Implementing EHS in Your Church

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (EHS) is a paradigm that ultimately informs every area of a church, ministry, or organization. And so the one question that continually emerges in our work with leaders is: “How do I bring EHS into our church—and then how do I keep it there!?”

There are a variety of tools, books, conferences, and curriculums for leaders who want to teach and train their people in emotionally healthy spirituality. Three tools in particular are essential to becoming a transformed EHS church: The EHS Course, EH Skills 2.0, and The Emotionally Healthy Leader.

The Three Core Tools

1. The EHS Course. This eight-week spiritual formation course provides a foundational overview of the EHS paradigm for your church or ministry. It includes reading Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and learning to cultivate a rhythm of meeting with Jesus twice a day using Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Day by Day: A Forty Day Journey with the Daily Office. Daily devotions correspond with the eight weekly themes of the course. The EHS Workbook then is used by participants during the course itself. The eight sessions include:
   1. The Problem of Emotionally Unhealthy Spirituality (Saul)
   2. Know Yourself that You May Know God (David)
   3. Go Back to Go Forward (Joseph)
   4. Journey through the Wall (Abraham)
   5. Enlarge Your Soul through Grief and Loss (Jesus)
   6. Discover the Rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath (Daniel)
   7. Grow into an Emotionally Mature Adult (The Good Samaritan)
   8. Go the Next Step to Develop a “Rule of Life” (The Early Church)

Many churches around the world, including ours, offer The EHS Course at least twice a year in order to reinforce these values in their culture. If possible, we encourage churches to offer it as a Church-wide course because of the importance of processing this powerful new content well. To help you lead a high-quality course, we provide additional resources on our website www.emotionallyhealthy.org. If you’re considering offering the course, I encourage you to register online in order to receive ongoing updates and support.

2. Emotionally Healthy Skills 2.0. Over a sixteen-year period, we identified eight essential skills and then developed training for to help our leaders and church members grow into emotionally and spiritually mature followers of Jesus Christ:
   1. The Community Temperature Reading
   2. Stop Mind Reading
   3. Clarify Expectations
   4. Genogram Your Family
   5. Explore the Iceberg
   6. Incarnational Listening
   7. Climb the Ladder of Integrity

The formula is simple: New skills + new language + intentional follow-up = transformed community. While Emotionally Healthy Skills 2.0 can be used in small groups, Sunday school classes, equipping sessions, leadership meetings, or as a Church-wide course, the most important factor is intentionally following up in specific situations so people learn to do life differently. Emotionally Healthy Skills 2.0 is available from our website at www.emotionallyhealthy.org.

3. The Emotionally Healthy Leader. The topics discussed in this book require ongoing discussions, personal and team applications, and nuancing for your particular context. Reading the book alone is not sufficient to make significant shifts in how you and your team lead. To help you engage and apply this material more deeply, we developed a free discussion workbook you can download at www.emotionallyhealthy.org or www.zondervan.org. A number of other podcasts, videos, and additional resources for leaders are also available on our website.