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

by Peter Scazzero

God opened my eyes to see I was a human being, not a human doing, which gave me permission to feel difficult emotions such as anger and sadness.

Geri and I discovered the importance of love as the measure of maturity and reprioritized our schedules to place our marriage before ministry.2

It didn’t matter how many books I might read or how much I devoted myself to prayer, I would remain stuck in repeated cycles of pain and immaturity unless and until I allowed Jesus Christ to transform aspects of my life that were deep beneath the surface.

Leading out of our brokenness and weaknesses became a core value. Loving well was now the most important task among all our work for God.

Spending time in solitude and silence, praying the Daily Office, and practicing weekly Sabbath became our core spiritual disciplines.

I stopped praying for God to bless my goals and started praying for his will.

Once again, I had to take a hard look beneath the surface of my life — this time at the hidden mass of pain and failures related to my role as a leader. As I began to consider the changes I needed to make, I soon realized that applying the principles of emotionally healthy spirituality to the tasks of leadership and building a healthy organizational culture would be far more complex than I had imagined.

I want to be a better leader. I’m open and eager to learn, but I don’t know where to start. I know something’s not right. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens. I can’t go on this way. I’ve hit a wall and I need help to make sense of what went wrong so I can get back on my feet and lead differently.

I’m stuck in an environment I can’t change. I’m a mid-level leader in a negative situation, and I feel powerless to change it. I’m doing the best I can, but I’m not having an impact. I’m running programs but not changing lives. I feel plateaued and stagnant. I’m too overwhelmed by work to enjoy life — with God, myself, and others. I’m missing out on the joys of life because of the crushing demands of leadership.

if we hope to transform the world with the good news of Jesus, we must begin by embarking on a personal journey, one that will lead us through a deep, beneath-the-surface transformation in our own lives.

In part 1, we’ll explore the four core tasks of the inner life every leader must undertake: facing one’s shadow, leading out of marriage or singleness, slowing down for loving union, and practicing Sabbath delight.

inform our spirituality. In part 2, we’ll build on the foundation of an emotionally healthy inner life by exploring four core outer-life tasks we routinely deal with in the course of leadership. These include planning and decision making, culture and team building, power and wise boundaries, endings and new beginnings.

The emotionally unhealthy leader is someone who operates in a continuous state of emotional and spiritual deficit, lacking emotional maturity and a “being with God” sufficient to sustain their “doing for God.”

Emotional deficits are manifested primarily by a pervasive lack of awareness. Unhealthy leaders lack, for example, awareness of their feelings, their weaknesses and limits, how their past impacts their present, and how others experience them. They also lack the capacity and skill to enter deeply into the feelings and perspectives of others. They carry these immaturities with them into their teams and everything they do.

Spiritual deficits typically reveal themselves in too much activity. Unhealthy leaders engage in more activities than their combined spiritual, physical, and emotional reserves can sustain. They give out for God more than they receive from him.

When we devote ourselves to reaching the world for Christ while ignoring our own emotional and spiritual health, our leadership is shortsighted at best.

Leadership is hard. It involves suffering. But there is a big difference between suffering for the gospel as Paul describes (2 Timothy 2:8) and needless suffering that is a result of our unwillingness to honestly engage difficult and challenging leadership tasks.

four characteristics: low self-awareness, prioritizing ministry over marriage/singleness, doing too much for God, and failing to practice a Sabbath rhythm.

They Have Low Self-Awareness

Emotionally unhealthy leaders tend to be unaware of what is going on inside them. And even when they recognize a strong emotion such as anger, they fail to proce...

While these leaders may have benefited from personal and leadership inventories such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, StrengthsFinder, or the DiSC profile, they remain unaware of how issues from their family of origin have impacted who they are today.

They Prioritize Ministry over Marriage or Singleness

Whether married or single, most emotionally unhealthy leaders affirm the importance of a healthy intimacy in relationships and lifestyle, but few, if any, have a vision for their marriage or singleness as the greatest gift they offer.

They Do More Activity for God than Their Relationship with God Can Sustain

But no book or conference will address the underlying issues in Carly’s life or give her what she really needs — time to slow down for God, for others, and, most importantly, herself.

They Lack a Work/Sabbath Rhythm 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.

“I know you love your work,” Craig replies, “but what else in your life right now gives you joy and delight?”

Why do we persist in unhealthy patterns?

four unhealthy commandments of church leadership.

