Customer Reviews

Emotionally Healthy Church, The

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

PREMISE: Too many of our churches are led by people who claim spiritual maturity, but lack the ability to live godly lives because of their emotional immaturity. Now . . . do we know ahyone like that?!?

PLAN: We must (starting with the leaders) grow in emotional maturity. Here are the basic steps . . . 1) We must look below the surface of our lives, 2) We must come to grips with the scars from our past, 3) We must learn to be honest about our brokenness and become vulnerable. (I have noticed that those Christians I most admire have the ability to be open and honest about their lives.), 4) We must learn how to say, "No" and follow God rather than be pushed around by others, 5) We must not run from the pain of life, but rather embrace it and learn to grow through pain, 6) We must take the lessons we have learned and step into incarnational ministry as Jesus did.

POSITIVES: The author writes from personal experience. After many years of seemingly successful ministry as a pastor with a rapidly growing church plant and invitations to speak in a growing number of seminars across the country he finds himself with a crumbling marriage and a major church split when one of his staff defects and starts a new rival ministry. The pain of this experience woven through the pages of the book lend an air of credibility to the message.

PROBLEMS: There aren't many. The author's mix of counseling techniques and spiritual formation could cause the reader to raise his or her eyebrows, but I don't consider this much of a problem. I like to be challenged by what I read. The author waxes and wanes hot and cold in a place or two. I liked some chapters better than others, but that's normal for me. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is because I am not certain right now if the book will cause a change in my life. I only give 5 stars to those works that change me.

PREDICTION: This book will become an important work among pastors and in church leadership training.

Scazzero's thesis is that the emotional health and spiritual health of a Christian are inseparable. The discipleship model of the church must nurture emotional growth in order to foster true spiritual maturity. Scazzero suggests six principles in building an emotionally healthy church: (1) Look beneath the iceberg; (2) Break the power of the past; (3) Live in brokenness and vulnerability; (4) Receive the gift of limits; (5) Embrace grieving and loss; and (6) Make incarnation the model of loving well.
One benefit of this book is that Scazzero has integrated various topics of emotional health and Christian spirituality into a single volume, providing the backbone for a comprehensive discipleship course on emotional health. Daniel Coleman pioneered emotional intelligence. Edwin Friedman and Ronald Richardson developed family systems theory. Henri Nouwen wrote The Wounded Healer. Henry Cloud and John Townsend advocated boundaries. Parker Palmer relates vocational discernment and accepting limits. Jerry Sittster and Nicholas Wolterstorff shared how God may be doing soul work through experiences of grief and loss. Numerous experts have talked about listening skills, self-differentiation, and empathy. Scazzero's contribution is in pulling these resources together; weaving them masterfully into a coherent work; and providing compelling reasons why this work is important for the emotional health of the church.
A second benefit is that Scazzero has taken an evangelical approach by making a noble attempt to build his six principles on biblical foundations. For example, Scazzero takes the secular Emotional Intelligence material and slips a theology of grace underneath. The Gospel provides the motivation, power, and security for us to look beneath the surface (principle 1). Similarly, principle 3 is built on Paul's theology of weakness; principle 5 on the biblical basis of lamenting found in the Psalms; and principle 6 on a theology of incarnation. In this respect, Scazzero may have gone beyond the work of some of the masters listed above.
The third contribution is that Scazzero has taken the application of his principles beyond an individual to the entire church. The Copernican revolution begins with the senior pastor. Its effect rings out to other staff, elders and board members, the congregation, and to the wider community in concentric circles. Scazzero shares his experience at New Life Fellowship and outlines many practical suggestions on how these principles may be implemented in preaching, education, small group, and counseling ministries of the church.
I recommend this book to all church leaders who desire to take emotional health seriously and to implement a discipleship strategy that will change lives.

