Peter Scazzero’s book, The Emotionally Healthy Church, offers a new vision of discipleship— an approach that really changes people. Scazzero argues most churches and ministries separate emotional health, relational depth, and spiritual maturity.
Our understanding of spirituality often exults the spirit over the other critical aspects that make us human—those physical, social, intellectual and emotional aspects. True discipleship, on the other hand, integrates all the components of our person.
At the heart of his argument, Scazzero argues that emotional health and spiritual health are inseparable. In other words, “it is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.”
Scazzero offers the following six principles to help you begin to integrate emotional health and spiritual health—first in yourself and then with your disciples.
1. Look Beneath The Surface. Emotionally healthy people take a deep, hard look inside their hearts, asking, “What is going on that Jesus Christ is trying to change?” They know that a person’s life is like an iceberg, with the vast majority of who we are lying deep beneath the surface. Emotionally healthy people invite God to transform those beneath the surface layer that keep us from becoming more like Jesus Christ.
2. Break the Power of the Past. Healthy people understand how their past affects their present ability to love Christ and others. Numerous external forces may shape us, but the family we have grown up in is the primary force that shapes and influences us. Discipleship includes an honest reflection on the positive and negative impact of my family of origin. Scazzero suggests using a simple family genogram to help you gain awareness of the critical issues of your past. (See Scazzero’s book for more details and to ensure a biblical balance to this.)
3. Live in Brokenness and Vulnerability. Emotionally healthy people live and lead out of brokenness and vulnerability. They understand that leadership in the Kingdom of God is from the bottom up, not a grasping, controlling, or lording over others. It is leading out of failure and pain, questions and struggles—a serving that lets go.
4. Receive the Gift of Limits. Emotionally healthy people understand, according to Scazzero, the limits God has given them. They joyfully receive the one, two, seven, or ten talents God has so graciously distributed to them. They don’t try to live a life God never intended. As a result, they are marked by contentment and joy.
5. Embrace Grieving and Loss. Emotionally healthy people embrace grief as a way to become more like God. As Scazzero argues, they understand what a critical component of discipleship grieving our losses is. Why? It is the only pathway to becoming a more compassionate person. To grow, we must pay attention to pain.
6. Make Incarnation Your Model for Loving Well. Emotionally healthy people intentionally follow the model of Jesus. They have learned to follow the three dynamics of incarnation found in the life of Jesus— enter into another’s world, hold on to yourself, and hang between two worlds. As Scazzero realizes, “my most effective discipleship is to be an incarnational presence to another person. It was for Jesus. It is for all his followers.”
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