By • September 28, 2015
PART 1 of 2 parts
If you’ve heard anything of Peter Scazzero’s personal journey, you know the pivotal moment and the two words that catalyzed a transformation of his life and ministry.
“I quit!”
They were a decade into the planting of New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, N.Y., when Scazzero’s wife Geri had finally had enough. She knew something was desperately wrong with how they were doing life and ministry. Something had to change, and the change was triggered Jan. 2, 1996, when she told him, “I quit,” and left the church.
That decision, and the hope that in time grew out of it, was the subject of her 2010 book, co-authored by her husband, I Quit! Stop Pretending Everything Is Fine and Change Your Life.
Out of the pain and promise of their experience—and the 19-year journey since that January night—Peter and Geri Scazzero have invested their energy in the integration of life skills and discipleship they call Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. It has played out in the church they still serve together, in their writing and speaking ministry, in their personal faith and, significantly, in their marriage.
With the release of his latest book, we explore the challenges and the possibilities of The Emotionally Healthy Leader.
Define an emotionally healthy leader. What does emotional health look like?
They’re operating emotionally and spiritually “full.” Their cup’s overflowing and they have a life with God that is sufficient to sustain their “doing” for God. They have a significant emotional awareness—they have faced their shadow. They know their good sides and their ugly sides, and how they impact their leadership. They have slowed down their lives to have a deep walk with God out of which they lead. And they’ve got some rhythms in their life—how they work and how they Sabbath—so that their life isn’t all work but has a biblical rhythm to it.
You’ve written a lot about emotional health as something that has not always characterized you.
In my first 17 years as a Christian, most of it was spent in leadership. I would say my discipleship was very much focused on biblical knowledge and how to lead. I brought those gifts to bear on planting the church. But what was lacking was an integration of emotional maturity and spiritual maturity. So in 1996, after 17 years as a Christian and eight years pastoring New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, I hit a wall and I didn’t have any theological framework for it—no biblical framework to integrate a healthy emotional component to my spiritual formation. There wasn’t a “slow-down” spiritual component either. Everything was doing—getting it done, building the church. There wasn’t a serious focus on the inner life and how that intersected with the outer life.
When I looked around me for healthy models, I found two extremes. On one extreme you had make-it-happen leaders—they were building big ministries, but were not very reflective. Then you had folks who were reflective, but they weren’t building organizations or churches either. I couldn’t point to and learn from folks who had a deep inner life and were building a ministry, organization or church, like I was trying to do.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was that integration that was lacking. So I would learn from people like Henry Cloud, Henri Nouwen and Dallas Willard, but they weren’t building organizations or churches. I was in inner city New York and very much committed to reaching people for Christ and building a healthy church that would multiply itself. In seminaries or leaders’ conferences we didn’t talk about these things—not in any kind of depth.
Oh, and one other thing about an emotionally healthy leader: They also lead out of their marriage or singleness. They’ve got a real integration spiritually of their vocation and whether they’re married or single that’s spiritually and theologically integrated. And that’s not a secondary issue. I didn’t understand the implications of that starting out.
And that’s an interesting point because the closer we are in relationship with someone the more our strengths shine, but those areas of personal liability are also revealed more in deep relationships than in more superficial relationships.
Yes. I mean, basically the understanding if you were married was, Hey, be a great leader and have a stable marriage so that you can continue to serve Christ effectively. And if you’re single, make sure you stay sexually pure so you can build the church and the kingdom of God. But there wasn’t any kind of training or equipping around the fact that if you’re married, your marriage is to be a sign and a wonder for Christ. You have to be equipped to have a great marriage out of which you lead the church. There’s a whole lot more to that than just having a “stable” marriage. And the same thing if you’re single; you need to be equipped to be a single leader in your sexuality, in your relationships, so that you lead out of your singleness—even if you’re waiting or hoping to be married one day.
I mean, I cannot remember any leadership conferences talking about being a single leader, being a married leader, beside the reminder to go on a date with your spouse, be sexually pure, don’t get into pornography. It was all just kind of keep it together versus you lead from a place of such health that one of your loudest gospel messages is your life as a married person or single person. That’s a radical paradigm shift.