So many books, but so little substance. If you are a church leader, pastor, minister, or leader of a small group, this book is beyond must read. Many books will help you teach spiritual principles, many books will teach you how to build width in membership and attendance, but this book will help you build DEPTH and will start with one person: you. Don't go any further in your ministry until you've read this. You won't regret it.

The Emotionally Healthy Church effectively addresses an overlooked need in the North American Church. Although the premise that emotional health and spiritual health must be wholly integrated is not a new concept, it certainly has been a neglected truth in the past few decades. The result of such neglect has sabotaged our effectiveness in producing healthy disciples, and healthy churches. Since our current approach to discipleship has failed to bear the fruit of genuinely "mature" followers of Christ, perhaps this book has been prophetically written for "such a time as this."

Mr. Scazzero's six principles for bringing about an emotionally healthy discipleship are passionately written from the perspective of one who has personally been struggling with these issues, who has now found a way to recognize (and consequently help his readers to recognize) the unaddressed/unmet needs of our emotional/inner life. He can then reveal to us the appropriate steps to be taken in finding the pathway to wholeness. The fact that the author has struggled in such a personal way assures the reader that this is not just another theoretical approach to church health/growth.

Although this book is very helpful and insightful, I personally found it lacking in laying out a clear strategy for discipleship. The author did give examples of people who were addressed in specific areas of weakness, but failed to outline how the disciplinary/recovery plan was implemented with the kind of detail that would help other pastors deal with similar situations. I would like to have seen a detailed outline of the use of leadership and people skills in addressing the issues with the lives of his staff members and parishioners.

The Body of Christ is both organic and institutional. Most discipleship methods are institutional and impersonal. Because we are all individuals there can be no cookie-cutter method or approach to genuine discipleship. I like the ideas given in this book because they deal more directly with a personal/relational way approach to our mandate to "make disciples." However, I think this idea could have been more developed. Perhaps the author's new book will bring more to light on this issue.

Since all ministry flows through relationships, it then behooves us to maintain a healthy relationship with Jesus (the vertical/upward), people that comprise our circle/world with mutual influence (horizontal/outward), and with our self (inward). It is this last relationship that is so often neglected, which results in a myriad of problems in our other relationships. Very few people understand their relationship to themselves. Though it isn't quite stated this way, the six principles outlined by pastor Scazzero all have to do with that self relationship.
One of my favorite quotes refers to when we stand before God He is not going to ask us "Why weren't you Moses?" or "Why weren't you Billy Graham?"- (my insertion), but "Why weren't you - you?" Too many pastors, and consequently their congregations don't know who they are. We spend much too much time trying to be like other people, instead of discovering and being who God created us to be. I would also have liked to have found a chapter (or more) on the pathway to self-discovery. Finding out who you really are - who God created you to be. Something to get people to the point of emotional health will help clear a way for them to discover the unique person God has created them to be. A sense of confidence in who you are, and a clarity of your uniqueness in calling is essential to emotional health and in helping others to take hold of the same.

I do recommend this book to all, especially church leaders. This work is an excellent beginning to opening the dialogue with the larger Body of Christ in re-shaping our method in fulfilling the Great Commission to "Make disciples of all nations (ethnos)."

I have been a member of the author's church, New Life Fellowship for many years. Because my husband and I were "there" to live through the experiences shared in this book, I thought reading it would be a fun experience, but I didn't think it would be a life changing experience for me. After all, I had been sitting under the teaching Pastor Pete shares in this book, experientially for many years now and it is woven (by the Holy Spirit) into the very fabric of our being a local church. But, much to my surprise (and yes, temporary horror) I found the Holy Spirit confronting me with issues in my life in which I used to walk in greater emotional (and thereby spiritual) maturity but due to some hard experiences in my walk, I had reverted to a more unhealthy practice in my life. God is SO good and so faithful to use this book to grow me in yet one more area by revealing this fact to me through it. Now I am allowing the Holy Spirit to a more healthy practice in that area. I have found with the Lord, that my heart needs to always be in a position to change as He seeks to heal me and bring me from glory to glory.

