I have been blogging on a leadership transition occurring at my local church. (See my previous post here). I have suggested that the way forward for us is to go through the pain generated from recent personnel changes, specifically the end of the working relationship with the founders of the church, so as to come out the other side of the experience empowered to love one another more deeply.

I am using Scazzero's book The Emotionally Healthy Church as my template for the way through the current situation. Scazzero planted a church in the Queens area of New York City. Ironically, the name of the church was New Life Fellowship. That's the original name of our church after we dropped the word 'Baptist' and before we added the word 'Vineyard'.  Now we are simply New Life Church.   

In chapter one, Scazzero links the emotional health of leaders with that of their congregations. Leaders who have the capacity to publicly admit pain, disappointment and failure are better able to model appropriate and mature emotional behaviors for their congregation. Leaders that deny there is pain, pretend it is of little consequence or are not willing to publicly admit their emotional weaknesses model the opposite.

People trust leaders who are sincere, authentic and transparent with their emotions. Being transparent about the pain gives followers a sense that their leaders understand human frailty. People feel safe with those who understand and identify with that frailty. Trust develops under these conditions.

Those who cannot admit their pain publicly, will find their exhortations falling on deaf ears. People are not stupid. They can see when leadership is struggling with issues. Why not admit it? Those who have admitted it and are transparent with it gain favor in people's hearts.

This is what Scazzero does in recounting his story of emotional challenge and transitions at his church. It was when he connected with his emotions on a personal level and found appropriate expression for them in his church context that he was able to model for others how to respond appropriately to pain and disappointment.

"What God did in our lives spilled out into the church immediately, beginning with our staff team, then our elder board, and eventually the rest of our leadership. For the first time, I understood what it meant to minister out of who you are, not what you do. My discovery was contagious. We went from being "human doings" to "human beings " The result has been a rippling effect, very slowly, through the entire church. Beginning with the staff and elders, interns, ministry and small-group leaders, the congregation at large—directly and indirectly—we have intentionally integrated the principles outlined in this book throughout the church." (p. 34)

For us at New Life we need leaders who own emotions by "ministering out of who they are" in a way that allows the people they lead to follow suit.

For example, people can invest the present circumstances with emotional pain from previous events in their personal lives. Some have described the surprise announcement of the loss of the founders of our church as a divorce. The congregation are like the children who are the last ones to find out that there is trouble in the marriage. Some people who have really experienced divorce may invest in the present circumstances the feelings of hurt and abandonment they felt with their parents surprise divorce even though the two situations are very different.

Emotionally mature church leaders will see the potential for this to happen in their congregation. So they identify the pain people are feeling -- the pain at being surprised with difficult news. Then they own that pain publicly as their own pain and empathize with those who are feeling that pain, but distinguishing it from the pain that people may have personally experienced in other situations in their lives.

Then they model how they, as leaders, are dealing with the pain by seeking or offering forgiveness. They show their people a way out of the pain, a way that takes the pain "out of circulation" by grounding the 'electrical current' of the pain in forgiveness so that it is dissipated in a healthy manner, thus allowing healing to happen.

In doing so they diffuse the emotions generated by that pain that are often made worse by previous painful experiences. This allows people a measure of closure on the pain, giving them release to renew relationships and start the process of rebuilding trust.

So the way through pain for our church is not to skirt the issue or to pretend it will go away. Growing emotionally means that we own the pain and talk about it with an effort to bring healing by reconciling with one another in love. Love does not mean there will be no more pain, it simply means that when pain does come, as it inevitably will come, we are not overwhelmed by it. Instead we embrace it as a necessary part of our emotions and we let it shape us so that we can care for one another more deeply.

Thus church leadership needs to model the way through the pain. As Scazzero succinctly states, "As go the leaders, so goes the church." Our leadership has an amazing opportunity right now that does not come around often. It is an opportunity born from adversity. We have reaped the consequences of emotional immaturity too much in our past, now is our opportunity to step into the pain and through the pain and out the other side. This is what I mean by the pain shaping us as a congregation and maturing us in our spirituality as well our emotions.

The Kelowna city motto is  "fruitful in unity." It is a motto we as a church have previously endorsed. God wants for us to be an emotionally healthy and a spiritually fruitful church. For us to be fruitful as God desires we need some pruning. Pruning is painful but it presages fruitfulness. The question is: are we able to trust the Master gardener as he humbles us and removes from us the dead wood of our previous hopes, expectations and agendas? He is the one causing us to lay it down for the common agenda of loving one another more deeply. This is his goal and he will make us fruitful in unity.

I for one welcome the pruning. I am tired of the pretense. I really want to get real with my friends and fellow travelers at New Life. I really do want to learn to love well. I hate pretending things are okay when they are not. I am sick of allowing my expectations to run ahead of me creating false hopes that inevitably lead to disappointment. I am weary of faking it, hoping that if I just hold out long enough, I can make it. I just want to lay it all down and admit the failure, the disappointment, the hurt and be broken before Jesus.  

There is a big rock in the windshield of my car (read this post about that) and I am having trouble driving. Maybe we all have dents, bruises, scratches, dangling mirrors, door handles that don't work and, yes, even some rocks sitting in our windshields. Maybe we need to face up to the fact that when 'Buicks' accumulate a lot of miles they just don't work the way they used to, so they need some help getting along.

Maybe we need each other to get along rather than trying to do it all by ourselves. Maybe we can find each other in authentic relationships born of adversity where we realize that we really do need one another and so we really do need to learn to love one another deeply.

So I look forward to engaging with one another in an authentic manner that admits emotional frailty and even celebrates it, for as the apostle Paul discovered, "when I am weak, then I am strong." (1 Corinthians 12.1). And for us as a church maybe when we are weak, that is when we discover our strength because we are leaning on each other and on Jesus who binds us all together in love.