A quarterly e-newsletter for partnering counsellors & mediators of the Clergy Care Network

1. Cornelsen’s Comments
2. Clergy Care Network Update: Summer Summary
3. Real Life: Say What You Need To Say!
4. Recommended Resource: Margin by Dr. Richard Swenson
5. Feature Article: Assessing Change by Gary Direnfeld
6. Upcoming Workshops & Professional Development
7. Contact Us

Emotionally Healthy Churches — What's All the Buzz About?

For almost two decades, counsellors have suspected that many Christians (including pastors) are not very emotionally healthy. Counsellors have tried, with little luck, to get church leaders' attention about what they have seen as destructive patterns in Christian families and churches. Many attempts by mental health professionals to suggest that there were problems brewing went unheeded and some of the messaging that did get through was viewed as suspicious, even an attack on Biblical truth. Yet the dysfunction in many Christian families and churches went on.

Finally, in 2003, the groundbreaking book The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero went on sale and things began to change. Pastors and the people in their congregations began to listen. Why are they listening now when much of what Peter has been saying has been out there for years? I think it is because it came from a pastor who has lived in the dysfunction and found the path out of it.

I have personally discussed this with Peter and he agrees that the basic information has been out there. He very humbly confesses that the information in this book and its acceptance is about God's sovereignty and timing, not so much about him. The good news is that finally the message is getting out there: spiritual and emotional maturity are not mutually exclusive.

As a mental health professional who deals with pastors and leaders, you might be frustrated that people haven't latched onto this a long time ago. But rejoice that the message is finally beginning to be accepted! Blessings to you as you continue to pass on hope to those who are weary from the battle.

Geof Cornelsen, M.T.S. (C), Director of Clergy Care

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By Wendy Kittlitz, MA, CCC, Assistant Counsellor

As summer rapidly draws to a close, I’m sure that you are looking into plans for fall. Clergy Care Network is part of two events that we would like to tell you about. We hope you can make it to at least one of them!

We are sponsoring, together with the Pentecostal Assemblies and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, a Clergy Forum featuring Peter Scazzero in Ontario. Peter is the author of The Emotionally Healthy Church, a book which we recommend highly for its challenge to pastors and church leaders to become emotionally healthy individuals in order to lead emotionally healthy churches. Peter has recently published a second book: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, which carries on the theme. His message is extremely important and we believe it is one which church leaders need to hear. The role of the Christian counsellor in this process is a pivotal one, since often it is the Christian counsellor who is the person in the community trained and equipped in the language of dealing with the emotional side of people.

Join us for this conference on October 17, 2006. It would be wonderful to see cooperative alliances forged between pastors and Christian counsellors through dialogue around these issues. See our column below for registration information.

The Dealing with Difficult People seminar is taking place in Red Deer, Alberta on October 25, 2006. Alan Simpson, who works with Outreach Canada, and our own Geof Cornelsen will present. This seminar was developed out of consultations with church leaders who told us that dealing with conflict in the church is one of their greatest challenges. While we recognize that many of you could conduct this seminar, we would love for you to be in attendance so you can get to know the pastors and Christian leaders in your communities. You may have additional training and/or resources to help them as they take ideas back to their congregations. If you register, let us know that you are a network counsellor. We will do what we can to make participants aware of your work in their areas.

Focus on the Family Canada is also preparing an exciting season of other events across the country. Please watch this newsletter for further details as plans develop. A few things on the horizon include the Love Won Out workshop coming to Vancouver in May 2007, a cross-country tour of parenting workshops and another workshop with Peter Scazzero, likely in Alberta.

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I took a call recently from a pastor who was dealing with a serious addiction issue. From his denominational affiliation, I knew that he was eligible for Employee Assistance Program (EAP) services. However, this put me in a bind since we rarely have up-to-date information on which of our referral counsellors work for various EAP providers. My first move is to refer to someone in our network, but when people are eligible for EAP services, it makes financial sense to make that their first option. I know that many of you (like me) do work for EAPs. It helps us to know which ones you work for! Please remind us so we can keep our databases current!

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Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero

“In this gut-honest book, Scazzero outlines his journey and the tell-tale signs of an emotionally unhealthy spirituality. Then he provides seven biblical, reality-tested ways to break through to a living, breathing, daily experience of the revolutionary life Christ meant for you to live.

‘The combination of emotional health and contemplative spirituality addresses what I believe to be the missing piece in contemporary Christianity,’ he says. ‘Together they unleash the Holy Spirit inside us so that we might experientially know the power of an authentic life in Christ.’ ”

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Bridging the Great Divide—Therapy and Discipleship
By Peter Scazzero
May 21, 2003

I was, by all external measures, a successful senior pastor of a large, numerically growing, multi-ethnic church in Queens, New York. I was also emotionally immature, a "workaholic" for God and failing at home as a husband and father.
God had been trying to get my attention for a few years. Finally, He sent an earthquake.

