strategy – unSeminary

Fostering Community in a Fast-Growing Multi-Campus Ministry: Scott Freeman on Effective Pastoral Care

Rich Birch — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re talking with Scott Freeman, the Pastor of Community at Grace Church in South Carolina.

As a church expands, there is a constant tension to manage between growth and deep community. Grace Church has experienced significant growth over the years with ten campuses and over 250 community groups. Today Scott shares about their discipleship-driven model of groups, and how they train leaders while creating environments conducive to life change.

Discipleship-driven. // When asked about what Biblical community looks like at Grace Church, Scott explains the community groups at the church are for covenant members only and are based primarily on location with a heterogeneous mix of people of different ages and life stages. Being discipleship-driven means they don’t only study the Bible, but also incorporate activities such as prayer, service, fellowship, and exploring how to live out the core values of the church.
Groups are campus specific. // There is a benefit to worshiping on Sundays alongside people that you’re in a group with during the week. The staff is intentional about putting groups together based on factors like area of town and shared experiences and gives a lot of thought to which people would work well together and learn from each other.
Check in every three years. // Grace has discovered that having community groups meet for about a three year life cycle is a good timeframe for groups to develop vulnerability and allow individuals to get to know each other. When the group winds down after three years, it also allows new leaders to emerge and step up to lead groups of their own. Making changes every few years in the groups brings in new ways of thinking and keeps people from becoming too comfortable.
Ministries in addition to groups. // As the church has grown, Grace has added other forms of Biblical community besides groups which offer special levels of care and work to complement the community groups. Some of these programs include Re|engage to support marriages, Re|generation recovery ministry, divorce care, and grief share to help individuals with specific needs. Rather than competing with community groups, these ministries have enhanced the personal growth and vulnerability of members and the community groups have benefitted from it.
Group life pastors. // Each of Grace’s ten campuses has one or more group life pastors who are responsible for a certain number of groups at their respective campus. The group life pastors work with the group leaders to equip them, offer support, and share best practices.
Keep groups engaging. // Curriculum for the groups includes sermon questions, reflection on past teachings, and a look ahead to the upcoming teaching. The church also encourage groups to serve together and provides access to additional curriculum through a church subscription to RightNow Media. The church works to keep the format fresh and different to encourage engagement, allowing group leaders to try different approaches so the groups don’t become predictable week after week.
Train group leaders. // Grace’s community group leaders are trained through an onboarding class called Equip. It asks in-depth questions about their lives to assess the leaders’ willingness to be vulnerable and share their own struggles. The church believes that if leaders pretend to have it all together, it hinders transparency within the group. In addition, Scott hosts a monthly podcast for leaders, covering various topics related to leading groups.

You can find out more about Grace Church at www.gracechurchsc.org. Plus, explore various training links and documents below:

Equip Hub // Contains resources Grace Church uses to train leaders and disciple people in their church.
Shepherding Values Hub // Contains relevant resources to equip community group leaders in shepherding effectively in their role.
Shepherding Values Overview // A review of the five guiding principles for discipleship at Grace for group leaders.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Man, it’s going to be a great conversation today. Really excited for this discussion – we’ve been looking forward to it for a while. We’ve got Scott Freeman with us. He’s a part of the leadership of a church called Grace Church in South Carolina. This is a ten campus church. There’s fantastic, they’re doing all kinds of amazing things that we’re going to get into dive into today. They exist to make mature followers of Jesus Christ there. It’s really a family of congregations in the upstate region if I’m reading my geography right. So, Scott, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Scott Freeman — Great. Thank you, Rich! Good to be here.

Rich Birch — Yeah, why don’t you fill in the picture? Kind of tell us a little bit of the Grace Church story, kind of help me understand more about the church.

Scott Freeman — Sure. Yeah. The the church was planted in 1995 so we are coming up on 30 years. I actually moved to the Greenville area in 2000, and became a member. I actually am not seminary trained. I was teacher and a coach previously. And so I attended the church as a member from 2000 until 2008, and then came on staff in 2008. So I’ve been on staff now in a variety of roles. All kind of in the world of biblical community for 15 years.

Rich Birch — Love it. There’s been a lot of change, you know, over that time frame particularly in this area.

Scott Freeman — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Why don’t you kind of give us a sense of that?

Scott Freeman — Sure.

Rich Birch — What’s what’s changed and evolved since, you know, that when you started even. It’s kind of interesting.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, when I when I first started attending Grace in 2000 there were probably 200, 300 attendees on Sunday mornings.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Scott Freeman — I think there may have been 10 community groups total. Um by 2008 when I was asked to come on staff, we had grown—it was still just one campus but—we had about 60 community groups…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Scott Freeman — …and one pastor was overseeing all of those.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Scott Freeman — And obviously he was feeling spread very thin.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Scott Freeman — And the decision by our elders was to add three group pastors to kind of work underneath him and take 20 groups each so that we could equip those leaders to then disciple their group members. And so so in 2008 we’re at 60 groups and one campus and now fifteen years later we are at 10 campuses across the upstate and we have over 250 community groups.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Scott Freeman — So we’ve definitely grown significantly since since 2008.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. This I’m really looking forward to this conversation because um Grace is one of these churches that is an outlier in a lot of cases. You know, we’re still seeing two thirds of multisite churches aren’t getting beyond three locations. Ah, and it’s it’s less than 1% get beyond ah six. So you know you you are in the rare, you know, rare air on that front. And then the same on the community groups thing, like is you know wide penetration. That’s I’m really looking forward to learning from that. But why don’t we start with kind of…

Scott Freeman — I sent you…

Rich Birch — Yeah sorry, go ahead.

Scott Freeman — It is interesting you say that with the with the three to four. Um I would say that was probably the hardest jump, was and and I was part of that on the biblical community side. I was not ah necessarily in in a lot of the decision making on that, but that was probably the the fork in the road where it was the most difficult. Going from 7 to 8, 8 to 9, 9 to 10 has not been nearly as difficult as that um, when really a central staff became necessary and the 3 to 4 was probably ah, a difficult jump.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. You ah at that phase you go from being a church with campuses to a church of campuses.

Scott Freeman — Mmm-hmm.

Rich Birch — Like you have to really you you can kind of fake it for a while there and like just everybody work harder. Ah, but that doesn’t scale. You know to 4, 5, 6, 7 locations for sure. So why don’t we start with um maybe we’ll start at the granular level. So when you ah when you define um, like a ah biblical community, what does that look like, what what are kind of the group’s experience look like? Help us understand that.

Scott Freeman — Sure. Um, most of our groups are made up of—and I will say our groups are covenant members only—um and a lot of the kind of the way we structure groups works for us. I would, you know, not say it’s right for everyone. I don’t think it’s a right/wrong thing but we choose to make our groups primarily discipleship-driven. Not necessarily outreach and trying to allow, you know, new folks to come in through groups. So with that being in mind it is for covenant members only. Ah, typically it is a heterogeneous mixture. We do have some kind of life stage specificific situations in different groups. But for the most part it’s a mix of marrieds and singles. It’s a mix of different stages of life.

Scott Freeman — Groups meet typically for about a 3-year life cycle. And um, they do a mix ah curriculum wise of questions that we provide from the from the teaching, weekly teaching. And um, we ah we asked that groups not just be a bible study where the group leader ah re-teaches the weekly teaching, but that they pray together. They serve together. There is fellowship. There’s bible study. Um, they talk about how to be generous with their time and their resources together. It’s all of our core values hopefully focused on as equally as possible during that group meeting.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. I’d I’d love to dig into a couple of those things. You know, the the whole um, you know, heterogeneous/homogenous group question. Why has Grace fallen down on the like, Okay we’re going to… so so are the groups then more kind of based on the region that you’re in? It’s kind of more, you know, like hey we’re in this part of town kind of thing? Is that is that what they look like?

Scott Freeman — Right. Yeah, yeah, um, you know, we do group our groups are based on the campus you attend. So rarely would there be someone from our downtown campus in a community group with someone from our Pelham campus. It is campus specific because we do feel like there is benefit to worshiping alongside folks, you know, on the weekends that you’re in group with. And then there are some just logistical challenges, night of the week, that people are able to meet, um area of town. We are very intentional though about placing groups together. Um, you know, we pray through that process. We do we are strategic and think this couple would be great with this couple. Ah, but there are a lot of times where we make placements and we have folks come and say, man, that was so awesome that y’all knew I needed someone who had also lost their mom because I’d lost mine. And we had and we had no idea. You know and it was just…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s God’s grace, right?

Scott Freeman — Absolutely, absolutely.

Rich Birch — That’s yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s cool.

Scott Freeman — So um, so we are intentional about that. And there are some again logistical things. But for the most part it is area of town because we do want people in community with folks they’re going to run into during the week… and

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Scott Freeman — …and be on PTA with, and and see in the grocery store…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Scott Freeman — …and those type things.

Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Um, now the 3-year life cycle that stood out to me. What do you mean by that? Kind of pull that apart.

Scott Freeman — Sure.

Rich Birch — When you’re when you’re talking about that with people, what do you say?

Scott Freeman — Yeah, um, now I will say that is not written in stone. It’s not, you know, an absolute.

Rich Birch — Okay, sure.

Scott Freeman — Um, we have kind of found that groups need long enough to obviously get vulnerable and transparent with each other, ah, get to know each other. If you um, you know, break up a group sooner than three years, it may not have time for that to happen. We’ve also learned that at typically around the three year mark um, things start to get a little comfortable, maybe a little bit stale. And often there are folks in that group that need to be leading their own group. And unless you kind of kick them out of the nest, it’s it’s not going to happen.

Scott Freeman — And so we’ve kind of, you know, found that 3 year sweet spot of starting to have conversation with the leaders um to say, hey you know, you’re nearing the end of year 3; you probably have some folks in your group that could lead their own now. We’re not going to scatter that group in 8 different directions. Typically it would split in half, maybe split into thirds. But um, the the 3 year change up does kind of, you know, give people a restart.

Scott Freeman — Um, I know we had a group that had been together for 4 years and when I first came on staff. Ah my boss was like you know I really feel like you’ve got some people in your group that need to lead. It’s probably time to to break it up. And and I understood the rationale behind it. My my wife was not happy when I got home and told her that these folks that we’ve been doing life with for for 4 years, we need to kind of go in different directions. But I did realize when we ended that group and started a new one just how predictable. I knew who was going to make the joke. I knew who was going to answer. I knew who was going to say what. And it challenged me as a leader and it gave us the new ways of thinking. And some folks went out from that group and um and led their own when they when they really needed to. And so they would have just stayed comfortable had we not have we not ended it.

Scott Freeman — Um and and we’re still friends with those folks we we haven’t lost community with them.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Scott Freeman — Um, so you know so again, 3 years is kind of when we start to have that conversation. There have been groups so we’ve ended after 2, just because it wasn’t going well.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Scott Freeman — There have been some that really started to get traction at that 3 year mark and we let it go 4, and maybe even 5 or 6. So it’s it’s not a hard and fast rule. But that’s kind of our our standard.

Rich Birch — Yeah rule of thumb. It’s kind of like that. That’s interesting. That’s interesting.

Scott Freeman — Right.

Rich Birch — That the other thing I heard you say… did I did I hear you say that groups are 14 to 18? You start up… that seems a little large, that’s larger than what I hear in kind of, you know, when you read a book on how to run a groups ministry…

Scott Freeman — Right.

Rich Birch — …you know, they they won’t say that.

Scott Freeman — Yeah.

Rich Birch — So is what did I hear that right?

Scott Freeman — Well if I said, if if I could create the ideal group, I would say it’s probably 12.

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, okay, great.

Scott Freeman — Um and but A, we run short on leaders…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Scott Freeman — …and so spaces are at a premium and we have to you know expand. There’s also just the we our community especially you know the city of Greenville, lot of industry, a lot of people coming and going. There’s a lot of folks that ah, you know, um are coming in and out. And so there is some attrition in groups. And so we know that if we launch them at 16 to 18 they probably settle in at 12 to 14. So we do probably we launch them a little bigger than we want them to end up, just knowing that in a lot of cases that will happen.

Rich Birch — Smart. Yeah, that’s smart. That’s that’s ah that’s a great idea. That’s that’s compelling for sure. I totally get that. Um, now talk about, so the church as a whole has experienced tremendous growth over these years. And ah there can often be this tension of it’s the like get big, go deep. You know how can you really? I know, you know, this but like, you know, can can people develop actual community in a fast-growing church? Talk me through how the group structure has tried to support that. You know, the growth that’s been happening kind of in the church as a whole.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, I I will say and I’m speaking on behalf of our governing elders here…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Scott Freeman — …who make the decisions on when to launch campuses and that kind of thing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Freeman — I think one mindset on adding campuses that has been very helpful is that we don’t ah see an area and think, man, we’d really love to have a church in Spartanburg. Or we’d really love to have a church in Anderson. We have a group of people who are driving 30 minutes to one of our campuses from one of those spots, and it is a no-brainer to say, well let’s find a location and provide a campus in this community where people are already coming…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Scott Freeman — …you know, to to our church. And so it’s really um, giving them the opportunity to worship locally and invite their friends versus them having to commute to church on the weekend. And so I think that has helped. Um and then, you know, when you do have 10 campuses, you have 10 growth centers of people going out and sharing in their community about life change that’s happening. And um, it’s really, that’s where you kind of see the exponential growth instead of um, you know one site you’ve got 10 smaller sites that are growing at the same time.

Scott Freeman — And so that has that has really helped. But there has to be depth there and there has to be real life change or it’s not going to be sustainable. And I think people see that um, you know, we’re intentional about teaching the bible. We’re intentional about discipling people and helping them no matter where they are in their christian faith when they first come to Grace, helping them grow in that and grow deeper. And I think people respect that and want to be a part of that.

Rich Birch — Love it. Um, do you guys do any other, you know, things that might look like one of these groups but aren’t really one of these groups, like classes, or you know other types of biblical community?

Scott Freeman — We do. And that change, it really was a mindset shift for us probably 6 or 7 years ago. Community group was the answer for everything in in our minds.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Scott Freeman — You know, if you’ve you’ve got marriage issues, well, you know, get in a community group. You having financial struggles? Well, get in a community group so people can know you and help you work through that. Parenting issues? Community group. And we started to realize that there were and are specific issues that people need real intense focused help in a certain area. And so I guess the first idea or thing we launched was Re-engage which we got from Watermark in Dallas. And we launched that as a marriage ministry. In some cases people did that alongside community group, but in a lot lot of cases it was kind of a off-ramp from community group to really focus on their marriage for a season, get healthy, and then come back into a community group.

Rich Birch — Right.

Scott Freeman — Um, and that went really well. We have since added Re-generation Recovery Ministry. We have divorce care. We have grief share. We have a number of different care and recovery forms of biblical community. And we’ve really had to communicate while community group is the most common and probably the um the form of community that a big big percentage of our members are in, it is not the normal, or the the right form and all these others are are lesser. Um, you know in fact, ah in a lot of cases. People are getting very vulnerable and growing tremendously in Re-gen and then they’re bringing that to their community group after the fact, and our groups are getting better as a result of these other ministries. So we’ve we’ve had to view it as not a competing thing, but as the complementary form of Biblical community.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. And you know, I think that is addresses a practical concern, particularly at school, you know you know, as are as as [inaudible] not as school, as they scale you know as they grow you end up, you know by just by the sheer number of people, it’s like man we’ve got a giant number of people who are going through a marriage issue, are going through you know, recovery. And and so um, you know, if we were a smaller church we could maybe have ah a person in one of those scenarios in a group and kind of um, you know, just deal with it. But at scale you’re like, man, we got to figure out how to how to do that. That makes total sense. I love that. That’s that’s good. Can you…

Scott Freeman — Yeah, and and when when a couple is struggling, say in their marriage or someone is dealing with an addiction or you know any any felt need like that, and it’s week after week after week, not only does it they don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from the group, or the group feels like they’re monopolizing the time, and it really kind of shuts down. You know my wife and I might be on the way to group and have a minor conflict and think, you know, that’s something we should probably bring up to the group, but I mean it it would seem silly compared to what that other couple is going through. So we’re just going to stuff it and stay quiet. And so it can really kind of derail um, what the group wants and needs to accomplish to disciple everyone. So um I think those are the cases where some of these alternate forms of Biblical community become really effective and appropriate.

Rich Birch — Yeah, could you talk me through what what the staff structure looks like. So I think you said you had 250 plus community groups.

Scott Freeman — Right.

Rich Birch — How are you supporting those from ah ah, you know, what’s the staff structure look that provides care and, you know, direction for those groups?

Scott Freeman — Right. Um, every every member every covenant member at our church has a responsible pastor.

Rich Birch — Okay, wow.

Scott Freeman — And so um, they and they know they know who that is. And so um, at our smaller campuses there um is a campus pastor and a groups pastor. And so those um you know our smaller campuses may have 12 or 15 of those community groups. And so that one groups pastor spends a majority of his time working with those um leaders over those community groups. And then ah really his his main job is to equip those leaders to then do ministry within their group. He will get in involved and meet directly with members of those groups at times, but really to replicate himself and to um equip those leaders is is the primary focus.

Scott Freeman — And then so on some of our larger campuses, our Pelham campus is is our largest, we have four group life pastors um, who again still have 20 groups or so that they’re responsible for and they cover those eighty groups at that campus in that same way. So every group leader has a pastor that they have his cell phone number. They can call him any time a day. We have group life women’s ministers who are able to care for the female leaders. All of our groups right now are, because they are heterogeneous, they’re led by couples. Um, and so you know the men are meeting with with the men, the women are meeting with women, and that our staff is there to support those leaders as well.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s ah, that’s cool. Love love that. Um, when you thinking about you know the curriculum. How so you said it’s a mixture of sermon based and then and then are groups do like then picking other curriculum, you have like a set of other things that they can do? Is that what that looks like? Maybe unpack that a little bit.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, um, we encourage groups to, again, find times to serve together. So there are weeks where they’re completely outside the home and they’re going and and serving somewhere in the community. We do provide sermon questions every week. And and we do that uniquely. We have a couple of reflection questions on the teaching that they’ve just heard and then we have the passage that is going to be taught the upcoming week with a few look ahead questions to that. And so it really kind of creates some anticipation of what’s to come.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s cool.

