The Emotionally Healthy Church

1 Corinthians 13

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; 10 but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. 13 So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.



I borrowed this from Mike Cope's blog of last week:

"Something is desperately wrong with most churches today. We have many people who are passionate for God and his work, yet who are unconnected to their own emotions or those around them. The combination is deadly, both for the church and the leader's personal life.""It is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. For some reason, however, the vast majority of Christians today live as if the two concepts have no intersection. Our standards of what it means to be 'spiritual' totally bypass many glaring inconsistencies. We have learned to accept that:-You can be a dynamic, gifted speaker for God in public and be an unloving spouse and parent at home.-You can function as a church board member or pastor and be unteachable, insecure, and defensive.-You can memorize entire books of the New Testament and still be unaware of your depression and anger, even displacing it on other people.-You can fast and pray a half-day a week for years as a spiritual discipline and constantly be critical of others, justifying it as discernment.-You can lead hundreds of people in a Christian ministry while driven by a deep personal need to compensate for a nagging sense of failure.-You can pray for deliverance from the demonic realm when in reality you are simply avoiding conflict, repeating an unhealthy pattern of behavior traced back to the home in which you grew up.-You can be outwardly cooperative at church but unconsciously try to undercut or defeat your supervisor by coming habitually late, constantly forgetting meetings, withdrawing and become apathetic, or ignoring the real issue behind why you are hurt and angry."We've all been able to see this incongruency with others, haven't we? One of the most angry people I've ever met in my life is especially angry when he talks about the immature anger of others. One of the most toxic persons I've ever known is a therapist who probably has helped people in her office but leaves bodies along the road in her out-of-the-office life.

He suggests certain principles of emotionally healthy leaders and churches: (1) look beneath the iceberg; (2) break the power of the past; (3) live in brokenness and vulnerability; (4) receive the gift of limits; (5) embrace grieving and loss; and (6) make incarnation your model for loving well. "

In the end it all comes down to faith, hope and love. What do you think?