The History of New Life Fellowship Church

By Pete Scazzero (November, 2010)

Beginnings (Sept. 1987-April 1994)

New Life Fellowship Church began in September 1987 in a small wooden church in Corona, New York on National Street. Beginning with a small team of eight to ten dedicated individuals, we set out to establish a high-quality church in Queens, New York City with a number of core commitments – passion for Jesus, quality community life built on small groups, a focus on grace, the bridging of racial, cultural, economic and gender barriers, taking the gospel to the streets, and engagement of the poor and marginalized.

Queens has over 2.3 million people with sixty-five percent of her population born outside the United States. Our neighborhood of Corona/Elmhurst has over 123 nations represented. The average entering freshman class in high school has a fifty percent dropout rate. Forty percent of our community is without health insurance. In 1987 this unique phenomenon was already evident and I sensed God’s calling to plant a strong local church in this location. Our vision was to have a local focus with an eye to global missions.

The church grew rapidly, adding one hundred people in each of her first three years. In 1990, sixty people from the English congregation began a Spanish speaking service in the afternoons. This congregation also grew quickly and within a couple of years we were averaging 250 people in Spanish. By 1994 New Life was one church in two languages and I was preaching at three services. In addition, we fed over a hundred homeless men and women each week at the church and opened up a learning academy for job development.

Rapid growth continued, and we outgrew our Corona building. As a result, the English congregation moved in September, 1993 to the Elks Lodge in Elmhurst about a mile away. We began planting churches and launched a ten person, full- time internship at New Life.

Rapid growth however, masked the cracks and gaps in our spiritual foundation. While we did form our first official elder board in early 1994 (moving from an Advisory Council model), this could not prevent a church split in the Spanish congregation in early1994. (You can read about this in the opening chapters of The Emotionally Healthy Church: Updated and Expanded, Zondervan, 2010). Two hundred people moved down the street to launch a new Spanish church and New Life entered her “dark night of the soul.”

New Life’s Dark Night of the Soul (1994-1996)

From 1994-1996, I began a slow descent into an inner journey to confront my own monsters. We continued to rebuild both congregations, but I was struggling internally as God was uprooting my foundation, and slowly depositing seeds of what we now call “emotionally healthy spirituality.” This marked the beginning of a season of change and uncertainty, as New Life shifted from an emphasis on external, outward growth to an inward journey with Christ. I began seeing a Christian counselor and looking at some of the missing components of my discipleship. Meanwhile, we slowly rebuilt the Spanish congregation back to 150 people while the English continued her steady pace of growth.

Emotional Health Begins (1996-2003)

This season culminated in January of 1996 when Geri quit New Life, sending us to a week away with two Christian counselors where God met us in an extraordinary way. This climaxed my two-year journey of emotional health. We finally saw it: Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. That revelation changed us, and slowly, all of New Life.

After a brief sabbatical, we returned in 1996 to slowly begin working this out practically – on all levels of the church. We began to focus on marriages as part of our discipleship, integrate emotionally healthy skills, and begin confronting the places at New Life where we had placed gifts over character. This was a large, momentous shift. As a result, God began to shift the culture and pace of New Life.

We embraced our limits on multiple levels. Julio Rodriquez, a seven-year old Christian at the time, took leadership of the Spanish congregation while I focused exclusively on the English congregation with her 65 plus nations. The Spanish church, Iglesia Nueva Vida, also outgrew the 200 seat Corona space and moved to Woodside. It now numbers well over 1000 people and has planted over 25 churches in Latin America. We remain in a wonderful relationship with Iglesia Nueva Vida as a sister congregation.

Over the next seven years, New Life continued to pioneer emotionally healthy discipleship. This culminated in 2003 with the publication of, The Emotionally Healthy Church (Zondervan, 2003). At that point New Life entered a new phase of serving and blessing pastors across North America.

Contemplative Spirituality (2003-2007)

This injection of emotional health into New Life as a culture slowly led to a study of monasticism and the contemplative tradition. Emotional health was powerfully changing people at New Life, but people remained too busy. I wrestled, for years, with how to help people slow down to cultivate their personal relationship with Christ and not live off other people’s spirituality.

