A New Look at Success for the Body of Christ

books:

	• Emotionally Healthy Church, The Peter Scazzero Zondervan, 2003 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good Confessional

The book rates well as a confessional of a Pastor who almost burned himself and his family out. He had a bit of an awakening as to how to make himself emotionally more open and available to others, and how to set up more healthy boundaries for himself. The principles that he offers are practical, but not as important for ministry professionals as just reading his story and reflecting on it. There's a helpful self-exam included in the book which can be photocopied and used with staff teams. My only hesitation with the book is that he describes the crisis happening in 1997, and the book was published in 2003, meaning he got everything figured out enough to write a book about it in 5 years, which seems to me overly quick.

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A helpful corrective

As the founding pastor of a large, missional, inner-city NYC church (New Life Fellowship), Peter Scazzero's life and ministry were turned upside down when his wife told him that she was leaving their own church. Scazzero's journey from disorientation to reorientation and growth is the occasion for this book. Scazzero believes that the lesson he learned through his experience--"that emotional health and spiritual health are inseparable"--will be a "Copernican revolution" for the Church (50). It will require a whole new paradigm for the way we view pastoral ministry and Christian maturity. It will require restructuring of our churches' very DNA.

Before Scazzero's awakening, his ministry was outwardly viewed as very successful. It had experienced tremendous growth in some of the hardest neighborhoods of NYC. It was different. It was diverse. It was fresh. But as every mystery novel and introduction to philosophy book reveals, things are never what they seem. Scazzero was a workaholic who neglected his family and friends in order to build "his" church. He was defensive, insecure, and often shied away from confrontation because he could not deal with rejection. What resulted was a church with those very characteristics--a church that split for those very reasons.

After spending the first two chapters describing the problems he faced in his own life and ministry ("Part 1: Discipleship's Missing Link"), Scazzero spends the next two chapters generalizing and diagnosing the problem from a biblical point of view ("Part 2: Biblical Basis for a New Paradigm of Discipleship"). He describes the relationship between spiritual and emotional maturity and has the reader take a personal assessment of her own level of spiritual/emotional maturity.

In the next six chapters, which comprise "Part 3: Six Principles of an Emotionally Healthy Church," Scazzero offers the primary substance of his work, which is summarized nicely in the introduction:

"... Jesus' followers...need training and skills in how to look beneath the surface of the iceberg of their lives (ch. 5), to break the power of how their past influences the present (ch. 6), to live in brokenness and vulnerability (ch. 7), to know their limits (ch. 8), to embrace their loss and grief (ch. 9), and to make incarnation their model for loving well (ch. 10). Making incarnation the top priority in order to love others well is both the climax and point of the entire book. The church is to be known, above all else, as a community that radically and powerfully loves others." (18)

Like a good topical sermon series, Scazzero fills out each of his six principles (which correlate directly with chapters 5-10 mentioned above) with biblical examples, personal narratives, references to and quotes from other Christian authors (such as Henri Nouwen), and word pictures to boot.

After proposing and elaborating on his six steps to emotionally healthy churches, Scazzero briefly concludes--in "Part 4: Where we go from Here"--with a short chapter identifying the next steps for the reader, which include finding emotionally healthy mentors and becoming a mentor for others, practicing patience through all the set-backs in the process of developing emotional health in the church, and never forgetting the importance of prayer throughout the process. A final chapter includes questions and chapter-by-chapter study guide materials for discussion groups.

The Emotionally Healthy Church is part autobiography, part exhortational manifesto, part Christian psychology, and part "how-to." Writing a book with so many parts is bound to have both advantages and liabilities. Such is the case with this book. On the one hand, these different elements allow Scazzero to draw from a variety of resources, both anecdotal and from the literature on the topic at hand. His convictions are forged in the fire of his own personal experiences, which gives this book poignancy not always found in such "six-steps" types of literature. Indeed, for each of his principles, he is able to offer countless examples of how that particular principle added to the transformation of either his own life and ministry or the lives of someone within his ministry. He gives stories. He gives names. He gives real-life people. This all tends to have an impact on the reader on the levels of pathos and ethos. Then his move to the relevant literature allows him to address how these principles are not particular to his specific ministry but can be generalized to ministry across the board in a way that should be relevant to the reader--to address the reader's logos.

On the other hand, combining such a variety of parts into a single work can tend to dull a message that might otherwise be stated more sharply and succinctly. In this regard The Emotionally Healthy Church reads a bit like a sermon preached on a well-known biblcal text. The pastor knows that the congregation knows the point of the passage, but the pastor still fears that the congregation has not yet internalized it. So instead of making a strong yet simple restatement of the message of the text, the pastor feels obligated to "fill it out" with illustrations, quotes from authorities, personal narratives, and a list of steps on how to get from here to there. Eventually all the extras begin to drown out the otherwise clear message, while the congregation starts to wonder if the pastor has missed his natural exit. Similarly here, despite Scazzero's contention that he is offering a "Copernican revolution" for ministry, very little of what he says is actually original. This, of course, is no fault of Scazzero's, and I am sure if Scazzero were asked, he would admit that he was not necessarily trying to be original. Indeed, I think his point is that it would truly be a "Copernican revolution" if pastors actually internalized the message and put it into practice in their churches. But unfortunately, I think many readers of this book will get caught up in the stories and illustrations and eventually begin to miss the proverbial forest for the trees.