Scott Freeman — And it really kind of minimizes the group leader’s desire or a tendency to maybe try to reteach what, you know, you’ve just heard.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Scott Freeman — So it’s a little bit of a look back and a look forward. It gets people involved with the reading plan, and hopefully create some questions that they may have coming into next week’s teaching, and they come ready to to learn. Um, we do ah, you know, we ask if they’re going to do a book or something kind of outside of the norm that they run it by us just to um, you know, make sure we’re okay with it. But you know if we’ve got somebody in a leadership position, 99% of time when they bring something up, it’s it’s great.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, totally.

Scott Freeman — Um, we have we have a church subscription to Right Now Media. So um, we we have group leaders that use curriculum from that at times. Um, we do encourage our leaders, you know, if there’s anything that you are um so dependent on, like we should forget to do the sermon questions one week and not it not be a tragedy. You know…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Scott Freeman — …leaders ought to be able to move on and because things are going to happen. Um, and so we tell leaders, if you’ve done the sermon questions every single week for the last two years, you need to take a season and just stop.

Rich Birch — Right. That’s a good insight.

Scott Freeman — So the main the main thing… Yeah, the main thing is keeping it fresh, not getting locked in on one one way of doing it. We also encourage groups to just change just the group dynamic. So one week ah, you know, come together as a group but then have the guys go in one room and the ladies go in another. Another week maybe just break up into small groups of four. Because the more you can change the the environment, change the people that folks are around, you never know which setting is going to allow someone to confess something, to bring up something that they’ve been scared to bring up. And so we just want to create as many different environments as possible so that life change can happen through that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s cool. I love that. There’s obviously, you know, I love the direct connection, you know, that every group leader or couple has, you know, some people that they can interact with. Love that; I think that’s fantastic. Obviously a really great support in the background from that that point of view. But what other training, if I’m a community group leader, what other training am I getting kind of ongoing ah throughout the three years that I’m journeying that maybe like, do you do classes for them…

Scott Freeman — Right.

Rich Birch — …or you know, what does what does that look like?

Scott Freeman — Yeah, we have a group we have ah ah, an onboarding class called Equip and it’s as much vetting as it is training.

Rich Birch — Right.

Scott Freeman — We we have very um in-depth questions, I kind of icebreakers that are asking, um you you know, hey what’s the biggest challenge you’ve had in your marriage in the last year? What is your biggest failure as a parent? And we just want to see are you willing to share, are you willing to be honest about your own struggles? Because we don’t want you to go into a group as a leader and act like you have it all together, because you don’t.

Rich Birch — Right.

Scott Freeman — And that’s not gonna promote, you know, transparency in the people that are in your group as well. Um, you know we even asked leaders, hey imagine that a year from now you’re disqualified from ministry. What sin pattern would it be that that got you there?

Rich Birch — Wow.

Scott Freeman — And just make people think through um those type real, you know, struggles and questions. So we do um, a lot of that a lot of, you know, shepherding ideas. We use a lot of Paul Tripp material with ah Love-Know-Speak-Do um. Ah so we train them um, before we launch them as leaders with material like that. And then once they are leading I do a monthly podcast about just a um, a topic related to leading groups. It might be struggling with you know your group struggling with attendance. It might be how to lead the singles in your groups well. It might be um, you know, ideas of service projects that you can do, different things. Um, so just each month I put something out like that. It goes to all 250 leaders. And then our group pastors are in constant communication with those leaders, whether it’s a quick conversation on a Sunday morning between services, or a huddle where the pastor gets 5 or 6 group leaders together and they just share, hey here’s a challenge I’ve got. How would you handle that? You know, and just sharing best practices and ideas. So um, we we definitely don’t want to train them and say, all right call us if you have any issues, and not be proactive about continuing…

Rich Birch — Ah, good luck.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, you’re ready – go for it.

Rich Birch — Ah we’ll see in 3 years.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, that’s right.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, okay. That’s cool. That’s really cool. Now when you look to the future, what are some questions that are on the horizon for you – stuff that you’re wrestling with, thinking through, hmm like I wonder, you know, maybe some things that you’re, you know, thinking about – do we… should we change up, that kind of thing?

Scott Freeman — Yeah, um, you know, I think we’ve had tension on um, how much freedom to give leaders and then how much to legislate. Um you know, I think if we if we give too much direction and “you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this”, then our more capable leaders feel stifled and are kind of like, you know, you really you could get anybody to do that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, you don’t need me.

Scott Freeman — I’ve just become, you know…that’s right. Um, but then some of our our newer leaders who might need more support. Um, and so I think finding that balance of providing enough direction and support for them without stifling the leaders. You know, we’ve got a lot of leaders who are CEOs during the week in their company, and then telling them how they have to take attendance, or how they have to do this. And and giving them some freedom in that and just, you know, releasing some of that to them and say, hey you’re a leader. We trust you we want to come alongside you and help you do that. But I would say that’s a challenge that um that we’re wrestling with. And then just constantly trying to keep the leadership pipeline going and making sure that we have enough leaders. If we do, you know, if God continues to bless us and we do continue to grow in the way that we have, that we have enough leaders to to lead those folks that that God brings to us in the in the years to come.

Rich Birch — Love it. Do you guys do like um like mult… like kind of entry points during the year like groups are starting kind of in seasons or are they just starting all the time.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, um, we do start I guess there are two main, you know, beginning of the spring, beginning of the fall.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Scott Freeman — Our smaller campuses have a little bit more flexibility because the membership class or the entry point might have 4 or 6 or 10 people coming at a time versus a bigger campus that has, you know dozens coming at a time. And so there is some flexibility and our smaller campuses may launch a little bit more often. Um, we have we’ve tried events, like we did ah a group launch…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Scott Freeman — …um which started to feel a lot like rushed or speed dating…

Rich Birch — Okay, yes, yes.

Scott Freeman — …I heard some people call it. Um, and so we’ve we’ve tried to not make it feel like that, but also be intentional and help people find a group as quickly as possible. Um I think we we felt more tension when community group was the only form of biblical community to get people in quickly. Whereas now that we have men’s and women’s ministry, and we have Re-engage, and we have Re-gen, there are a lot of ways that folks can get connected ah in the window of time between them arriving at the church and then actually getting placed in a community group. You know, even if they show up in February and we’re not launching groups until August, there are plenty of ways to get connected to get them involved and and disciple them before they get into a community group in August so.

Rich Birch — Interesting. This is this been fantastic. It’s like been a great, I got a page of notes here. Look it’s like looking up under the hood of everything that’s going on at your church. I love that. Just as we’re kind of coming to the end here, is there anything else you love to share to kind of give us a sense of what’s going on in your, you know, Biblical community at the church?

Scott Freeman — Um, I mean I would just say all the ideas and things that we used or most of it we’ve we’ve stolen from other people, you know.

Rich Birch — Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah for sure.

Scott Freeman — Especially in the early in the early days we we met with a ton of other folks to figure out what it looked like to um, to do groups. And and some of that stuff we’ve held onto, some stuff we’ve changed. Um I will I will share some documents with you that we can, you know, include…

Rich Birch — Oh great.

Scott Freeman — …include in the show notes that folks can um you know use and take and change and do whatever they want to with.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Scott Freeman — But ah you know, if we can pay that forward and and help folks um I know when we first went to Watermark and saw the scale that they were doing Re-gen and Re-engage, I kind of thought there’s no way we’ll ever do it at this scale. And I know that there are people that look at our church and think the same thing. And I would just say you really you can scale any of these ideas to whatever size you’re at currently and it can um it can still work. So.

Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. What what would be some of the documents or maybe talk us through what those would be because so people could, we’ll put them in the show notes, friends, we’ll link there.

Scott Freeman — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But give us a sense of what some of those are, or or you know one that’s particularly helpful you think oh this could be really good for church leaders.

Scott Freeman — Sure, the um the Equip class that we use for onboarding leaders and training them, I can include kind of what we do for that.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Scott Freeman — We did take those Paul Tripp ideas and expand them into just some shepherding values that we want our leaders to um, you know, to love their groups, um, you know to know them thoroughly, to love them patiently, to speak wisely and direct biblically, and um, you know, to pray throughout all of that. Um, and so there are some ah things that we’ve created around that idea that I can put in there.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Scott Freeman — And um, yeah, just just a lot of you know again things that we’ve stolen from other churches through the years…

Rich Birch — Yes, love it.

Scott Freeman — …and kind of tweak to make our own. So.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good; that that’s so helpful. I really appreciate that, Scott. That’ll be that’ll be a great resource for for folks to take a look at. And you know, I know we’re always looking to kind of learn from each other and that’s a great a great way to do that. So thank you. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show today. If we want to send people somewhere online to track with you, track with the church, where do we want to send them to do that?

Scott Freeman — Yeah, our website is gracechurchsc.org – sc as in South Carolina and yeah I would encourage we have you know teaching on there. We have a lot of our curriculum from our men’s roundtable, from our Ezer women’s ministry that ah, that might be of help. And um and all of our staff I know that one of my favorite things is meeting with folks from other churches and…

Rich Birch — Totally.

Scott Freeman — …and sharing ideas because we we learn as much as we um share, probably more. So um, ah feel free to to reach out and email and we’re we’re here to help any way we can.

Rich Birch — That’s wonderful. Thanks so much for being on the show today, Scott. Really appreciate you. Thanks for being here, man.

Scott Freeman — Yeah, thank you. Thanks for what you do.

The Future of Faith is Child-Friendly: Stephen Moore on WinShape Camps for Communities

Rich Birch — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. This week I’m excited to be talking with Stephen Moore, the Director of WinShape Camps for Communities. WinShape, an organization started in 1985 by Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, started as a college program and has since grown into five different ministries, with focuses on professional development, marriages, foster care, college discipleship, and summer camps. WinShape Camps for Communities is a traveling day camp program that partners with churches to bring camps to communities all over the US while spreading the gospel of Jesus.

Are you looking for a fun and engaging way to reach more families in your community with the gospel? Want to create opportunities for college-age kids to gain ministry experience while developing their leadership? Listen in as Stephen talks about the importance of children’s ministry in shaping the future of the church as well as the transformative power of camps for campers, their families, and the summer staff.

Children are the future. // Children’s ministry is more than just a place to keep kids occupied during services. The future of the church is children; the gospel is for them too. WinShape Camps for Communities wants to help build local, engaged church members from a young age in the places they visit. They don’t water down the gospel at the camps so the kids who attend can come to a knowing relationship with Christ.
Engaging kids. // The mission statement of WinShape Camps for Communities is to glorify God by creating experiences that transform campers and families with the message of Christ. Don’t just entertain kids by showing videos in your kids ministry, but invest in discipleship and be intentional to engage them as they learn about Jesus.
Form a bond. // WinShape Camps for Communities is about embracing all-out-fun and all-out-faith. By spending time with the kids at camp and investing with them in the activities they enjoy, the staffers build trust and form a bond them. Then when the time comes for the WinShape staff to share the gospel, the kids are ready to open up and listen. Camp is a setting where the gospel can come alive in a way that it doesn’t in day-to-day life at home.
Bringing camp to you. // Not everyone can afford or feels comfortable sending their children to overnight camps. WinShape Camps for Communities partners with churches and local businesses to bring camp to a community. The traveling camps provide a safe and fun environment for children during the summer, while also incorporating the gospel and faith into the activities which range from sports and crafts to science experiments.
Work with others in your community. // WinShape Camp for Communities is for local churches in a community, not just one church by itself. WinShape hosts a big event every January and invites host churches for a rally in Atlanta. There is a three-day event with guest speakers to teach and empower church leaders. They are also invited to bring up to eight people from different churches with them. When they go back home, these churches are given information on how to engage with other businesses and churches to invite them to partner with the traveling camp.
WinShape brings everything. // The churches partnering with WinShape don’t have to provide anything other than volunteers to help connect with the kids. WinShape Camps for Communities bring everything with them, including all the necessary equipment and resources for the activities. Everything they do ties back to the gospel, including flag football, where they take breaks for short devotionals. By providing volunteers from the local churches to work with the kids, the kids will see familiar faces if their family decides to attend services at the church.
An opportunity for young adults. // Working as summer staff at camps is an invaluable experience for college-age kids as well. Regardless of a young person’s area of study in college, working at a camp contributes to their personal and spiritual growth as well as helping develop their leadership skills. Plus, the impact of working with kids and families to make a difference in their lives is priceless.

You can find out more about WinShape Camps for Communities at www.winshapecamp.org.

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey, everybody; welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. I’m really looking forward to today. You know it’s summertime and you know when you think of summer you think of camps, and so today ah we’ve brought you a bit of a different look on leadership on something that all of us I really do think should be reflecting with. You know every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you and today will be absolutely no exception to that. Super excited to have Stephen Moore with us. He serves as the Director of WinShapes Camps for Communities, a traveling day camp program that brings camps ah to churches all over the country. Ah where he’s ah he’s served with WinShape camps for over sixteen years. Stephen has recruited literally thousands of summer staff to bring the gospel of Jesus and even more more ah to even more campers and families. Super excited for ah Stephen to be on the show. He’s he’s also excited for the local church. And we’re looking forward to learning more from him today. Thanks for being here today, Stephen.

Stephen Moore — Happy to be here, Rich. Thank you for having me and excited to engage with you about camp and about what we’re talking about this morning.

Rich Birch — Yeah, why don’t you kind of ah tell what did I miss about WinShape, tell us about WinShape folks that don’t know about about you guys or your mission, kind of talk us through that a little bit.

Stephen Moore — Yeah I’d love to. Um, WinShape was started in 1985. It was ah founded and started by the founder of Chick-Fil-A, Truett Cathy um, and it originally started with the college program at Barry College in Rome, Georgia, and then soon after a overnight camps for boys was added. Then the next summer an overnight camp for girls was added. And so about forty years ago WinShape got its start and today it has grown into five different unique ministries. So we focus on professional development. We focus on marriages, focus on homes, we focus on college discipleship. And specifically where I work we focus on summer camps.

Stephen Moore — So we have five overnight summer camps in North Georgia. We we have teams in Costa Rica and Brazil right now doing summer camps in those countries. And then we do traveling day camps all over the entire United States as you mentioned a little bit ago, and that’s what I have the opportunity to specifically work with – our traveling day camps.

Rich Birch — Love it. This is so good. And we were just before we got recorded, today we’re recording this literally on like the opening day. And so the fact that Stephen is sitting down with us for a half an hour is pretty amazing. So we really appreciate uh your time with us. I know you’re passionate about this.

Rich Birch — And, you know, I was about a month ago just maybe over a month ago I saw an interesting article entitled “Pastors, Children’s Ministry is More Than a Place to Keep Kids Occupied.” And I sat up and I was like, Ooo, that is so true and resonates with so much we talk about here at unSeminary. And so I wanted to get Stephen on to talk about that. That’s a bold title ah, because you know you’re saying maybe there are churches that are just keeping kids occupied. Ah what’s the opportunity that maybe some churches are missing by just kind of having a lower view of kids ministry? Talk us through that.

Stephen Moore — Yeah. I mean I think we see it even in scripture in Mark when Jesus says hey let the little children come to me. You know, the disciples and others are trying to stop that and he he sees and he knows that, hey no, the gospel is also for for children. It’s for everybody. And so we see it in scripture and we believe that at WinShape. Um, we often say at WinShape, we are not the local church but we are for and support the local church. So if you’re a pastor listening to this, we thank you for the ministry you’re doing, and we want to come alongside and support you in that.

Stephen Moore — Um, I think the sad reality is there are people leaving the church. Um, and we’re seeing that and so we want to focus on them and we want to engage them. But we um also know the future of the church is children. You know, seven year olds today are going to be twenty-seven year olds in 20 years. And we want them to be plugged in and invested in their local church. So what we want to create and help build are local engaged church members. And we think doing that at a young age is important. So we do not water down the gospel at Winshape Camps. No, we boldly preach and teach the gospel. And we want kids to come to a ah knowing relationship with Christ um, while at camp and then while in their local church. So, a way that we do that is is through our mission statement. We glorify God by creating experiences that transform campers and families with the message of Jesus Christ. And so we would hope that churches do that with their children’s ministries. Hey, don’t just engage them. Don’t just entertain them. Don’t just throw on Youtube videos and have fun. No, engage them with the message of Jesus Christ and let church be a place where they are able to hear and learn about Him, and ultimately hopefully grow in a relationship with him.

Rich Birch — I love that. And you know one of the things we’ve seen about growing churches that are making an impact is they are next generation obsessed. They’re thinking about kids. This is a key piece of the puzzle that you can’t just kind of phone this in. You’ve got to, you know, think about it strategically, you have to invest in it. You’ve got to ah, give great resources towards that. Why do you think you know maybe some churches struggle with this. Maybe it’s the you know more the investment, the finding people. What is the what’s the sticking point there that maybe holds ah you know, churches back, or the churches that you’ve maybe engaged with or seen out there that have, you know, maybe struggle with this?

Stephen Moore — Yeah. I think um I think some of them is the resources and the volunteers. You know, in order to have a ah thriving children’s ministry you need to have folks volunteer and engage with that. And so I know that that’s that’s something even at WinShape we’ve struggled the last few years and engaging and hiring our summer staffers. Um, there’s so many options for people. Um, and we think working at camp, I mean any camp not just WinShape, is one of the best ways you can spend your college summers. I did it for four summers and I grew so much in that. So I think that’s one reason.

Stephen Moore — And I think too ah, it is work. You know, I think there is an element of oh well, we could just make children’s ministry or our children’s program really simple and entertaining and it won’t take as much like discipleship and investment. But what we do at camp is work. It’s tough work but it’s so rewarding. And it’s so life changing that it’s worth that additional investment in going that, what we would say WinShape, that second mile. I’m going that second mile second to be able to engage with people and invest um within them in a deeper, not just entertaining, but in a life-changing way.

