Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast. My name is Rich Velotis. I'm the lead pastor here at New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, New York City. And I'm here, as always, with Pete Skazero. 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 about an issue that has caused a lot of tension in our country.

We're going to talk about racial reconciliation as it pertains to emotionally healthy spirituality.

And so this is an issue that we have heard about all over the country, news, churches, protests.

It's all over the place. And yet EHS speaks to it.

And so EHS is not a program.

It's really a paradigm, a particular way of following Jesus,

a particular framework for theology and spiritual formation.

And EHS actually was birthed out of a context of racial tension.

And so you mentioned that in a staff meeting last week

as we were talking about Ferguson and Satin Island and everything

and the racial tensions that exist in our country.

And you mentioned that the

Emotion Healthy Church, your first book, came out of the ground of racial tension. Can you talk

about that? Because I found it to be incredibly fascinating. You know, what's so interesting is I,

and I hadn't realized until we were talking about at the staff meeting, when I wrote the

emotional church, it was probably an additional 100 hundred of two pages, because it was all applied to the racial

dynamic in New Life. But then they realized it was two separate books, and so we took that

out and we said we'll get to it later, it's many years later. But it is really interesting.

So anyway, yeah, as myself, I understand we planned a new life fellowship in 1987, and as you know, Rich, I'm Italian-American, we aren't known for our, what's the word, our finesse, our love for other races.

I brought home a Jewish girl in ninth grade, a white Jewish girl.

As a friend, my father said, if you bring that girl one more time through these doors, I will break your legs.

She was white, okay, let alone everybody else. So I was raised in a particular environment here,

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