Peter Scazzero stands on the steps outside New Life Fellowship in New York City swilling coffee between services. Queens Boulevard is a sidewalk away, and the people ascending and descending the steps seem to come from every nation under heaven. Scazzero breaks from a conversation momentarily to flag down a passing church member. "Hey, Miao!" he shouts to a woman on the other side of the sea of people. "Good to see you again. Let's talk later!"
This is where the Italian-American, New York-born-and-raised pastor seems most comfortable. But he wasn't always this at ease. Twenty years ago he was in his mid-30s, already pining for retirement, a ministry workaholic in a church rife with conflict.
That's when a series of events led him to what he calls "emotionally healthy spirituality." The new focus revitalized him, his marriage, and his church. Drew Dyck spoke with Scazzero about his journey and the kinds of practices that led to his transformation.
Early in your ministry you had some experiences that compelled you to seek emotional health and spiritual transformation. What were they?
What precipitated my transformation was simple: things were not going well at church or at home. Five or six years after planting New Life we were growing and people were coming to Christ. But people were not changing deeply. It really showed when there was stress and conflict in the church. It was clear to me that we had a big problem. Initially I looked at everybody else and said, "They aren't changing!" We had a lot of people saying they were on fire for Jesus, but they were still arrogant, still proud, still nursing conflicts like they were 12 years old. I thought to myself, Something's not right here.
So I started doing everything I could to help them grow: Scripture-teaching, worship, prayer meetings, community-building, spiritual warfare, prophetic ministry, gifts of the Spirit—you name it. We were doing it all, but something was still missing. I wrestled for a few years trying to identify the problem. It was a real wall.
I was exhausted. Then things started to go very wrong in the church. One of our congregations had a split, and I saw some ugliness in our people, and I felt hurt and betrayed. But I kept my head up, just kept going, kept pastoring. I thought I was being spiritual by keeping composed, but inside I was a mess.
I had been too busy building, leading, reaching people for Christ. Those are all good things, but it didn't leave a lot of time to look inward.
One of those experiences was an important encounter with your wife. What happened?
Around this time Geri came to me and just laid it all on the table. She said, "Pete, I'm leaving the church. I can't take any more of this stress, this constant crisis. This church is no longer life to me. It is death."
By this point we had experienced eight years of unrelenting stress. I had brought home constant pressure and tension from church, year after year, and she was done. She said she was tired of living like a single mom. She said my leadership stunk, pointing out that I was unwilling to confront members who needed to be confronted.
It was incredibly painful to hear that, but God used her. So the pain was God's means of transformation. God was trying to get my attention for years, but it took a lot to stop me. I'm a Type-A guy: "make it happen, keep pushing." For God to stop me, and get me to look at my inner life, sadly, it took a ton.
If you are married, your first "neighbor" you are to love is your spouse. I was loving the whole world, and my wife didn't feel loved by me.
Supposedly I was raising up mothers and fathers of the faith, but I was an emotional infant trying to lead New Life Fellowship. I knew the Bible. I'd gone to seminary. I was gifted. I could preach and lead a church, at least on a certain level. But I was too busy to love.
Geri's confrontation was the push I needed. That was a huge shift. I started thinking that maybe there were some things in me that needed tending to. It wasn't like I hadn't been cultivating my spiritual life before that time. I'm a very disciplined person. I spent a lot of time in Scripture, praying, and doing spiritual disciplines. But it wasn't enough for transformation.
Many leaders might think if they were more consistent about prayer and Bible study that their inner lives would flourish. How can that not be enough? What more did you do?
It wasn't enough. I started going to Christian counseling for the first time. That was very humbling. I didn't even really believe in Christian counseling at the time, much less that I needed it.
I also started reading Henri Nouwen and other writers who were outside the box for me. I began learning about the importance of Lamentations and Psalms. I spent time looking at my family of origin, how it impacted who I am today, how it affected the way I did ministry. As I went on this journey, just looking at my own life, I started to realize I wasn't such a lovely person on the inside. Here I'd been looking at everyone else, thinking they were the ones who needed to change. But I needed to change first.
When Geri called my bluff, basically telling me "you're not practicing what you preach," it was difficult. But out of that crucible of pain we saw the missing link to transformation. We realized we were missing something, and it was destroying us.
That was the beginning of emotional health, emotionally healthy spirituality. It has a lot of components, but the basic idea is this: emotional health and spiritual maturity can't be separated. You cannot be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. For example, if you're not approachable, kind, loving, gentle, warm, it doesn't matter how much Bible you know, how gifted you are. You're not mature spiritually.
What's the relationship between emotional health and spiritual health?
Well, they're not identical, but you cannot be spiritually mature without being emotionally mature. Now defining emotionally maturity isn't easy—it has many components to it. It's a little like EQ (emotional intelligence), but it's very different too because it's much deeper and transformative.
It's not learning a bunch of skills to have a better workplace and to get a product. It's about being transformed from the inside out. It's about who you are, deep down, that impacts your relationship with God, with others, with yourself, and the whole created order.
So, for example, at the conferences I do for pastors, we look at family of origin. We do a three-generational genogram and then ask, "How does your past impact who you are in the present?" We also teach things like grieving and loss. How do you deal with loss? How do you process grief? That's an undertaught topic. There's a whole book in the Bible called Lamentations; two-thirds of the Psalms are laments. Jesus was called the "Man of Sorrows." Yet, we don't do grieving. We don't do loss. We do bigger, better, faster.