Rich Birch — I love that. Well WinShape, ah you know, your reputation as an organization is just so positive. You know, high quality. Um, you know, people that engage with WinShape are just like, Man, they do just do such great stuff. And one of the things that um I’ve heard people say and then when I was doing a little bit of research I see you actually talked about it, or I read on your website, you talk about all-out-fun and all-out-faith, which I just love that. I love this idea of, hey, our our ministry is both of those things. Can you talk us through that? What does that look like, because man, I think that’s something our churches could learn. How how can we have all-out-fun and all-out-faith at the same time?

Stephen Moore — Yeah, that’s that’s a great ah great question. I think what we do and what we try to do is we try to build trust with children. We try to allow them to, you know, play soccer or flag football, or go to gymnastics or painting or crafts or fast food or wacky science. Those are just some of our our skill offerings. We go out out of the rec field and play games, and we listen to what the children are interested in because we know if they are able to engage with that counselor, if they’re able to engage with the volunteer, there’s going to be a trust built. In over 3 or 4 days um then when that staffer wants to sit down and and tell them about the gospel, that kid’s going to be more engaged to listen because they know that that staffer or that volunteer cares about them.

Stephen Moore — Um, and so I remember sitting down with a dad last year he came and he told me he said, thank you for the ministry you do. It’s so meaningful because we teach our kids these things in the home each and every day. But when they hear it from a 22 year old college student that cares about them, that invest in them, that wants to engage with them in whatever that activity is they hear it in a different way. It’s a reinforcement of what it’s taught at home and so that child is more open and receptive to the gospel in that setting because they’re a place they’re they’re doing activities they’re not normally doing. And they’re engaging in fun in a way they normally don’t. And so their faith can grow while at camp. Thats at any sort of camp – at our overnight camps, center day camps. There’s a lot of great Christian camps across America. We we think WinShapes one, but there are other ones too that I think it’s a camp is a setting where the gospel can come alive in a way that maybe doesn’t in ah in a day-to-day activity at home.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I’ve I’ve joked and now you didn’t say this; I’ve said this. So don’t this is don’t don’t take this in a negative way. But I’ve joked in other settings because I’m a huge camp booster. I think it’s really important for for families to engage with. I think it’s really important for, like you say, young leaders – it’s an incredible place to work, whether it’s WinShape or other places. But I’ve joked in other contexts I said, you know, like in a lot of churches ah Jesus has like a bit of a moldy basement and and maybe like ah some you know flannel board or something like that. But when you go to camp, Jesus there, man, he’s like super engaging. He’s got all kinds of fun activities. He’s going to, you know, it’s bright and sunny out and you’re running around outdoors, doing something amazing. What an incredible context for the message of Jesus to ah, you know, to resonate. Just incredible. I just think that’s it’s one of the things that makes camp ministry just so important, I think for kids particularly.

Rich Birch — What what does it look like? So I have to be honest until I engaged with you on this, I did not know that WinShape did day camps. So this is like a learning experience for me. What does that look like when you, you know, you end up partnering with a place, and what kind of activities – how does that all work? Give us a sense of what that kind of looks like.

Stephen Moore — Yeah, of course. And and you mentioned a few minutes ago camp started this morning so yesterday…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Stephen Moore — …our five overnight camps kicked off. So parents were dropping off yesterday afternoon, and they’re on day two.Day camp started this morning at 8am in ten different communities across the US.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Stephen Moore — So um, we have 10 different teams and those teams we just finished two weeks of training together.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Stephen Moore — So we brought all our WinShape summer staffers together. We professionally and intentionally trained them in their activities, in safety, in gospel presentation, and we send them on the road. Um.

Stephen Moore — And so we what we understand is not everyone can afford an overnight camp experience, nor are parents comfortable. You know some parents might say, hey, I’m not ready to send my first grader away for a week or two, but I do want them to experience camp. So what we said is, well, let’s take camp on the road.

Stephen Moore — Parents are also looking for things to do with their children while not in school during the summer. And a safe and a fun environment is important to them. We agree, but let’s put the gospel and faith in it as well.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Stephen Moore — Um, and so that’s what we do. Um so we partner with local businesses. We partner with local churches. And I think if even Florence, South Carolina we’re doing camp there in a few weeks. 25 different churches come together and send kids to camp there.

Rich Birch — Wow, wow!

Stephen Moore — It’s not just one church. It’s WinShape Camps for Communities. We want to be for that whole community.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. That’s good.

Stephen Moore — Um, and so we’re doing camp… yeah… in Texas and Florida and Illinois, all the way out to California and New Mexico and Oklahoma and everywhere in between. So um, we come in, we we set up on Sunday we go to church, we attend church at that local church. We set up all day Sunday and then Monday morning through Thursday camps from 8 to 5 and then Fridays our big Friday family fun day. So we we bring in all the parents, all the cousins, and the grandparents, and we feed them lunch. And then our day wraps up, our team packs up, and they go to the next location.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness. Love it.

Stephen Moore — But I want to focus real quick on… Um, yeah, it’s it’s a fun…

Rich Birch — That’s amazing. That’s clearly university, college students doing that. That’s a grinder. What an incredible summer though. That’s so fun being on the road. Sorry didn’t mean to cut you off there.

Stephen Moore — Yeah, no, you’re good. You’re good. We um, we want our staffers to build really intentional relationships with the campers and invest in them. But more importantly, we want local church volunteers there as well. Because we know on Friday we’re packing up and we’re headed to the next town. We we intentionally ask the church to provide a volunteer for every 10 campers.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Stephen Moore — So if there’s going to be 380 campers one week, we want 38 volunteers. Because on Sunday morning when that kid maybe comes back to church for the first time, which happens so often because the parents are like, Man, my child had such a fun week. We don’t go to church. Maybe we should try this place out on Sunday morning. They come on Sunday morning. They’re going to see familiar faces because there’s 38 volunteers that were with us all week are going to be there on Sunday so that child is going to immediately feel that safety and that comfort. And they’re going to even want to be more involved there. So that’s something we also do. That that volunteer component is really important to us.

Rich Birch — Can you give me a sense of the like the scale, the scope of a kind of typical WinShape Day Camp? Like is this, like you mentioned you know, almost 400, 380 kids – is that kind of typical, is that what that is typically looking like, or are they larger smaller?

Stephen Moore — Yeah, well…

Rich Birch — What, you know…

Stephen Moore — Yeah, we’re…

Rich Birch — I know they’re all different, I get that.

Stephen Moore — No, that’s a good question. We um, our average camp size is usually around 250 to 280 campers…

Rich Birch — Yep, okay.

Stephen Moore — …um per per our day camps. Our community camps um we will have some that are going to be closer to 550 campers…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Stephen Moore — …and then we’ll have some that are closer to 175. So um we bring in either a team of 20 to 25 people, or if it’s a really large camp. We’ll actually send two teams to one location.

Rich Birch — Okay, that makes sense.

Stephen Moore — So this week we have ten unique locations. Next week we might have a really large location so we’ll send two teams there. So we’ll have nine unique communities. So this summer we’re doing 84 weeks of camp over the next nine weeks.

Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. And um, that’s incredible. It’s so cool. What when at the kind of community level. So is that I talk me through how churches are working together on this. I love that idea of like, hey, maybe there’s a group of churches that are trying to leverage this kind of opportunity. What what does that look like maybe maybe if you could have your like perfect hey this would be amazing if we did this everywhere that would be incredible. What does that kind of look like?

Stephen Moore — Yeah, you know it kind of goes back to our name WinShape Camps for Communities. We are for communities and for the local churches in that community, not just one church. So what we we do a big event every January where we bring in a lot of our host churches. We call it Host Rally. We fly them in um, to Atlanta we do a very like 3-day training. We bring in speakers, guests. We want to enrich and empower them. We know church leaders and pastors can sometimes, it’s a struggle. And so we want it to be ah a very faith-fi like encouraging weekend but we also want to equip them to do camp.

Stephen Moore — So we invite them to bring up to up to 8 people, if they want, from different churche and a leadership team. And so it’s not just First Baptist Church or whatever church. It might be 3 or 4 churches coming to that event. And when we when we send them back home, we encourage them, we help them, we resource them: Hey, this is how you can go engage with other businesses and other churches and invite them to come to camp. Um that that church I mentioned a few days ago or a few minutes ago, 25 different churches from that community. That community had over 80 families attend camp that don’t regularly attend church.

Rich Birch — Wow, interesting.

Stephen Moore — So there might have been 120 families that do. There’s 80 families right there that don’t attend or engage with the church that sent their child to a church for five days during a week. So they’re gonna be so much more likely to say, hey, I want to get plugged in because my child had an awesome experience at camp. They came back changed. We hear that so many times from parents – the child I dropped off on Monday isn’t the same child that I picked up on Friday afternoon; something changed this week. And what we think is, it’s the gospel. We think it’s Jesus. They were introduced to him and engaged it with him in a way they’ve never had before. And so then that parent’s like, you know what? I want to try that out. So we think camp is such a great tool to help local churches connect with people in their community that they normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to do with.

Rich Birch — Love it. How, at the kind of participant or at the camper level, how do WinShape Camps for Communities differentiate against other… like what kind of activities are you doing and what is that like? So again, I can picture your overnight camp experience and I’m trying to picture how do you get that into the back of a bus and move it.

Stephen Moore — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Um, you know what does that look like?

Stephen Moore — Yeah, sometimes people are like…

Rich Birch — You can’t bring those nice hills in Georgia; you can’t move those nice hills in Georgia you can’t, you know, to everywhere across the country, you know.

Stephen Moore — That’s right, we’ll figure out a way to do that. Um, so I think some people are like, is it just VBS on steroids? And we’re like no, it’s it’s more than that. So you know, we just sent our teams out. They travel in two 15-passenger vans, two 26-foot moving trucks, and an additional pickup truck. So that’s what’s great for these churches. You don’t have to provide anything; just provide us some volunteers and some space to do it.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Stephen Moore — We bring everything with us. We bring our sound and our tech equipment. We bring LED walls. We bring an incredible, impressive set with us. Um we bring in 18 different skill offerings from flag football to soccer, to wacky science to archery. You know, we bring in targets and bows and arrows, because we think these campers maybe don’t get an experience this every day. So Let’s do something new for them. We haven’t quite figured out how to bring the horses on the road with us. So horseback riding’s just at our overnight camps. But rocketry – that’s something we bring in…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so fun.

Stephen Moore — …little kids get to shoot off rockets into the air at camp in that skill. So um and again camp is from 8 to 5, and we often hear parents tell us—and the reason this is fresh on my mind is because I just let a session at this at staff training a few days ago—that it’s their child’s favorite and best week of the summer every single year…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Stephen Moore — …and they can’t wait for us to come back to the next year. And we know that’s not just unique to WinShape camps. We know that that that’s just camp in general. It’s such a special unique thing, but we want to be really intentional about what we do at camp and have it tie back to the Gospel. So if we’re taking flag football, we’re in that skill for 50 minutes, we’re taking a water break at 15 minutes in, we’re going to sit down and do a short devo. And we’re going to just, hey, for the next three minutes let’s have a water break and let’s look at a piece of scripture and how that ties into the rest of the day.So we’re intentionally trying to do that through each and everything we do at camp.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that That’s so good. Again this is fantastic. Love what you guys are up to. If there’s churches out there like that are thinking maybe this is the kind of thing I want to pursue, um are there kind of some characteristics or something you’re looking for in churches that would you’d love to partner with? I’m assuming you’re interested in partnering with new churches because you’re talking on this thing. Ah, but you know you might be looking, and obviously not for this summer but for following summers. But yeah, what what would you, you know, who are the kind of churches you’re looking for, what are some of the traits, what does that look like?

Stephen Moore — Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, so you might disagree with this and that’s okay.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Stephen Moore — We’re not looking for a camp to just come do camp for the kids in your children’s ministry.

Rich Birch — Yes, great. Love it.

Stephen Moore — We think those kids are very, very important. We think those kids need to hear the gospel and we want those kids at camp. Absolutely we want them there. But we want you to be interested in hosting camp to reach kids outside of your doors…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Stephen Moore — …to reach your community. That is really important to us and that’s one of the main characteristics we’re looking for in our churches. Are you someone that wants to get outside your walls, meet people in the community. And sometimes that’s difficult and challenging. Sometimes you know people might step into your door on Sunday morning that don’t look or, you know, act like the rest of your church, but those people need the gospel. The kids in your children’s ministry need the gospel, the kids at the church, you know, three blocks down the street need it. So we want it to be a community church that’s trying to engage with other areas and people in the community that aren’t typically in your doors on a Sunday morning. That’s really important to us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love that. And I love the you know the check they’re around that sounds like the kind of thing like most churches are going to agree with that. But you got to ask the second question, do you really? Ah because, you know, we want to see that happen in our ministries, but then when it happens and the complexity that can come there…

Stephen Moore — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …um, you know we have to be ready for that for sure. So I love that. Do you, um you know, in in the actual programming, do break up into small groups at any point and kind of help kids wrestle with, is there… you talked about like video walls and all that, is there like worship experiences? Give give us a sense of those kinds of that that kind of part of the program.

Stephen Moore — Yeah, that’s yeah I can give you just a quick flyover of our day. So we get there…

Rich Birch — That’s perfect.

Stephen Moore — …kids come, they’re jumping on inflatables. As kids arrive, we call it, you know, kind of arrival village training. So um, and then there’s put in different villages. So we have ocean, safari and alpine. And these are funny terms, I know, bu you know we break it down to kindergarten and first grade is 1one age. Second and third grade is another age. And fourth, fifth and some communities sixth grade is our next age. And they’re going to small groups with kids their specific age.

Stephen Moore — Um, we design our camper curriculum, that’s age specific. So ah, first grader is going to have a camper book and a camper guide that looks different than fifth graders. Um, because we want it to we want to engage in with them with the gospel in an age appropriate way. Um, they’re going to three different auditorium elements a day. and in these auditorium elements we have a worship leader that’s leading different songs and different activities. We have a theme director that’s delivering what we would call Christ-centerered truths. In our theme of the day this summer we’re going on a road trip through the life of David.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Stephen Moore — So we’re looking at a different story and a different example of the life of David every day. And we’re just tying it back on Wednesday with our gospel message on what it looks like to to be adopted as a son and daughter of Christ. And so we’re teaching that um each and every day at camp. But then we’re also kids get to sign up for four different skills. So we have, you know, so anywhere between 15 and 20 different skill offerings. And kids get to go to four of those throughout the week of camp, and those they get to choose. Um, we do rec every day, and then we do team time twice a day. And in that team time setting, that’s more of the small group bible study setting where they’re diving deeper with maybe you know 12 to 14 other kids on what the message is that day. So, it’s a fun-filled day, and they go home tired.

Rich Birch — I love it.

Stephen Moore — Um, but it’s incredible.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it.

Stephen Moore — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. And I think the transferable, listen you might be listening in and saying, listen, we’re not going to run this at our our church, which is okay. But the thing I do want you to think about is man how can you inject some fun, some intentionality, some um, you know, some thoughtful process – you can hear even in just how Steven’s unpacking that. Man, there’s there’s a lot of thinking around how all of that fits together, so that it speaks the language, that it appeals to kids, obviously parents love it. They’re like this is a great. this is a great thing and want to partner with that. It’s intentionally, outward focus intentionally, saying hey we want to reach people in our community. Just love that. I hope that inspires you as you’re listening in today. Kind of as we come to wrap up, anything you’d love to, you know, so you know, say as we kind of wrap up today’s conversation?

Stephen Moore —Yeah, Rich, you just used some some words that we use often at camp. We call it the WinShapeCamps recipe. So right now we’re doing 17 different camps as we speak. Those 17 camps are 10 community camps in the US, a community camp in Brazil, and a community there are a community camp in Costa Rica, and 5 overnight camps. What we want is we want to be cooking the WinShape Camps recipe wherever we’re doing camp.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Stephen Moore — And that keeps us in line. And I’ll just quickly do a flyover those recipe ingredients…

Rich Birch — Yes, let’s do it.

Stephen Moore — …and you know, I would invite any church to do those. Um so resource stewardship – we want to use our resources and take care of the things God’s entrusted to us – um, equipment stewardship. I mean um, sorry we’ve we’ve changed some of these names.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Stephen Moore — So Christ-centered truths is another one. So we want we want everything we do to have, you know, Christ as a part of it. Intentional culture. We want to be intentional about the little things we do. So a camper, they’re no longer just stepping foot into you know a local school or local church. They’re stepping foot into the Safari village where they’re a lion and they get to be with their other lions. So we’re gonna be doing cheers and we’re be doing games throughout the day.

Stephen Moore — Want to be people-first. We care about our people. We care about our summer staffers. We care about our volunteers. We care about our our campers. And engaging fun is our last one. We think everything we do, if fun’s involved, kids are going to be more receptive and understanding to hear, hear about Jesus. So um, that’s kind of our WinShape Camps recipe. And so any…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Stephen Moore — …church could do that. just like it doesn’t have to be that. But as you do children’s ministry. How can those elements be a part of what you do?

Rich Birch — Yeah that’s so good. I love that. I love how those hang together to really create a compelling ministry for, you know, for kids. And I know there’s people are listening in today that have found that, you know, just super helpful. So ah, really appreciate that. Well as we wrap up, if if people want to track with you or track with WinShape, where do we want to send them online? How do we want to, you know, get them connected with you?

Stephen Moore — Yeah, that’s that’s a great question – winshapecamps.org – you’ll be able to choose our overnight camps or our day camps is one it’s going to be your first dropdown option. So that’s one way to get connected. I think my email’s on there. But if it’s not, it’s smoore@winshape.org – um, so S-M-O-O-R-E um and so you could do that. Another thing I didn’t hit on yet, Rich…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Stephen Moore — …but I just want to real quick before we leave…

Rich Birch — Absolutely.

