Chapter 1: As go the Leaders so go the church

“The key to successful spiritual leadership has much more to do with the leader’s internal life than with the leader’s expertise, gifts, or experience. “ What a concept. It reminds me that you can have all the money in the world and still not be happy….you can have all the experience and gifting, but still not be a successful spiritual leader. It’s interesting to think about that because people really don’t seem to account for the internal life. You don’t put it on your resume. People care about experience and gifts, God cares about the inside…the heart, the emotions, the complete you.

This chapter talked a lot about the background of Peter and Geri. How they came to be in the ministry and when Geri (the pastor’s wife) decided she’d had enough and was going to quit the church. She no longer respected Peter and said he didn’t have the guts to lead, to confront the people who need confronting. She told her husband that “the church is no longer life for me. It’ is death”. I would be heartbroken to hear that from anyone, let alone my spouse. Imagine being the Pastor and hearing not only that you weren’t a good leader, but that the very thing you’ve been hoping was going to be the hope to the people, was killing the person closest to you. The amazing thing is that she had the guts and wisdom to actually communicate that to him. It took lots of years, but she could’ve let it change her entire opinion of church. She chose to speak life into a dead situation. She was forcing the situation to change!

Peter talked about how he put so much into the church and their people that he had little energy left to parent, enjoy his children or his wife. “Even when I was physically present, such as at a soccer game for one of our daughters, my mind was usually focused on something related to the church. Am I supposed to be living so miserably and so pressured in order that other people can experience joy in God?”

“We mistakenly thought that dying to ourselves for the sake of the Gospel meant dying to self-care, to feelings of sadness, to anger, to grief, to doubt, to struggles, to our healthy dreams and desires, and to passions we had enjoyed before our marriage.”

“We were busy for God”

“We were gaining the whole world by doing a great work for God while at the same time losing our souls.”

The breakthrough finally came when at an attempt to get their marriage back on track, Geri and Peter went to a week long marriage retreat. They felt like it was a safe enough atmosphere to truly share their hearts. At 2 in the morning, Geri jumped up on the bed and let Peter have it. It was an extremely liberating experience for both of them. She had stripped off the heavy spiritual veneer of “being good” that kept her from looking directly at the truth about our marriage and lives. They talked…they talked about their parents and their lives and marriages and realized that, “We left them when we got married, but somehow they were still shaping our lives. Jesus had penetrated only superficially onto the depth of our persons –even though we had been Christians for almost twenty years.”

After this breakthrough, Peter saw God through a whole new set of eyes. “I saw Jesus was able to express his emotion with unashamed, unembarrassed freedom. Jesus was anything but an emotionally frozen Messiah. At the same time, I observed how Jesus was able to separate himself from the expectations of the crowds, his family, and his disciples. His relationship with his Father freed him from the pressures of those around him. He was not afraid to live out his own unique life and mission, regardless of other people’s agenda for his life.”

Their new goal was not to change the church but to allow God to change them.

“God was clearly speaking to me through the GIFT of depression, an unhappy spouse, and a life that would periodically spin out of control. My only response to these painful realities was: “God, please remove them as quickly as possible so I can go on with your work.” The only problem was I was not open to God speaking or moving in my life in those ways. My paradigm included God speaking through Scripture, prayer (an inner voice), sermons, a prophetic word, and sometimes circumstances – but surely not this.” How often do we try to ask God to take something away or make it better without realizing the potentially gift he’s given us. God can speak to us through anything and often does if we are willing to allow him.

Peter writes, “For the first time, I understood what it meant to minister out of who you are, not what you do.”

Our new small group book

There are definately quotes taken directly from the "Introduction: The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero" in the following.

I don’t think of myself as an overly emotional person. I feel like I’m in tune with my emotions and I’m real about how I’m feeling and how my world view affects the way I react to situations. I wouldn’t say I shy away from talking about emotions, but I realize it’s also not something that people tend to feel comfortable talking about. I know talking about emotions and how you feel, makes people more vulnerable, but if we are truly to be transparent in the church, why doesn’t the church express how important emotions and being emotionally healthy truly are?

