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

by Peter Scazzero

Friendships work best among equal peers with equal power. This balance is compromised when one person functions in a position of spiritual leadership or supervision of the other. Ethics scholar Martha Ellen Stortz has written an excellent description of the core qualities of friendship and how these conflict with Christian ministry and leadership.13 In what follows, I’ve summarized a few of the qualities of friendship she identifies: Choice. Friends choose each other. This means they don’t choose other people; they exclude them. As leaders in a community, when we exclude people, we risk taking sides and inadvertently defining who is “in” while others are “out.” In the early years of our church, my executive assistant often commented on what she described as my favoritism toward my inner circle of friends. She said that I treated them differently. I dismissed her observations at the time, but she was right. Our friends have more access to us than other people. And this gives them greater influence than most other people with whom we serve. Equality. Friends are equal in power and status. As senior leader, I had doors opened to me that others in my friendship circle did not — from vacation opportunities from donors to growth opportunities along with the authority to hire and fire. As lead pastor, I could also open opportunities for my inner circle of friends at New Life that they could not open for me. Because of my particular mix of positional and personal power, all things...