Stephen Moore — …um is we want to engage with campers and we think it’s really important, but also I think working as summer as a summer staffer is an unbelievable value experience a valuable experience. I have 3 kids of my my own. They’re 2, 2, and 5, and I genuinely think the practical summer examples I had while working camp were very helpful for me, and they translate to any and every job out there. You could be studying chemistry and working camps still going to be a good beneficial thing for you to do during the summer. So if you know anyone of that college age, you know, 18 to 25 that you think could work camp or would be a good fit for WinShape, send them to us as well because we would love to be able to have them spend a summer with us to grow and be able to share their faith.

Rich Birch — Totally. I heartily endorse that. Ah you know, I do think like I said earlier I think the camp experience is fantastic for kids. It’s a great kind of thing to be a part of, but I really think to be honest, the sweet spot where the the place where God seems to have his ah, uses these experiences I think particularly as on that staff age transition as as young leaders. You know, man, it’s just something amazing happens ah when a young leader dedicates their summer, or like you say, all four you know summers of theirs, you know, college summers kind of thing. Man I just love that. That’s so good.

Rich Birch — Well I appreciate you coming on the show today, Stephen. I hope the rest of the summer, I know it will be fantastic, but we’re cheering for you. Thanks for giving us some time today.

Stephen Moore — Yes, Rich. I appreciate it, and thanks for the time.

He Gets Us: Kyle Isabelli on Reaching Out to Non-Christians with Gloo

Rich Birch — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s unSeminary podcast. We’re chatting with Kyle Isabelli, the lead pastor of Avenue Christian Church in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Wondering how to connect with hurting people in your community who might not venture through your church’s doors? In today’s episode Kyle and I have a fantastic conversation about the church’s community outreach efforts using the He Gets Us campaign and the Gloo platform. Listen in to hear how you can use these free digital tools to connect with and care for your community.

Gloo and He Gets Us. // Since COVID, Avenue Christian Church has utilized resources that Gloo and Barna offer to churches. In addition to church health and spiritual health assessments, Kyle and his team began to explore the He Gets Us campaign and the connection that Gloo provides to it. The He Gets Us campaign invites people to get to know the real Jesus. It communicates that Jesus understands them and that whatever people are experiencing, Jesus faced it too. He Gets Us became more widely known after two of their ads aired during the Super Bowl in 2023. In addition to being on TV, their ads are also online and on billboards.
The local church partnership. // The He Gets Us campaign messaging engages people in areas where they are struggling and invites them to reach out for help via text. When someone reaches out with a question or a need, the Gloo platform then forwards the messages to local partnering churches. As a partner in the campaign, Avenue Christian Church receives messages from people in their area code seeking help or encouragement so they can respond with practical care.
The response. // As a He Gets Us partner, Avenue gets an average of two to three messages per week forwarded to them. They then respond to the person, letting them know who they are, the church they are from, and that they are available to talk. When they reach out, they have a 50% response rate, with about half of those interactions leading to phone conversations or connecting individuals to the church through attending a service or coming to a small group.
Behind the scenes platform. // Gloo has an online platform that your church can sign up for where all of the contact data is stored. You can send a text message or make a phone call through Gloo and track when you were last in touch with your contacts. If the contacts have opted in to receive communications from your church, you can also export the data to Excel and use it in your church management software. In addition, Gloo offers a host of other high quality resources including prayer prompts, sermon tools, reading plans, discussion guides and more.
Less promotion, more care. // Working with Gloo has helped remind Avenue Christian Church that their digital strategy has to be less about self-promotion and more about how to provide care for people in the community, listen to what their going through, and meet their needs while sharing the gospel.

You can find out more about Gloo at gloo.us and how to partner with the He Gets Us campaign at hegetsuspartners.com. To learn more about Avenue Christian Church visit www.avenuechristian.com and connect with Kyle at www.kyleisabelli.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: CDF Capital

Since 1953 CDF Capital has helped church leaders and individuals bring light to the world through the thoughtful stewardship of their capital. The Church, including your church, requires more than just financial capital, it also needs spiritual and leadership capital. While separate in purpose, these three forms of capital are intertwined and inseparable for the cause of kingdom growth. Together, when we partner with the Lord to bring spiritual, leadership, and financial capital to a church, the results are transformational. At CDF Capital our ministry is simple: we lend money to churches.

CDF Capital, in partnership with Barna Group, conducted a research study to better understand what happens in churches after a new leader comes in. Barna Group interviewed 111 pastors online who have experienced a leadership transition within the last 12 years. Click here to get your free download of the study.

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Man, I’m really looking for to today’s conversation. In fact it’s been probably six months in the making; really been looking forward to today’s call. You’re going to want to lean in for this one. We’ve got Kyle Isabelli – he is at Avenue Christian Church. It’s a multi-generational church that represents the western suburbs of Chicago as they ah help people live their best life with Jesus in charge. Kyle, I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here today.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, thanks Rich. I’m excited to have this conversation with you today.

Rich Birch — Yeah, why don’t you fill in the picture about Avenue? What is tell us a little bit more; give us a kind of a flavor, a sense of the church.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, Avenue is a church that has been in the western suburbs for over 60 years. It was originally started in suburbs a little bit closer to the city. And then the mid 60s it it made its way out to Clarendon Hills which is, some people may not know, it’s Downers Grove, Hinsdale for about 30 minutes outside of the city. And they’ve had a heart to really reach the the community, and really be a light in the community. And I’ve been the senior pastor here now since January 2020. And prior to that I was here as a youth pastor, started in 2017. So I’ve been here six years. And it’s been cool to be a part of a church that really is multigenerational, that we have new, younger families that are here, but you also have people here at our church that have been here longer than I’ve been alive, you know. So it’s it’s such a blessing to be able to lead in this context and to see God work and move in really helping more and more people find new life in Christ.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. This um, so today what we want you… we got connected on Carey Nieuwhof’s online community called The Art of Leadership Academy. And you posted in there about your church’s participation in the He Gets Us campaign. If people remember this Super Bowl 2023 a big ad on that, a whole campaign built around that by our friends or powered by our friends at Gloo and, you know, associated other folks. And so today we’re going to dive in this is kind of we’re going to open up the hood take a look at what happened at Avenue understand ah you know, kind of lessons learned, that sort of thing. But why don’t we start with, you know, what led you to say, hey this is the kind of thing we want to be a part of? What kind of got you to that?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, our our church throughout covid had been utilizing a lot of the resources that Barna and Gloo had been sharing with churches. We used a lot of the church health assessments. And the Summer 2022 we had our entire church take kind of like a spiritual survey to gauge their spiritual health as as well as like ways that we as leaders in the church can do a better job of caring for our church. So we’ve been utilizing Gloo for quite some time, Barna quite some time.

Kyle Isabelli — And so we began to hear about the He Gets Us ads which actually launched in March of 2022 during the and NCAA college tournament, the basketball tournament. And so you see a few of these ads coming out, you’re like what’s all this about? And so Gloo then begins to share how these ads are posted on social media, and if people text in saying oh that resonates with me, or I have a question about that, or something speaks to me in that way, they text in. And what Gloo does is then sends those text messages to local churches.

Kyle Isabelli — So for instance, if someone has an area code that is close by our church—so here in the western suburbs it’s a 630, a 708 or an 815 area code—um our church then would receive that text message. So for instance, someone struggle with anxiety, and they see the ad about anxiousness and they want some help or encouragement with it, they’ll they’ll text in: hey, I need help with this; I’m feeling anxious. And we get that message to our platform through Gloo. And so then we’re able to start a conversation with them. We’re starting to text them and and be able to, you know, engage in conversation. And this has been so incredibly helpful because over these last few years in our polarized society um churches and pastors especially our credibility just within society has kind of decreased. I think leadership in general…

Rich Birch — True.

Kyle Isabelli — …our credibility has gone down for better or for worse…

Rich Birch — Sure, sure.

Kyle Isabelli — …whether we did that to ourselves or we’re just a byproduct of being a leader or a pastor or church. Um that’s just the reality of where we’re at. One of the things in Barna, ah Glenn Packiam in his book about being a resilient pastor, he shares that like 55% of people have little to no trust in pastors and church leadership. They don’t they don’t view them as a credible source.

Kyle Isabelli — And so now to overcome that um, people are able to, you know, get connected with the pastor or church with that. They probably wouldn’t have thought of before, but they’re willing to have a conversation about what they’re struggling with it. And it opens up this this gateway to, hey this is I’m a pastor um, from this church. Can we let’s just talk about your anxiety. Let’s just talk about whatever is going on. And so it’s allowed us to kind of reach into our community even more despite people not having the best thoughts or feelings about a church whether for better or for worse.

Rich Birch — That’s interesting. Can can you give me a sense, so we’ll start with the kind of anecdotal story like you know, maybe somebody that you’ve ended up connecting with as a church and the impact the kind of positive impact either through He Gets Us or pre-, you know, He Gets Us with the other work you’ve done with Gloo.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah. I mean for instance I met with a guy a few weeks ago. He texted, he said he was having marriage problems, he was on a second separation. And so I texted, said, hey, you know I’m really sorry to hear that. Would you be willing to come in and like have a conversation with me? I’m not a marriage counselor, but I can least have this initial conversation with you. And so he came in. We began to talk and um, you know, shared the gospel with him. And said, you know, I I hope your marriage can be restored and there’s some things that you definitely have to work on. But like I want you to know what’s really going to make a change in your life and hopefully from that spiritual change in your heart then you can see changes in other parts of your life. And he’s like he’s like, I went to church growin’ up. No one’s ever told me about Jesus in this way; I don’t read my bible. And so I gave him a bible here at our church. I said, hey start reading through this.

Kyle Isabelli — And um, so now for these last couple weeks I’ve met with him once or twice, we talked through, he’s attended one of our church services. Um, still working through his separation, working with the details of that, but um, just trying to help people out. And I would have never…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — …had that conversation with him apart from him clicking on an ad from He Gets Us on, I think it was on Tiktok.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — I dunno which ad it was…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Kyle Isabelli — …but he clicked on it. We got the message. And the conversation and the relationship really started because of that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. So this is what I love about our friends at Gloo. Like they’re, you know, they’re empowering churches. They’ve developed tools. You know, there’s a number of things that they’ve tried to do to help people, um you know, help church leaders connect with their community. And there is often, you know, a lot of their solutions are built around this idea of providing actual care for people, which I think is amazing, is fantastic. So what about on the kind of, I’m sure there’s people that are listening in that are like, what about so how many, is that like the one conversation you’ve had? You know, what’s that look like? Or do you have a you know a phone center now, you got 25 people all day long texting people back. What’s that look like?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, so where we’re at um at our church, we started in October of 2022.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — So now we’ve been doing this for about—today’s June 1st—we’ve been doing it, you know, eight, nine months. Um we average about 2 to 3 messages per week. Some weeks it’s less, some weeks it’s more. And out of those messages we get about a 50% response rate. So…

Rich Birch — Okay.

Kyle Isabelli — …if we text back right away saying, hey, this is who I am. I’m a pastor here in the western suburbs of Chicago. I’m a partner with He Gets Us. Thanks for reaching out. I hear this is what’s going on your life. Would you like to share more? We leave it at that. On the bottom of it it says like, hey this message comes from Avenue Christian Church., You can you can, you know, text n…

Rich Birch — Check them out or you…

Kyle Isabelli — …or text no to get out of opted out or whatever. And so about 50% of people do engage with us, um at least over texting. And I would say out of that 50% probably another half we’ve been able to have phone conversations, get connected in our church and have them start coming to some of our, you know, life groups or small groups at our church. Get them… Some people I’ve had to refer them to counseling, you know, and say, hey, let’s we have some we have some counseling services that we partner with in the area. This is something that’s probably above my pay grade…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kyle Isabelli — …but let me let me help you out. It’s above my training, let me help you out and point you in the right direction.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — So you know some people would look at that and say oh only 50% of people respond back to you. But these are people we would have never connected with in a million years had it not been for being a partner with Gloo and being ah a He Gets Us a partner.

Rich Birch — Um, and then how how is that working, so like you talked about the six is it 630 area code? Um…

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, there’s three different area codes that kind of are generally within the Chicagoland area where we’re at…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — …that we’ll we’ll get those coming to our feed I guess.

Rich Birch — And so obviously on the backend there’s a little bit of like ah like there’s obviously multiple churches in 630 or in those areas that are engaged. They’re doing something to root calls to, you know, various different churches. You have a sense of how that looks? And and is that are they scaling it based on the size of your church or how does that work?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I don’t know how they scale it. My my guess from from my initial conversations and then also talking with a couple other churches in the past six months that are in this area is that it’s almost like a checklist.

Rich Birch — Sure.

So it’s just like all right, we sent this one to Avenue today and…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — …and like I know Community Christian is another one and they, you know, they get the next one that comes up. And then the next one that comes up. and so I think it might just go on to rotation. I’m not 100% sure, but we’ve never myself and another staff person handle these initial contacts, and it’s never been like this overwhelming thing where like you said, there’s a call center now…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kyle Isabelli — …there’s 25 people, you know, time of thing. So um, yeah, so all I know is it’s based on area code.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — It’s based on where they’re coming from. And and like getting capturing people’s information, you know, you get ah in a church setting to capture a first time visitor’s information is so hard some days, you know?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so…

Kyle Isabelli — It takes them like six weeks…

Rich Birch — Oh, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — …to finally a write down their email, you know? And now it’s like we get their phone number and email immediately before even having a conversation with them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. Like so if, you know, doing the math quickly, you know, there’ve been somewhere around 200 contacts, which is amazing. Like that’s if you if, you know, eight months a couple and a half, you know, two and a half a week um…

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — …you know, 50% of those you actually hear back from. So there’s like a hundred legit kind of conversations. They’re all legit…

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …but a hundred conversations you’ve been engaged with. And then, you know, some some people that you’ve actually and then other 50%, so you maybe moved 40, 50 people to actual phone conversations, which is you know, pretty amazing. Tell me what’s the size of your church? Like what’s the I’ve tried to get a sense of scale for people that are listening in.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Because it would to your point to even even if you whittle it down to that 50, even if you say okay, the 50 who kind of followed the bottom of the the funnel, for a lack of better word. The people that you you know, actually end up getting on the phone, man a lot of churches would do a lot of work to get 50 contacts…

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …like that would be a tremendous amount. So yeah, give us a sense of that.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I mean we’re we’re a church of about 400 on Sunday.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — And you know, with you know people come in once or twice a month…

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely.

Kyle Isabelli — …you know, probably more would call Avenue their home. But that’s our average attendance. So we’re a mid-sized church. So to to your point to have 50, 40 to 50 contexts, you know, 10 to 15% of our weekly attendance that we’re able to engage with people in the community, like I don’t know an outreach strategy, a digital outreach strategy that has that type of return on investment, if you want to put it in those terms. Like it’s it’s pretty remarkable. Um, and and such a blessing for for us to be a partner with them. So it it to me the the numbers, the math as we kind of broke it down, it just it makes a lot of sense. Especially because it’s something that they give to churches for free. Like that doesn’t cost us…

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, you can’t beat the price.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, you can’t beat the price of that.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, and how much does all this cost? Well they give it to you.

Kyle Isabelli — Yes.

Rich Birch — So yeah, absolutely. Just to put that all in context context, friends. So a church of 400 people, you know, the industry average, the kind of ah thing that we would typically would love to see us driving towards from a first time guest contact information, that would average 8 a week. Like we should be seeing somewhere in that range typically. And I don’t know where where you guys are at, but when you even put it in that context, if you think three contacts a week are coming in on average through through the the internet that are above and beyond that, that’s a robust number, again, considering all the work that it does you have to do to to gather contact information from people who attend on a regular basis. That’s that’s incredible. So when you know the interesting thing, so did you see as the actual Super Bowl went through a spike? Did that was there a lot that week? Has it been pretty consistent? Yeah, give me a sense of, you know, as as it’s trickled on do you still get contacts? How’s that going?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I would say Super Bowl saw a little bit of a spike. Um you know in Chicago in particular for most of the fall and then now this new baseball season ah, the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox they consistently have He Gets Us ads in their ballpark. So in Chicagoland it’s probably been more prevalent. I don’t know how that is compared to the rest of the country. So we didn’t see too much of a spike for Super Bowl and the weeks after because it had kind of been a part of everything we’re doing. Um, but I will say that um I just think about the dollar amount that goes into creating these ads.

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, that’s huge.

Kyle Isabelli — Like as ah as a church our size like we would never have the millions upon millions of dollars to to create these amazing amazing digital ads, get them advertised in multiple platforms. Like we don’t have the the team, the resources, we can’t do any of that. And so to have that type of resource and for your church just to be a benefit, ah it’s huge. And so it just it makes sense for any church anywhere to utilize it because people are on social media, people are on the internet, people are streaming, and these He Gets Us ads are everywhere. And so it’s it’s such a blessing to be a part of it. So yeah, so not too much of a spike when the two big ads did show. Um, but we, like I said, being in the area that we’re in we I think it’s been more consistent because it’s been here a lot longer.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Yeah, I think Chicagoland is one of Gloo’s—I’d have to look, but—one of their focus communities. Like they have a number of communities across the country that they’ve ah they’ve said hey we’re going to put disproportionate effort in, for sure, which makes sense. Yeah, that’s that’s fascinating. All right so.

Kyle Isabelli — Um, yeah.

Rich Birch — when you now are you able to, ah so you get the text and email you get their phone and email which is amazing. Um, have you put those into another follow-up sequence? Are you allowed to do that? What are the restrictions around that? Can you continue to, you know, be proactive? Obviously if Ppeople opt out then, you know, obviously you can’t keep going. But if if what what does all that look like?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, so Gloo, the the nice thing about Gloo is that um there is an actual online platform that you can utilize that your church signs up for. So all of their data is is stored in there. So if we want to do a phone call or send a text message, we can do it through Gloo obviously. But if we have something else going on in our church and they’ve opted into communicating with Avenue Christian Church, we’ll send that to them. You know, we can ask them, hey, we we send out a weekly email of our church… because some people even do um have reached out because He Gets Us started a campaign of saying like, hey, it’s time for you to come back to church. Pandemic’s over; start coming back to church. Do you need to find new church home? So we’ve had quite a few people have responded “looking for a church home”. That’s been their kind of one sentence prop. So um, we’ll we’ll put them in our database, you know.

