Church leaders need to give themselves a checkup to discover their spiritual health, David Ferguson told those attending the Healthy Leaders, Healthy Churches conference March 8.
Ferguson, co-director of Intimate Life Ministries, a training ministry that serves more than 40,000 churches throughout the United States and abroad, discovered the negative effects of unhealthy leadership even in his own ministry after several years of serving God and realized that many churches have the same problem.
Often, churches seek to change their methods to improve their overall health overlooking the need to change the church message, Ferguson noted. “If all we change is the church methods, it will be like changing the chairs on deck of the Titanic.”
He stated that leaders need to look at three important issues to improve a church’s health:
Seeing God as He really is.
Using the two greatest commandments listed in Mark 12:29–31, Ferguson stated that we cannot love God any deeper than we love others or any deeper than we are able to see Him.
Using John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Ferguson pointed out that many people see God as an inspecting, disappointed and distant God instead of the loving, promise-keeping God that He really is.
According to him, many Christians are trained to have this mind-set and then proceed to mimic that behavior.
For example, Ferguson and his wife, Teresa, revealed how the information taught to children sometimes contradicts the true heart of God.
In the popular children’s song about Zacchaeus, children are usually instructed to point a finger at Zacchaeus to represent Jesus calling him down from the tree. This makes it seem as if Jesus is condemning him, when He would have actually welcomed Zacchaeus with outstretched arms.
“For many years in my ministry, I didn’t see Jesus as the healthy leader that He really is,” Ferguson said. “When you see God as He really is it makes you more excited to love others.”
Seeing people as they really are.
Ferguson stated that the first human crisis occurred in Genesis 2 before sin was introduced in the Bible when God said that it is not good that man was alone.
According to Ferguson, this should teach us that people are not just sinful, they are also alone.
Our churches may be filled with people who first see people as fallen and sinful, but they may never see them as alone, Ferguson said.
He added that two critical issues of leader health are to see people as God sees them and to love them as God loves them.
“We have to quit training people to take Bible verses and leave church looking for people who are violating them,” he said. “We’ve got the Bible in one hand and rocks in the other.”
Ferguson noted that Christians can do more about a person’s aloneness than their sinfulness. As Paul instructed in Ephesians 4:29, we should meet people at the point of their need and give them words that edify.
“If we are not careful, our message in evangelism will be that all we care about is that they are sinners,” Ferguson said.
Doing what the Bible instructs us to do.
Galatians 5:13 states, “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.” Ferguson used this verse to remind the audience that we should not feel that it is our duty as Christians to condemn others.
He also recalled the old adage, “The truth shall set you free.” He then noted that the truth makes us free to love.
“The purpose of our instruction is to love,” Ferguson said. “It is God who justifies … it is Jesus Christ the Righteous who is the only Person that can condemn, and the only Person that can condemn you is now praying for you.”
Emotional fitness important for healthy leaders
Cups running over referred to something other than God’s blessings at a breakout session on emotional fitness during the Healthy Leaders Healthy Churches conference March 8–9.
David and Teresa Ferguson of Intimate Life Ministries, Austin, Texas, used a cup to illustrate how painful emotions build up inside one’s internal “cup” and overflow into behaviors that may not be understood or accepted by others.
Negative responses in church, the home or at work are not always about a specific incident. Often they are about everything else that is going on in a person’s life that has not been dealt with in an appropriate way. Negative emotions come because believers keep the emotions from past events or problems. These emotions could be hurt, guilt or anger.
By emptying their cups of negative emotions and living in the present, people can live in God’s abundance, the Fergusons said.
“If [the devil] can keep a believer’s heart bound up in the past, it robs us of present abundance in Christ,” David Ferguson said.
Christians can be bound by emotions related to the future as well. Emotions such as fear, worry or insecurity over things yet to come or imagined can debilitate a person in the present.
This lack of what David Ferguson calls “emotional fitness” can lead to symptoms such as physical complaints, controlling/obsessing, escaping into work, drugs, irritability/hostility, sleeping/eating disorders or being emotionally numb.
These outward characteristics aren’t always visible in church. Church members typically gather to shake hands and sing hymns during gatherings at church and attempt to cover the negative emotions that reside inside them. This hinders true worship.
“We can preach some of our best sermons but these things are choking out the Word,” David Ferguson said.
Members failing to deal with emotions can cripple a church and rob it of its joy, David Ferguson said.
“You’ll find that sometimes the saints aren’t being excitedly filled with the gratitude and wonder of getting on with the things of the Kingdom because their hearts are filled up with painful emotions,” he said.
Teresa Ferguson said her life was typical of what most people do with their negative emotions. “Growing up we didn’t know what to do with our hurt; we were told you were supposed to forgive your offender, which I did, but I didn’t know what to do with all the rest of it. We were told to put the past behind us and keep going — I did. I stuffed it down and kept going, and we were the leaders in our church,” she said.
“It’s normal folks. We’ve got stuff in us and we don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “I had stuffed for so long that there was no room for any positive emotion.”
“Church answers” didn’t seem to work, she explained. “We were told to pray more, fast, memorize Scripture and rebuke the devil and the symptoms would go away, but they didn’t. Instead I had more condemnation and guilt from questions like, ‘What’s wrong with me that I can’t get rid of my sin? Why can’t I overcome it?’ ”
She said symptoms of poor emotional fitness can be escaping to computers to avoid relationships, reliance on medications, depression, loss of physical health, controlling behavior and loss of emotions such as love, joy, patience or affection.
“When negative emotions crowd into the cup we’re not going be able to pour out the positive emotions,” she said.
The result is the spilling over of negative emotions, particularly impatience.
The church is not the place to gloss over negative emotions present in its members, but it is the place to address them working through “truth in love,” the Fergusons said.
“Jesus Christ ought to be our model of experiencing abundance. He is the only Person who lived every moment of every day in the present,” David Ferguson said. Jesus’ heart was not filled with hurt, anger, fear or condemnation.
In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus was experiencing sorrow that His disciples fell asleep rather than praying with Him. He didn’t just shrug His shoulders and say, well that’s just how it is, denying His feelings, but He was venerable with Peter, James and John. He didn’t let His emotion explode in anger nor did He pretend it didn’t hurt, according to David Ferguson. “He shared the truth in love, asking Peter, ‘Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?’ ”
Jesus offers top leader example
A study of Jesus’ life provides church leaders with practical models of relational leadership, according to David Ferguson of Intimate Life Ministries.
Jesus sought to build deep, caring relationships with His disciples, so much so that about half of His ministry was spent getting to know them and training them, said Ferguson. “This is a critical part of what it means to lead like Jesus led.”
The goal of relational leadership is to serve others and not to pursue becoming a leader. In serving others, leaders can build a caring and connected team.
Effective leaders have also learned how to be humble and therefore approachable. “Jesus was approachable by tax collectors, prostitutes — sinners of all kinds,” he said.
Understanding people is another key to being a good leader. Ferguson suggested learning the ways those on the team like to be responded to and the way they respond to others.
Lastly, healthy leaders develop the vision with the team. Leadership is a partnership and is most effective when the entire team has developed a clear vision of the goal and why the goal was chosen.
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