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

by Peter Scazzero

We Acknowledge and Monitor Dual Relationships

Perhaps nothing is as complex for leaders as the challenge of navigating dual relationships with family and close friendships.

The Challenge of Dual Relationships A dual relationship is when we have more than one role in someone’s life.

I do not believe it is healthy or biblical to try to entirely eliminate dual relationships from Christian leadership. Drawing rigid professional boundaries in a church or para-church organization may well limit what God is doing. These boundaries simply need to be prudently and carefully monitored.

I should have limited my mentoring and handed the mentoring of her to others. I also should have ensured that a serious job review and job evaluation was done for her as it was for other staff. Because I treated her like a member of my family, I allowed myself to have different expectations for her. In fact, this dilemma can be even more challenging when the dual relationship is with someone in our own family.

The Challenge of Family

The Challenge of Close Friendships

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...

The result was a Rule of Life for the pastoral staff (and later for the administrative staff and church board) that continues to guide us to this day.14 This excerpt describes the three distinct yet overlapping roles of pastoral staff and how we are to navigate them well in our relationships with one another: Using their God-given talents, our members work and serve as volunteers out of a sense of passion and mission. We too work and serve out of a sense of passion and mission; nevertheless, we function in a dual relationship with the New Life Fellowship (NLF) Board and congregation as “employees.” In fact, we have at least three roles in the community of NLF: we are family members, leaders in this church family, and employees. These roles carry challenges in how we relate to one another and to NLF. Each year, we are set apart by the board of elders to serve the body at New Life Fellowship in a unique way. Whether full or half time, we are given a salary in order to fulfill this special calling free from the constraints of secular employment. The body as a whole supports us financially so that we can devote ourselves to serving the body — praying, pastoring, and equipping the saints to do ministry (Ephesians 4:11ff). This is our privilege and our joy. At the same time, the elder board is responsible for the stewardship of the church’s resources in our dynamic, changing environment. Our call from God to pastoral leadership may last our entire lives regardless of our employm...

CHAPTER 9 ENDINGS AND NEW BEGINNINGS

The Continuum of Endings in Leadership

Not every problem can or should be solved or overcome; some things just need to be allowed to die. This isn’t necessarily a failure. Often it is an indication that one chapter has ended and a new one is waiting to be written. This happens in our personal lives as well as in leadership.

If we accept the broader culture’s view of endings — as failure and something to be avoided — we will neglect one of the most essential tasks of leadership, helping others navigate endings and transitions well. To navigate transitions well means leading with care, helping others to avoid the traps of bitterness, hardness of heart, or resistance to the new thing God might be unfolding in our midst.

Characteristics of Endings and New Beginnings in Standard Practice

Why are endings and transitions so poorly handled in our ministries, organizations, and teams? Why do we often miss God’s new beginnings, the new work he is doing? We miss seeing what is ahead in part because we fail to apply a central theological truth — that death is a necessary prelude to resurrection. To bear long-term fruit for Christ, we need to recognize that some things must die so something new can grow.

We View Endings as Failures to Be Avoided

In each scenario, the underlying problem is the leaders associating endings with failure. They don’t see that embracing the end is the only way to open up a new future. In fact, if they could model openness to and acceptance of endings, they would help those they lead to see an ending as normal and of value, not a failure.

We View Endings as Disconnected from Spiritual Formation in Jesus

Do you see how much we are missing out on when we fail to connect the pain of endings with our maturing into spiritual adulthood, when we fail to allow it to lead us to a deeper connection to Jesus? Because so few of us have a biblical understanding of what it means to truly wait on God, we fail to grow and mature through the inevitable endings that accompany all leadership. Instead, we begin to develop a hard protective shell, the emotional armor we feel we need to survive the many blows and arrows that will surely come. Our superficial theology fails to grasp that Jesus’ death and resurrection is not only the central message of Christianity but also the necessary pattern of our lives.

We Disconnect Endings from Our Family-of-Origin Issues

We must ask ourselves questions like these: • Did my family deny or minimize loss and endings? • Did my family blame others, demanding that someone or something was always to blame for a loss? • Did my family members blame themselves for endings and losses, retreating into isolation or depression? • Did my family members distance themselves from endings and losses by intellectualizing them or manufacturing half-truths to soften the painful reality of what really happened? • Did my family tend to medicate the pain of loss through self-destructive, compulsive, or addictive behavior? • Did my family retain a sense of hope and expectancy of what the future might bring — even when things were at their worst? Or did they resign themselves to despair and hopelessness when confronted with difficult transitions?

Our society doesn’t teach endings. Our churches don’t teach endings. Our families don’t equip us to embrace endings as part of the rhythm of life. When we add our own insecurities and fears, it seems obvious that we consider endings as interruptions to be avoided no matter what it takes. The problem is that, in the process, we block the new beginnings God wants to birth in and through us.

