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

by Peter Scazzero

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.

Lead by example. Talk about your Sabbath experiences, both successes and failures.

Provide support resources that address questions and challenges. At New Life, we have trained our board members, staff, and key leaders about Sabbath.

Engage your team by asking them about their Sabbath experience. Part of supporting the value of Sabbath is demonstrating interest in it.

before you can really lead out of your Sabbath and give the gift of Sabbath to others, you have to begin practicing it yourself.

to be an emotionally healthy leader we must drive certain practices deep into our inner life if we are to build well. I defined these inner life issues as: face your shadow, lead out of your marriage or singleness, slow down for loving union, and practice Sabbath delight.

I assumed . . . • If we opened and closed our meetings in prayer, God would guide all our decisions. • It was always God’s will that our church be in a season of bearing fruit (and rarely, if ever, in a season of pruning). • If an initiative was strategic and impactful, it was therefore God’s will. • It was always God’s will for us to overcome the limits we faced. • Each member of our team routinely paid attention to what was happening inside them as well as using Scripture and wise counsel to discern God’s will in planning and decision making. • Each member of our team arrived at meetings in an undistracted state, having anchored themselves in loving union and prayer ahead of time. • Numerical growth and increased levels of participation in serving through our ministry programs was evidence of authentic growth in Christ. • God overlooked any mixed motives we might have as long as our plans and decisions overall were headed in the right direction.

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.

We Define Success Too Narrowly

In churches, we tend to define success by such things as attendance, finances (giving, meeting or exceeding budget, etc.), decisions for Christ, baptisms, numbers participating ...

The models of success I’d been exposed to in books, the media, and at numerous Christian leadership conferences were based mostly on large, rapidly growing churches in middle- to upper-class suburban contexts or mega-churches in South Korea, Latin America, and Africa.

The problem was that the portion of our time and energy devoted to thinking about external issues far exceeded the amount of time and energy we devoted to internal measures of transformation, such as the depth of people’s personal relationship with God, the quality of marriages and singleness, the level of emotional maturity, and the integrity of our relationships as a community.

We Make Plans and Take Action without God

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?

We Go Beyond God’s Limits

Going beyond our limits is one of the most significant challenges and temptations we face as leaders.

Characteristics of Emotionally Healthy Planning and Decision Making

Over the years, I’ve come to rely on four characteristics of emotionally healthy planning and decision making that I believe must become ever more deeply rooted in the soil of our hearts. These four characteristics emerged from our leadership work at New Life as well as our work with churches and leaders around the world. 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.

We Define Success As Radically Doing God’s Will

New Life had one objective: to become what God had called us to become, and to do what God had called us to do — regardless of where any of that might lead us. That would be the sole marker of our success. It meant that all the previous markers — increased attendance, bigger and better programs, more serving — had to take a backseat to this one. I was no longer willing to “succeed” at the expense of hearing and listening to the will of God.

The challenge every leader and team must face is undertaking the slow and painstaking discernment work to identify precisely what that is for you at any given point in time.

But as time went on and we leaned into God’s wisdom for our context at New Life, there were three markers of success we felt God had clearly given us. This is how we defined success: Success is when people are transformed deep beneath the surface of their lives.

Here are several examples of the measures we set: • Each leader at New Life will develop his or her relationship with God by spending ten to thirty minutes in prayer and Scripture reading in the morning, and a few additional minutes of prayer and reflection in the afternoon/evening. • Our staff, board, and key leaders will slow down their lives by practicing Sabbath for twenty-four hours each week. • Our staff, board, and key leaders will pray the Examen at least once a day in order to discern and follow God’s will in their lives.7 • Every member of our pastoral and administrative staff team will consistently integrate emotionally healthy skills into their ministries and relationships. • Each member at New Life will develop a personal Rule of Life that enables them to receive and give the love of God. They will share this at their membership interview. • Eighty-five percent of our members will connect in a small group and/or ministry (i.e., a smaller community) as part of their spiritual formation. • Every child/teenager will participate in a discipleship small group with an appointed leader. • Fifty percent of married couples will go through training to view their relationship as a living sign of God’s passionate love for the world.

Think of it this way. Just as the conditions required for the growth vary among the 800,000 plants in the world, every Christian is unique and in need of a tailored, personal approach for spiritual growth. Every plant needs a different combination of resources — light, temperature, fertilizer, pH, etc. Legumes, such as soybeans and clover, have bacteria in their roots and make their own nitrogen. They need a particular type of fertilizer without nitrogen. Some plants, such as grasses, need full sun. Others, such as impatiens, need full shade. Mastering a working knowledge of the unique combinations for all 800,000 plants is the work of a lifetime. And knowing the many unique pathways God uses to help his people grow into maturity is also a lifework. One size does not fit all.

Success is bridging racial, cultural, economic, and gender barriers.

