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Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

From the EHS web site http://www.emotionallyhealthy.org:
“Emotionally Healthy Spirituality was birthed out of the realization that key areas were missing in the church’s spiritual formation/discipleship initiatives. Over an 18-year period, these missing elements were identified and were found to be applicable around the world as essential to engaging in deep, beneath-the-surface spiritual formation. This is grounded in the conviction that genuine growth cannot help but release the life and gifts of God through His people out into the world.”

Join us for this eight week series, as we take a close look at what it means to break from the past and experience true emotional healing.

An intro to the course can be found here: EHS – youtube

Click here for blog posts about EHS: EHS posts

For further details about this course, please contact Phil Hughes.

Grow Into An Emotionally Mature Adult

The goal of the Christian life is to love well. Jesus was aware that true spirituality included not only loving God, but also the skill of loving others maturely. Growing into an emotionally mature Christian person includes experiencing each individual, ourselves included, as sacred, or as Martin Buper (a twentieth century philosopher & religious thinker) put it, as a “Thou” rather than as an “It”.

Journey Through The Wall

Emotionally healthy spirituality requires that you go through the pain of the Wall- or, as the ancients called it, “the dark night of the soul.” Just as a physical wall stops us from moving ahead, God sometimes stops us in our spiritual journey through a spiritual Wall in order to radically transform our character. Often, we are brought to the Wall by circumstances and crises beyond our control.

Know Yourself That You May Know God

Self awareness is intricately related to our relationship with God. In fact, the challenge of Scripture to shed our ‘false’ self in order to live authentically in our new ‘true’ self strikes at the very core of true spirituality. In AD500, Augustine wrote in ‘Confessions,’ “How can you draw close to God when you are far from your own self?” He prayed: “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.” In 1530, John Calvin wrote in his opening of the ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion:’ “Our wisdom…. consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.’

The Problem Of Emotionally Unhealthy Spirituality

Emotional health and spiritual maturity cannot be separated. It is impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. When we ignore the emotional component of our lives, we move through the motions of Christian disciplines, activities, and behaviours, but deeply rooted behavioral patterns from our past continue to hinder us from an authentic life of maturity in Christ. We often neglect to reflect on what is going on inside us and around us (emotional health) and are too busy to slow down to be with God (contemplative spirituality). As a result, we run the high risk of remaining stuck as spiritual infants, failing to develop into spiritually/emotionally mature adults in Christ.