Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leadership Podcast. My name is Rich Velotus. I'm the lead pastor

at New Life Fellowship Church here in Queens, New York City. And I'm here, as always, with Pete

Scazzaro. Pete is the founder of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. He's also the founder of New Life

Fellowship Church. And today we're going to talk about leadership and singleness.

And so Pete, we've talked about leading out of your marriage. Today we're going to talk about leading out of your singleness.

And so let's just frame the conversation. Why should we be talking about leading out of singleness?

Not many people seem to be talking about it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of books on this topic here

Why talk about leading out of your singleness?

Well, let me begin by saying that even as we entered this conversation that I bring certain limits to the table

Because I want to be sensitive

to the singles who are out there.

So number one, obviously I've been married for 31 years.

So the bulk of my experience has been as a married person.

Secondly, I come out of our tradition, which is an evangelical, charismatic, Protestant

tradition, which really has not valued singleness, has not developed a theology

around singleness over the last almost 500 years.

And then thirdly, really, I've only been in this seriously for the last 10 years, which is not a long time in

in terms of studying and researching it,

as well as intentionally entering into singles worlds.

But the reason it's so important is because we have so many single leaders in the church,

and it's an increasing population, and it's so biblically important.

And right now the tendency is to overemphasize

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