As per my last post I have had some conversations with people about the emotional pain resulting from recent personnel changes at New Life Church Kelowna. The responses ranged from "We have been talking about the pain too long and it is time to move on." to "The pain is very real, any attempt to deny it revictimizes those who have it." to "It really hurts but I am willing to forgive." That last response is the emotionally healthy response.
In his book, The Emotionally Healthy Church, Peter Scazzero makes the case that a spiritually mature church is an emotionally mature church. Emotionally mature churches are able to go through the pain and come out the other side of it, allowing the pain to refine, purify and shape the church community. Immature churches ignore there is pain or they get so fixated on the pain that they cannot move on.
Our challenge at New Life is how do we process our pain and the pain we have caused others in an emotionally mature manner? I think Scazzero's book can help us do that. He is a pastor from New York city who burned out in his ministry and learned some very hard lessons about what it means for a church community to bear with one another in love. He says,
"The sad reality is that too many people in our churches are fixated at a stage of spiritual immaturity that current models of discipleship have not addressed. Many are supposedly "spiritually mature" but remain infants, children, or teenagers emotionally. They demonstrate little ability to process anger, sadness, or hurt. They whine, complain, distance themselves, blame, and use sarcasm—like little children when they don't get their way. Highly defensive to criticism or differences of opinion, they expect to be taken care of and often treat people as objects to meet their needs. Why?
The answer is what this book is about. The roots of the problem lie in a faulty spirituality, stemming from a faulty biblical theology (chs. 3 and 4). Many Christians have received helpful training in certain essential areas of discipleship, such as prayer, Bible study, worship, discovery of their spiritual gifts, or learning how to explain the Gospel to someone else. Yet Jesus' followers also need training and skills in how to look beneath the surface of the iceberg in their lives (ch. 5), to break the power of how their past influences the present (ch. 6), to live in brokenness and vulnerability (ch. 7), to know their limits (ch. 8), to embrace their loss and grief (ch. 9), and to make incarnation their model for loving well (ch. 10). Making incarnation the top priority in order to love others well is both the climax and point of the entire book. The church is to he known, above all else, as a community that radically and powerfully loves others. Sadly, this is not generally our reputation. "(p. 18)
I think the pain we experience both individually and corporately is, as C S Lewis put it in his book, The Problem of Pain, God's megaphone trying to get our attention so we can address some serious personal and community issues. Moving on without addressing these issues, I fear will condemn us to repeat our folly, and re-experience the pain again in our new situation.
So I actually think we need to move toward the pain as a church rather than away from it. I think the pain is where God wants us to go. It is the cross he intends for us to bear as a church right now. Not that we stay at the place of pain, but that we move through the pain and out the other side, allowing the pain to shape us.
I think God wants us to become 'wounded' healers, who are familiar with sorrows so that we are better able to bear the sorrows of others. This is what it means to live incarnationally. (Henri Nouwen has written a classic book on this subject called The Wounded Healer).
If we can own this as our story in which our pain has redemptive value, it can bring lasting healing to that pain and empower us for the way forward as individuals and as a church community.
That is the message of Scazzero's book and it the way we can become an emotionally healthy church. My hope is for us to be a community that does not continue to re-offend and re-experience relational pain but that we learn to love one another deeply, so deeply that no amount of pain or disappointment or anger will ever again come between us. This is my hope for the way forward for New Life Church Kelowna.
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