This culminated in a four-month monastic sabbatical in early 2004, traveling both in the United States and in Europe to learn from a variety of communities. The profound season of silence and solitude transformed Geri and I to such an extent we wondered if God was calling us out to live in an ecumenical monastic community for married couples with children. It soon became evident, however, that God was calling us to remain at New Life where we began introducing the treasures of the contemplative tradition. Like the introduction of emotional health, this was both a major, yet very powerful shift for our community. We slowed down our lives to be still before the Lord, practice Daily Offices and Sabbath-keeping, and begin exploring the development of our own personal “rule of life.”
I like to say that we finally stopped waiting on the Lord for a growing church and started to simply wait on the Lord for Him alone

Based on our life together as a local church, I finally wrote this down I a book entitled: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (Nelson, 2006). The thesis of the book, and our church, is simple: emotional health and contemplative spirituality, when interwoven together, offer nothing short of a spiritual revolution, transforming the hidden places deep beneath the surface of our lives.

While God has been doing a profound work internally in New Life Fellowship over those first twelve years, He ensured our future stability when The Elks organization placed their 60,000 square foot landmark building on the market in 1998. For the next five years, New Life engaged in a lengthy, difficult process of negotiating, and finally purchasing, the facility in December 2003 for $6.5 million. Wisely, the congregation saved over $3.7 million for the down payment at closing. This led to a marked expansion of the entire ministry on every level.

Personal Integrity in Leadership (2007-2009)

For almost twenty years I, along with our board, experienced only limited effectiveness in integrating emotional health and contemplative spiritual practices into the leading of the church. I sometimes avoided meetings I knew would be hard. I skimmed on “truth” when it was uncomfortable. I avoided discussions about people’s performance when it was poor. I preferred to not ask difficult questions or speak up when something was clearly wrong.

Finally, a number of events converged to prepare me for, what I now call, a conversion of leadership/personal integrity.

Until this point, we often divided leadership into sacred/secular categories. I said all of life was holy, but I treated the executive/planning functions of pastoral leadership as less meaningful and sacred than prayer and preparing sermons. For over a year I incorporated the job description of the executive pastor into mine, determined to learn the role. I cancelled speaking engagements outside New Life, said no to a potential book contract, and signed up for a round of excellent counseling to sort through my own “beneath the iceberg” blockages that were in the way. I preached less, and we moved more deliberately to a teaching team.

Over the next year I learned that the skills for doing the executive work of an organization are not hard to learn. The real difficulty was making the time, thinking carefully “before the Lord,” summoning the courage to have difficult conversations, and following all the way through..

We also developed for our pastoral staff team a “Rule of Life” in 2007. The purpose was to articulate a unique combination of spiritual practices for us as staff that would provide the structure and direction we needed to walk with integrity with our growing church. We made our Rule of Life public to our church membership so they know the kind of lives we seek to live. This is available on the website. I encourage you to read and ponder it. Our elders then followed in developing their own Rule of Life.

In September of 2008, we finally moved our entire church membership to an intentional Rule of Life as well. We have since begin calling this our Way (Rule) of Life. This led a major focus on intentionality in our spiritual formation.

Growth and Expansion Years

Because of our commitment to a in-depth transformational spiritual formation model, we have sought to grow slowly, integrating people into our small groups and resisting the temptation to simply be a crowd.

A few major events have expanded New Life into the fastest growth rate of her history. We have formed a 4 person teaching team, added a third service on Sunday evenings and expanded the ministry of EHS to over 60 countries with the support of the Willow Creek Association.

Our New Life Community Development Corporation now has a permanent home here in Elmhurst. The Community Health Center serves hundreds of the medically uninsured in our community and the food pantry feeds over 1600 people each week. ESL classes continue to expand and we are initiating youth development and mentoring programs.

What Does the Future Hold?

God has made New Life an amazing community. It has been said that we are one of the most multiethnic, diverse churches in the United States. With our shifting demographics in Queens, we aim to remain that way.

We are living in an exciting and momentous time in our history. Yet I firmly believe we are only a seed of what God intends this local church family to grow into.

Let us pray together that we as a church family might be faithful to this unique opportunity and calling God has given us here in the center of Queens, New York City. And may we do His will, not ours. May we glorify His name, not ours. And may we advance His kingdom and not ours.

Available Resources
(resources are available through Willow Creek Association)
willowcreek.com/resources;
emotionallyhealthy.org; and
Amazon.com

Books

By Pete Scazzero:
The Emotionally Healthy Church: Updated and Expanded (Zondervan, 2010).
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (Nelson, 2006).
The Daily Office (Zondervan, 2010).

By Pete and Geri Scazzero:
I Quit: Stop Pretending Everything is Fine and Change Your Life (Zondervan, 2010).

CD’s and DVDs’ for Churches

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Church Wide Initiative Kit.
Emotionally Healthy Skills (currently piloting for release in 2011).

Annual Emotionally Healthy Leadership Conference

(see emotionallyhealthy.org for details).