A Sureer Footing

“Pete, I’m leaving the church,” Geri told her husband, the pastor. “I no longer respect your leadership.”

“I’m working on it!” Pete yelled.

“Good for you, but I can’t wait any more,” she replied. “I quit.”

Pete and Geri Scazzero began New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York, eight years before Geri’s announcement. Their neighborhood, Elmhurst, may be the most ethnically diverse in America—over 120 nationalities are represented in its Zip code. New Life was succeeding where others had failed, bringing diverse nationalities together into one church.

Despite the appearance of success, the Scazzero’s marriage and the church’s leadership were crumbling. New Life suffered a staff-led split, the pastor’s depression, and now the pastor’s wife was giving up.

What did I do wrong? Pete wondered.

Seven years have passed since the day Geri “quit.” Pete is still pastor of New Life Fellowship. Geri is still his wife, and she still attends the church. But New Life is radically different today, and so are the Scazzeros.

As Pete and Geri rebuilt their marriage and their ministry, they identified mistakes that undermined them from the beginning. The biggest was misapplying Jesus’ admonition from Luke 9:23, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Leadership editors Marshall Shelley and Drew Zahn traveled to Queens to ask the Scazzeros how they found healing and what they’ve learned.

Where did the problems begin?

Pete: We are poster-child evangelicals—grew up Catholic, converted in college, and joined InterVarsity staff. When we left InterVarsity, we couldn’t find an established church that fit the model of ministry we learned in the parachurch. I wanted to bring the best of the parachurch—evangelism, a heart for the poor, teamwork, small groups—into the church. So we determined to plant one.

Geri: We knew that being a Christian meant leading and giving and sacrificing. Our life was intense from the day we came to know Christ. That became part of our later dysfunction.

In 1987 the Christian and Missionary Alliance wanted to plant 100 churches on a single day through their Easter 100 event. Anyone who planted a CMA church would get $5,000. We were told to launch the church by sending out 20,000 invitations. Though it cost the entire $5,000 to do it, we hand-addressed all 20,000 envelopes and mailed them.

Pete: That strategy wasn’t going to work in New York, but we didn’t know any better. I was consumed with getting the church started.

After six weeks I realized the church plant was a flop. We didn’t have a building. We didn’t have a core group of people. We didn’t have any way to help all the needy people that came to us. The church closed in June.

In September, we started again and planted New Life Fellowship. It took root, but it was only a matter of time before it threatened to collapse, too.

What was the fatal flaw?

Pete: Me.

Geri: As goes the leader, so goes the church.

Pete: My emotional immaturity sabotaged the ministry. It wasn’t a lack of training or skills or gifting. I was unwittingly living out scars of emotional dysfunction. At the time I didn’t see how issues of my past impacted my present leadership. No one told me there might be things from my life before I was a Christian that would affect who I was and how I was leading.

I thought, I’m new before God. Why would I want to go back and navel gaze?That’s for screwed up people. I’m not screwed up. I’ve got a job to do for God, a mission.

When did you begin to recognize the problem?

Pete: After Geri confronted me, we went to a counselor who diagnosed several things we had been blind to. He told me that I was consumed with the church, that Geri was depressed and lonely, and that our marriage lacked intimacy.

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll leave. I’ll go to a different church.”

“You’ll recreate the same thing somewhere else,” he said. That stunned me.

Geri: He told us that the mess outside of us was happening because of everything inside of us.

Pete: I couldn’t see it then, but our personal flaws created an unhealthy church.

How did your internal struggles show up in church life?

Pete: Everyone brings their upbringing with them when they join a church—learned patterns of conflict resolution, anger management, marriage expectations, parenting. I was functioning according to the dynamics of my family of origin, instead of the family of God. I’d never learned to break those patterns.

For example, someone might say, “Why can’t we be like Brooklyn Tabernacle and meet every Tuesday for prayer?” Inevitably, I’d answer, “Okay. We can do it that way.”

My responses were formed years before the questions were asked. I grew up with the messages, “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re a loser.” So I was always open, too open, to other people’s expectations.

Geri: Pete was passionate and willing to take risks. But he stumbled over making decisions. He’d proclaim, “Let’s move the mountain!” But when it came to how we were going to move it, his insecurity arose, and he couldn’t lead any farther.

Pete: I had other issues, too. When I was young, I developed a fear of conflict and confrontation that I still struggle with today. My insecurities compelled me to prove myself with success. Why did I want a big church? It wasn’t about God; it was about me. I needed to succeed, or I’d go back to feeling like a loser. I was going to make this church happen, even if it killed me and my wife and my kids.

Geri, how did you respond to Pete’s drivenness?

Geri: I’d unknowingly brought my issues into the ministry, too. My identity was in being thought of as a good person. I felt I had to be “good” Christian—a happy do-gooder who never has negative feelings and always supports others.

In the family I grew up in, Dad was there every night. We always had dinner and holidays together. But I remember one Fourth of July after Pete and I married and moved to New York City. I could smell the barbeques in people’s backyards. It was wonderful. But where was Pete? Out doing evangelism. I resented his absence, but as a “good” Christian wife, I didn’t confront him on it. Suppressing my feelings began to poison me.

Pete: The emotional cracks in our marriage were starting to show. Geri was changing from vivacious to depressed. She began to get bitter over being poor, about feeling trapped in the concrete jungle, and about me not being around.

And I’d say, “This is the price of serving Jesus. We just need to persevere.”

Meanwhile, what was going on at the church?

Pete: That first Sunday in September we had 45 people. Soon we had 90, then over a hundred. We planted a Spanish-speaking church, and it grew to 250. We saw miracles, conversions, healings. One man fled to New York to escape a Columbian drug cartel. He became a Christian at New Life.