And the discussion between you and your wife Geri on these things became a crisis point for your own re-evaluation of what it meant to be emotionally healthy.
Our turning point was 1996—I like to say I was born again again, a second conversion. We made a commitment at that point to lead out of our marriage. So we have spent the last 19 years studying, researching, learning what that looks like practically. That’s why there’s a chapter in the book, “Lead Out of Your Marriage or Singleness.” And it’s actually the second chapter of the section on the inner life because it’s so neglected. I start with “Face Your Shadow,” then “Lead Out of Your Marriage or Singleness” then “Slow Down for Loving Union” then “Practice Sabbath Delight.” Those are four issues that need to be properly cemented in your foundation, then that informs the way you do planning, decision-making, building teams and cultures, and so forth. But that inner life needs to be grounded well.
You sometimes describe your journey as four conversions, presumably because each of these signpost experiences was a profound spiritual turning point. You speak of your conversion from agnosticism to zealous Christian leader; from emotional blindness to emotional health; from busy activity to slowed-down spirituality. In the fourth, you talk about a conversion “from skimming to integrity in leadership.”
Actually, this book came out of that fourth conversion. In 2007, as our church and ministry continued to grow larger, I realized that there were some issues inside of me that needed to be addressed.
You know, you’ve got employees, you’re busy planning, you have a large organization you’re running. It required a level of inner life that was more complex, that needed to be deeper than I had known. I realized I was skimming on some of the applications of emotionally healthy spirituality to the core issues I talk about in the second half of the book, which is the outer life of leadership—the things we deal with every day, like planning, decision-making, power and wise boundaries.
I speak of it as a conversion because I realized I had not brought my theology fully into the way that I was leading our church. I was still picking secular models and grafting them into the tree without doing the hard work that’s required of integration. Not that we don’t learn from good secular models, we do. But you picture a tree that’s got deep roots, the tree is informed by the health of those roots.
For example?
Let’s just take making decisions, strategic planning. I brought in many strategic planners over the years to guide us in the process, each with excellent models of strategic planning. Here’s the problem: They didn’t deal with the issue of how we listen to the voice of God—corporately.
And how do we define success beyond just the metrics of numbers? For most of us it’s just, well, we have more people, more budget. It’s just numbers. But there’s a lot more to biblical success than numbers.
Just because there’s an opportunity for expansion doesn’t mean it’s God’s will either. So how do I sort all that out?
That was like another level for me. So in 2007 I decided that I would become the executive pastor for a couple years. I wanted to dig in to budget-making, supervision of staff, hiring and firing, and really do the integration theologically of the inner life to the outer life. I did not want to just skim in these areas.
It’s one thing to preach sermons and cast vision. It’s another thing to get into the nitty-gritty of building healthy culture and confronting the elephants in the room.
My learning curve from 2007 to 2015 has been very steep. I took notes for six-and-a-half years on what I was learning, and I spent the past 18 months writing the book, addressing issues that I felt hadn’t been adequately addressed in leadership.
Our way of thinking about things feeds our actions and reactions. Those actions through repetition become habits, and they can become rather engrained. From your experience, how do we begin to break some of those unhealthy cycles as we’re moving toward health?
The question is, How do we change? And the answer is, Very, very slowly. I’m still changing. I’ve been 19 years in this journey and I’m still learning. Along the way, I ended up being exposed to a fellow named Benjamin Bloom and his “Taxonomy of Learning Domains”—how people learn. He talks about the five-stage process of how we learn and change.
First, we become aware of something. “Hey, it’s really good to slow down in life.” Then we ponder it. We read a book, listen to some tapes, maybe even preach it. Then we value it. “Slow down for God? Everybody should slow down for God.” But Bloom would say, to really know it, you’ve got to change your behavior and your actions. There’s a big gap between those who actually reprioritize their entire lives—level four—and then level five, where we actually own it. He says most people never get beyond three; they value it. They believe it, but they don’t change their lifestyle.
So I encourage people, Relax. Change is slow. Just make one or two small, incremental steps at a time. You plant those seeds and over time it’s going to bear fruit.
The changes we’re talking about in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality are a whole life change: how you live your personal life, how you do your walk with Jesus, how you listen to God, how you lead other people, how you make decisions, how you build teams. Your whole life. You have to understand, this is a journey. It’s going to take some time.