What might that look like in practice? Each level of leadership — elders, staff, ministry leaders, etc. — reflects our diversity. That means there are deep cultural and racial differences that could divide us from one another. In an attempt to bridge these divides, we regularly take the time to listen to each other’s stories as part of doing life together.

Success is serving our community and the world.

Before moving on to the three remaining markers of success, I encourage you to pause and reflect for a moment. 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?

We Create a Space for Heart Preparation

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.

Personal Heart Preparation

Ignatius taught that the degree to which we are open to any outcome or answer from God is the degree to which we are ready to really hear what God has to say. If we are clutching or overly attached to one outcome versus another, we won’t hear God clearly.

What this means for me is that I pray for indifference so I can pray the prayer of indifference. Every day, I pray for the grace to honestly say, Father, I am indifferent to every outcome except your will. I want nothing more or less than your desire for what I do.

Team Heart Preparation

If I am leading the meeting, I’ll begin with two to three minutes of silence, or perhaps we might pray the Daily Office together.

We like to begin every important planning retreat with a “being” experience before tackling the “doing” component of these longer meetings. For example, we began a recent staff retreat by reading about Jesus’ rhythms of solitude and ministry, followed by a discussion of a poem by Judy Brown. We read the poem twice aloud, asking people to underline and take notes on what spoke to them. Fire What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water would. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between, as much as the wood. When we are able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel, and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible. We only need lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. 12 Judy Brown Afterward, we took about ten minutes for discussion. We asked the group: What words or phrases call out to you from this poem? We then gave everyone about twenty-five minutes on their own for guided personal reflection using these questions: • When in your ministry or life in the past year have you piled on too many logs? • When has too much of a good thing not been a good thing? • What does it look like for you to create sufficient ...

We Pray for Prudence

The word prudence is used to characterize people who have the foresight to take everything into account. Prudent people think ahead, giving careful thought to the long-term implications of their decisions.

Prudence remembers past experiences, our own and others, and draws out any applicable lessons and principles.

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 for as long as it takes and to give the decision-making process the time it needs.14

We had prepared ourselves in part by reading a book about communal discernment, Pursuing God’s Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups by Ruth Haley Barton.

First, we prayed for indifference — that each of us would be willing to let go of our attachments to any particular outcome. Then we did a roll call to assess how open each of us was to whatever God might say. Redd asked, “How many in this room are now indifferent about the outcome?” We started with a simple yes-or-no question, but in subsequent discernment meetings have used a one-to-ten continuum, with one meaning we are entrenched in and committed to a particular outcome, and ten meaning we are totally open to following through on whatever God might want. At the end of our three-hour process, it was clear to everyone that six months was much too soon to launch additional sites, and that there were a number of things we needed to tend to before launching.

We Look for God in Our Limits

Our limits may well be the last place we look for God. We want to conquer limits, plan around limits, deny limits, fight limits, and break through limits.

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.

God reveals himself to us, and to the world, through limits in unique and powerful ways — if we have eyes to see. Consider these examples from Scripture: • Moses was limited by the fact that he was slow of speech. He shares his concerns with God, who then says, “Who gave human beings their mouths? . . . Is it not I, the LORD? Now go: I will help you speak and will teach you what to say” (Exodus 4:10 – 12). God makes it clear that he is present in and through Moses’ limitations. Moses then leads three million people for the next forty years in the power of God. • Jeremiah was limited by a melancholy disposition. He cursed the day he was born and wanted to die. Yet God was present in and through the limits of his temperament, giving him insights about the heart of God that still touch millions of God’s people to this day. • John the Baptist was limited by his simple, semi-monastic life in the desert. But God was present in that limitation, granting John an ability to see something nobody else in his day could see clearly — the extraordinary revelation of Jesus as the Lamb of God. • Abraham was limited by having only one son with Sarah. He suffered under that limitation, yet he met God in extraordinary ways through his journey of faith. He became the father of us all (Romans 4:17), and his story provides us revelations of who God is — all of which came out of his limits. • Gideon was limited by the size of his army — just 300 Israelites going up against 135,000 Midianites. Bu...

My time limits are a gift. Thanks to Geri, we have led an intensive small group in the basement of our home almost every year during the twenty-six years I was senior pastor.

Out of this quiet but consistent investment over the years have come a steady stream of leaders who have served the church and expanded its reach far beyond what I could have imagined. And virtually all of the published small group resources and books we have written were shaped and refined in the crucible of our basement over those years.

Our location limits are a gift. I have often grumbled and complained when I compared our location to that of other churches.

Take a few minutes to reflect on the four characteristics: defining success as radically doing God’s will, creating a space for heart preparation, praying for prudence, and looking for God in our limits. When you consider the challenges you face in your own leadership, which one speaks to you the most? What fears or concerns do you have when you imagine implementing this in your leadership? What are the short-term costs of stopping, turning, and doing something different? What might be the long-term implications if you don’t? If you are willing to take the risks and live with some temporary disorientation, I can promise you that God is waiting for you there.