Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation

by Peter Scazzero

More specifically, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: • Slows down our lives to cultivate a deep, personal relationship with Jesus amidst the hurry and distractions that routinely overload us. • Offers guidelines to determine how much the values and goals of Western culture have compromised, or even negated, the radical call of Jesus to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. • Makes provision for surrendering to, rather than fighting against, the gift of God’s limits in our lives. • Integrates sadness and loss into our following of Jesus. As a result we no longer miss out on the treasures God has buried within them. • Provides clear criteria to measure spiritual maturity by how we are growing in our ability to love others. • Connects how our family of origin and personal history influence our discipleship in the present. We no longer treat deep patterns and traumas from the past with a quick fix. • Embraces weakness and vulnerability as core to accessing God’s power and offering his love to the world.

What we needed was a whole new way of doing discipleship that worked beneath the surface of people’s lives so they might experience a deep transformation and have a sustainable, long-term impact in the world as a result. We needed a model that was transformative.

Too many people have been “babied” in their discipleship, to the point that they have become nearly disabled spiritually. As a result, they accept without question a faith that promises freedom and abundance in Jesus, and yet they never seem to notice how they remain imprisoned, especially in unbiblical ways of relating to themselves and others. They shrug their shoulders as if to say, “It’s useless. I can’t do anything about that. It’s just the way I am.”

In the process, I’ve become convinced that implementing a robust and in-depth discipleship for our people requires that we address at least four fundamental failures: 1. We tolerate emotional immaturity. 2. We emphasize doing for God over being with God. 3. We ignore the treasures of church history. 4. We define success wrongly.

In other words, if those around us consistently experience us as unapproachable, cold, unsafe, defensive, rigid, or judgmental, Scripture declares us spiritually immature.

What Jesus taught and modeled was that our love for God was measured by the degree to which we love others. In fact, he was so clear about it that it would have been unthinkable for his followers to think otherwise. And yet, they did—and so do we.

Work for God that is not nourished by a deep interior life with God will eventually deteriorate—and us with it.11 Over time our sense of worth and validation gradually shifts from a grounding in God’s love to the success or failure of our ministry work and performance. And that’s when the peace, the clarity, and the spaciousness of our life with Christ slowly, almost imperceptibly, disappears.

As much as I love our branch of the church, I also recognize that Protestantism has a shadow. Our revivalist focus on individuals making a decision to receive Christ has led to a two-tier Christianity—believers and disciples. We now have large numbers of “believers” who have accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior but who are not “disciples” following him. At the same time, our discipleship initiatives are top-heavy on renewing the mind through Scripture, but correspondingly weak in other critical components of a fully orbed, biblical spirituality—such as the practices of silence, stillness, solitude, and waiting on God. If we are going to make disciples of Jesus who are healthy and whole, we must actively seek to learn from both our history and from Christians very different than us.

Success, according to Scripture, is becoming the person God calls you to become, and doing what God calls you to do–in his way, and according to his timetable.

We tend to show deference to those the world considers important. Our insecurities are often revealed in those moments. But John didn’t adjust his message to avoid offending those in power. The fact that the religious leaders prayed five times a day, memorized large portions of Scripture, and fasted twice a week didn’t keep John from calling them a brood of snakes (Luke 3:7). He had no problem stating the truth—that their relationship with God was superficial and that they were more concerned with accruing power and position than they were for the things of God. Without apology, John summoned them, along with the rest of God’s people, to the humbling waters of baptism—a rite reserved for the conversion of pagan Gentiles, contaminated outsiders who needed a washing!

When we define success wrongly, it means our best energies will be invested in things such as cutting-edge weekend services, cultivating our brand, and preparing captivating messages. Little is left over for discipleship—our own or that of others—especially when it produces what appears to be such a small and slow return. With the little time left to invest in the messy work of discipleship, we do the next best thing. We standardize discipleship and make it scalable. Our approach resembles more of a conveyor belt in a manufacturing plant than the kind of relational discipleship Jesus modeled for us. We like standardization. Jesus preferred customization.

Deep change is what Emotionally Healthy Discipleship (EHD) is all about. In Part 2, we will focus on the seven marks of a biblical discipleship that deeply transforms lives: • Be Before You Do • Follow the Crucified—not the “Americanized”—Jesus • Embrace God’s Gift of Limits • Discover the Treasures Hidden in Grief and Loss • Make Love the Measure of Spiritual Maturity • Break the Power of the Past • Lead out of Weakness and Vulnerability It’s important to keep in mind, however, that each of these marks fall within this larger biblical framework of community, including life-on-life discipling relationships, small groups, and serving.

