Sabbatical Prep: How to Plan and Prepare for Your First or Next Sabbatical
A FREE Webinar on April 14th | 2 PM ET
April Webinar
Store Sale
Personal Assessment
How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
Take a free 15 minute personal assessment now!
Personal Assessment
Why do churches with sincere faith, gifted leaders, and strong theology still split?
In this powerful episode of the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast, Pete Scazzero exposes a hard truth many leaders have experienced but rarely name: church fractures are rarely about doctrine or vision—they are about formation.
Drawing from decades of pastoral leadership and personal failure, Pete explains why spiritual maturity without emotional maturity is unsustainable. Churches don’t split because people don’t love Jesus. They split because leaders and communities lack the emotionally healthy skills needed to love one another well under pressure, conflict, disappointment, and power dynamics.
This episode explores why skills like incarnational listening, clarifying expectations, understanding how family history shapes leadership, and engaging in clean conflict are essential for healthy culture. Pete shares stories from his own leadership journey, including a painful church split that could have been prevented if these skills had been in place.
If you’re a pastor or leader longing to build a church culture that thrives—not just for a season, but for generations—this episode offers wisdom, hope, and a clear next step forward.
👇 Explore more at emotionallyhealthy.org
📅 Join our next webinar: emotionallyhealthy.org/webinar
As leaders, we want to make wise, Spirit-led decisions that move our ministries forward. But without realizing it, we often fall into patterns of planning that keep us stuck—repeating the same mistakes year after year.
In this episode, Pete Scazzero gets painfully honest about the five planning mistakes that hindered him for years—and how these missteps continue to trap leaders today:
- Insufficiently preparing
- Flippantly defining success
- Ignoring the most important work—listening to Jesus together
- Skimming on development
- Failing to anchor vision in calendars, limits, and next steps
Pete shares the lessons he’s learned the hard way through decades of leadership in the local church and Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. With clarity, candor, and practical wisdom, he offers a better way forward—one that’s rooted in prayerful discernment, emotional maturity, and thoughtful preparation.
If you're tired of spinning your wheels and ready to do the deeper work of strategic planning in God's way, this episode is for you.
Listen now and take your next step toward leading with greater clarity, peace, and purpose.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
Free EH Leader Planning & Decision-Making Guide: https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/leader
EH School of Leadership: https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/school
Next EH Webinar: https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/webinar
👉FREE DOWNLOAD: Craft a Rule of Life for You and Your Team - emotionallyhealthy.org/rule
Most pastors today are trained in strategies, systems, and leadership models that promise church growth—but often leave the soul malnourished.
In this episode, I share a deeply personal and urgent message from a live talk I gave to pastors around the world who are moving beyond using the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Course as a tool—and toward building a deep culture of emotional health and spiritual formation in their churches.
What if the future of church leadership doesn’t look like the latest model, but like something ancient? What if the way forward requires going back?
I unpack how, for over 1,100 years, the church’s most influential leaders were not trained in classrooms—but in monastic communities of prayer, silence, and deep formation. And I lay out the implications for us today as we discern the next faithful steps in shaping a new kind of leadership pipeline rooted in being before doing.
This is more than theory—it’s shaping the future direction of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship.