“I quit!”
They were a decade into the planting of New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, N.Y., when Scazzero’s wife Geri had finally had enough. She knew something was desperately wrong with how they were doing life and ministry. Something had to change, and the change was triggered Jan. 2, 1996, when she told him, “I quit,” and left the church.
That decision, and the hope that in time grew out of it, was the subject of her 2010 book, co-authored by her husband, I Quit! Stop Pretending Everything Is Fine and Change Your Life.
Out of the pain and promise of their experience—and the 19-year journey since that January night—Peter and Geri Scazzero have invested their energy in the integration of life skills and discipleship they call Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. It has played out in the church they still serve together, in their writing and speaking ministry, in their personal faith and, significantly, in their marriage.
With the release of his latest book, we explore the challenges and the possibilities of The Emotionally Healthy Leader.
Define an emotionally healthy leader. What does emotional health look like?
They’re operating emotionally and spiritually “full.” Their cup’s overflowing and they have a life with God that is sufficient to sustain their “doing” for God. They have a significant emotional awareness—they have faced their shadow. They know their good sides and their ugly sides, and how they impact their leadership. They have slowed down their lives to have a deep walk with God out of which they lead. And they’ve got some rhythms in their life—how they work and how they Sabbath—so that their life isn’t all work but has a biblical rhythm to it.
You’ve written a lot about emotional health as something that has not always characterized you.
In my first 17 years as a Christian, most of it was spent in leadership. I would say my discipleship was very much focused on biblical knowledge and how to lead. I brought those gifts to bear on planting the church. But what was lacking was an integration of emotional maturity and spiritual maturity. So in 1996, after 17 years as a Christian and eight years pastoring New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, I hit a wall and I didn’t have any theological framework for it—no biblical framework to integrate a healthy emotional component to my spiritual formation. There wasn’t a “slow-down” spiritual component either. Everything was doing—getting it done, building the church. There wasn’t a serious focus on the inner life and how that intersected with the outer life.
When I looked around me for healthy models, I found two extremes. On one extreme you had make-it-happen leaders—they were building big ministries, but were not very reflective. Then you had folks who were reflective, but they weren’t building organizations or churches either. I couldn’t point to and learn from folks who had a deep inner life and were building a ministry, organization or church, like I was trying to do.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was that integration that was lacking. So I would learn from people like Henry Cloud, Henri Nouwen and Dallas Willard, but they weren’t building organizations or churches. I was in inner city New York and very much committed to reaching people for Christ and building a healthy church that would multiply itself. In seminaries or leaders’ conferences we didn’t talk about these things—not in any kind of depth.
Oh, and one other thing about an emotionally healthy leader: They also lead out of their marriage or singleness. They’ve got a real integration spiritually of their vocation and whether they’re married or single that’s spiritually and theologically integrated. And that’s not a secondary issue. I didn’t understand the implications of that starting out.
And that’s an interesting point because the closer we are in relationship with someone the more our strengths shine, but those areas of personal liability are also revealed more in deep relationships than in more superficial relationships.
Yes. I mean, basically the understanding if you were married was, Hey, be a great leader and have a stable marriage so that you can continue to serve Christ effectively. And if you’re single, make sure you stay sexually pure so you can build the church and the kingdom of God. But there wasn’t any kind of training or equipping around the fact that if you’re married, your marriage is to be a sign and a wonder for Christ. You have to be equipped to have a great marriage out of which you lead the church. There’s a whole lot more to that than just having a “stable” marriage. And the same thing if you’re single; you need to be equipped to be a single leader in your sexuality, in your relationships, so that you lead out of your singleness—even if you’re waiting or hoping to be married one day.
I mean, I cannot remember any leadership conferences talking about being a single leader, being a married leader, beside the reminder to go on a date with your spouse, be sexually pure, don’t get into pornography. It was all just kind of keep it together versus you lead from a place of such health that one of your loudest gospel messages is your life as a married person or single person. That’s a radical paradigm shift.
And the discussion between you and your wife Geri on these things became a crisis point for your own re-evaluation of what it meant to be emotionally healthy.
