The Emotionally Healthy Church: A Strategy for Discipleship That Actually Changes Lives

The Emotionally Healthy Church, Expanded Edition, the newly updated and expanded edition of the groundbreaking bestseller The Emotionally Healthy Church, features a fuller, deeper look at the six principles contained in the original and includes a crucial, additional chapter: Slow Down to Lead with Integrity.

New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York, had it all: powerful teaching, dynamic ministries, an impressive growth rate, and a vision to do great works for God. Things looked good—but beneath the surface, circumstances were more than just brewing. They were about to boil over, forcing Peter Scazzero to confront needs in his church and himself that went deeper than he’d ever imagined. What he learned about the vital link between emotional health, relational depth, and spiritual maturity can shed new light on painful problems in your own church.

In this revised and expanded edition of his Gold Medallion Award–winning book, Scazzero shares refreshing new insights and a different and challenging slant on what it takes to lead your congregation to wholeness and maturity in Christ. Our churches are in trouble, says Scazzero.

They are filled with people who are:

• unsure how to biblically integrate anger, sadness, and other emotions

• defensive, incapable of revealing their weaknesses

• threatened by or intolerant of different viewpoints

• zealous about ministering at church but blind to their spouses’ loneliness at home

• so involved in “serving” that they fail to take care of themselves

• prone to withdraw from conflict rather than resolve it

Sharing from New Life Fellowship’s painful but liberating journey, Scazzero reveals exactly how the truth can and does make you free—not just superficially, but deep down. This expanded edition of The Emotionally Healthy Church not only takes the original six principles further and deeper, but also adds a seventh crucial principle. You’ll acquire knowledge and tools that can help you and others:

• look beneath the surface of problems

• break the power of past wounds, failures, sins, and circumstances

• live a life of brokenness and vulnerability

• recognize and honor personal limitations and boundaries

• embrace grief and loss

• make incarnation your model to love others

• slow down to lead with integrity

This new edition shares powerful insights on how contemplative spirituality can help you and your church slow down—an integral key to spiritual and emotional health. The Emotionally Healthy Church, Expanded Edition includes story after story of people at New Life whose lives have been changed by the concepts in this book. Open these pages and find out how your church can turn a new corner on the road to spiritual maturity.

Peter Scazzero is the founder of New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, New York City, a large, multiracial church with more than seventy-three countries represented. After serving as senior pastor for twenty-six years, Pete now serves as a teaching pastor/pastor at large. He is the author of two bestselling books—The Emotionally Healthy Church and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. He is also the author of The EHS Discipleship Course and two devotional books. Pete and his wife, Geri, are the founders of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, a groundbreaking ministry that equips churches in a deep, beneath-the-surface spiritual formation paradigm. For more information, visit emotionallyhealthy.org or connect with Pete on Twitter @petescazzero.

Warren Bird (PhD, Fordham University) is vice president of research for the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA.org). He draws from twenty years of experience of pastoring and seminary teaching. He is an award - winning researcher and writer, having co-authored more than thirty books for church leaders. He and his college sweetheart wife live just outside of New York City.