Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast. My name is Rich Velotis. I'm the lead pastor at New Life Fellowship here in Queens, New York City. And I'm here with Pete Scazzaro. Pete is the founder of New Life, as well as the founder of emotionally healthy spirituality. And today we're going to have a conversation on the topic. Can you be a believer and not a disciple? Quite a provocative title, Pete.

You wrote a blog on it. So I wanted to let's unpack it a little bit. First of all, why did you

write this blog? What was, what were you thinking about wrestling with, about this notion of being a believer and disciple?

Well, it started out by noticing it's a number, you know, a number of years ago when I was, you know, a travel in different parts of the country, I realized, oh, my gosh, it's like a lot of people who are believers.

But that's, for not following Jesus. It was very confusing to me.

And actually, my brother's church was a climax for me, which is a mega church in the Midwest,

and just meeting some members of a small group and realizing, you know, my brother is a good example

of someone who's accepted Christ, believer in Jesus, but his family life is not following Jesus' whole heart.

It's kind of like the church is there.

He's got a small group that meets every other week, you know, it's marriages.

And I remember they were going to do EHS one week, which is a spiritual out of the course.

And he did one week, and he just realized, he can't do this here.

He does, I said, why me he can't do?

He said, we don't, we don't do things that serious.

It's, it's too intense.

We'll do like, you know, fellowship and maybe we'll talk about a sermon for like 10 or 15

minutes.

And then we have fellowship and we share together.

It's a great time.

But you're like, this is like, you're like tapping, you're, you're, you're going a place that we don't, we don't do that

in Midwest.

Yeah.

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