Friday, January 06, 2006

Becoming a More Emotional Healthy Church


man of Sorrow! (not me)
Originally uploaded by Pesi.

Our community is in the process of working toward our common goals for this coming year. I have surveyed and talked with many people in our congregation and tomorrow we will be in dialog about our goals for next year.

One goal that I have for our congregation this year is becoming a more emotionally healthy church. Peter Scazzero has written an excellent book on this topic which our staff has been reading and discussing.

Besides looking at our general spiritual formation, Peter helps us look at our emotional development as well. He helps those of us who are Type A's look at areas that we tend to overlook. Here is a list of some of the parts of our emotional life that Peter helps us explore:

  1. Looking Beneath the Surface
  2. Breaking the Power of the Past
  3. Living in Brokeness and Vulnerability
  4. Receiving the Gifts of Limits
  5. Embracing Grieving and Loss
  6. Loving Incarnationally
I would say that becoming an emotionally healthy church will be recieved by our congregation as a good goal. I will leave you with one good quote from Peter, as he is talking about how he and his wife were learning what it meant to die to self:

Jesus does call us to die to ourselves. "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself daily and take up his cross and come follow me." (Mark 8:34) The problem was that we died to the wrong things. 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 feelings of saddness, and to passions we had enjoyed before our marriage.

If you get a chance, I would encourage you to take the emotional health inventory to see how you are doing in your emotional development.

posted by J.R. Woodward @ 7:22 PM

3 Comments:

At 9:04 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

I read this book last winter, and it blew me away. I had no idea the emotional health inventory was online. I've given the test to a few people who were amazed to find out that they weren't as mature as they thought they were.

It was good hangin' wit' ya in Amsterdam!

 
At 1:50 AM, Blogger J.R. Woodward said...

Billy,

It was good seeing you as well. Yeah, I'm looking forward to focusing on this as one of our goals this next year. It's cool you can take the test on-line, huh?

I hope to see you again soon. You are always welcome to come to LA.

 
At 6:39 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi I was out surfing on the net looking for the latest info on daydreaming. Ok your blog wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it got my attention and interest, now I see why I found your page when I was looking for daydreaming. Anyway I'm glad I stopped by, great read, catch you later.

 

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