A resource with the potential for genuine transformation – for you and your church.

The collection of books and resources under the banner of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality has probably been the most transformative in my journey over the last ten years. It was also crucial in enabling a process of cultural transformation in our church during that time. I know that there are lots of books and courses that claim to be life transforming – but this one genuinely is, or has the potential to be if we learn from it.

Ten years ago, I went through a spiritual crisis that involved me stepping out of my church leadership role for a significant time. One of the things that got me through that painful and confusing time was the material, by Pete and Geri Scazzero, on emotionally healthy spirituality. At the beginning of that time, I read Pete’s original book, The Emotionally Healthy Church, in a weekend, and was gripped. He was describing my experience and what I saw in churches all the time, including among leaders. We talked about faith, and power, and the victorious life, but there were far too many emotionally unhealthy attitudes and dysfunctional relationships. Too often, there was a mismatch between what we professed and what we lived. There was great emphasis on faith and hope but all too little on love. It created an environment which lacked authenticity and healthy vulnerability. I realised that I had a lot of inner work to do, and I knew that I wanted to be a part of something different.

In the years to come, we went on to use the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality course in our local church and it was one of the most important resources that helped begin a significant cultural transformation.

The key message from the material is that ‘it’s impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.’ For years, I aspired to be a spiritual man, a man of faith, a man of God. But I hadn’t truly faced the fact of my own emotional immaturity. I thought that by more prayer, exercising more faith, meditating on the Bible, resisting temptation, etc. I would become the spiritually mature man I wanted to be. Those activities are certainly important but they are not enough if we are not allowing God to expose and address the broken and damaged places in our lives that are the inevitable result of living in a fallen world. I was still effective in many ways in my leadership and calling (simply because of the grace gifting of God) but this led to an unreality, a gap between the public and the private that was in danger of becoming a chasm into which my whole life would fall. And so I stood down from leadership and began the inner work.

The journey of emotionally healthy spirituality begins with ‘knowing yourself that you may know God’. This requires painful honesty and vulnerability as we face our own weaknesses and sin. Radical self-awareness is the first stage of this journey but it does not happen overnight. It is like peeling back the layers of an onion and it takes time and courage.

Going back in order go forward – this can be one of the most difficult lessons as it involves facing up to the good, the bad and the ugly that we have received from our family of origin; some people get stuck here as they feel (wrongly) that it is dishonouring to parents and family.

Journey through the Wall – all the groups I have done the course with preferred to refer to this as going through valleys, and that it was not a one off. It involves learning to let go of our need to control our lives.

Enlarge your soul through grief and loss – learning to grieve and lament well and to come to terms with the limitations in our lives is vitally important.

Discover the rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath – this and the last chapter was a part of reintroducing me to some ancient traditions which had been neglected but are being reintroduced all over the place now with writers like John Mark Comer – see here.

Grow into an emotionally mature adult – understanding that the mark of maturity is our ability to love well and key to this is listening well.

Develop a rule of life – creating a trellis to help us stay connected to, and keep growing in love for, Christ

I also went on to read The Emotionally Healthy Leader and made it required reading for our leadership team. The original book, The Emotionally Healthy Church,  is still my favourite. Watch out for a review and summary coming soon. However, I would recommend that every church should run the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality course.

One word of warning. If you are going to run the course in a church, be careful how you do so. There can be resistance to it, especially with the early ‘going backwards to go forwards’ chapter which, as I indicated, involves being honest about how our family of origin influences us. I would suggest start with the leadership team doing it together first, and then think carefully about how you then roll it out to others. Be prepared for the fact that some people either cannot, or are unwilling to, take such an inward look as the course requires. And some people are just not very introspective. They simply want to get on with life and with stuff to do, without spending too much time looking inward or backward. Well, we are wired differently for sure and some people are not ready so there is no use pushing it. But for those who commit to doing the course, asking for the help of the Holy Spirit, and looking out for one another as they work through it, they cannot help but benefit tremendously. When you do it with a healthy and committed small group, one of the wonderful side-benefits is deepening relationships with your fellow travellers through the honesty and vulnerability it requires.

There is also Emotionally Healthy Woman by Geri Scazerro (which I have not read!) and there is an Emotionally Healthy Relationships course, which I have yet to work through. The original EHS book has now been reworked as Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. Like many of these things that come from the US, it has all become a bit of a corporate brand and it is possible to be put off by this. This is not helped by the fact that the website is mainly babout promoting for purchase all the different courses and events. But the essential insights and the Scazzero story behind them, which they tell with appealing honesty, are invaluable. And the leadership podcast on the site is excellent. It is a pity there is not something comparable to this simply on emotionally healthy spirituality for everyone.

However, if you wanted to get a taster of the material before reading one of the books, I’d recommend subscribing to the YouTube channel and watching a sampling of some of the videos. You can access there the key videos for the EHS course to get some idea of the content. But I would definitely recommend you do the course together with others to get the full benefits from it. Recognise also that this is a lifetime’s journey of transformation; it is not just a case of completing the course and then moving on to the next thing. It provides insights and tools that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life journey.