Emotionally Healthy Discipleship

Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation

Peter Scazzero

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310109495
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The global church is facing a discipleship crisis. Here's how we move forward into transformative discipleship...

Pastors and church leaders want to see lives changed by the gospel. They work tirelessly to care for people, initiate new ministries, preach creatively, and keep up with trends. Sadly, much of this effort does not result in deeply changed disciples.

Traditional discipleship strategies fail because they only address surface issues and do not go deep enough into the emotional health of individuals.

But transformative, emotionally healthy discipleship is a methods-based biblical theology that, when fully implemented, informs every area of a church, ministry, or organization. It is a discipleship structure built from the center that:

• Slows down our lives so we can cultivate a deep, personal relationship with Jesus.
• Challenges the values of Western culture that have compromised the radical call to follow the crucified Jesus.
• Integrates sadness, loss, and vulnerability, that, when left out, leave people defensive and easily triggered.
• Acknowledges God's gift of limits in our lives.
• Connects how our family and personal history influence our discipleship in the present.
• Measures our spiritual maturity by how we are growing in our ability to love others.

In Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, bestselling author Pete Scazzero takes leaders step-by-step through how to create an emotionally healthy culture and multiply deeply-changed people in every aspect of church life, including:

• Leadership and team development
• Marriage and single ministry
• Small groups and youth and children's ministry
• Preaching, worship, and administration
• Outreach

Complete with assessments and practical strategies, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship will help you move people to the beneath-the-surface discipleship that actually has the power to change the world.

**Winner of the 2022 ECPA Christian Book Award for Ministry Resources**

Part One

The Current State
of Discipleship

Chapter One
The Four Failures That
Undermine Deep Discipleship

In his bestselling book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells the story of a woman who for decades lived in a family system that kept her stuck and immature.¹

Madeleine arrived at St. Benedict’s Hospital in 1980 at the age of sixty. She had been born blind and with cerebral palsy. Throughout her life, she had been protected, looked after, and babied by her family. What shocked Sacks, the neurologist responsible for her care, was that she was highly intelligent, spoke freely and eloquently, but could do nothing with her hands.

“You’ve read a tremendous amount,” he noted. “You must be really at home with Braille.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, “All my reading has been done for me. . . . I can’t read Braille, not a single word. I can’t do anything with my hands—they are completely useless.”

She held them up. “Useless godforsaken lumps of dough—they don’t even feel part of me.”

Sacks was startled. He thought to himself, The hands are not something usually affected by cerebral palsy. Her hands would seem to have the potential of being perfectly good hands—and yet they are not. Can it be that they are functionless—“useless”—because she had never used them? Had everything been done for her in a manner that prevented her from developing a normal pair of hands?”

Madeleine had no memory of ever having used her hands. In fact, Sacks notes, “She had never fed herself, used the toilet by herself, or reached out to help herself, always leaving it to others to help her.”

She lived, for sixty years, as if she were a human being without hands.

This led Sacks to try an experiment. He instructed the nurses to deliver Madeleine’s food to her but to leave it slightly out of her reach, as if by accident.

He writes, “And one day it happened—what had never happened before: impatient, hungry, instead of waiting passively and patiently, she reached out an arm, groped, found a bagel, and took it to her mouth. This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years.”

Madeleine progressed rapidly from there. She soon reached out to touch the whole world, exploring different foods, containers, implements. She asked for clay and started to make models and sculptures. She began to explore human faces and figures.

Speaking of her hands, Sacks writes, “They were, one felt, not just the hands of a blind woman exploring, but of a blind artist, a meditative and creative mind, just opened to the full sensuous and spiritual reality of the world.”

Madeleine’s artistry developed to the point that, within a year, she was locally famous as the “Blind Sculptress of St. Benedict’s.”

Who would have imagined that such a great artist and astonishing person lay hidden within the body of this sixty-year-old woman, who had not only suffered from multiple physical limitations but who had also been “disabled” by those who had thought they were caring for her?

It’s a striking story in its own right but also illustrates a disturbingly similar dynamic at work in our churches. Too many people have been “babied” in their discipleship, to the point that they have become nearly disabled spiritually. As a result, they accept without question a faith that promises freedom and abundance in Jesus, and yet they never seem to notice how they remain imprisoned, especially in unbiblical ways of relating to themselves and others. They shrug their shoulders as if to say, “It’s useless. I can’t do anything about that. It’s just the way I am.”