"Pete, I'm leaving the church," my wife Geri had muttered quietly.

I sat still, too stunned to respond.

"I can't take any more of this stress — the constant crisis," she continued.

Geri had been more than patient. I had brought home constant pressure and tension from church, year after year. Now the woman I had promised to love just as Christ loved the church was exhausted.

We had experienced eight unrelenting years of stress.

"I'm not doing it anymore," she concluded. "This church is no longer life for me. It is death."

When a church member says, "I'm leaving the church," most pastors don't feel very good. But when your wife of nine years says it, your world is turned upside down.

We were in our bedroom. I remember the day well.

"Pete, I love you, but I'm leaving the church," she summarized very calmly. "I no longer respect your leadership."

I was visibly shaken and didn't know what to say or do. I felt shamed, alone and angry.

I tried raising my voice to intimidate her: "That is out of the question," I bellowed. "All right, so I've made a few mistakes."

But she calmly continued. “It's not that simple. You don't have the guts to lead, to confront the people who need to be confronted. You don't lead. You're too afraid that people will leave the church. You're too afraid of what they'll think about you."

I was outraged.

"I'm getting to it!" I yelled defensively. "I'm working on it." (For the last two years, I really had been trying, but somehow still wasn't up to it.)

"Good for you, but I can't wait any more," she replied.

There was a long pause of silence. Then she uttered the words that changed the power balance in our marriage permanently: "Pete, I quit."

It is said that the most powerful person in the world is one who has nothing to lose. Geri no longer had anything to lose. She was dying on the inside and I hadn't listened to or responded to her calls for help.

She softly continued, "I love you Pete. But the truth is I would be happier separated than married. At least then you would have to take the kids on weekends. Then maybe you'd even listen!"

"How could you say such a thing?" I complained. "Don't even think about it."

She was calm and resolute in her decision. I was enraged. A good Christian wife, married to a Christian (and a pastor I may add), does not do this. I understood at that moment why a husband could fly into a rage and kill the wife he loves.

She had asserted herself. She was forcing me to listen.

I wanted to die.

The power balance in our marriage was forever altered.

This soon led us on a journey that would take us into areas of Christian training we had never received. The rigid, tight box into which we had unwittingly placed God had been split open.

It soon became apparent that entire areas of our lives were untouched by the Lord Jesus —  our immature handling of anger and conflict, our inability to process loss in a way that "enlarged our soul", our distorted understanding of what it meant to die to self, the influential sin patterns, passed on from generation to generation, that were still operative in our marriage.

We finally admitted that emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. Biblically, it is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.

The idea that spiritual maturity can be achieved apart from an integration of the emotional aspects of who we are go back to Plato, gnosticism and Augustine, not Scripture. In the minds of many today, the denial of anger, ignoring pain, skipping over depression, running from loneliness, avoiding confusing doubts and turning off our sexuality has become a way of spiritual life.

As a result, I have invested the last seven-and-a-half years sorting out the role of counselling as part of the larger mentoring and discipleship process. Emotional health is now central to our leadership development, focusing on the indispensability of leaders to model an emotionally and spiritually mature life.

Although churches are generally open to Christian counseling, it continues to be separated and compartmentalized from the whole of Christian discipleship. In other words: "You (counsellors) do your thing and we (the church) will do our thing." It is not seen how a commitment to emotional maturity is crucial to discipleship. My concern is that these be integrated. In light of this, I see Christian counsellors as having a unique, prophetic contribution to what God is seeking to do in the church around the world today. The following are a few suggestions that I trust will help you bridge this divide and more effectively impact your church or ministry community:

1. Shift your paradigm from counselling to discipleship — You are working within a church culture and system that understands discipleship as the heart of Christianity. Many of us leaders (as well as our people) are defensive and afraid of where you might take us with all this talk of emotions. Help us understand your passion in the context of discipleship (i.e. of seeing people become more like Jesus — 2 Cor. 3:18). You are asking us to open up and expand into unknown territory with you. Like most seminary and Bible school graduates, my discipleship paradigm was very narrow. All of my Christian training inside the church taught me that if I would be faithful to the spiritual disciplines (prayer, Word, fellowship, giving, confession, solitude, simplicity, etc.) and obey Jesus, I would be fine. Yet I was in pain, struggling with this restlessness that something was not right — not only in me but in the larger church.

I needed a Biblical theology and language to frame what I was experiencing as I was learning about my interior. For example, in the past I believed that as a member of the family of God I was a new creation and all things were new. I never understood or even considered the impact of my family of origin into who I was today as a disciple of Jesus. Counseling enabled me to become aware of how various negative patterns of the past (e.g. how my family dealt with intimacy, anger, resolving conflict, abandonment, marriage, etc.) were seriously hindering me from becoming like Jesus Christ. For this reason, I would argue, good biblical counseling is discipleship.