Our turning point was 1996—I like to say I was born again again, a second conversion. We made a commitment at that point to lead out of our marriage. So we have spent the last 19 years studying, researching, learning what that looks like practically. That’s why there’s a chapter in the book, “Lead Out of Your Marriage or Singleness.” And it’s actually the second chapter of the section on the inner life because it’s so neglected. I start with “Face Your Shadow,” then “Lead Out of Your Marriage or Singleness” then “Slow Down for Loving Union” then “Practice Sabbath Delight.” Those are four issues that need to be properly cemented in your foundation, then that informs the way you do planning, decision-making, building teams and cultures, and so forth. But that inner life needs to be grounded well.
You sometimes describe your journey as four conversions, presumably because each of these signpost experiences was a profound spiritual turning point. You speak of your conversion from agnosticism to zealous Christian leader; from emotional blindness to emotional health; from busy activity to slowed-down spirituality. In the fourth, you talk about a conversion “from skimming to integrity in leadership.”
Actually, this book came out of that fourth conversion. In 2007, as our church and ministry continued to grow larger, I realized that there were some issues inside of me that needed to be addressed.
You know, you’ve got employees, you’re busy planning, you have a large organization you’re running. It required a level of inner life that was more complex, that needed to be deeper than I had known. I realized I was skimming on some of the applications of emotionally healthy spirituality to the core issues I talk about in the second half of the book, which is the outer life of leadership—the things we deal with every day, like planning, decision-making, power and wise boundaries.
I speak of it as a conversion because I realized I had not brought my theology fully into the way that I was leading our church. I was still picking secular models and grafting them into the tree without doing the hard work that’s required of integration. Not that we don’t learn from good secular models, we do. But you picture a tree that’s got deep roots, the tree is informed by the health of those roots.
For example?
Let’s just take making decisions, strategic planning. I brought in many strategic planners over the years to guide us in the process, each with excellent models of strategic planning. Here’s the problem: They didn’t deal with the issue of how we listen to the voice of God—corporately.
And how do we define success beyond just the metrics of numbers? For most of us it’s just, well, we have more people, more budget. It’s just numbers. But there’s a lot more to biblical success than numbers.
Just because there’s an opportunity for expansion doesn’t mean it’s God’s will either. So how do I sort all that out?
That was like another level for me. So in 2007 I decided that I would become the executive pastor for a couple years. I wanted to dig in to budget-making, supervision of staff, hiring and firing, and really do the integration theologically of the inner life to the outer life. I did not want to just skim in these areas.
It’s one thing to preach sermons and cast vision. It’s another thing to get into the nitty-gritty of building healthy culture and confronting the elephants in the room.
My learning curve from 2007 to 2015 has been very steep. I took notes for six-and-a-half years on what I was learning, and I spent the past 18 months writing the book, addressing issues that I felt hadn’t been adequately addressed in leadership.
Our way of thinking about things feeds our actions and reactions. Those actions through repetition become habits, and they can become rather engrained. From your experience, how do we begin to break some of those unhealthy cycles as we’re moving toward health?
The question is, How do we change? And the answer is, Very, very slowly. I’m still changing. I’ve been 19 years in this journey and I’m still learning. Along the way, I ended up being exposed to a fellow named Benjamin Bloom and his “Taxonomy of Learning Domains”—how people learn. He talks about the five-stage process of how we learn and change.
First, we become aware of something. “Hey, it’s really good to slow down in life.” Then we ponder it. We read a book, listen to some tapes, maybe even preach it. Then we value it. “Slow down for God? Everybody should slow down for God.” But Bloom would say, to really know it, you’ve got to change your behavior and your actions. There’s a big gap between those who actually reprioritize their entire lives—level four—and then level five, where we actually own it. He says most people never get beyond three; they value it. They believe it, but they don’t change their lifestyle.
So I encourage people, Relax. Change is slow. Just make one or two small, incremental steps at a time. You plant those seeds and over time it’s going to bear fruit.
The changes we’re talking about in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality are a whole life change: how you live your personal life, how you do your walk with Jesus, how you listen to God, how you lead other people, how you make decisions, how you build teams. Your whole life. You have to understand, this is a journey. It’s going to take some time.
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