The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World

by Peter Scazzero

Biblical Sabbath is a twenty-four-hour block of time in which we stop work, enjoy rest, practice delight, and contemplate God.

The problem with too many leaders is that we allow our work to trespass on every other area of life, disrupting the balanced rhythm of work and rest God created for our good.

I identified the four foundational characteristics you read in the opening line of this section that define Sabbath as a twenty-four-hour block of time in which we stop work, enjoy rest, practice delight, and contemplate God. These four characteristics have since served me well in distinguishing a routine day off from a biblical Sabbath.

In a very real sense, the practice of Sabbath joins heaven and earth, equipping us not merely to rest from our work but also to work from our rest.

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of being fundamentally flawed, defective, unworthy, and “deficient in some vital way as a human being.”5 So we work harder, and then work even harder. Maybe, if I get over this next hill at work, then I’ll feel better about myself and how things are going to step back and relax. But for now I can’t stop.

Shame, on the other hand, is about who I am.

When we fall short as a leader, we think things like, I’m such an idiot. I’m awful and worthless! I’m such a fraud — this wouldn’t have happened if I were a decent leader. Shame testifies not to wrong doing but to flawed being.

Sabbath can be terrifying because doing nothing productive leaves us feeling vulnerable.

Overworking hides these feelings of inadequacy or worthlessness not just from others but also from ourselves. As long as we keep busy, we can outrun that internal voice that says things like: I am never good enough.

Part of who we are is what we do. God is a worker, and we are workers. But that is not the deepest truth about who we are. We are first of all human beings. But when things get switched around and our role or title becomes the foundation of our identity, we are reduced to human doings. And when that happens, ceasing work or productive activity becomes extremely difficult.

Keeping the Sabbath is a core spiritual discipline — an essential delivery mechanism for God’s grace and goodness in our lives. It provides a God-ordained way to slow us down for meaningful connection with God, ourselves, and those we care about.

Legalism can be defined as relying on our own obedience to gain acceptance from God.

Licentiousness, on the other hand, is an abuse of God’s grace by completely disregarding his commands.

As leaders, it reminds us that life is about more than work; life is about God. When balanced by a Sabbath rhythm, work takes its proper place as a good, but not a god.

Sadly, many of us remain under a harsh and controlling taskmaster, a “Pharaoh” who now lives inside our heads, telling us we can’t stop or rest. The culture shackles us in chains, telling us our only value is in what we achieve or produce, that we are losers unless we accomplish more — whatever it may cost us.

God is sovereign over every principality and power in the world. God is King of kings and Lord of lords. When we practice Sabbath delight, we proclaim that Jesus Christ defeated every spiritual force of evil at the cross (Colossians 2:15). We affirm that human beings have infinite value and worth apart from their productivity, and that God’s love is the most important reality in the universe.

Play is important because it is an indicator that we really do believe life is more than work. It balances our tendency to be too serious and too focused on results.

Although the staff members and volunteers we work with are certainly not our servants, they are under our authority and subject to our influence. This means it falls within the legitimate scope of our responsibility to encourage the boundaries that make Sabbath possible for them.

to be an emotionally healthy leader we must drive certain practices deep into our inner life if we are to build well.

Without that anchor, my leadership was weak and fragmented, especially when it came to planning and decision making.

When we default to assumptions like these, we are succumbing to one or more of three common temptations: we define success too narrowly, we make plans and take action without God, and we go beyond God’s limits.

It is biblical and wonderful to make plans to expand God’s kingdom. The questions we must continually ask, however, are these: Where does this opportunity or plan fit within the larger plan of what God is doing in the world? How do we sense God is inviting us to do this work? Our perspective is limited. His thoughts and ways are far higher and different than ours (Isaiah 55:8 – 9). The only way we can know his plans is to listen carefully to his voice.

Going beyond our limits is one of the most significant challenges and temptations we face as leaders.4 It takes maturity to decline a great opportunity for growth and to embrace a modest plan.

attempting to do more than God intends is a formula for both failure and burnout.

EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY PLANNING AND DECISION MAKING 1. We define success as radically doing God’s will. 2. We create a space for heart preparation. 3. We pray for prudence. 4. We look for God in our limits.

Success is first and foremost doing what God has asked us to do, doing it his way, and in his timing.

What might change in your context if you were to define success not by the numbers but as radically doing God’s will?

What are the markers of success to which God is calling you and your team? What fears or anxieties are you aware of as you even consider such questions?

true obedience is a learned, struggled-for, and prayed-for obedience. If it took falling with his face to the ground and great struggle for the Son of God to submit himself to the will of the Father, how can we expect that it will require any less of us?

Prudence has been called the “executive virtue,” meaning it enables us to think clearly and not be swept up by our impulses or emotions. Prudence remembers past experiences, our own and others, and draws out any applicable lessons and principles. It partners with humility and willingly seeks counsel from others with more experience. Prudence is cautious and careful to provide for the future. Prudence asks, “Feelings aside, what is best in the long run?”13 It carefully considers all relevant factors, possibilities, difficulties, and outcomes. Perhaps most important is that prudence refuses to rush — it is willing to wait on God

Remember the words of the apostle Paul? God’s power is made perfect in our weaknesses, not in our strengths (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Limits are often simply God’s gifts in disguise. This makes them one of the most counterintuitive, difficult truths in Scripture to embrace. It flies in the face of our natural tendency to want to play god and run the world.

We see only a small part of God’s plan at any point in time. His ways are not our ways. But what he does in and through our limitations is more than we could ever accomplish in our own strength.

1. We define success as radically doing God’s will. 2. We create a space for heart preparation. 3. We pray for prudence. 4. We look for God in our limits.

So what precisely are these things called team building and culture that we are responsible for developing and stewarding well? Team building is fairly easy to define; it involves mobilizing a group of people with diverse skills who are committed to a shared vision and common goals. Culture, however, is somewhat more challenging to describe. Why? Because it consists primarily of unspoken rules about “the way we do things around here.” Culture is that imprecise something, the invisible presence or personality of a place that can be difficult to describe without actually experiencing it.

Perhaps the simplest and best definitions I’ve come across describe culture as “the sum-total of the learned patterns of thought and behavior” of any given group;3 and “culture is what human beings make of the world.”4

Culture includes such things as our vision, values, and strategy (seeker-targeted, multisite, purpose-driven, etc.), common practices and style (we have a choir and they wear robes, we sit silently before services, we dress informally, etc.), and even our language and use of space. How we exercise authority, conduct relationships, handle conflict, position ourselves in the community (or marketplace), and define personal and/or spiritual growth are all expressions of the culture in which we lead. And as Christian leaders, we must be intentional about taking the chaos of what people bring to the organization (from their very different backgrounds and families of origin) and shaping it into a new culture that seeks to operate as the family of Jesus.

creating an emotionally healthy culture and team is one of the most powerful opportunities we have to impact people’s lives and our long-term mission.

How can we expect to change the world for Christ if we ourselves are not being changed by him?

When we make our transformation in Christ the first priority of our leadership, we instill that value in our culture and in our teams.

We look outside our context, North American culture, and our evangelical subculture for fresh perspectives and practices that will help us grow personally and professionally.

Go outside your normal boundaries/cultures

Where will Phil be as a leader — one, three, ten years from now — if he continues avoiding conflict and stuffing his disappointments and hurts?

The most elegantly simple description of power I know is this: power is the capacity to influence. As author Richard Gula writes: [Power] is what enables us to make things happen or not. In this sense, everyone has power, but we do not all have it to the same degree. Power as influence is always relative to our resources. One of the most important self-examinations we can do is to name our sources of power, for we are most at risk of ethical misconduct when we minimize or ignore our power.

Every leader needs to be aware of the six primary sources of power.

Positional power.

Personal power.

“God factor” power.

Projected power.

Relational power.

Cultural power.