Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast.

My name is Rich Velotis.

I'm the lead pastor of New Life Fellowship Church 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 talk about a very important topic in leadership, something Pete that you've thought about and wrestled with

for over three decades as a pastor and leader. We're going to talk about success. Now,

this is something people have written a lot of books on this, Christian, non-Christian,

and it's very interesting to see how we define success,

specifically in church context. So Pete, maybe how about you, you planted the church in 1987.

I'm sure you had a vision of what success was and that impacted your life and your decisions.

Tell me a bit about your journey of success and your travels around the world.

You've met a lot of pastors that have had a pretty clear, maybe narrow view of what success is.

You know, it's interesting.

While I was shaped in my early years by university, a parish church ministry when I came

to Christ at 19, and really for the following five years, that was very much about small

discipleship on campuses, wasn't so much about numbers.

And yet when I eventually planned a new life fellowship,

and once I got into the culture of church world,

and I think the American culture as a whole,

I also fell into the trap of we measure success by numbers,

was it numbers, buildings, and people saved.

And budget, you know, numerical.

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