Growing Together in 2025 Through Emotionally Healthy Leadership

Ingra, Jota, Suelem, Daniel, Luciane, Maria Zilda, Sara, Neto, Mark, Melynda - André & Simone (front)

At the end of 2024, we invited a group of talented and dedicated members from Família em Cristo to prayerfully consider joining a journey that would require both time and intention — a monthly three-to-four-hour meeting, plus personal reading and reflection between sessions. It wasn’t a light commitment.

But after a few weeks of prayer and discernment, they said yes.

So on March 22nd, we gathered for our first meeting. What followed over the next eight months has been nothing short of transformative for all of us. Together we studied, reflected, shared perspectives, and practiced the principles with emotionally healthy leadership as our mission.

Each month we focused on one or two key objectives, exploring how spiritual and emotional maturity intersect in leadership.

We studied the following principles

• The Emotionally Unhealthy Leader: Facing the truth about how emotional immaturity can quietly undermine spiritual leadership.

• Facing Your Shadow: Understanding how hidden fears, motivations, and wounds affect how we lead.

• Leading Out of Marriage or Singleness: Seeing our closest relationships as our first ministry.

• Slowing  Down for Loving Union with Christ: Learning to lead from a deep, consistent relationship with Jesus.

• Practicing Sabbath Delight: Embracing rest as a rhythm of grace, not a reward for exhaustion.

• Planning and Decision-Making: Making Spirit-led, non anxiety-driven, choices.

• Building Culture and Team: Creating communities that reflect emotional health and safety.

• Understanding Power and Setting Wise Boundaries: Stewarding influence with humility, clarity, and integrity.

• Endings and New Beginnings: Allowing God to lead us through necessary transitions.

Mid-Year Gathering

In June we gathered for our first conference, joined by Justin and Jill, Scott Warner, and Chad and Haley Warner. This team challenged us to look deeper into the various ways our past impacts the present (Hills), what it means to lead in health, viewing the church as a “field, not a factory” (Scott), and how escaping the “chaos cycle” in close relationships allows those relationships to become assets for the Kingdom instead of sources of stress (Chad & Haley).

It was a time of honesty, reflection, and encouragement — a midpoint that focused our hearts and minds on the importance of the internal work of healthy leadership.

The Final Retreat: Rhythms of Grace and Faithful Planning

On October 17–18, we closed our leadership year with our second conference, filled with laughter, learning, and a sense of holy anticipation for what’s next.

We began with a creative “escape room”–style review of Chapters 6–8, putting teamwork, awareness, and trust to the test. It was learning in the moment as we paused to see how team principles came to life as the group tried to solve the problems at hand. Then we explored the nature of Crucial Conversations and styles of conflict, we practiced turning tension into transformation through interactive role plays,and discussed the challenges to doing this in real time. We summarized that healthy leadership chooses presence over protection, humility over control, faithfulness over fear.

After lunch together, we turned our focus toward the future — planning for 2026 through the lens of Rhythms of Grace. Guided by Ecclesiastes’ reminder that “there is a time for everything,” we began by naming the natural rhythms of our city: the rainy season, school calendars, holidays, and family vacation patterns that shape participation and energy in our community.

From there, each group designed four hypothetical ministry events using a project-planning framework. Together we asked:

• Who are we trying to reach?

• What are our goals?

• What resources will be required — financial, relational, spiritual, and emotional?

• And in what season or rhythm of the year would this best fit?

We then discerned what we hoped these efforts might produce.

• Activities: What will we actually do in obedience — the ministries, gatherings, and acts of service that express our calling?

• Short-Term Outcomes: What visible fruit do we hope to see in the next few weeks and months?

• Long-Term Results: What kind of transformation are we praying for in the years ahead?

This prayerful process reminded us that planning isn’t about control — it’s about co-laboring with God and collaborating with each other in the knowledge and expectation that God is in control. 

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” - Prvb 19:21

Transformation in Everyday Life

We spent some time sharing how we have been impacted and transformed by God's hand as we’ve attempted to practice emotionally healthy ways of thinking, listening, and acting over this year. One sister, who works as a law professor, realized  during this year that she had no margin for rest because she had not set clear boundaries for herself at work. She said yes to everything out of fear for what might happen if she said no. As she prayerfully discerned that fear was motivating her decision she decided to trust God and to carefully establish some new clear boundaries. She shared that something she feared might upset her colleagues, to her surprise, became something that they thanked her for. The new clarity helped everyone align expectations and that alignment created a healthier work environment. We praise God!

Another sister, a small business owner, felt convicted to make Sunday sacred. For years and years Sunday morning work has been essential to their business. However after considering the importance of rest and sabbath she decided that one day of rest a week was needed. It was not easy and it took almost a year of restructuring but she reshaped her company’s habits to ensure she could rest and worship weekly — leading not just by policy, but by example. We praise God!

Emotionally healthy leadership isn’t just theory — it’s a lived way of being that transforms families, workplaces, and churches.

A Year of Growth and Gratitude

We closed the year sharing memories, gratitude, and laughter, hugs and tears. We celebrated the relationships formed, the courage shown, and the quiet ways God had worked in and through each of us.

It was, in every way, a year of growth, grace, and gratitude.

God is good, and His ways are what we long to know.

We remain committed to growing this Família em Cristo — this family in Christ — together.