NEW LIFE’S HISTORY

by Pete Scazzero

Small 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. We began with a small team of dedicated individuals set out to establish a high-quality church in Queens, New York City with a few 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 investment to the poor and marginalized.

Queens has over 2.2 million people with sixty-five percent of her population born outside the United States. This unique phenomenon was evident in 1987 and sensed God was calling us to plant a strong local church that could serve and bless the larger global church.

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. New Life was one church in two languages, with Pete preaching at all three services at that point. In addition, we fed hundreds of homeless each week at the church, and opened up a learning academy.

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 had, 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, Zondervan, 2003). 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.

Emotional Health Begins (1996-2003)

This 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 shift to say the least. 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 international English congregation with her 60 plus nations. The Spanish church, Iglesia Nueva Vida, also outgrew the 200 seat Corona space and moved to Woodside. It now numbers well over 1500 people and has planted over 25 churches in Latin America. We remain in a great 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. When we returned, we began introducing the treasures of the contemplative tradition to New Life. Like the introduction of emotional health, this was both a major, yet overwhelmingly positive 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.”

God met us in profound ways. We realized how much of our strategic planning was coming from the wrong foundation. We 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 the past twelve years, He ensured our future stability when The Elks Lodge 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 running 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. I formally 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. It is included on the website. I encourage you to read and ponder it. We also made our Rule of Life public to our church membership so they know the kind of lives we seek to live. 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. This led a major focus on intentionality in our spiritual formation.

The Future

We have a rich sense that God is in our midst leading and guiding us. Much more, we trust, will unfold as He leads us. God has made New Life an amazing community. We are living in an exciting and momentous time in our history.

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