Kyle Isabelli — And and Gloo ah, you can export it through Excel. So we can load it to our database which is you know CCB, Community Church Builder. And everything’s very seamless. If we want to use more of that data we can import it into our own database, but Gloo has a great online platform that makes it very simple to see everything, all the contacts, when’s the last time you’ve connected with them, what’s the last message that you’ve had with them, so on and so forth. So it it really is a one stop shop – their online platform.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s fantastic. So what would be your advice, so I’m sure there’s church leaders that are listening in that are like, man, we’re missing the boat here. We should get involved. What would be ah, you know, beyond—and we’ll get to links and all that in a bit but—like what’ll be your advice for a church that’s maybe just starting? Or is there a piece of this that you wish you know back eight months ago, oh we should have done this differently when we got the ball rolling?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I think um I think there are probably many churches like ours that coming out of the Super Bowl ad um, did a series based on like the He Gets Us ads. And that’s another um thing about the online platform is they have sermons and discussion questions that go with some of their ads. So for our Easter series, and it started palm Sunday went through Mother’s Day, we would show one of the He Gets Us ads as a as a bumper video, and then we would you know teach on that topic about Jesus and how it relates. And there are sermon outlines, guidelines that if, you know, you need to use you can utilize them.

Kyle Isabelli — So I think many churches probably started there and just kind of left it, like oh this is a cool thing. Let’s talk about it. Whereas I wish we would have done that in October so that by Christmas of 2022 we would have been really honing into saying like, here’s our promotion, here’s what we’re talking about and then a month later in February it just it continues on. You know, so it’s it’s continuing on people’s minds in our community. It’s on the mind of our church for them to say, oh yeah, our church was talking about this this this Christmas and this fall. And we’re starting to engage with people and and they’re sharing it on their social media and stuff like that. So I wish we would have done that before, but even still connecting with our Easter services, connecting it with some of our big, you know, Palm Sundays and Mother’s Day, continually following up with people in that regard.

Kyle Isabelli — We did a stations of the cross like prayer experience where we tied in the last week of Jesus to different those different videos and and different, you know, scriptures and different reflection questions that came from Gloo, like you can make it your own. But I wish we’ve just done that a little bit earlier. But it’s it’s not too late. Like you can still do it. He Gets Us is continuing to put out more ads and and they’re creating new things and more people are donating, so it’s still free. So I would say jump on and try to figure out how it can help your church’s community outreach moving forward.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love it. If you log on, again you just can can go to Gloo.us if you’re if you’re um, a church, you just log on create an account. It’s super easy. Super fast to do. But you’ll see in there in the He Gets Us resources there’s prayer prompts, sermon resources, reading plans, discussion guides – all kinds of content that even if you were not thinking about like even you’re like, I don’t know do I want to have somebody answering text messages. Even if you weren’t interested in that, man, there’s a great opportunity to leverage those resources. They’re well done, high quality. Um, yeah, that could be really really helpful.

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — So as you look to the future, how do you think this will shape your, you know, your church’s approach? You’re kind of, you know, where you go from here?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I think it has reminded us of our need to engage in some of these tough conversations with people, to really get over the fact that maybe the church doesn’t have the best reputation overall.

Kyle Isabelli — And say, you know what, we’re gonna be a church that creates our own reputation in our community. And we’re gonna do that by caring for people’s needs, listening to them, helping them where they’re at. Um and through the through our conversations, through showing them the love of Christ like their hearts will be open to the gospel. Their hearts will be open to attending a church service, or coming to a program, or you know taking their next steps in their faith journey. Whatever it is this is getting us outside of our walls um and helping us understand and see even our own personal digital strategy has to be less about promotion of, hey this is what’s happening at our church, and here’s what we’re teaching on! And it needs to be more about like how are we helping people in our community meet their needs…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — …and and hit their pain points and and talk through the things that they’re going through. So it’s it’s really kind of flipped the script for us in a couple different ways and I think that’s going to continue to drive some of our outreach strategies moving forward.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fantastic. This has been just a really, you know, great conversation. Is there any part of this that you look at or like yeah that just actually hasn’t been that great? Or it maybe hasn’t met your expectations or you know it kind of just is like maybe more not negative, but just a little, you know, maybe it just hasn’t been as fantastic as it sounds on this box, you know, kind of thing?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, um, the platform is easier to use on a phone than it is ah than it is on a computer or laptop.

Rich Birch — Okay, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — Um, which is that that’s a small thing. And for me…

Rich Birch — Fascinating.

Kyle Isabelli — …as I was sharing earlier with with you, Rich, is that I’m not I don’t like being on like social media as much.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — I’m not really into like having the apps on my phone; I would rather do it on a desktop. Um and just kind of put my phone away a lot of times, until the fact that it really is a lot easier to communicate with people on the phone versus the desktop. It’s a downside. If you’re fine using your phone, um, go for it. It’s not a big issue. But for me, there’s some kinks in there when it comes to the desktop version. So but that’s you know it’s such a minor detail. Otherwise it’s like ah, you know, I would say one more thing.

Kyle Isabelli — Some of the ads, you know they’re not always my favorite ads all right? Maybe I don’t fully agree with the message, or I don’t really like how they talked about Jesus in this way. Like sure that’s that’s going to happen. But that’s not the point of it. The point of it is that it’s connecting with someone who doesn’t know Jesus, or is far from Christ and it’s given you an opportunity to talk with them. So it doesn’t matter if I don’t fully agree or fully like the ad. Or you know you see a lot of hate that’s on social media over these last few months about He Gets Us. Like there’s so much more good and redemption that can come out of it, even if you don’t one ah hundred percent like the ad. So.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — I would those are two small things that’s like, oh could be a little bit better, but otherwise it’s it’s been such a great blessing for our church.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, I wonder if um, there was you know there has been pushback on that side on the messaging side. And since you brought it up, I didn’t bring it up, um, you know, maybe just go into that a little bit more. Like it it it has been, you know, it’s an interesting time in our culture where, you know, the way I read that is, you know, if if this was 20, 30 years ago and ah Billy Graham was coming to town, they used to do a lot a lot of ads Billy Graham would, you know, they would do all kinds of ads to, you know, advertise. And you know, I I put it in that category of like you may not love all those ads; you might not love all of that, but at the end of the day you’re like, yeah, it’s Billy Graham though. It’s going to be okay, like it’ll all work out in the end. Um, that’s kind of how I read it was I was I’m like, yeah, I not sure I would have you know you know, but but but it doesn’t seem we live in such a polarized era that it’s like people get so worked up over stuff.

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — Um, yeah, maybe talk through that a little bit more. Is there anything else on that front that you know, kind of sticks out to you…

Kyle Isabelli — Absolutely.

Rich Birch — …um, you know, as you think about the, you know, at the at the actual messaging itself?

Kyle Isabelli — I would say that, you know, even in our church after we we shared about it and talked about it and then did the series, you had some people like, I didn’t really like that ad; I don’t agree with it. And or I don’t I’ll just be frank – I don’t like that certain companies are donating to Gloo and funding some of it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — And I don’t like where their money’s coming from. And I don’t agree with their political stance on this company.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — And so it’s like I get it. And you can go down that rabbit trail with any type of nonprofit. You can go down that rabbit trail with any type of corporation that’s trying to do good in society. And so I said just look at how it benefits the local church, look at how it benefits the mission of of making disciples. We would never have these conversations with these people. They wouldn’t they wouldn’t give church a chance in million years apart from seeing an ad, sometimes at like one o’clock in the morning…

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — …because they’re discouraged and depressed and they don’t know what to do with their life. And this random ad showed up as they’re scrolling through social media. And now we get to have a conversation with them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good.

Kyle Isabelli — Like we don’t get that we don’t get that if they didn’t see that He Gets Us ad. So let’s, you know, at our church we like to say—and I can’t remember who’s the, if it’s Francis of Assissi or someone else, but—our mantra is in the essentials we want to have unity, in the nonessentials liberty, and in all things love. And so our digitals outreach strategy to reach people in our community to me is a nonnessential.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — So let’s have liberty. Let’s show grace to one another, and in all things let us show love to one another. So that, yes, I I get the point, but the the pros so much outweigh the benefits…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — …and we’re not forsaking the gospel message. We’re not watering down the gospel message. In fact, we’re getting an opportunity to clearly articulate the gospel…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kyle Isabelli — …to these people who are in need.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah. And yeah, that’s very well said. And you know, the other piece I would add to that is, you know, you got to look at the form. These are these are quick spots. They’re, you know, you talk about a Tiktok ad.

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — Like, man, I feel bad for people who are saying, hey we’re going to try to make a thing that’s like in 4 seconds it’s going to get people’s attention. Like good luck with that, dear pastors. I’m like you know you know, could you if you were restricted to ah to a sixty second thing on a Sunday morning ah, how would what would you do with it? You know, how would you do that? And so, you know, I think on balance, all the stuff I’ve seen, I haven’t watched it all but all the stuff I’ve seen and been like, man, that’s clever. It’s interesting it. And it does it it does what it’s supposed to do, which is move people to do exactly what you said is, hey, I’m struggling with my marriage. I’m, you know, I’m I got this issue, this is this is bugging me, and to reach out. And really then the ball’s in our court is to say, hey, we’re going to pick this ball up and and run with it. So yeah, love that. This has been fantastic. Anything else you want to share just as we wrap up today’s episode?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, once again, Rich, thanks for for having me on. And and I would just once again, encourage pastors and in churches go to Gloo.us G-L-O-O dot U-S and sign up. And become a free partner and start getting connected with people in your community who are hurting, who are in need, who are looking for hope, who are looking for healing. Like you have an opportunity to to take a step forward and reaching more people in community. So don’t waste the opportunity. Yeah.

Rich Birch — So good. Yeah, love it. Well this has been fantastic. Where do we want to send people online to track with the church or with you?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, our church’s website is avenuechristian.com. And then if people want more about me and my family and my life and my journey kyleisabelli.com that’s I-S-A-B-E-L-L-I.

Rich Birch — Love it. This has been fantastic. Thanks for being here today.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, thanks, Rich. Appreciate it.

Faith Forward: Fr. Peter Wojcik on Strategies for Engaging Millennials, Gen Z, & Gen Alpha in the Church

Rich Birch — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today we are joined by Father Peter Wojcik, pastor at Saint Clement Parish in Chicago.

Do you struggle to engage Gen Z in your church? Do you want to invite younger generations into ministry, but aren’t sure where to start? Saint Clement is a dynamic Catholic community in the Archdiocese of Chicago which is having an amazing impact on its community. Listen in as Father Peter shares the unique approach of the 125-year-old church as they engage younger generations.

Get to know Gen Z. // Reaching out to different generations has its challenges. Despite their differences, both Millennials and Gen Z have a longing for spirituality, community, and to contribute to the common good. However, unlike Millennials, Gen Z didn’t refuse to be part of the church. Rather they never had the chance to be part of the church because their parents never brought them. Recognize that Gen Z doesn’t care what church they go to as long as you listen to them, provide opportunities to serve, and invite them to come and belong before finding Jesus.
Experiencing God through community. // Along with Millennials, Gen Z is one of the most isolated generations so community and belonging are critical for them. Take a step back and ask yourself are you focusing on your way of doing ministry and your preferences, or the preferences of Gen Z and what Jesus wants us to do with younger generations? Keep learning about younger generations and how to create as many openings for them to experience God through community as possible.
A place of belonging. // To engage the younger generation, Saint Clement has implemented strategies that focus on creating an environment on the church campus that is inviting, full of life and important to a lot of people. They are also passionate about belonging, and have signs everywhere that invite people in. As people explore Saint Clement, they are also invited to engage in conversations about identity and purpose which are relatively foreign to young people today.
Identity and purpose. // Part of the way Saint Clement invites people into the conversation is by engaging them about themselves before talking about Jesus. In July they hold a special program called Theology on Tap, a four-week lecture series for young adults where they enjoy beer and pizza and hear from a guest speaker, in this case, about purpose. They don’t have to become a part of the church at this point; they can simply come for the program to discover more about themselves and to meet other young people. As a follow-up, the parish then offers a three-week course developed by Alpha that’s called Ever Wonder? which helps create a place for people to have comfortable conversations about identity and purpose. It includes a 15 minute video and 30 minutes of discussion in a small group context. These community-based opportunities lead into Saint Clement’s fall programming which includes Alpha.
Create space for young leaders. // Father Peter shares that over 90% of their leaders at Saint Clement are under 35. These vibrant programs which engage hundreds of young adults were birthed out of a small group of young people who were invited to minister to their peers. If you want more young adults to get involved in your ministry, step back and ask yourself: Do we really need them? Are we going to empower them and really listen to them? Are we going to be okay if not everything will be perfect and they make mistakes? Create that space for them to learn and grow as leaders in your church. Let them know that they are needed even if everything doesn’t work out as planned.
Look into what makes disciples. // When people are ready to grow in their faith, Saint Clement offers Alpha Bible courses, catechism classes, and also uses The Chosen series as a tool to help people learn more about Jesus and the characteristics of discipleship. During this time they watch an episode of The Chosen and then are divided into small groups for 30 minutes to have a discussion about what shifted in people’s lives because of their interaction with Jesus.

You can find out more about Saint Clement at www.clement.org.

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey everybody welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You know every week we try to bring you a church leader who will both inspire and equip you and today it’s our privilege to have Father Wojcik with us. He is at St Clement Parish; it’s a dynamic Catholic community in the Archdiocese of of Chicago that really strives to accompany people in a transforming relationship with Jesus and his church. They offer support, prayer, community groups, including Alpha which is actually where um, you know Father Peter and I bumped into each other was at the Alpha Leadership Conference in London. And I’m really excited to have you on the show today, Father. Thanks for being here.

Father Peter Wojcik — Oh thank for thank you for having me. And I’m super excited to have this conversation with you.

Rich Birch — Nice. Good. Well fill out the picture. What did I miss about the parish? Kind of give us a sense of the community; talk us through that.

Father Peter Wojcik — Absolutely. So you know Chicago obviously it’s a large city with a lot of different communities serving different markets, if you will, different parts of ah of Chicago from Latino to African American all the way to um, the community that I serve which is in Lake Home Park. So that’s kind of close to downtown Chicago. We are close to the lake in ah in a quiet, ah old neighborhood and it was a historically German community that established church 125 years ago. And it really was an immigrant community that was rather poor and living at what at that point was really a rough part of city. And they had this dream of creating a community in which the children will be safe. They can educate their children and come together in faith. And we’ve been continuing that and somehow by God’s grace over the last, you know, 125 years this community just kept growing and and and attracting different groups of people.

Father Peter Wojcik — And in about 70s and 80s it became kind of a hub for a lot of ah, people who didn’t quite feel connected with the church ,or especially in the Catholic Church who didn’t quite find their space. And um and they loved it here, and they now became our older population, if you will. And ah, but but they really built a foundation around few principles. The first one is that we welcome everyone.

Rich Birch — Right.

Father Peter Wojcik — We we actually do believe that everybody has the right to come to Jesus and and and that’s how the faith and conversion journey starts is by experiencing his love and mercy. So they they were very they were really passionate about making sure we do that. The second thing was you know inclusivity, knowing that that everyone not only was invited to be part of it, but everybody was invited to be a leader. And so I think the diversity of our leaders was really important.

Father Peter Wojcik — The third one was really empowerment. You know, ah one of my predecessors, Father Fahey, was just a brilliant man when it came to just allowing people to do new things. And when I hear the stories of this community, it was at that time that they really try some very new methods. I mean this was one of the first communities in a Catholic Church here in Chicago that constituted the lay council of people…

Rich Birch — Okay.

Father Peter Wojcik — …that helped the pastor actually to make all the decisions and so forth.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Father Peter Wojcik — So there were a lot of things that they started doing early on. And so my job now as a pastor is to make sure we don’t screw it up and we keep doing this.

Rich Birch — I love it. How long have you been at the at St Clement?

Father Peter Wojcik — So I’ve been a pastor here this is my third year…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — …running the place. And but eleventh eleventh year of living here.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Father Peter Wojcik — I I moved here eleven years ago so I had kind of a really great benefit of living in in the parish and helping here on the weekends as I work in the Archdiocese. And that three years ago I transitioned into…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — …serving here full time.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well you know, Father Peter, there there was a bunch that I heard you talk about at the conference that that grabbed my attention and, you know, I was, you know, really struck again that, you know, wow, like all churches may look different. We might have, you know, slightly different approaches to our worship experience or whatever that is, but man, we’re struggling with the similar things. You know, we’re trying we’re trying to figure out how we can point people to Jesus. What does that look like in our context? And and and one of the things that that struck me was particularly your church’s focus on ah, next generation – reaching out to young people. Can you tell us a little bit of that story? What’s what’s happened there over these last few years?

Father Peter Wojcik — Well first and foremost I think there is a distinct difference between Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I think not all the young people are the same…

Rich Birch — Yess.

Father Peter Wojcik — …and you got to kind of step back and recognize it first as a church leader and say well which which which which group do I have? You know, what are the Millennials in my community? What are the Gen Zs? What what is Gen Alpha, the youngest generation? And ah you know and and kind of figure out first those those those groups. You know, I I would summarize them um in a very simple way and it’s a very generic way. So there’s probably more expansive ways to do it.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — But but but but in many ways I think um Millennials, by and large, are post-christian generation in least in the United States, at least in the cities like Chicago. They chose not to be part of organized religion.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — They don’t see organized religion as a pathway in many ways to experience God. They experience God in in different ways, if they entertain that thought. and so there’s this hardship of breaking through all those shelves, if you will, of why not to engage with God, specifically throughout organized religions. That’s one approach, and we try that; we we keep going at it.