We are supposed to be the embodiment of love to Christians and non-Christians alike. The struggle I’ve faced for years, in the church, is the how people claim you need to “love” the sinner, “hate” the sin and yet that’s not what you see and that’s definitely not what the “sinner” tends to see either. We need to figure out why we aren’t truly able to love like this. The church is to be know, above else, as a community that radically and powerfully loves others. Sadly, this not generally our reputation. Jesus’ followers need training and skills in how to look beneath the surface of the icebergs in their live, to break the power of how their past influences the present, to live in brokenness and vulnerability, to know their limits, to embrace loss and grief and to make incarnation their model for living well. Making incarnation (a person who embodies in the flesh a deity, Spirit or abstract quality), the top priority in order to love others well is both the climax and point of the entire book.

This makes me SO excited. When we were picking a book to do for our small group, I put this book in as one of the options and was thrilled when it was picked because it’s something that’s been deeply rooted in my heart for a long time. When I was about 18/19 years old I was counseling camp and remember the first night praying for my girls and not really knowing what to pray for them. God impressed very clearly in my heart that I was to pray that I would learn to LOVE like He loves. That I would love those girls like He would love them. Not with reservations, but taking the whole of them, each of them and loving them for everything they are. Loving them despite the fact they may be sinning or not following the rules or struggling. Loving them because He made them and made them perfect. It was an amazingly crazy week with ups and downs and through it all, I knew if I hadn’t started the week with that prayer the end result would’ve been drastically different. Ever since that night, that’s been a prayer that I’ve prayed over and over again. God let me love like you do. Let me see that person how you see them, through your eyes. Let me understand what matter to you not me. So to do a book whose focus is my hearts desire makes me really happy!

Peter starts off the introduction by telling a story of how he went up into the mountains with his family on vacation. He had grown very tired on the drive and at one point momentarily blacked out. His wife, Gerri, ended up diving for him the rest of the way. That night he couldn’t sleep and thought he had the flu. His wife was mad at him because she thought he over worked and that’s why he was sick. He goes on to describe how it kept getting worse the longer they were there. They saw several different doctors who were also on vacation in the mountains, who all had a different diagnosis. Finally, they saw he was having trouble breathing and grew alarmed and told him to go to a hospital two hours away. When they were dropping their kids off at the townhouse they had borrowed, the neighbor saw his laying in the car and his wife described the symptoms and told her that he had HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema). They quickly brought him to the nearest clinic. They took X-rays of his chest. His lungs had filled with water and within a few hours he could’ve been in a coma and dead by the next morning. The wrong counsel of those doctors almost ended his earthly life. As leaders, we often give faulty counsel to spiritually sick people who fill our churches. The training we get in churches and from the pulpit is often inadequate to address the deep needs underneath the surface of people lives. We are taught how to show them how to read the Bible and live a Christian life, but we aren’t taught how to address the emotional issues people bring with them into Christianity. As leaders we need to undergo a revolution in the way we understand and approach discipleship.

The sad reality is that too many people in our churches are fixated at a stage of spiritual immaturity that current models of discipleship have not addressed. Many are supposedly “spiritually mature” but remain infant, children, or teenagers emotionally. They demonstrate little ability to process anger, sadness or hurt. They whine, complain, distance themselves, blame, and use sarcasm – like little children when they don’t get their way. Highly defensive to criticism or differences of opinion, they expect to be taken care of and often treat people as objects to meet their needs.

I love this: Peter says, I believe the church is to be the primary vehicle of our spiritual and emotional maturity. He doesn’t say that it’s the Pastors job, or it’s the Christian counselors job, it’s OUR job as the body of Christ. It’s not to get up in everyone’s face and dive into their business, but it is to help them understand so that they can fully become Spiritually mature and also learn to fully love. Sadly, for too long we have delegated “emotional” issues to the therapist’s office and taken responsibility only for “spiritual” problems in the church. The two are inseparably linked and critical to a fully biblical discipleship. I believe wholeheartedly that God and his church are the hope of the world. But, unless we integrate emotional maturity with a focus on loving well into our discipleship, we are in danger of missing God’s point completely – love. The link between emotional health and spiritual maturity is a large, unexplored area of discipleship.

Peter writes, Embracing the truth about the emotional parts of myself unleashed nothing short of a revolution in my understanding of God, Scripture, the nature of Christian maturity, and the role of the church. I can no longer deny the truth that emotional and spiritual maturity are inseparable.