In The Emotionally Healthy Church, I have broken down the discipleship paradigm that integrates emotional health and spirituality into six principles:

1. A. Looking Beneath the Surface
2. B. Breaking the Power of the Past
3. C. Living in Brokenness and Vulnerability
4. D. Receiving the Gift of Limits
5. E. Embracing Grieving and Loss
6. F. Making Incarnation your Model for Loving Well

2. Do your own internal work — It is necessary to nurture and monitor your own emotional/spiritual growth regularly. What are you doing to continue your own personal development on your interior? This will enable you to flesh out for the church what this process of growing in emotional/spiritual maturity looks like. We need models, for example, on how to love well under stress, how to be good listeners, how to be non-defensive and not blame others, how to be broken and yet be graciously assertive, how to grieve losses without being permanently crippled, how to be open and honest and take responsibility for our feelings, how to continually work on our own unresolved personal issues while still serving Christ in the church, how to resolve conflict maturely. One of the great fears of church leaders is that if we open up people, they will become self-absorbed narcissists and stop serving Christ and others. The church needs you to model the balance of healthy integration of self-reflection and service to Christ.

3. Offer to teach classes, seminars, retreats — Classes on grieving (based on David's psalms), marriage and intimacy, emotional literacy, personal relationship skills, sexuality, compassionate listening, limits and boundaries, breaking addictions, recovering from abuse, etc. are all wonderful opportunities to expose a congregation to the knowledge, skills and tools counselling has to offer. Educational settings are much safer for many people than that of a counsellor's office.

4. Be faithful to yourself — A number of counsellors have confided in me over the years the frustration of feeling shut down by the church. The critical challenge to loving well is being able to be in community with people different than us while at the same time holding on to ourselves. Being true to ourselves (and not living out other peoples' scripts for our lives) is a large part of what it means to "take up our cross and follow Jesus" (Luke 9:23). So I encourage you to persevere in your own differentiation process. This will produce mature love that will transform not only you but also the lives of those around you.

5. Go forward in prayer and faith. Through relationships I have with pastors and leaders in North America, as well as from Mongolia, Cuba, Russia, Latin America, Indonesia, Korea and Africa, I have learned that they also sense something is desperately wrong. They are beginning to see the gap between emotional health and spirituality. They need help on how to build a bridge from an inadequate spiritual paradigm to one that includes emotional health. God has uniquely positioned and trained you to do this.
I want to encourage you to go forward in faith and prayer, remembering what Jesus taught us: "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you" (Matt. 17:20).

We welcome your articles for Good Hope. If you have a previously written article that you would like to share with other counsellors, or if you would like to share your experience of working with a pastor or his/her family, please email us at info@clergycare.ca.

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Clergy Forum: The Emotionally Healthy Church
When: October 17, 2006
Where: Brampton, Ontario
Featuring: Peter Scazzero

For more information or to register: www.evangelicalfellowship.ca/calendar/.

Dealing with Difficult People seminar
When: October 25, 2006
Where: Red Deer, Alberta
Featuring: Alan Simpson & Geof Cornelsen
Note: registration or network counsellors is at a special rate of $49 per person!

For more information or to register: www.clergycare.ca.

Imago Relationship Therapy: A Theory and Therapy of Couplehood
Presented by Internationally Acclaimed Dr. Harville Hendrix, Ph.D.

When: October 16-17, 2006. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Calgary, Alberta
Coast Plaza Hotel & Conference Centre
1316 - 33rd St. NE, Calgary

For more information or to register: www.jackhirose.com.

Best Marriage seminar
When: November 17-18, 2006
Where: Mississauga, Ontario
Featuring: Dr. Linda Leonard (one of our network counsellors)

For more information or to register: www.lifeskills4familyliving.com

Working with Couples: 1-& 2-Day Options
Presented by Internationally Acclaimed
Dr. Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. &
Dr. Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D.

When: November 29-30, 2006. 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Where: Richmond, B.C.
Best Western Richmond Hotel & Conference Centre
7551 Westminster Highway, Richmond
For more information or to register: www.jackhirose.com.

Lookin Ahead: Mark Your Calenders!

Joint Conference: Canadian Counselling Association & BC Association for Clinical Counsellors
When: May 22-25, 2007
Where: Vancouver, B.C.
Coast Plaza at Stanley Park

Details available at www.ccacc.ca
Note: We will host a reception for any of our network counsellors who may be here for this event! Please inform us if you plan to attend. We need a rough count of attendees.

To advertise seminars or workshops that you are involved with in Good Hope, email info@clergycare.ca

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We are always interested in hearing about new resources for counsellors, referrals for potential CCN counsellors and ideas for upcoming issues a Good Hope. Contact us anytime!

Geof Cornelsen
Director of Clergy Care
604.539.7940
geofc@fotf.ca

Wendy Kittlitz
CCN Assistant Counsellor
604.539.7930
wendyk@fotf.ca

1.888.5.CLERGY

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