An emotionally healthy disciple slows down to be with Jesus, goes beneath the surface of their life to be deeply transformed by Jesus, and offers their life as a gift to the world for Jesus.

A person who practices being before doing operates from a place of emotional and spiritual fullness, deeply aware of themselves, others, and God. As a result, their being with God is sufficient to sustain their doing for God.

These three statements summarize this be-before-you-do approach to ministry: 1. You cannot give what you do not possess. 2. What you do is important, but who you are is even more important. 3. The state you are in is the state you give to others. They’re easy to preach and teach, but challenging to live out.

In order to be with God before doing for God, we need to: make a radical decision, feel our feelings, integrate silence, and commune with Jesus throughout the day.

Jesus denounced any activity that had traces of seeking the approval or admiration of others. We are to give up all acting and every quest to be noticed by someone else, whether it be by building a larger or more unique ministry, accumulating more money or possessions, or advancing up a career ladder. Jesus knew the weaknesses of the human heart; he knew that the desire to impress others would be a constant temptation. He said to the religious leaders, “How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:44). He knew the desire for popularity had poisoned their faith and their leadership. He also knew it had the potential to poison the discipleship of his followers as well.

Freedom comes when we no longer need to be somebody special in other people’s eyes. We are to be content to be popular with him alone.

In following the crucified Jesus, we shift our focus from our great plans for God to the largely hidden work of doing small deeds of service for others.

When are my plans and ambitions legitimately for the glory of God, and when do they cross the line into my own desire for greatness? • What opportunities has God placed before me to be lowly with the lowly, to be little with the little?

According to Jesus, success is becoming the person God calls you to become, and doing what God calls you to do—in his way, and according to his timetable.

Let’s face it. We all want a spiritual life, but we prefer to be in charge of it and have it unfold according to our schedule and in our way. But following Jesus is not first doing things for him; it is first listening to him speak and then doing what he says. That is why listening to Jesus is more important than listening to any other person, project, program, or cause in the world.

Taking your next steps to relax in Jesus, to detach for Jesus, and to listen to Jesus is countercultural and prophetic, especially since it’s unlikely you are living in a monastic community with built-in structure and support. You can expect starts and stops, successes and failures, as you figure out what works best for you in light of your unique calling, responsibilities, limits, and temperament.

What is most important is that you take the long view of the call of God on your life—and on the lives of those you influence—to follow the crucified, not the Americanized, Jesus. Relax, allowing Jesus to hold you. Detach, surrendering your self-will and plans to him. And listen. You can bank on the reality that Jesus’s commitment and ability to speak to you is far greater than your commitment and ability to listen to him.

A core mark of emotionally healthy discipleship is a deep theological and practical understanding of limits. Without that, we severely compromise our ability to love God, ourselves, and others over the long haul. Healthy limits are important in every area of life—be it the workplace, parenting, marriage, friendships, or dating—but they are especially necessary for those of us who lead in the new family of Jesus called the church. They’re necessary because limits are a deeply spiritual issue. When we surrender to them, we acknowledge that we are not God. God is God and we are not. Instead, we accept that we are his creatures, and we surrender to the reality that he alone is in charge of the world.

The problem was that God had not given me the abilities, the capacities, or the calling he had given those other leaders. I brought different strengths to the task of leadership. My unwillingness to embrace my own limits led me down paths God never intended for me. I spent years attempting to live out a script for my life that was not mine. While the script needed an actor, I was auditioning for the wrong part.

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 limits is more than we could ever accomplish in our own strength.

One of the indicators we are on the road to spiritual maturity is when we live joyfully within our God-given limits. The problem is that most of us resent limits—in ourselves and in others. We expect far too much from ourselves and often live frustrated, disappointed, or even angry lives as a result. In fact, much of burnout is a result of giving what we do not possess.

The second way in which we experience limits as a gift is by breaking through them. Here are the crucial discernment questions we need to ask: Which limits are God asking me to break through by faith for the sake of his name in the world? What are the limits of immaturity that God is asking me to break through in my personal life?

Receiving the gift of limits as a church is both essential and challenging. It’s essential because, if we don’t, we miss the unique and creative ways God wants to move through our communities. And it’s challenging because it requires creating a new a discipleship culture that not only affirms limits as a value, but also helps people to integrate limits in practical ways. Over the years, there are at least four ways that we have worked to intentionally embed the gift of limits into our church: we systematize self-care of leaders, set limits on invasive people, give people freedom to say no, and teach healthy boundaries.