Emotional health also involves acknowledging limits. We don't do limits well in North American culture. But there's a whole teaching on limits in Scripture, about not crossing the line, like Adam and Eve did. We like to think it's our effort and determination that results in great things for God. But in 1 Corinthians 13, we see the most important aspect of maturity is the agape that flows through us, that comes out of our relationship with God. It's the one thing Satan cannot counterfeit.
How do you encourage emotional and spiritual health in your congregation?
It has to start with the leaders. If the leaders don't experience transformation, well, how is church going to be transformed? I realized that until people saw me taking my own emotional health seriously, they weren't going to buy in. Then it has to move out in concentric circles to other staff, then elders, and to other members.
At New Life our mission is informed by a set of spiritual formation distinctives. We call them our "5 M's." They shape our community as we follow Christ together.
1. "Monastic" reminds us to slow down to be with God. We have a Rule of Life for the church. The idea of a Rule of Life is borrowed from the monastic tradition. It provides guidelines to help us to pay attention and remember God. It isn't too rigid. It is meant to be a framework for freedom, providing healthy boundaries while leaving plenty of room for flexibility and individuality.
2. "Multi-racial," because we are in the heart of Queens, one of the most racially diverse places in the country, simply isn't optional. We have to love each other and work together. We're also serious about bridging racial, cultural, economic, and gender barriers. For instance, we aim not just to minster to the poor but to be a church of the poor, a place where the needy are welcomed and loved.
3. "eMotional health" (not quite an "M," but stick with me) means we make it clear that part of discipleship is learning new skills—like listening, clarifying assumptions and expectations, listening more than you talk, fighting clean, etc. These skills are essential for our individual and collective health.
4. "Marriage to Christ" means that we shape our lives (whether we are single or married) out of marriage to Christ. We recognize both marriage and singleness as vocations in God's kingdom, with deep significance for our walk with Christ. For example, if you are married, developing a marriage that reflects the marriage of Christ and his church is your top priority.
5. "Missional" means to constantly be offering ourselves to the world. We believe everyone is called to full-time ministry, that there is no sacred/secular divide. We commission people as teachers, social workers, police officers, doctors, lawyers, etc. The staff at New Life carves out time for spiritual growth: we pause several times a day to commune with God, observe a Sabbath, and spend an entire day every month in silence.
No doubt that encourages spiritual growth, but do you worry about losing productivity?
Absolutely not. I'm gaining hours because they're getting to God. I think we need to back up and ask, what does it mean to be a leader in God's church? To me, it's a person who is man or woman of prayer and the Word, who loves Christ.
Communing with God is leading. It's not about being a CEO or an expert in marketing. Not that I'm against those things. They're great gifts. But the folks who are leading our churches need to be like the early church fathers in the second or fifth centuries. Folks like Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and Augustine. They were theologians. They were monks. They prayed their theology. They didn't just talk about the Trinity; they communed with the Trinity. They were leaders in the church but were also theologians and men of prayer.
We don't think of church leaders as deeply theological, spiritual people as much anymore. American culture has deeply penetrated the church.
At New Life we say, "We want to invite you to follow Jesus." That means you're going to leave the world and you're going to leave the American church. Like the desert fathers of old who struck off for the wilderness, you're going to leave the world to cultivate your relationship with Jesus. But you're not going to leave literally. You're going to fashion a desert here in Queens in New York City, with 2.5 million people living in a 20-minute driving radius.
Fashioning a desert is about establishing a rhythm in your life that allows you to be with God and seek his face. As you do that, you'll be stripped of the idols of your own heart and the idols of our culture. Then as you come back, you bring a word from God to people around you, at work and at church. But understand—you're leaving, like Elijah and John the Baptist did. This is a radical calling to follow Jesus in the midst of a world in which you can't even distinguish the church and the world anymore. This is not entertainment culture. This church is not a shopping mall. We're inviting you to follow Christ with your whole being. And we're going to equip you to do that.
What are some blind spots for the American church when it comes to transformation?
Every culture in history has blind spots, and the 21st Century North American church is no exception. We have huge blind spots. That's why church history is so important. That's why being part of the global church is important. It provides perspective.
I've had the opportunity to be part of the global church just by being in Queens. We are exposed to so many different cultures and races from around the world, it becomes easier to see the blind spots each has on the topics related to transformation.
One huge challenge for Americans is the same thing a lot of people move here for—the American dream. That desire for success, comfort, money—these are tremendous pulls. Many of our brothers and sisters in sub-Saharan Africa aren't struggling with these temptations quite as much. They don't have second homes. They're not climbing the corporate ladder.
A leader in God's church is a person of prayer and the Word, who loves Christ.
Pastors fall into a version of the American Dream all the time. I call it the idolatry of numbers. It's this idea that your success is based on how large your church is. And it's very subtle. Someone in your city starts a church and it explodes to 2,000 people in less than a year. And maybe God asked them to do that. But I do know you can't build a church in two years. It takes years to build a church. It takes years for transformation. Jesus and the 12 showed us that.
I'm 25 years in, and I don't know any transformation that's not slow. I believe in the power of God falling on a person, absolutely. But there is the slow, painful work of discipleship. God changes me very slowly, but he changes me. And he changes our people. We grow community slowly. It's a slow process. It's not American. It's not quick. This isn't any three steps to a transformed life.
We also have a great need for silence and solitude. The Bible says "Be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 37), and "Repentance and rest is your salvation, but you had none of it so you fled," (Isaiah 30).
You know? That's us. We don't do stillness. We don't do rest. We run. And we can't build healthy community and healthy churches if leadership is running. The transformation that we need in our personal lives and in our churches is the integration of silence and solitude. Not that we dispense with other tools of transformation, but I believe there's a huge hunger in Western culture for this right now.
People are crying out for silence before God. And I'm not sure people can be transformed without it.
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