How Healthy Is Your Leadership? Being an emotionally unhealthy leader is not an all-or-nothing condition; it operates on a continuum that ranges from mild to severe, and may change from one season of life and ministry to the next. Use the list of statements that follow to get an idea of where you’re at right now. Next to each statement, write down the number that best describes your response. Use the following scale: 5 = Always true of me 4 = Frequently true of me 3 = Occasionally true of me 2 = Rarely true of me 1 = Never true of me ____ 1. I take sufficient time to experience and process difficult emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. ____ 2. I am able to identify how issues from my family of origin impact my relationships and leadership — both negatively and positively. ____ 3. (If married): The way I spend my time and energy reflects the value that my marriage — not leadership — is my first priority. ____ (If single): The way I spend my time and energy reflects the value that living out a healthy singleness — not leadership — is my first priority. ____ 4. (If married): I experience a direct connection between my oneness with Jesus and oneness with my spouse. ____ (If single): I experience a direct connection between my oneness with Jesus and closeness with my friends and family.

____ 5. No matter how busy I am, I consistently practice the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence. ____ 6. I regularly read Scripture and pray in order to enjoy communion with God and not just in service of leading others. ____ 7. I practice Sabbath — a weekly twenty-four-hour period in which I stop my work, rest, and delight in God’s many gifts. ____ 8. I view Sabbath as a spiritual discipline that is essential for both my personal life and my leadership. ____ 9. I take time to practice prayerful discernment when making plans and decisions. ____ 10. I measure the success of planning and decision-making primarily in terms of discerning and doing God’s will (rather than exclusively by measures such as attendance growth, excellence in programming, or expanded impact in the world). ____ 11. With those who report to me, I consistently devote a portion of my supervision time to help them in their inner life with God. ____ 12. I do not avoid difficult conversations with team members about their performance or behavior. ____ 13. I feel comfortable talking about the use of power in connection with my role and that of others. ____ 14. I have articulated and established healthy boundaries in relationships that have overlapping roles (for example, with friends and family who are also employees or key volunteers, etc.). ____ 15. Instead of avoiding endings and losses, I embrace them and see them as a fundamental part of the way God works. ____ 16. I am able to prayerfully and...

our families were places of warmth, safety, and respect, then we absorb those qualities like the air we breathe. They inform our understanding of ourselves and the way we interact with the world. If our families were instead places where coldness, shame, put-downs, and perfectionism were the norm, we naturally absorb these qualities, and they too inform the way we view ourselves and how we engage the world. In the same way, we have been birthed into a church family that has its own unhealthy and largely unspoken commandments about leadership. If you want to become an emotionally healthy leader, sooner or later you will have to resist the pull of one or more of these commandments.

Unhealthy Commandment 1: It’s Not a Success Unless It’s Bigger and Better Most of us have been taught to measure success by external markers. In the context of the church, we typically measure things like attendance, baptisms, memberships, people serving, number of small groups, and financial giving. And let’s be clear — numbers aren’t all bad.

But let’s also be clear: There is a wrong way to deal with numbers. When we use numbers to compare ourselves to others or to boast of our size, we cross a line.

When it comes to the church and numbers, the problem isn’t that we count, it’s that we have so fully embraced the world’s dictum that bigger is better that numbers have become the only thing we count. When something isn’t bigger and better, we consider it — and often ourselves — a failure.

Success isn’t always bigger and better.

Perhaps the best biblical text about this issue is found in Luke 10. Jesus sends out seventy-two disciples two by two. When they return, they are excited to report significant numerical impact and that the demons submit to them in his name. Jesus affirms their activity of kingdom building, but he also reminds them of something more important: “Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). In other words, he wants them to remember that their joy comes from their relationship with him, not their achievements for him.1

How then do we resist obeying this bigger-is-better commandment? The only way, I believe, is to slow down our lives for a relationship of deep, loving union with Jesus (more about this in chapter 4), and to have a few trusted companions who protect us from self-deception.

Unhealthy Commandment 2: What You Do Is More Important than Who You Are

Who you are as a person — and specifically how well you love — will always have a larger and longer impact on those around you than what you do. Your being with God (or lack of being with God) will trump, eventually, your doing for God every time.

We cannot give what we do not possess. We cannot help but give what we do possess.

if we have not lived the truths we teach and been transformed by them personally, the spiritual transformation of those we serve will be stunted.

The evil one was intent that Jesus’ doing — not his being with God — be the foundation of his life and ministry.

Unhealthy commandment #3: Superficial spirituality is ok. We cannot assume deep transformation is occurring.

What I do matters. Who I am matters much more.

Unhealthy Commandment 3: Superficial Spirituality Is Okay

I ask questions like: “Describe to me your rhythms, how you study Scripture apart from preparations, when and how much time you spend alone with God.”

The problem is that in most settings, as long as leaders are doing their jobs (volunteer or paid), everyone is pleased.

Just because we have the gifts and skills to build a crowd and create lots of activity does not mean we are building a church or ministry that connects people intimately to Jesus.

How can we overcome the lure of this deadly commandment? We slow down. We commit ourselves to learning from the contemplative tradition and writings of leaders through church history.