Hi, my name is Pete Gazzaro. I want to welcome you today to the emotionally healthy leader

podcast. Our theme today is why real discipleship starts in the basement. Why real discipleship

starts in the basement. I spent, as you know, 26 years pastoring as a lead pastor at New Life Fellowship,

but towards the end of my tenure there, as we were looking at succession, we brought in a consultant

who wanted to understand the unique DNA of New Life. And so we had an off-site retreat with all our staff.

And they began asking questions about, you know, what is it that made New Life, really the great church that it was and is.

And we spent more than a half a day on that topic.

And he put up on a wall of all people's responses.

And a word kept coming up over and over again.

And it was the word basement.

Actually, next to the word basement was Jerry's name quite often.

Now, the basement word, why real discipleship starts in the basement,

and we use that word basement, is because over a 16-year period,

Jerry and I led a discipleship basement group in our home.

For between 14 and 16 selected people,

marriage and singles, from the church. And we had a different group each year. And it ran generally

from early September to mid-April, 16 weeks. One time a week, we'd meet for three to three

and a half hours. And then we'd have four actual weekends that were more intensive times. Thursday, Friday night evenings, and then three hours each. Then we'd meet Saturday all day and Sunday evenings. Now, there was a couple of years in that 16-year period. We actually ran less intensive configurations just to kind of give

ourselves a break. But we continue that idea of the basement group. And actually, today we have

something equivalent in the larger global ministry that we call emotionally healthy discipleship.

Now, what happens when we do discipleship in the basement, as I'm going to describe to you today, things happen far beyond anything we could possibly imagine.

Now, the reason this is so important to be making disciples, and again, we're calling it in the basement, is because Jesus, first of all, calls us us in the Great Commission to go and make disciples, be making disciples of all nations, you know, teaching everything that we've learned from him that we are to teach to other people. That's for every leader and every follower of Christ. It's core to what it means to be a Christian. Now, remember, a Christian is someone who is a disciple, that is, they're learning, they're following Jesus. They're with Jesus and they're following him, and they're allowing themselves to be shaped and formed by him and thus aligning their entire lives around God's purpose in the world, and their unique place in that. And that's why this podcast actually applies to not just pastors and leaders, but everybody

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