This problem, which I refer to as shallow discipleship, isn’t a recent one, but it has worsened and deepened over the years.² When I first came to faith forty-five years ago, a popular phrase used to describe the church was that we were one mile wide and one inch deep. Now, I would adjust it to say we are one mile wide and less than half an inch deep.³

That’s not to say that there haven’t been any attempts to turn this dynamic around. In fact, as I’ve worked with churches across the world, I’ve witnessed many heartening efforts to address our plight—prayer meetings for revival, intentional community life, renewed emphasis on Scripture reading, greater engagement in spiritual warfare, dazzling worship services, rediscovery of the supernatural power of God, increased involvement with the poor and marginalized, and more.

All are valuable. But none successfully address the fundamental question: What are the beneath-the-surface failures that undermine deep discipleship and keep people from becoming spiritually mature?

Over the last twenty-five years, I’ve had a chance to reflect long and hard on this question and on the discipleship systems that have kept people immature for so long. I’ve done this as the lead pastor for a local church and in my work around the world with different denominations and movements, in urban, suburban, and rural areas, and across racial, cultural, and economic divides. In the process, I’ve become convinced that implementing a robust and in-depth discipleship for our people requires that we address at least four fundamental failures:

1. We tolerate emotional immaturity.

2. We emphasize doing for God over being with God.

3. We ignore the treasures of church history.

4. We define success wrongly.

It’s vital that we understand the background and implications of each failure. Why? Because apart from a clear understanding of the depth of our situation, we will not stick with the long-term solution required to fully address the widespread damage these failures are causing in our churches.

So let’s get started, beginning with the roots of a discipleship system that too often results in people who are less whole, less human, and less like Jesus, rather than more whole, more human, and more like Jesus.⁴

FAILURE 1: WE TOLERATE EMOTIONAL IMMATURITY

Over time, our expectations of what it means to be “spiritual” have blurred to the point that we have grown blind to many glaring inconsistencies. For example, we have learned to accept that:

• You can be a gifted speaker for God in public and be a detached spouse or angry parent at home.

• You can function as a leader and yet be unteachable, insecure, and defensive.

• You can quote the Bible with ease and still be unaware of your reactivity.

• You can fast and pray regularly and yet remain critical of others, justifying it as discernment.

• You can lead people “for God,” when, in reality, your primary motive is an unhealthy need to be admired by others.

• You can be hurt by the unkind comment of a coworker and justify saying nothing because you avoid conflicts at all costs.

• You can serve tirelessly in multiple ministries, and yet carry resentments because there is little personal time for healthy self-care.

• You can lead a large ministry with little transparency, rarely sharing struggles or weakness.

OUR FOUR FAILURES

1. We tolerate emotional immaturity.

2. We emphasize doing for God over being with God.

3. We ignore the treasures of church history.

4. We define success wrongly.

All of these are examples of emotional immaturity in action, and yet we don’t see them as the glaring contradictions they are. Why? Because we have disconnected emotional health from spiritual health. Where did we get the idea that it’s possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature? The answer is multifacted, but let me focus here on two significant reasons.

Reason 1: We No Longer Measure Our Love for God by the Degree to Which We Love Others

Jesus repeatedly focused on the inseparability of loving God and loving others. When asked for the one greatest commandment, Jesus identified two—love God and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:34–40).

The apostle Paul made the same point in his first letter to the church at Corinth. He warned that great faith, great generosity, and even great spiritual gifts—without love—are worth nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–3). In other words, if those around us consistently experience us as unapproachable, cold, unsafe, defensive, rigid, or judgmental, Scripture declares us spiritually immature.

The most radical expression of Jesus’ teaching about love was also one of his most fundamental principles: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. . . . If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?” (Matthew 5:44, 46). For Jesus, enemies were not interruptions to the spiritual life, but often the very means by which we might experience deeper communion with God. That is one of the reasons he issued stern warnings such as, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1).⁵ Jesus knew how easy it would be for us to avoid the difficult work of loving people.

Jesus radically reversed the teaching of first-century rabbis who stressed relationship with God at the expense of relationship with others. If you were in worship and realized someone had something against you, the rabbis ta...