Father Peter Wojcik — But but with Millennial ah with Gen Z is a little bit different because I would really talk about them as pre-Christian generation. They they were raised by people my age. They are not um, they’re not really deeply religious by any stretch, but they are longing for spirituality. They are longing to be recognized. They’re longing to contribute to a common good. They want to do good things. They actually do like the sense of community and belonging. They are the most isolated generation together with millennials that we know of. And so there is this natural longing. And unlike millennials they didn’t refuse to be part of the church; they never had a chance to be part of the church.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — Their parents never brought them to church. So when you start with them and you work with them you have to recognize that as a starting point they actually don’t care what church they go to as long as you offer belonging, as long as you listen to them, as long as there’s opportunity for them to actually serve bigger community. And then that you really authentically want them to move in the right direction, which for us Christian leaders is a direction toward Jesus, right? If we actually do it in ah in an organized and thoughtful way I think there is a great opportunity for us to engage that generation.

Father Peter Wojcik — And so that really has been our story here at St Clement, you know. Because it’s Lincoln Park we have this incredible number of Gen Zs around, young people who are coming off college or year two years post college are in our neighborhood. And you know we we just simply keep saying, come and belong. Just try belonging before you try faith, before you try your belief in Jesus, just come and try belonging.

Father Peter Wojcik — You know, Alpha became such a big tool for us because we’ve seen the consequences of it. We’ve seen people coming and kind of just strolling in um, you know because they saw signs, or our welcomers were outside welcoming people to come to Alpha, and they would talk to people passing by and they said what what are you doing? And they’re like well we we run this course and they said I’m not Christian but I can come. And so every course we run we got people actually from the sidewalk in…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s amazing.

Father Peter Wojcik — …because they were just kind of interested. Now I would never do that, I am a huge introvert. You know, I’m in my 40s; there’s no way I would go to it.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah I get it.

Father Peter Wojcik — But that’s the difference and you have to pay attention. Just because you as a leader wouldn’t do it…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — …that doesn’t mean that Gen Z won’t do it. It’s not about your preferences. It’s about them and their preferences. And I think that’s what’s so important is to step back as Christian leaders and ask ourselves, you know, are we focusing on our way of doing ministry? Are we focusing on what Jesus wants to do with that generation, and try to keep learning about that generation. How to create as many openings for them to experience God through community as possible.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I love this idea of you know, hey we’re asking we’re inviting Gen Z to really—and you didn’t quite say it like this but so correct me if I’m if I’m wrong—but it’s like hey, we we’re inviting you to belong before you believe. And I think there was a previous generation, right, where it was the other way around. It was like you’ve got to believe these things first before we’ll let you in the building. I just I think that’s great. What what else how else have you done that as ah as a church, as a communit,y to try to create an inviting place, create an inviting culture where people can belong, where those Gen Z folks can can be a part of the community?

Father Peter Wojcik — We’ve we’ve done number of things that were pretty systematic and we hold ourselves accountable to those forces. You know, just the outside appearance of the place. You you might think it’s not important but actually it is. If you know if you worship space in our, you know, we have a historic church. If the church looking from um, outside inside looks dead, if there’s, you know, if our dress is dead and there’s no flowers and so forth, what it shows is that it’s a place that is actually not important to anybody…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — …that nobody cares about that place. So first strategy we had is our campus looks great. And it doesn’t just look great for the sake of the campus. It looks like a place that is very important to a lot of people. That’s one.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s gold.

Father Peter Wojcik — Second second thing that we’ve done is we have signs all over the place to simply say, you know, everyone is invited, we are passionate about belonging, and we want to invite you into to be part of the conversation, right? So before, again, um I think that was so important with what you said, before we jump into um conversation about Jesus we start a conversation about themselves, right?

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Father Peter Wojcik — What’s your purpose, your identity, who who you are.

Rich Birch — Love that.

Father Peter Wojcik — And and and listening to them first. Third one is we, especially around summer, we have a lot of summer opportunities here in Chicago, we develop something we call Theology on Tap which is really kind of a beer evening, and so we have pizza and beer and wine, and we invite young people to come for four weeks in a row – in our case, it’s Tuesdays in July. And basically we say, hey come, we’ll have a big party, and then we have a speaker. And this year our topic of those four weeks is purpose. Um, how to find purpose. And 70% of young adults don’t know their purpose is.

Father Peter Wojcik — So this is one way in which we want to help them. Whether they choose to be part of our congregation or not, we kind of don’t care. We feel like as the disciples of Jesus we are co- responsible each other to have good lives anyway. And so our way to do it is to simply help young people to reflect on how to find purpose and how to discover purpose for themselves. So we’ll spend four weeks. Out of that, so so we usually get somewhere between um, a 190 to 300 people…

Rich Birch — That’s amazing. That’s amazing. That’s incredible.

Father Peter Wojcik — …an evening [inaudbible]. And that’s a nice way of introducing them, helping them to meet other young adults, especially we focused on new people in the city, right? Trying to invite them to participate so we push it as much as we can through social media and and other channels. And then as ah as a follow-up to it in August we have a three week course that actually Alpha developed um, that it’s called Ever Wonder. And it really is developed for that generation for Gen Zs, and it’s belonging, purpose, and identity. And so it’s very similar to Alpha. You come, you watch a video for 15 minutes—it’s very short video—and then you have a 30 minute small group conversation. And again we’ll do it outside and and it’s just a way for people to get more comfortable talking about what is in their hearts with other people. Because what’s interesting is the younger generation folks that are great at technology. They’re not great at talking about themselves with other people.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — And so we create a space for them to really have comfortable conversations. And that really leads to our fall programming. So we we have four Alpha for people who want to you know, engage in exploration of faith. We have we have our Lydia course, you know, taken from at the Acts so specifically for professional women. It’s it’s it’s a way for professional women to grow in community. We have about 600 women in that group.

Rich Birch — That’s incredible.

Father Peter Wojcik — And then and then the last one is the men’s executive speaker series and again and kind of will continue this topic of finding purpose as as men and in leadership. And so so there’s pathways in which we try to build on the sense of belonging, and welcome, and keep inviting people to return, but also keep inviting them to bring friends because it’s an easy way to get engaged.

Rich Birch — There’s so much there – that was like a master class. I love that. I love the the intentionality. I love the, hey, we’re kind of building through the summer. I love the idea of the church as a social platform. Like I think that is a powerful idea that I think um, you know, I think so we we may forget about that in in a lot of our churches that something like, you know, Theology on Tap—know a number of churches to do things like that—that that obviously there’s a lot going on there, but a part of that is actually just providing a way for for people to connect. And then I love how you’re kind of weaving purpose through all of those to kind of lead people from one, you know, to the next. How did this start though? Like so you know that’s a tremendous tremendous amount of momentum that’s already begun begun. There has it just always been the case? I love the history, the fact that, you know, St Clement has been an innovative parish, has been a kind of church that that is trying new things. Was there any innovation that kind of got this ball rolling, that ended up saying you know hey we’ve kind of been in an inflection point to reach more…

Father Peter Wojcik — Sure.

Rich Birch — …you know, younger generation?

Father Peter Wojcik — I think COVID in many cases accelerated the need because you’ve been reading so much [inaudible] about how high was the level of isolation. And ah and loneliness in especially among young adults. And the surgeon general here in the United States just published study on isolation. And it was a striking thing. He said he said in it, you know, um, being isolated equals, healthwise, to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s, wasn’t that crazy? That was unbelievable. And I saw that. Yeah, that’s unbelievable.

Father Peter Wojcik — Isn’t that something? Like that that really is the impact loneliness have on your heart and your life.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — And we felt really passionate to say, listen we we are going to do anything we can to keep saying you are welcome. We want you to be part of the community. And we want to meet you whatever you are. And so part of um that that really was was the beginning of it. And second thing is we we really engage a small group of young adults—I would say about 30 of them—and we really started a listening to them, talking with them, and praying with them.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — And we said what would it look like for you to minister to to other young adults, right? And and that group from 20 grew to about 120 young leaders now which is doing incredible amount of work every week. And so you can see how now they they’re shifted right from being customers of services, which really struggle in the Catholic Church – a lot of people come and they, you know, they kind of treat the church as a provider of services. So they come when they want a service and there will be a customer and then when they don’t need the service they’re out, right? Versus then being part of the community that develops and changes, and and fosters a spiritual life. And so that was our big goal and young adults is to move them from what the culture teaches them they are, which is customers, to really being kind of collaborators in bringing mission together. And it was incredible to watch that shift early on about two, three years ago when they really started driving, you know, first courses, Alpha, book clubs, all the stuff that they fought was relevant for young people their age. And now they they really are driving and building more courses around it…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — …and you know after Alpha we have 3 different choices people can choose from um, as as to engage more in faith, for more in community. And the beauty of it is that at this point I would say at least 90% of all our leaders are younger than thirty-five.

Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. That’s incredible, Like that’s very unique. That’s ah, you know, there’s lots of churches that would love that, but haven’t been able to engage at that level. That’s incredible.

Father Peter Wojcik — Well I think it’s it’s really empowering people and calling them to it. I really believe every church can do it but where you have to step back is to say, Okay, do do we really need them? Are we going to empower them and really listen to them?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — And third are we going to be okay with the fact that not everything will be perfect, that they will make mistakes? They’re young adults in their 20s. There are some things they will do really well and there are some things they won’t do well at all.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — But that’s part of the collective learning. And if you don’t create that space for them to learn how to do ministry better if you only want to keep rescuing them, and fixing, and improving, then what happens is they get discouraged and they say, well you don’t need us.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow. That’s good. I was going to ask that – was there in that listening process or maybe as you’ve been launching, was there either like a surprise that you’re like, I wouldn’t have naturally thought or I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion that they kind of they tilted the ministry towards. Or is there been like a a stubbed tone moment that’s been like ooh maybe it didn’t go quite as well as we were thinking it would.

Father Peter Wojcik — Ah, there there were a number of those moments We we actually just recently served as some of our leaders specifically as we are working on our strategic plan. And ah and we were able to dig into some of the data and it shows a great difference between how young adult perceive faith, religion, and the role of the church versus other generations. I’ll give you a few examples.

Father Peter Wojcik — So one of the example was to um, propose some of our values that they think are very important to our community. And so everybody over 50 as one of the top five values selected ah “progressive”. None of the young adults selected “progressive”.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Huh.

Father Peter Wojcik — Um, and it was very interesting. Because again and and then we dig in into conversation with young adults and we said, why was that? And they said listen, the world as we live in is crazy enough. We don’t want now the church to become equally crazy. We actually come here so we find some enduring presence of God. So we find connection to a bigger history. So we find here some connectivity and deeper sense of belonging to something that is tradition-driven and that is 2000 years old…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Father Peter Wojcik — …versus three months old. Like we are just done with trends that change every three months.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Father Peter Wojcik — And so that is a very large driving, I think, energy for young adults is they’re really not attracted by flashy new technologies because that’s what they have on their phones every single day. What they’re looking for is really a thoughtful space when they can come and really have a conversation about things that don’t change. Because those are the things you can build your lives around. Not the things that change every single year because those are so fleeting that they’re just tired of it. So so we’ve learned that that, you know, what we have to do with young adults is we have to lead with with really a little bit more teaching and and leading them into understanding why we do certain things and that there is a meaning in all of it. And as they praise the meaning as they unpack some of those topics and conversations, it seems like they’re very willing to invite other people.

Father Peter Wojcik — The other thing that was just blew my mind is the fact that for, I think, Gen Zs and Gen Alpha now, religion is not private. In United States religion has been private for ever and ever.

Rich Birch — Yeah, true. Yep.

Father Peter Wojcik — But the problem is technology, right, took all the privacy away from things that were always private. Kitchen was private. There was never a doorway kitchen.

Rich Birch — That’s a good insight.

Father Peter Wojcik — Now kitchen concepts the kitchens are all open.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — Anybody who comes here your house sees your kitchen first. That was private thirty years ago.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — What you eat was private. Now it’s, you know, how your closet looked like was private.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — Now everybody has, you know, videos in their closets with their clothes. So all the things that traditionally were private are not private anymore.

Rich Birch — That’s true. Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — That is the opportunity for the church to say, listen your kitchen is not private so isn’t your religion. Your religion actually is pretty up there in a public square. And so why don’t we engage in this conversation in ah in a much more public way. And I think Gen Zs are actually not afraid to do it. We see it with Alpha. They keep inviting their non-churchgoing friends with no problem the way that I would really hesitate, and they don’t.

Rich Birch — That’s interesting. I love that. That’s so there’s some fascinating insights there, you know, that I’ve that resonates with some of the the work we’ve done and then some of the research we’ve done and stuff you know I’ve seen with the churches I, you know, work with, particularly you know this whole invite culture thing is a massive deal. You know the difference and we, so we say in our circles, you know, the difference between a plateaued or or stuck church and a growing church is growing churches train, equip, and mobilize, their or motivate, their people to invite their friends. That they you know they they don’t just leave that the chance. They try to find they try to do things and frame things in a way that makes it easy for them to invite. Um and it sounds like you’re seeing that definitely with Alpha and other aspects of your ministry. Maybe talk more about that. What is what does that look like for your for your church. You know, how you know how are you cultivating that kind of culture? Is there what what are you doing to try to encourage you know Gen Z or Gen Alpha to to invite?

Father Peter Wojcik — Well in order for them to invite they have to be comfortable that the places they invite people will be embracing them as they are, and will really focus on listening and respecting their perspectives, right? Where people won’t invite people is to places where they think they will be put down or disrespected or somebody would be unkind to them and so forth. And so I think um, you know, in ah in a Catholic Church from the tradition I’m coming from part of our um struggle always was that we had a lot of programming that was very deep theologically and rooted in our tradition. And therefore if you were deep theologically you had a lot of options to participate and deepen your faith. But if you didn’t, there was really no starting place for you, right? There was just no easy entry point. And so um I kind of use the analogy of the pool and I would say, you know, if you don’t have somebody who knows how to swim they would never jump into ten foot pool because that’s ten feet deep they would just drown. But if there is ah you know ten inches of water, they would put their their feet in it. And I think that’s what happens with the churches. The the churches have to have some really shallow entry opportunities that are very important for community creation, for belonging, for comfort that will keep leading people deeper and deeper and deeper into sense of belonging.

Father Peter Wojcik — And for us we kind of discovered through our own trial of an error way of doing things is that basically people are there just kind of three basic entry points for for us here. One is alpha; that’s our biggest one. Second one is the specifically around women and men ministry, just because our spirituality is so different. And what we found is that when the men are alone, they share much more freely.

Rich Birch — Right.

Father Peter Wojcik — And also that the professional women really appreciate a place where they are not compared to professional men. They just are being focus on their own and and appreciate that for who they are. And so so so those are kind of, this is one one place is Alpha. Second would be kind of those gender based ministries that that also are social, the social element, there’s community element, and there’s small group element to it.

Father Peter Wojcik — And the third one is service, right? That that we do actually a lot of service here, a lot of opportunities. But we, out of service, try to invite people into engagement in the community. So we do some kind of service every single week…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — …around St Clement or in one of our partner organizations. And we just keep inviting people to engage in that. Or engage in sports. We do a lot of open gym, and a lot of sports. And so that’s another way for people to jump in. So it’s social or service.

Rich Birch — Yeah…

Father Peter Wojcik — And what we discover is that once people get into one of those basic ways of engaging and out of that we can invite them to a deeper kind of sense of belonging. And and what we recognize is that, you know, when when people go through this first step, usually what they have kind of three different desires that we try to meet. One is they really want to learn more about the word of God, scripture. So we have we always after Alpha offer bible courses as a way for people to actually learn more about ah, the word of God.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Father Peter Wojcik — Second is we come to recognize that people really want to do more learning about Jesus. And so we use The Chosen series. We design a curriculum around it and and it’s called Following Jesus and so we we kind of look at characteristics of discipleship.

Father Peter Wojcik — And the third one we specifically look, you know, in in our own tradition around kind of some principles of Catholicism, of sacraments and stuff for people who really want to develop more of an understanding of who we are as a church. And so it seems like we we highly encourage, after the entry points, if you will, people will stay together as a small group as much as possible. And I think right now about 70% of our Alpha groups actually stay together for the next offering.

Rich Birch — Oh wow. That’s amazing. I love that. I love the I heard you mention The Chosen um, you know what you do there. Can you unpack that a little bit more because I that’s a really innovative idea and, you know, I seem that would seem like a great kind of next step out of Alpha for sure. Talk to us a little bit more about that.

Father Peter Wojcik — Well we, you know, everybody and when Chosen, came up everybody love Chosen.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s unbelievable. Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — And and talk about it a lot. And we thought, well why don’t we use it the same way, as a tool we use Alpha. And so we we kind of precisely the same thing. We, it starts, you know, we welcome people. We have hospitality – for our evening group we have dinner. For morning group we have breakfast. Then they watch the episode of Chosen. And then we divide them into small groups for 30 minutes and they have a discussion. And as Alpha is an entry to ah Christianity, Chosen we we treat Chosen as an entry to discipleship. So we kind of look at different episodes, and people’s interaction with Jesus and we say okay, what shifted in people’s lives because of their interaction with Jesus? What changes in the life of the disciple? And then therefore what should change in our lives once we encounter Jesus? So it becomes more of a discipleship course when we are invited not only to observe what happened to other other lives and and you know people who lived in the time of Jesus, but also what would do this, you know how our lives will shift because of our encounter with Jesus today.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. That’s so I’m like probably bad because I’m like cynical of so much Christian media. I’m like it’s just all so terrible. And so when The Chosen came out I was like I was a latecomer to that; I was like dragged into it. But I find it so compelling. It is so it just, you know, sucks me in and and it sends me back to scripture, and sends me back to my relationship with Jesus. And you know, I find it I get moved emotionally when I watch it. That’s what a cool cool idea. I just think that’s that’s fantastic.

Rich Birch — Um, can you talk a little bit about the community service thing. That’s a common trait we see in in lots of growing churches is they’re not the kind of place… I think there’s this common notion that which is not true the stereotype of like a growing church is the kind of place that’s like they’re just all about themselves or inward focus. They’re, you know, they’re just it’s just trying to gather people in a box somewhere. That’s not the case. They’re actually places that are that are moving people to actually serve. Talk to us maybe just unpack that a little bit. What does that look like for you guys?

