Tag Archives: EHS Course

4 Steps to a Meaningful Sabbath

All work — paid and unpaid — is good, but it needs to be boundaried by the practice of Sabbath. The problem with too many leaders is that we allow our work to trespass on every other area of life, disrupting the balanced rhythm of work and rest God created for our good. Sabbath is a twenty-four-hour block of time in which we stop work, enjoyrest, practice delight, and contemplate God. 1. Stop. Sabbath is first and foremost a day when we cease all work — paid and unpaid. On the Sabbath we embrace our limits. We let go of the illusion that we are indispensable to the running of the world. We recognize we will never finish all our goals and projects, and that God is on the throne, managing quite well in ruling the universe without our help. 2. Rest. Once we stop, we accept God’s invitation to rest. God rested after. Read more.

My 10 Top Lessons on Writing

The Emotionally Healthy Leader was my most challenging writing project to date. It required 6 ½ years of journaling, pondering, and prayer, and 1½ years of intensive writing itself. By the time it was over, I wondered if I would ever write again. (My first draft of over two hundred pages, for example, ended up mostly in the trash. So I reread two of my favorite books about the art and vocation of writing– Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing and The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard. Their insights offered me, once again, both perspective and vision. They put words on the complexity of the writing experience for me. My top learnings: Why do I write? I write to become clear (Merton, 10). I find that it (writing) helps me pray because, when I pause at my work, I find the mirror inside me is surprisingly clean and deep and serene. Read more.

Quit Overfunctioning

To quit overfunctioning is foundational to our leadership. In fact, unless we take up this biblical challenge, it will be nearly impossible to raise up healthy, biblical communities that effectively engage the world with the gospel and deeply transform lives. Overfunctioning can be defined as: doing for others what they can and should do for themselves. This is a key task for every leader that requires discernment, courage, and at times, wise counsel from others. The following four realities motivate us to make this a regular topic for prayerful discernment: Overfunctioning perpetuates immaturity. In Exodus 18, Moses mistakenly believed his self-sacrifice was serving the people. Moses became the largest obstacle, the bottleneck to the people’s growth and maturity. In Numbers 11, the Israelites demanded a rescue from their pain. Moses accepted the role. In doing so, he ensured their continued immature behavior. Overfunctioning prevents us from focusing on God’s unique call for our own. Read more.

Don’t Cast the First Stone!

We often forget that our rich tradition as evangelical Protestants has some “dirty laundry” and blind spots. For example: Martin Luther’s intensely disliked Jews and wrote essays against them that were resurrected and used by the Nazis. He also advised the German nobles to slaughter the rebelling peasants without mercy. Ulrich Zwingli condoned the torture and drowning of Anabaptists—some of them his own former students—because they believed in baptism by immersion. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield were slaveholders. African-American believers in our church have questioned me if they were really Christian! The great outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Asuza Street (1906) in Los Angeles split terribly over race, resulting in black and white churches throughout America for decades. Many leaders of the Protestant Missionary Movement, along with a number of contemporary Evangelical leaders, failed in their marriage and family life. John Wesley, for example, couldn’t live with his wife; his marriage was, by. Read more.

Quit Living Someone Else’s Life

Whose life are you living — your own or someone else’s? Does your leadership reflect how God has uniquely crafted you or are you trying to be somebody you are not? This is one of the greatest challenges we face. God invites us to ignore the distracting voices around us — regardless of their source — and to pursue wholeheartedly leading out of our God-given life. This is no small task. Just consider the pressures Jesus, Moses, and David faced. 4 essential practices provide essential guidance for us in this journey: Take Time to Discover Your Integrity The journey of living your life instead of someone else’s begins when you discover your integrity. This requires recognizing and defining what is important to you. When helping someone who is struggling with an inner conflict, I often ask, “What is your integrity calling you to do?” Most people hesitate before responding because they have rarely thought deeply about what they believe and. Read more.

What We Know and Don’t Know about Bringing EHS to Your Church

We are now in our 20th year of cultivating emotionally healthy spirituality (EHS) into the soil of our local church here at New Life Fellowship in Queens, NYC. It has deepened and enriched every aspect of our life together. In the last two years, however, we have begun to intentionally and carefully bring EHS to the global church. God has brought churches from different languages, cultures, streams, movements, and countries to us looking to integrate EHS into their context. So we are early in our learning process. What do we know to be true? EHS must begin with leadership. When leaders teach EHS without living it, there is little fruit. EHS involves the transformation of an entire church culture; it is not a program. EHS equips the church in a deep, beneath the surface spirituality for the sake of long-term mission. This is a major shift for leaders. The EHS Pathway answers the long-standing. Read more.

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