Invasive people operate on a continuum that ranges from mild to severe. Each of us regularly engages with mildly invasive people. These are the ones who take up too much space at the expense of others, who don’t allow others to express themselves, or who damage the community by approaching situations and people in ways that are not biblical. Yet setting limits on them is an important discipleship moment, both for them and the community.

Without shame, guilt, or pressure, we want to grow mature people who are free to say, No, thank you. The result is that the quality of the ministry we do provide is more loving. People are less cranky and stressed. They love and give love freely. Perhaps most important, giving people the freedom to say no helps us to create a culture in which people feel loved rather than used.

If I am a person with poor boundaries, I feel compelled to do what others want even though it is not what I want to do. I live in fear of disappointing someone or being criticized. I want others to like me, and I surely don’t want to be seen as selfish.

My invitation to you is to rearrange your ministry by accepting God’s gift of limits. If you do so, you will be engaging in nothing short of a groundbreaking and culture-defying act of rebellion against the contemporary Western way of doing church. But you can rest assured of one thing: When you do God’s work in God’s way in God’s timing, you always bear God’s fruit.

Niggle realizes the work he did in his earthly life was a gift. But even more, he discovers the work he did in his earthly life was only a partial reflection of a greater work that would find its completion only in the life to come. So it is with us. Sometimes it can seem as if living within boundaries and limits is not in our best interest or even in the best interest of God’s mission. But they are—more than we can possibly imagine.

Losses that are not grieved accumulate in our soul like heavy stones that weigh us down. When we fail to attend to them, they prevent us from living freely and honestly with God and others.

Leadership has losses all its own, and often a disproportionate number of them—people in whom we invest leave, dreams die, leaders and staff move on or don’t work out, betrayals happen, marriages in the church end, relationships shatter, and external crises such as natural disasters and economic downturns take a toll on the community. You can’t be a leader in the church and expect to escape loss.

Our society has trained us well to pay attention to success but not to loss and pain. And yet, loss demands to be grieved and pain cries out to be felt. In order to keep these feelings at bay, we develop a variety of coping strategies, many of which take the form of substance abuse.

Scripture describes three biblical phases to process grief and sorrow: pay attention to pain, wait in the confusing in-between, and allow the old to birth the new. Each of these three phases has distinct characteristics, and they don’t necessarily happen in a step-by-step fashion. In fact, they frequently overlap. And, as we shall see, it is also possible to experience all three phases at the same time! But the process begins with paying attention to and feeling the pain of our losses.

From Genesis to Revelation, the Scriptures invite us to integrate seasons of grief and sadness as a central aspect of the spiritual life. To reject these seasons is to live only half of life, and to live a spirituality marked by unreality. And if an authentic spiritual life is anything, it is an absolute commitment to reality, not an escape from it.

The Psalms are loved for good reason, for there is a “psalm for every sigh.” This longest book in the Bible includes psalms of adoration, thanksgiving, wisdom, repentance, and even psalms expressing doubt.

When our pain and grief goes unexpressed or unfelt, it gets buried alive. As a result, we lose access to the depth and range of feelings given to us by God and our emotional lives are compressed into a tightly constricted box. Eventually, the feelings we bury claw their way back up through the earth of our lives and manifest in symptoms such as depression, anxiety, emptiness, and loneliness.

Over time, it became difficult to distinguish between loving people for who they were versus using them for how they could contribute to the mission. Did I need people to come to faith in Jesus to build our church, or could I simply love them regardless of their decision to follow Jesus and serve in the ministry? I was so deeply involved in getting Christ’s work done that the line became impossible to distinguish.

Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.

In I-Thou relationships, we recognize each person as unrepeatable, an inestimable treasure, an image-bearer of the living God. We treat each individual as sacred, as one created from the very breath of God. Most importantly, we welcome their otherness, acknowledging how different they are from us.

In other words, we don’t try to get something from them or treat them as an extension of ourselves, the way we might treat an object such as a hammer or a phone. In an I-Thou encounter, we come to the other without preconditions—without masks, pretenses, and, at times, without words. We are completely available to them, seeking to understand them.

How do we live this out in everyday life? How do we practice the presence of people in the same way we practice the presence of God? One tool that has served me well comes from three questions offered by David Benner in his book Soulful Spirituality: 1. Am I fully present or distracted? 2. Am I loving or judging? 3. Am I open or closed to being changed?9

The life of Jesus teaches us three dynamics that characterize what it looks like to incarnate in order to love people well: we must enter another’s world, hold on to ourselves, and live in the tension between two worlds.

Speaking uses the God-given power of words to bring healing, growth, and the love of Jesus to people. It is indispensable to spiritual maturity and healthy community.

Respectfully. Give thought to your words and don’t simply blurt them out. Take the other person’s feelings into consideration.