Father Peter Wojcik — Absolutely. So so you know what we we actually seriously try to live out Matthew 28. I think the Great Commission is not only go and make disciples by proclaiming Jesus Christ – that is extremely important and we try to do it every day. But also by ah, really helping people to recognize how Jesus cares for them.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — And it’s very you know when you go to shelters when you go to um, serve the homeless, before you talk to to them about Jesus you you have to kind of ask them simple questions. You know, do you need the doctor? Do you need help? How how are you feeling?

Father Peter Wojcik — And all those basic questions that that that Jesus will ask first before he tells them about other. We have examples of it in the scripture. And so so I think Jesus modeled all of that for…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — …all of that for us. And so I think that’s what we try to do we. We do believe that in order to grow, we always have to be outward focused, that that…

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — …the only reason why we form disciples, why we lead them into transformation transformation in Jesus is so then they can help others to encounter the same the same gift. And it it is exercise in generosity. And so St Clement was very blessed to partner with other Christian churches about thirty years ago to establish a Lincoln Park community shelter. And we’ve been one of the partner organizations that started that organization and we’ve been supporting it ever since. So we have groups that do meals and help in the shelter. We have legal clinic that helps refugee um communities. We partner with Catholic charities and and sponsoring refugee families, and so we have meals. Right now we have a whole train meals that delivers meals to folks in in our police stations where the immigrants are leaving really…

Rich Birch — Okay.

Father Peter Wojcik — …to cross the border and were brought here on the buses, and now they have no places to go. And so so there’s many ways in which every day young people ah can engage in in really very practical and necessary service. And then here on our campus every Friday morning. We welcome our homeless neighbors for hospitality for breakfast, and then we have lunches for them. And and again it’s it’s, you know, because we have a Catholic school, it’s a great way for our young kids in the school. We have our middle school kids not only make sandwiches, but I also serve breakfast or homeless friends and so forth. And so it’s a way really for community to say listen, that’s what discipleship is. You come, you get to know Jesus, you worship Jesus, the worship transforms your heart, and you cannot help but you overflow with generosity. And you have to, you have to recognize that generosity toward other people, especially those who are less fortunate than you are, if you are a disciple of Jesus.

Rich Birch — Love it. This has been so fantastic, Father Peter. I really appreciate your generosity of being with us today. Um is there anything else you’d like to share just as we kind of wrap up today’s episode?

Father Peter Wojcik — You know we we always love to serve. So if there’s people who kind of listen to it and say, I’m intrigued and it makes absolutely no sense to me. Well welcome to my cloud. That’s what my teams does every single day when I tell them something. They said it sounds okay, we don’t know what you mean. Um…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — But that’s why that’s why we have a great team. So if if anyone, you know, needs support or or kind of unpacking, just reach out to us, we’ll be happy to walk you through it. But but I just I really believe that the revival is happening, that the holy awakening a church to a new chapter, leading us to 2033. And and I do believe that there is this outpouring of the Holy Spirit that is fresh, that is new, that is really renewing the church. And and I just hope we we are humble enough to recognize it, um interested enough to enter into it, and trusting enough follow the movement of the Holy Spirit. And I think it’s for the whole church. That’s the beauty of it.

Rich Birch — So good. Well, where do we want to send people online, Father, if they want to track with you, track with the church, where where do we want to send them?

Father Peter Wojcik — So we just visit clement.org is our website. We we have you know, social media. You can follow us on our social media. It’s @chicagopriest – I don’t know how ah in the world I got that one…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s amazing.

Father Peter Wojcik — …but I was I guess early in the market. Ah, and and then our website clement.org, there’s a lot of information, you can pull our information, reach out to us. We love to help anybody who needs help.

Rich Birch — Thank you so much, sir, I really appreciate you being on today. Thank you for your time.

Father Peter Wojcik — Well thanks for having me.

From Struggle to Success: Evan Courtney on Revitalizing a Church Campus Amidst Challenges

Rich Birch — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining us for the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Evan Courtney, the Executive Pastor at The Fields Church in central Illinois.

Have you ever experienced decline in your church or felt like everything was going wrong? Don’t miss this encouraging conversation as Evan testifies to the power of perseverance, overcoming obstacles that lead to new opportunities, and remaining faithful to God’s call.

The launch and decline. // When they launched their second campus, The Fields Church wanted the attendance at that location to be over 200, but that didn’t happen. They struggled to create an engaging Sunday experience and lacked strong leadership for the worship team. Then when COVID hit, they then lost their rental space. By the time the campus had found a temporary place to meet on Sunday nights, attendance had dwindled to 40 people who were essentially the volunteers handling the portable campus setup.
Finding leadership and a facility. // One of the things The Fields needed to put the campus on the right track was strong leadership to infuse their culture and DNA. Evan stepped in as campus pastor for eight months to be a consistent presence and help the campus move forward. Another thing the church needed was a facility that let them get back to meeting together on Sunday mornings.
Adjusting expectations. // It was still during the pandemic when The Fields began looking for a new location for their second campus. The expectations for finding a facility were a lot lower than the original launch of the multisite location. They no longer focused on needing a parking lot of a certain size or a certain amount of seating. Instead they focused simply on finding a building in which they could meet that had the minimum amount of space they needed for their Sunday morning service. Eventually they found an office building on a back road and converted it into a meeting space in about a week.
Relaunching the second campus. // Even though their second campus was on the verge of shutting down, the core group of people attending were committed to seeing the location succeed. They focused on inviting new people and saw growth from 40 to 200 people within a few months. Their growth was not due to any special strategies or magic bullet. They simply showed up, had services, and continued their regular activities in addition to training and motivating their members to invite their friends.
Breakthrough for the second campus. // During the pandemic, another local church approached The Fields about merging. After eight months of conversations, they decided to join forces. The merger brought in more people and a facility located on a busy street. As a result, their second campus saw significant growth, with 400 people attending Easter services and an average of over 200 people on Sundays.
Determine what you need in a campus pastor. // It’s hard to hire someone from a highly metropolitan area to move to a highly rural area, or vice versa. The Fields Church decided to hire someone from within rather than seek someone from outside the area. Campus pastors need to embody the mission of their church, have a heart for the community, and understand the culture and life in an area.
Three limiting factors. // As they look to the future, there are three limiting factors to growth that The Fields Church considers: Will the auditorium space, kids’ space, or parking at their current locations limit future growth? What would a launch and services in a new community look like for a third location?

You can find out more about The Fields Church at www.thefields.church.

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, I am so glad that you have tuned in today. Ah you know every week we try to bring you a leader who will inspire and equip you and today I’m super excited to have my friend, Evan Courtney, with us. He is executive pastor at a church that you should be tracking with. It’s called The Fields Church. Started nearly 100 years ago, it’s a multi-site church with two campuses in Central Illinois, plus church online. They really have a desire to be influential in Coles County, the county they’re in, also across all of Central Illinois, and then eventually be a valuable resources for other rural countries across the midwest or other other rural churches across the midwest. And they’re just fantastic people. Evan, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here today.

Evan Courtney — Hey thank you, Rich. I appreciate the resources that you always provide to other churches and inspiration that you’ve given us over the years.

Rich Birch — I, yeah, this is a fun one. I was I was joking with Evan ahead ahead of time because like we actually know each other where sometimes I have to like pretend like I know people on the podcast, but Evan and I actually know each other and have been journeying together for a while, and I wanted to bring this story to you and you’re going to you’re going to love it today.

Rich Birch — But, why don’t you fill out the picture? Kind of tell us a bit more about The Fields, kind of you know what did I miss there as we kind of got this thing rolling today?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we are, like you said, we’re 100 year old church that probably for about 20 years all throughout the 80s and 90s was us was really kind of ah stagnant in attendance. So we averaged ah an attendance of about 150 for about 20 years.

Evan Courtney — Um, that wasn’t necessarily negative. What happened was leadership came in and was able to kind of clean and straighten up and kind of balance some things out, and kind of outlast some people. And so that was all that was all really healthy. Um, and so actually our lead pastor now, that was his father-in-law was here for 20 years. And then 2008 transitioned, he retired which was really good during that season. He realized that he was kind of at the cusp of, you know what, maybe he was downward trending as a leader. And so said instead of taking it, continuing to lead the organization down, he’s like you know what? I think I’m going to go ahead and pass this off.

Evan Courtney — And so we passed it off to our new lead pastor ,Travis Spencer. And since 2008 we took about two or three years to kind of look at our schedule and look at what the rhythm of the things that we were doing and we transitioned from being a church of ministries, of events, and we transitioned to being a church of a pathway a discipleship pathway that took about 2 years to do. And during that time attendance flat, which was okay, um, for us. And then coming out of that couple years you know 2010, since then we’ve just seen incremental, not explosive growth, but over the last thirteen years we’ve seen 5, 8, 10% growth every single year.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s kind of where we have been.

Rich Birch — Love it. And this is the kind of story I love because, you know, that kind of growth over an extended period of time, man, it really starts to snowball eventually. And it is um I don’t want to say easier but it is um, you know, it maybe is easier to get your hands around from a let’s serve people and integrate them. If all of those people, if you had 500 people all show up in one year, most churches would would you know wouldn’t be able to handle it. And so the fact that over these years you’ve seen that growth is is pretty amazing. Now we we connected a couple years ago when you guys were thinking about going multisite and ultimately that landed in ah The Fields launching a campus at another ah community ah, just kind of about the year before covid. Tell me that story, what, you know, kind of talk through what was the launch like and all that.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we actually weren’t even thinking about going into multisite. We were thinking about building a bigger building. Because we are running out of space and in the middle of conversations with the design build company, like the ones that we’re paying to build us million dollar building, they said to us, well have you guys, instead of building a building, if you want to reach people wouldn’t it be less expensive to just plant another location next to this neighboring community?

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And it was interesting because it was coming from it as they essentially lost themselves business…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Evan Courtney — …by telling us, you don’t need to build million dollar building, you need to just launch into this other community.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And for us what it is there’s this community next to us that’s ten miles away. And so we launched the second location ten miles away. But because we’re in rural context, it’s a rival community. And so people from one community don’t travel to the other community, whether it’s sports, restaurants, they don’t do it. And so what we saw, we kind of looked at our data and we saw that we had 70 individuals that were attending our location from this other community. But all of those individuals, none of them were born and raised for that other community. They were all transplants. We had nobody coming, nobody serving, nobody giving, that was from, born and raised, in that community. And so that’s what we did was [inaudible] to gather your these people say, hey you know what? Let’s launch a location in your community. We know it’s ten miles away but there’s this invisible line that people aren’t willing to cross. And so we had a little bit of fear of if we launch a church that close, is it just going to take our attendance and just split in half?

Evan Courtney — Um, but what we have seen is that it really just is a whole different group of people.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s pretty amazing.

Evan Courtney — And so is new growth, not just dividing ourselves up.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. So the thing one of the things to underline here, friends, when we’re thinking about multisite is, you know, there’s like the stuff that’s on the map, like you can draw it out and it’s like the physical things. But then there are these like emotional, cultural, social, you know you know, lines on the map that don’t show up that really you only know when you’ve been journeying in a community together ah for a while. And you know there might be opportunity there that’s not that far away. 10 miles is not that far ah, but can be way too far for people to attend church.

Rich Birch — Now I want to kind of fast forward a little bit and um, you know, so the campus launched ah, you know, rah rah, we’re excited for that. But then at some point during kind of, you know, obviously you know we I had the first year anniversary, and then we ended up into covid, and there was like this this kind of sign that, Okay, maybe this isn’t going well. I don’t want to you know that’s me saying that. You know you’re you’re not saying that. But you know you came to the point where like, oh gosh this isn’t… can you describe what were some of the points when you look back and you say, oh this is evidence that maybe maybe things were not working, that you know we were we were struggling more in this this new campus than you would have envisioned. You know, we all do these things and envision them just exploding overnight, but that doesn’t always happen. What were some of those kind of points that brought you to the point where like, okay, this isn’t going well.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we is so when we launch, we didn’t launch at a higher number than we we thought. Like when we launched we wanted to our average attendance to be over 200 kind of be over that cusp. That didn’t happen. We don’t know why. I mean we had huge numbers at launch. But kind of looking back the the weeks and the months after that, one of the pain points that we had was we didn’t have great worship. And we kind of just pushed it out like, hey it’s okay, but really worship hurt us because we were doing video which was already, you know, is a little bit, is a lot different than live teaching. So the engagement’s a little bit different. And then our worship was really bad. We didn’t have a strong kind of a leader taking that. And in honestly a lot of it had to do with we couldn’t find a drummer.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so I just remember we’re piping in drums on a soundtrack…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …and everybody in that room knows…

Rich Birch — You could tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Evan Courtney — …there’s no drums but I can hear the drums. And it just, you know what, it just like the the experiential of the worship was just a very low. And kind of it just it wasn’t a bang of a service every single week. So we knew that was a tension point. And then we were then right when we ran into Covid we lost that space, that the rental space that was at a school, and so we lost that space and now we’re online. And when here where we were out in Illinois, like we were only online for about two months, and then it was starting to ramp back up for us to be able to meet in person. And when we got ready to do that, I think just the amount of energy and the amount of work was going to take more to relaunch to launch.

Evan Courtney — And so what we what happened was we lost some leadership during that transition. And so now we had no facility, um, we had no leader, and so we’re trying to rally who do we have left? Like we didn’t know who we had left because we’re doing online.

Rich Birch — Oh man.

Evan Courtney — And we just and so we called every single church in the community and said, Do you have a timeframe that we could do a service? One out of 40 churches that we called and said, yeah you can use our space…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …on a on a Sunday night. And so we did learn during this time that Sunday night services don’t work when you’re portable. So we were bringing in port… so we had people show up 90 minutes before service, set up portable gear, ran service on video…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …from the morning service that they could have watched online that morning on you know Facebook and Youtube…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Evan Courtney — …and then tear down and so people are getting there at 3:30…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …watching the video message of the person that was actually in the room, the lead pastor was in the room too because he had to help set up.

Rich Birch — Right. Oh gosh. Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And they’re like, why is he not speaking? He’s in the back of the room, I can see him. But we wanted we were just in that rhythm like, Nope we said we were doing video.

Rich Birch — We’re doing this. We’re gonna do it.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s what we learned was like Sunday nights in our community didn’t work. Nobody wanted to be there. We had 40 individuals that were coming to service. And a majority of them were in their dream team their volunteer shirts and we’re like the only people we have is volunteers. So it was bad worship. We were forcing video teaching. And we had a bad time slot. And we we had 40 people.

Rich Birch — Okay, so friends, they’re just a bunch there. Like I think this idea of and sometimes this stuff is is clear in hindsight, understanding what is it that makes your experience, you know, understanding like, you know, we we launch these things and we try like, hey we’re going to try what we can on the music front. And ah but, man, it just didn’t live up ah to that. You know, we’ve got to think really carefully about those things, and sometimes they’re a bigger deal than actually we even know. They’re, you know, we we thought like oh we can make that work and it it doesn’t necessarily.

Rich Birch — So now there would be lots of churches I think at this point that, you know, so you’re down to 40 people, you know, video teaching, we got Travis showing up to set this thing up, mostly volunteers. Um, you know at that point there would be a lot of churches that would say, hey we’re just going to throw in the towel here. Like that’s you know that’s not going to happen. Well, you know friends, the reason why we have this on is obviously because they didn’t throw in the towel, and we continued. So walk us through what were some of what you know the milestones as you came out of covid that you look back on now and say, wow this was a linchpin decision change that led us to where now, friends, and we’ll get to where we’re at today. But things are way better today than than those 40 people. But kind of what were some of those linchpins kind of across the the the months you know after that?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so the big one was leadership. We had to get somebody. We had to get our culture and our DNA back into that into that church, of being online, somebody else’s building, we were losing some of that. So we had to get a leader in there. And I actually jumped in and and let it for about eight months. We just needed somebody on our team that was consistent, a face that they had seen, a voice that they had heard over the years. So that was one was the leadership.

Evan Courtney — The second one is facility. We knew we had to get back to Sunday mornings. And so we had to do whatever it took to get back to Sunday mornings. So the third one was for us to do that, we had to find a facility. And so our expectations of a facility on, for what we called was our relaunch of relaunching this church, the expectations were a lot lower than the launch.

Rich Birch — Interesting.

Evan Courtney — Like the launch we had this we we needed a preschool room, we needed an elementary room, we needed a lobby, we needed an auditorium that at least I had 300 seats. We need to have parking for those, you know, we needed a hundred parking spaces. All of a sudden we just kind of threw that out the door and said, you know, we just need to find a space. If we don’t find a space we’re done.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Evan Courtney — So those are the 3, the 3 main things.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, so on the facility piece, I love that idea of you actually lowered your expectations. You know, I think that’s that’s a keen insight. As you what what kind of did the minimum bar become as you were like okay, we’ve you know we we need to find something. Sunday morning obviously is the primary was you know the primary idea, but was it what else was in that mix of that conversation?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, we we just needed we needed to find us ah somebody that would rent to us during that time of covid. Coming out of covid there wasn’t a lot of spaces. We needed to find an auditorium that it could at least, or a space, that could at least hold a hundred people. A hundred adults.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And then two rooms for kids.

Rich Birch — Okay, that’s amazing…

Evan Courtney — We didn’t care about parking. We could figure that out, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Like most those places are gonna have some sort of parking. And we didn’t we didn’t worry about a lobby.

Rich Birch — Okay, so did you…

Evan Courtney — We thought: adult space, two kids’ spaces.

Rich Birch — Right. And so then did you go back to the 40 churches? What what happened next?

Evan Courtney — No, so what we did is ah we actually we just, somebody caught we we kind of pushed out to our team and said you know what, just pray. Let’s ask God to open places. When we first initially launched ah two years before that we had already looked at all the places that were available. We we knew everything. And so somebody reached out to our team and said, hey what about this office space out on this back road. I just passed it; I saw there’s a “for rent” sign. What do you think? So we showed up to it and it was just an open office. And so we looked at it, walked in, and and they said hey do you want this? And we’re like yeah, there’s nothing else. There was maybe 25 parking spots…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …open office and 2 break rooms. And so we converted that. We took a week and converted it.

