September 2003

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

Many pastors and Christian leaders live with denial, pride, defensiveness, frenetic schedules, workaholism, lonely spouses, and covetousness for higher-impact churches. At least Peter Scazzero did.

The senior pastor of New Life Church, a large multiethnic church in Queens, New York, confesses that he experienced much of this until a wake-up call jolted him out of his dysfunction. Scazzero shares the painful lessons he's learned about the critical need for emotional health in Christian leadership.

"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," he writes.

Scazzero offers six practices of emotionally healthy churches: self-awareness, breaking the power of the past, learning to live in brokenness, accepting limits, embracing loss and grief, and making incarnation the model for loving well.

The book also includes a reproducible spiritual/emotional inventory and a discussion guide. Scazzero's paradigm for following Christ could very well transform pastors, church leaders, and Christians who want emotional maturity and revitalized churches.

The Emotionally Healthy Church is available at Christianbook.com and other retailers. An excerpt of the book is available on the Zondervan site.

In 1998 author Peter Scazzero wrote a piece for Christianity Today sister publication Leadership Journal about "Beating the Pastoral Blues."