (55).

In his book The Emotionally Healthy Church, Peter Scazzero is similarly concerned with the matter of change and transformation in the Christian life. As a pastor in New York City he raises what he believes to be a pressing need in most churches – emotional health. Scazzero’s thesis is that many Christians need what amounts to a second conversion. “Something is desperately wrong… We have people who are passionate for God and his work, yet who are unconnected to their own emotions or those around them’ (37). Much of the basis of this conclusion stems from personal experience; Scazzero had trained and pastored for a number of years before he came to these conclusions.

Pete Scazzero, after leading New Life Fellowship Church for 26 years, co-founded Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, a groundbreaking ministry transforming church culture that multiplies deeply changed leaders and disciples for the sake of Jesus’ mission in the world. Scazzero only brings confusion to any biblical understanding of the nature of humans by mixing in false psychological concepts of what a person is by nature. Is anyone born with a “true self” before being contaminated by parents and the world as erroneously claimed? Or are they blank or clean slates? No! The Bible declares that we are all descendants of Adam and therefore born in sin.

Jesus refused to separate the practice of the presence of God from the practice of the presence of people. When pushed to the wall to separate this unbreakable union, Jesus refused. He summarized the entire Bible for us: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40). (P. 171.)

The Bridge across the Tiber back to Home Sweet Rome is now open for traffic

Pantheism teaches that God is all things. But Pantheism has now been combined with Theism (God is a personality) and this produces panentheism, which attempts to retain God’s personality but adds that He also indwells every created thing. That is why the GENOGRAM is one of the core tools in both parts of the Emotionally Healthy Discipleship Course. Yet, in over 4 decades of leadership, I've found that so much of this pain is completely UNNECESSARY. After leaving IVCF, he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary for one year, followed by two years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary from which he graduated with a Masters of Divinity (M.Div). He later received his Doctor of Ministry in Marriage and Family from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (Eastern University).