You Know You’re Not Doing Endings and New Beginnings Well When . . . • You can’t stop ruminating about something from the past. • You use busyness as an excuse to avoid taking time to grieve endings and losses or to allow for the possibility that you might meet God in the process. • You avoid acknowledging the pain of your losses rather than grieve, explore the reasons behind your sadness, and allow God to work in you through them. • You often find yourself angry and frustrated by the grief and pain in life. • You escape or medicate the pain of loss through self-destructive behaviors such as overeating, use of pornography, inappropriate relationships, substance abuse, overengagement with social media, or working too much. • You struggle with the envy you feel toward those who don’t seem to be hit by the same hardships in life that you experience. • You often dream of quitting in order to avoid the pain, disappointments, setbacks, and endings that routinely characterize leadership. • You are not honest with yourself about the feelings, doubts, and hurts deep beneath the surface of your life. • You rarely acknowledge directly that a program or person has outright failed. You avoid that pain by spinning the truth and glossing over the losses, disappointments, and struggles. • You rarely think about change in your role or position because you dislike change.

Characteristics of Emotionally Healthy Endings and New Beginnings

Although the process of navigating endings and new beginnings is almost always complex, we can say we are making a healthy transition when our process takes us through four phases: • We accept that endings are a death. • We recognize that endings and waiting in the confusing “in-between” will often take much longer than we think. • We view endings and waiting as inextricably linked to our personal maturing in Christ. • We affirm that endings and waiting are the gateway to new beginnings.

We Accept That Endings Are a Death

Most of us tend to live under the illusion that God wouldn’t intentionally lead us into such pain — especially multiple times. We can’t make any sense of why the people and things we love must literally and figuratively experience the finality of death. So we are shocked, anxious, confused, and often angry when endings come.

we come to know Jesus in the “participation in his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10).

As a person who tends to resist accepting the necessity of endings, I consistently do four things to keep me on track: • I face the brutal facts of situations where things are going badly and ask hard questions, even when everything inside me prefers to distract myself or flee. • I remind myself not to follow my feelings during these times of embracing endings as a death. My feelings inevitably lead me to avoid what I need to face. • I talk with seasoned mentors who are older and more experienced, asking for their perspective and wisdom. • I ask myself two questions: What is it time to let go of in my personal life and in my leadership? And, If I embrace this death, what new thing might be standing backstage, waiting to make its entrance in my personal life and in my leadership?5 This second question especially encourages me to move beyond my fears, reminding me that God has something good for me in the future — even though I may not yet see any hints of what that might be.

We Recognize that Endings and Waiting in the Confusing “In-Between” Often Take Much Longer than We Think

We View Endings and Waiting as Inextricably Linked to Our Personal Maturing in Christ

Jesus Christ is deeply formed in us when we trust God enough to embrace endings and losses. Endings and waiting bring us face-to-face with the cross, with death, with the refining fire of what John of the Cross described as “the dark night of the soul.” A dark night is an experience of spiritual desolation and the ordinary way we grow in Christ as leaders.

Much of my growth as a leader has come out of these kinds of painful, mysterious, and confusing experiences — the in-between times — over which I have so little control. When I have resisted God in such times — by simply getting busier and adding new programs, for example — I have missed the new beginnings God had for me and those I led.

We Affirm that Endings and Waiting Are the Gateway to New Beginnings

Peter followed that summer with a three-month sabbatical to help him retool for the next phase of this new role that was unfolding before him.

The Seven Stages in Our Transition Process The following are the seven stages of the transition process developed by the board and me. I shared these stages with the congregation in 2011. 1 Define the founding pastor’s new role. Since I would be staying at New Life, the first thing we had to determine was what my role and contribution would be once a new senior leader was in place. This would have a significant impact on the contours of the next senior leader’s job description. I was convinced it was God’s will that I surrender my power and come under a new lead pastor for the future of New Life. 2 Define the new senior pastor’s role. We determined the job description for the new senior leader and his or her relationship to the elder board. 3 Establish a task force. The elders commissioned a transitional task force to begin the search for a new senior leader. 4 Identify potential candidates. The task force and the elders concluded that we had two potential internal candidates at New Life. We began conversations with each of them to discern God’s choice for this role. During this process, one of the candidates determined that remaining at New Life was not God’s will for him. 5 Complete a year of “testing.” The elders then set up a one-year framework for “testing” Rich, the remaining candidate, and possibly choosing him as the next lead pastor. 6 Affirm a new leader. That year of “testing” concluded successfully in December 2011, and the elder board affirmed Rich as the new ...