I do appreciate that Scazzero is reacting strongly against a results driven, works oriented kind of pastoral ministry, which is so common in American churches today. His emphasis on the personal aspect of pastoral ministry is something that can hardly be overdone. Again, the fact that his conviction is based on his own personal transformation from the former kind of pastor to the latter gives his message credibility and hopefully will allow him to connect with pastors who find themselves in similar situations or even seminarians like myself who may be looking ahead to pastoral ministry in their future and trying to shape what their conception of pastoral ministry should be. Yet, oftentimes the stronger one reacts against one polarity is the extent to which one finds oneself at the other pole. Here again The Emotionally Healthy Church may be susceptible to critique.

Though Scazzero never states it explicitly and no doubt does not intend to convey this message at all, there is a slight feeling that comes across from this book that spiritual growth is not quite as important as emotional growth. In one sense, this criticism is unfair, since Scazzero's whole thesis is that the spiritual and the emotional cannot be separated, but on the other hand, one almost comes away with the impression that the reason they are inseparable is because the former is reducible to the latter. Again, this is certainly not Scazzero's intended message, and I am confident that he would reject this notion out of hand, but there is a sense in which this book's reaction could use a bit of a counter-reaction in order to balance his message. For example, at various points in the book Scazzero contends that the simple resolve to pray, memorize scripture, attend church, etc., will not in itself bring about spiritual maturity. This is because, as Scazzero states, "It is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature" (50). However, what is not explicitly addressed by this book is whether or not it is possible to be emotionally mature while remaining spiritually immature. Scazzero is correct that the resolve to engage in the spiritual disciplines is not sufficient to bring about spiritual maturity, but surely it is a necessary condition. Moreover, I would venture to say that one of the reasons the resolve does not bring about spiritual maturity is because the resolve is not followed by actual action. I know that in my own life I spend a lot more time thinking about how important prayer and Bible memory is for spiritual maturity than I actually spend prayingor memorizing. I suspect that the same may be true for many of the spiritually immature in our churches.

All that to say, I believe Scazzero's message is a helpful corrective to a (perhaps the) dominant polarity in our churches--the idea that spiritual maturity is solely a "spiritual" matter. Yet, I also firmly believe that the nomenclature of spiritual growth should not be completely overshadowed by the emotional. One simple but notable example of this danger can be found in Scazzero's chapter on the principle of living in brokenness and vulnerability (ch. 7). To illustrate how God tends to use people who are broken and vulnerable, Scazzero offers a list of biblical examples (p. 124). While this list includes some with authentic weaknesses, such as Moses's stuttering problem and Abraham's old age, Scazzero also includes things like David's affair, Jonah's obstinacy, and Moses's murder. It is true that God used these people in spite of and sometimes even through their weaknesses, but still I think it is important that we are able to distinguish between weaknesses and sins. While we might be wise to embrace the former, I think we should repudiate the latter as much as possible. Doing so will require that we maintain a distinction between the spiritual and the emotional.

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A New Look at Success for the Body of Christ

The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero is a true story of a pastor, his family and his church as they come to grips with immenent failure. Out of this struggle they learn to handle emotions correctly, improve relationships and develop their walk to a new level of maturity. Today, we benefit from the principles of discipleship as outlined in this book and the focus for a successful church has shifted from numbers and programs to emotional health and improved relationships. The book is both enlightening and practical.

Helpful Yet Mistitled Book

The Emotionally Healthy Church is a book about an emotionally healthy model of spiritual vitality for individuals and congregations. The book has four parts. The first two parts of the book lay out the need for emotionally healthy congregations and church leaders. The second two parts go about sharing the elements of an emotionally healthy disciple and an emotionally healthy congregation.

I have mixed emotions about this book. One one hand, I thought the whole book was mistitled. The title of the book--The Emotionally Healthy Church--leads one to believe that the book will be about community formation. Instead the book is about promoting emotional health in leaders, and then hoping that this penchant for emotional health will trickle down from the leadership to the congregation. The title should have made this more clear.

However, once I decided to read the book anyway I discovered a lot to think about and grow with in my ministry. It challenged me to work on ways to become more emotionally healthy, and to find ways to communicate that to my family and hopefully at some point to the church family I lead. There is a lot of good content in the book, and every pastoral leader should read The Emotionally Healthy Church and think about what it says

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I needed this book for class and hoped it would come quickly and it came in just a few days! It was in great condition and exactly how I expected it to be.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Something is desperately wrong with most churches today. Many sincere followers of Christ who are passionate for God and his work are unaware of the crucial link between emotional health and spiritual maturity. They present themselves as spiritually mature but are stuck at a level of immaturity that current models of discipleship have not addressed. Discipleship that really transforms a church must integrate emotional health with spiritual maturity. The Emotionally Healthy Church, winner of the Gold Medallion Book Award, offers a strategy for discipleship that accomplishes healthy living and actually changes lives.

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