Geri: Pete is a gifted and charismatic leader. But giftedness isn’t as important as the character behind it. People can get by for a long time on giftedness, thinking it evidence of maturity. But the most important lesson we learned is that spiritual maturity requires emotional maturity.

Pete was driven, but insecure. That problem began to show in our staff. We were maxing them out constantly. They were tired.

Pete: It was not a happy team. We were constantly trying to take another hill. We celebrated success quickly and then moved on to the next hill. And we were doing this because I, as the leader, was living out my own emotional immaturity through the people I was leading.

What finally led you, Geri, to say you’d had enough?

Geri: I couldn’t continue pretending to be happy through the constant crises and staff tension. My husband, my family, and my life had all been sacrificed to building this church. Things broke when an associate pastor took over the Spanish-speaking congregation.

Pete: At that time I was leading both our English—and Spanish—speaking churches. But I wasn’t pastoring; I was working too many hours to pastor anyone.

I’d heard rumors that this associate was dissatisfied, but I didn’t believe it. Then one Sunday in 1993 I went to the afternoon Spanish service, and 200 people were missing. They had gone with him to start another congregation.

When I confronted him, he told me he was more capable of being the senior pastor than I was. “You made promises to disciple me,” he said, “but your words meant nothing. You do not deserve to lead these people.”

Geri: Pete took the blame on himself.

Pete: It confirmed what I had been feeling about myself from childhood: I’m not a good leader. I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t protest the split or defend myself; I just let them go. It felt like I had let myself be raped.

My indecisiveness grew worse as I slipped into depression. I began unleashing years of anger, cursing in the car and behind closed doors. We tried counseling and reading books, but after two years of trying to turn things around, it still wasn’t working.

Geri: During Pete’s depression we hired two new staff members to provide direction. It only made things worse. But Pete was worried about what firing them might do. And he was afraid to confront them. The church was being torn apart, and Pete couldn’t find the courage to do anything about it. That’s when I told him I couldn’t go on.

I quit.

How did you turn things around?

Pete: I was a church planter, committed to missions, committed to God. But no one taught me that emotional immaturity, my leftovers from childhood, could sink my ministry. I never saw this shipwreck coming.

When Geri stood up to me, it forced a crisis. For the first time in years, Geri dropped the happy pastor’s wife charade and was totally honest. It challenged me to do the same.

Geri and I went to a retreat center to sort things out.

Geri: Throughout our entire Christian life, we tried to die to ourselves and follow Christ. But we distorted the meaning of it. At that retreat center we learned for the first time that we had died to parts of ourselves that Christ never called us to die to, and we weren’t dying to parts that he did.

Which “self” experienced the wrongful death?

Geri: I was constantly helping, listening, encouraging, giving. If I felt surrounded or overwhelmed by people and their needs, I assumed that was an impulse I needed to die to.

But God made me to need time alone. God wasn’t calling me to die to solitude; he was calling me to die to the misconception that a “good” pastor’s wife is always around people.

Pete: I kept pushing Geri to be an active people person. One key to staying power: if you’re not faithful to who God made you to be, there will be dangerous consequences down the road.

Geri: I thought I was doing right by suppressing negativity. But instead of dying to selfishness, I was dying to self-care. I was dying to intimacy with myself, my husband, and God.

God never asked us to die to our marriage. He never asked us to die to our joy and love for each other. But we had. We were gaining the whole world, but we were losing our souls.

There’s a children’s song about J-O-Y, Jesus and others and you, in that order. The idea is that you should focus on loving Jesus and loving others before thinking about yourself. But that’s not true. Loving Jesus, loving others, and loving yourself are all interdependent, inseparable.

I thought I was loving people. But instead of love flowing out of an emotionally and spiritually healthy person, my actions more often came from not wanting to be thought of as a bad Christian. That’s not love.

The day I truly became loving was the day I learned to care for myself, my Lord, and others at the same time, to hang on to all three without giving up the others.

What do we need to die to?

Pete: That’s different from person to person. But essentially, it’s dying to whatever distorts our ability to love and to find joy in God.

For me, I need to die to the compulsion to prove myself. I need to die to my fear of conflict and abandonment. That’s what I was supposed to die to, and they were the only things I didn’t sacrifice.

Someone who is totally driven before coming to Christ is usually totally driven after. When we become Christians, the names may change, but our emotional idols remain the same.

The other half of dying to self is taking up the cross and following Jesus. What does that look like?

Pete: Following Jesus now means responding to him and to the Spirit, instead of a need to accomplish. To follow Jesus might be to take a nap this afternoon. For me to follow Jesus might be to not abandon the family to do evangelism on the Fourth of July.

Geri: Part of carrying my cross and following Jesus meant being honest about my emotions and willing to express them in a healthy way. But that was horribly difficult for me. I felt like I was walking on a tightrope with nothing underneath me.

I said to Pete one day, “I’d rather die than say what I really think.” I was changing the way I operated from childhood, and it’s been really scary. But I do have something beneath me, the gospel. I can step out on that tightrope of honesty, knowing Christ has given me the grace and power to follow him there.

Pete: I also needed to bring honesty to my life and ministry, even though that meant conflict and confrontation. For me to follow Christ means speaking the truth. It’s always hard, especially when I know people don’t want to hear it. For a while I awoke every morning and said to Geri, “I’m going to battle today.” That’s what it feels like to begin living a different way.

Part of discipling our leaders now is inviting this kind of honesty. We talk about weaknesses. I try to teach that way. It’s powerful because it’s real. Our church is becoming real.

Geri and I don’t die to the unique ministry God gave us anymore. We die to the pressures we put on ourselves. From now on we minister out of who we are personally and who we are as a couple.

That’s dying the right way. That’s life.