The best and most wonderful step of all those presented in this book is the last step, "loving well" because that is what Jesus did and what He call us to do as well. The important and most amazing thing is that none of us can get to that place of loving well until we work through the proceeding steps. These steps are laid out in a simple, honest and easily digestible fashion that anyone can appreciate and which pastors and church leaders should embrace. Pastor Pete's open and honest vulnerability before God and us, has caused him to love us well, and his example, like Christ's is a empartation to us to do the same.

The author has layed out a critical issue that dramatically effects churches today. As I read this book I realized that so many of my church experiences had been effected due to the emotional "unhealth" of those in leadership. This book should be a required read in seminaries and in the leadership teams of all churches today.

Effective churches begin with effective leadership...effective leadership in churches begins with emotionally healthy pastors and elders. The problem is that most of our churches are being led by what Scazzero used to be. These leaders are destroying their staffs and people because of their own dysfunctional ways of relating. It all stems from a severe lack of preparation for leadership, emotionally. We're all spiritually prepared, but that's just the problem. If this book were read and followed by more church leaders today, masses of churches would be revolutionized and the beginning of God's power would be unleashed as we have never seen before.

Ric Joline
Build Believers Pastor
Community Fellowship Church
Lancaster, PA

Pastor Scazzero has been through deep waters. He has emerged, according to God's inimitable way of crafting us, as a wounded healer.

Pastors too often separate their own lives and emotional backgrounds from what they experience in their churches. They do this to their very great soul danger. As God's appointed shepherds, who should be leading their people to spiritual pastures and waters that can restore their souls, the pastors themselves are loaded with pain, emptiness, and dysfunction. Yet they often seem themselves as the counselors of hurting people, not the ones in need of counsel.

Unite a pastor who has a personal history of family dysfunction (and who ignores it) with a church that has a history of corporate dysfunction and you have toxic mess that characterizes far too many churches today. They can't even begin to fulfill the purposes for which Christ established them because there is so much pain and conflict.

Scazzero allows us to journey with him as God helped him uncover his own dysfunctional patterns as they afflicted him, his family and his church, and then how God led him to personal restoration. He then makes the "corporate jump" in his thinking that so few of us grasp--is it possible for churches to be as corporately unhealthy and as spiritually sick as it is for individuals? If so, how does a church find spiritual and emotional health again?

He makes the strong case that a true disciple of Christ and a disciple-making church cannot be unconcerned about emotional wholeness. For Jesus came to die, not just for the atonement of sin, but for the healing of all the damage sin has caused in our lives. A church that ignores this extension of Christ's atonement into the realm of emotional health will reap the whirlwind sooner or later.

I love books that make me think deeply. Thank you, Pastor Scazzero, for writing a book I love.

Dr. Ken Quick, Director, Church Cardiology
Author of "Healing the Heart of Your Church"

If you have ever read larry Crabb's books and left them frustrated about how your Church/small group could ever actually fulfill the desire for connecting from the inside out to the safest place on earth (like how I used his book titles?), then this is a book for you. Seriously, this book takes a very practical look at what the Church needs to do to provide a holisitic view of discipleship, that allows for a person to have deep emotions and how to properly process them. Its not about more bible study, more time at church, involvement in another program etc... Its about taking an honest look as an inidividual and as a Church, and helping to grow from within that pain. Good read, could have more practical application, but is the only book of its kind that I know of.

This book was incredible -- and unlike any other book on church life and growth I have read. It should be required reading for any member of a church. Mr. Scazzero addresses one of the most over-looked or denied problems in churches - emotional immaturity. Too many Christians have voluminous knowledge of Scripture, but no idea how this should apply to them as an emotional being. This book shows how to have real, authentic fellowship in a body of believers, and how to be strive for the emotional maturity that is modelled in Christ.