Rich Birch — Oh my… turned it around.

Evan Courtney — We took all of our portable stuff.

Rich Birch — Got all [inaudible] paint out in way we went. Yeah.

Evan Courtney — Yep, got to… yeah, got, we it was it paint, and then we had all over our portable gear. We just we just went from portable…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and installed all that stuff as permanent.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so we used spandex to that we were using on hallways to to cover up stuff and we just created hallways out of the spandex. Used all of our portable chairs that we were using in elementary spaces and we just set those up. Um, it just gave us, we had to have a place for the people to go to that said, you know what? This is our church. And we actually ended up in a part of a neighborhood in this community that there wasn’t a church within a mile.

Rich Birch — How interesting.

Evan Courtney — And all of a sudden we put a sign up and people started coming and attending. And we’re like how did you, like how did you hear about us? We’re on this back country road.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And they said, we saw the sign.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow. Wow.

Evan Courtney — That’s it?

Rich Birch — That’s it.

Evan Courtney — And so we started getting people from that neighborhood saved…

Rich Birch — No fancy Facebook campaign. No, you know…

Evan Courtney — No, no. And it was ah it was a marquee sign.

Rich Birch — Oh wow.

Evan Courtney — Right. So I mean I was just sliding the letters in there, a service 10 am…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and then just put our decal up. So.

Rich Birch — Wow. So the but you know part to underline there is I know there are a lot of churches that are portable. You know that this has been a challenging number of years. And I’ve said to multiple churches because they’re like we’ve tried everything we… there is no opportunity. And you know my pushback has been well, if the place you’re renting from today that’s substandard, if they called you tomorrow and said you can’t meet here anymore, you would you would get desperate and figure something out, right? You would figure out some sort of space. But because if you’re in this space that’s kind of almost working, like the Sunday night service was. It’s like it’s working but not really, you’ll just keep rolling until you draw a line in the sand and say no no, we we’re done. We have to find, you know, something else. So so then what happened next from there? So people start to show up. Ah you know things are looking a little you know, better. There’s like an uptick in excitement

Evan Courtney — Right.

Rich Birch — You’re still campus you’re still the campus pastor there. Ah you know what went on next?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, and so a couple of the other things to note real quick about the facility that we had to um, got were hard “yeses” before that became “it didn’t matter” was like ceiling height. It had it it had a nine foot ceiling. It was tile ceiling, and because of that we couldn’t do video anymore.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow.

Evan Courtney — Because you couldn’t get a big enough video screen. And so we flipped to live teaching out of the necessity of this thing is gonna die and we had to get it… It’s kind of like being in the ah ER. Ah, you’re just giving this thing, I see you’re giving this thing all the different hoses – the oxygen, the IV – and so we just said, hey if video is going to hurt this thing, let’s do live.

Evan Courtney — And so we started to do all those. And so what it was was we just Sunday morning continued to do Sunday morning, continue because of now you have your own building and it took work to create things into the building. We just saw an uptick of volunteers because they’re like, hey like they had their blood, and sweat, and their work equity into this building. So now is all of a sudden it became theirs. They became their identity where before they were at this rented school, they were at this borrowed church. All of a sudden it was like there ah an identity of, man, this is our place. And it didn’t matter that it was ah a bad looking building. It was actually the day that we put our sign up, the city called us and said, Evan, you can’t have church there. That’s ah, that’s zoned for high industrial.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And I said, well I didn’t I didn’t have a clue, like we were having this church and the church is dying. So what do you want us to do? And they’re like well you need to go through all this code paper. I’m like great, how long’s that going to last? And they’re like it probably takes three to four months. I’m like, well we’ve gotta meet. And he goes if you guys continue to meet, we’d have to shut you down, but that wouldn’t look good on the city if we shut down a church.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And I said, understood. And so we just continue to push forward…

Rich Birch — Wow Wow. Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and that’s kind of the momentum of people just continue to show. And they because they saw we only had 40 people, our church looked at each other and said if we don’t invite people, we’re done.

Rich Birch — So good.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s what it kind of was it like it was all these new people because they had all of a sudden they felt like like no, no, no, no, we launched this church. We’re not going to give up on this. And so it just began to invite people out of the woodwork.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — And so we saw growth up to 200 people from that Oct…that September when we relaunched with forty, that easter we had 200 people.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — And it was just it was it was I look at it now was it was we did average things over a considerable amount of time and it turned into above average results.

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. What would be some of those average things when you look back in that period that you you know really helped reach people?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so the the average things was like, every parade in our neighborhood or our area that was in our city we got into.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Just so they could see our name. Like that it was we we didn’t do anything spectacular – hay bales, throwing candy out, like nothing spectacular. We did that. Sunday mornings, no matter what, we’re having service. It doesn’t matter if there’s 20 people or 25 people – we’re having these teams, we’re having these monthly meetings. And so we just kind of went back to the grind that we were doing before just all these kind of ah small ah small events that we were doing.

Evan Courtney — We did a you know we do a halloween events that we typically did that was huge, and so we just scaled that back and said what can we do? Same with Christmas and Easter. We had to scale those back. But we just continued to do what we had always done before, and the kind of that just created those results and created those momentums.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. You’re speaking my love language. I know you know that, but you know like we have to just keep we have to keep doing these things. Keep keep pushing our people, you know we we talked about this so many times that churches that grow, they train, they equip, they motivate their people to invite their friends. And a part of that means as church leaders, we’ve got to keep thinking about it. What are we doing? What’s coming up that our people could invite their friends to? And you know all of those kinds of things are you know a piece of the puzzle.

Rich Birch — Okay, so now I know there was a significant “C” change here kind of as you continued. So you’re you know you’re at you know, kind of a weird place with the town. Things are like, okay, you got to get out. What happened next?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so during this whole process of right before Covid and during Covid, a local church had actually reached out to us. They were in the middle of their pastor was retiring and they had conversations with us that they knew that either they were going to have to go and do a pastoral search during the middle of Covid to try to find a pastor…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …to hire a pastor that they wouldn’t really know anything about. Um or they knew there was an opportunity they can merge with The Fields Church who they didn’t like everything about, but they knew everything, you know, they they knew us. And they knew the goods and they knew the bads. And so we were in the middle of covid having this conversation. They knew we were at a weak point too at this office building that we had renovated. And so they kind of but they knew overall the growth of The Fields Church and the excitement and and they wanted kind of really hitch themselves to us and become a part of what we were doing.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And so we went through a timeframe about eight months of conversations with them of them joining into our congregation.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — So you take us just continuing to do the path every single week and meeting, doing the average every single week. Them coming along and saying, you know what, we want to join you. And so a part of that was they had a facility…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …that was across from Walmart, which is the busiest street in town.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evan Courtney — They wanted to gift that to us, plus all of their people, to give those people to us. And so we were already on this high and already riding this momentum, and then they came in added to that. And so both of those things added together just created a greater impact. It just launched us years ahead of where we would be.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. You know, the the thing to underline there that we’ve seen time and again is typically in these you know merger or rebirth scenarios, like with this other church, um, you know they typically have been engaged in some kinds of other activity. They’ve been thinking about something else and this is like in the mix of it, right? And they’re you know they were obviously trying to wrestle through what do we do with and the the lead pastor issue is all is usually ah or is a significant catalyst. It’s like okay, either someone’s retiring or they’d like to retire. Or they, you know, they’ve been looking for a long time and can’t find someone. Um and you know, friends, I’m hoping you’re listening today and you’re like you may be pushing against one of these walls and you can take inspiration from The Fields to say, man, we just maybe we just have to keep going, just keep walking in this in the in the right direction.

Rich Birch — Okay, so bring us up to date today. So you know you end up moving into that location. They end up giving you the building, all of that stuff. So what does it look like today? Here we are you know summer 2023 you know what’s that what’s that campus look like? What’s kind of what’s happening there now?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, absolutely. So they merged with us, joined together. We launched huge with them, remodeled their facility. And so today this past easter we saw 400 people…

Rich Birch — That’s crazy.

Evan Courtney — …came out to easter and we are averaging over 200 people um, on a Sunday which is huge, huge for us…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Evan Courtney — …in the community, probably the second largest church in that community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Evan Courtney — And we’re beginning to see an influx of people that are coming from… so that location to the west of it is where our our our other location is, the location that’s 100 years old. And so on the opposite spectrum, on the east side is all of these people that are coming.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Evan Courtney — And so we’re just seeing an influx of new people, of people getting saved. But we’re not doing anything different. Like there’s no throughout this whole process, Rich, there’s no there’s no magic bullet.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Like there was no oh like we unlock this special thing that nobody else knows about. I think it’s just like we’re showing up. Like we’re we’re showing up and having services, we’re doing Growth Track. We do growth track every single Sunday. You know, if it’s you know if it’s a on Mother’s Day, we’re doing Growth Track if somebody signs up for Growth Track. And where I think we’re doing less and we’re just continuing to do it, and kind of continuing to do our rhythm.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evan Courtney — Um, and so that’s kind of what we’re seeing.

Rich Birch — Now it’s somewhere in there you ended up hiring Campus Pastor Mark – great guy – ah what how did you find that individual? I know I’ve heard you in other contexts like cheer for Mark, man, he’s been just such a critical piece of the puzzle. Talk us through that transition because you you know you listed leadership as number one reason, hey we got to fix that. You stepped in but then eventually we made a more permanent change there.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we’ve had… the the hard thing is we’ve had four campus pastors in the last in the since the launch of the location…

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Evan Courtney — …in the last 3, 3-4 years. Some of that is covid, just you know we jumped in for a little bit. We had another leader that was their first season. And so I think what we’ve learned is that when we hired Pastor Mark, no pastoral experience. Um he had Fields Church experience, had been on staff doing creative ah creative ministries, had done facilities. But what he had was culture. Like he he knew the ins and outs of The Fields Church and loved the ins and outs of The Fields Church. Like he loved everything about The Fields Church. And we’re like well we can… and had the call to pastor, but had not ever been educated that way…

Rich Birch — That’s huge.

Evan Courtney — …or never had gone that season in their life. Had done military and was working at ah, a car dealership. Um, but who was volunteering and serving at The Fields. And we’re like, you know what? There’s something inside of him. He’s got the culture. He’s got the willingness to learn. And so we said, you know what, we can’t, it’s hard to hire somebody outside to move… I mean regardless, it’s hard to hire anybody right now, but to move to the midwest into a community, you know, that’s 2 hours away from any metropolitan area is very difficult. Um, so we were like we’ve got to look internal, hired internal. Um, and we don’t have the culture and the DNA push. Like nobody’s pushing against that of like I really don’t think we should be doing this. It’s more of a sense of like, okay I want to do this. How do I do? That’s a lot easier for us to lead as as executive leaders for somebody trying to push their own kind of agenda that sort of thing.

Rich Birch — Absolutely. Talk us through that um, kind of at a high level when you think about the percentages of… so I hear what you’re saying on the culture piece. Don’t miss that, friends. You know we’ve talked about that in other context that like campus pastors need to, you know, they need to bleed the church. They need to be like wow these people are fully they’re onboard. They love the mission. But then the other piece of this in this case, you know, Charleston’s the name of this community. They need to be Charleston people. They need to have the like kind of vibe of the community. If if you were going to be like 51/49, you know, 51% they need to be like Fields people type people, 49% Charleston type people or the locations you’re in or, you know, how would you kind of grade those two, or is it they just need to be both of those? Talk us through when you think about, you know, this this the kind of intangible side of campus leadership.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so ours we would probably tip more towards the size of that community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Of like they’ve got to they’ve got to have that feel. They’ve got to they’ve got to love living here.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — It’s not a horrible area. But I mean they just, like anywhere, they’ve got to love they want to be able to envision them growing their family and their kids up into this area. If they can’t do that, nothing else is going to work. Like we even when we hire people that’s the first thing is like hey do you feel like you can fit in here? I had an interview once with a guy that was from Houston. And within the first couple minutes we had a conversation like, hey do you think you’d be able to move here and live here? And he asked me this – he goes, would I need to buy a jacket for the winters?

Rich Birch — Ah, yes, you… at least one, at least need least one.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, yeah. And so I’m like you know what, that was our last conversation. I go I don’t think this is this isn’t going to work.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Evan Courtney — It doesn’t matter how great of leader you are…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Evan Courtney — …if if if you’re not able to adapt, or or to know or to feel or to love the place that you’re going to live is, you know, that’s that’s the big piece for us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s a huge deal. And you know I think helping us and our, you know, our people get through those questions and understand that and to have the conviction around, you know, what what is it that makes leaders work in this part of the world. You know, I remember when I was serving in New Jersey, you know, very similar issues. You know, they looked a little different, but the same kind of thing. Man, you’ve got to like this kind of that in that case, it’s like northeast grind, you got to like the, like people here really do think that they’re like the most important people in the world and you kind of can’t fight them on that. Like if you’re from Georgia you can’t be up here and be like, well, you know people up here aren’t as cool as they are in Georgia. That doesn’t work. They’ll get shut down real quickly. And you know the thing is that’s a transferable principle regardless of where we are in the country. Every part of the country has that kind of cultural stuff that we’ve got to be aware of. And every part of the country—and I’ve I’ve joked with you about this before—every part of the country believes that they’re the hardest part of the country to hire people in.

Rich Birch — Like I you know I was with with some friends in Southern California and they were like, this is like really tough place to hire people. I’m like I don’t if yeah, that’s not true. Like you know, there’s lots, every every place has this. We all have this and, you know, I think it is true where where you are you know I’ve been in the communities you’re you’re in, and but it’s also true in lots of places. You know and and we and we sometimes, I think particularly if we’ve been in this community forever, it might be hard for us to get our head around how just how difficult that is.

Rich Birch — Okay, when we think about the future, so you look up over the horizon, either in this campus in Charleston, or future campuses or even in Mattoon, you know, what what what’s the future have for you? What’ll be some of the questions you’re asking, or things you’re thinking about as you look to future campuses, future locations, growth all that kind of stuff?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so growth pinpoints that we’re looking at right now is facility, and becoming a concern. Three limiting factors that we look at: facilities, is is there a limit in our auditorium space? Is there limit in our kids space? And is there a limit in our parking space? And if we have a limit in one of those three, then the rest kind of falls apart. And so that’s one of the things that we’re looking at both of our locations right now is what are what’s limiting us from growth?

Evan Courtney — The second one is is what is this we know how hard it is and difficult it is to do the third location, and the majority people stop at that second, so we’re looking at what does that look like. And for us it is a lot different than us doing the second because the second one we were able to look at this we already had this mass group of people in this inside community and and it was easy to get, you know, 75, 100 people to launch. Now we’re looking at a community next to us and we don’t hardly have anybody.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so we’re having to kind of reframe and think, okay, what does that look like? Does that look like us doing popup services for major holidays? Does that look at us starting small groups? You know does it look at us during outreach events? What does that kind of look like? So those are the two main things is that the facility and then and how do we launch this third location.

Evan Courtney — Because I feel like once we can get that third, the fourth is going to come easier. It’s going the third is going to help our our structure of our leadership and it’s not going to be of us versus them with the two locations, and the smaller and the bigger, but it’s going to kind of change the whole thing.

Rich Birch — I love it. So good. Well there’s… listen, friends, there’s so much we could talk about at The Fields. Um, you know we’ve focused in on this one story but there’s so many other things. I love what you guys do. The pumpkin fest thing I think is amazing. You know I’ve pointed people in that direction. I’m just going to leave that out there, friends – you’ll have to follow them to figure out what you know that’s all about. I think I think that your whole passion for and obviously it’s kind of been in the subtext of this conversation, but passion for these rural communities, I think there’s a lot of people who are wondering the same thing. Like man, there are, you know, none of the name brand big, very large multisite churches are going to plant a church in Charleston. It’s just not going to happen, right? And so the question is who’s going to say, we’ll take that. That’s ah our us. We’ll figure out how to do that. I love that your, you know, doing – there’s lots of stories we could we could tell there. But as we’re wrapping up today, any kind of final you know advice or anything you like to say to people as we wrap up today’s conversation?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so if we as we look at this I think the thing is is to to not give up on really what you feel like called God has called you to do. And that you are gonna run into hurdles; you are gonna run into roadblocks. But if it is God giving you this call, and he’s going to work it out, and you’re gonna be stronger than where you were going to be before. If we wouldn’t have ran into these roadblocks, we wouldn’t have the loss of pastoral staff and leadership, we wouldn’t be where we are today with Pastor Mark, with this merge…

Rich Birch — So true.

Evan Courtney — …or with this building across the street from Walmart. So just continue to to push forward because you’re gonna run into roadblocks and just sometimes you go around them, sometimes you jump over them, sometimes you just just blast through it.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well I mean this has been fantastic. If people want to track along with you or with the church where do we want to send them online?

Evan Courtney — Yep. The easiest place is just to go to the website: thefields.church and then all the socials are on there and you can find out information, email us, all of that information’s there.

Rich Birch — Love it. Really appreciate you being on today’s episode – thanks so much, man.

Evan Courtney — Thank you, sir.

Uniting the Church to Quench the Global Water Crisis: A Conversation with Mike Mantel

Rich Birch — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for tuning into today’s unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Mike Mantel, the CEO of Living Water International. They are a faith-based global humanitarian organization that links arms with churches around the world to serve thirsty communities through access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene.

What if the church of Jesus Christ could end the water crisis as it pursues the great commission? Listen to today’s conversation as Mike explains how.

Working with local churches. // Living Water International (LWI) started as a ministry focused on drilling water wells but soon realized that the involvement of the local church was key to engaging the communities where they were working. Now LWI equips local churches to address the basic needs of their communities, such as access to clean water. The church is the center of decision-making, bringing together the community to address these needs. This involvement not only provides physical resources but also attracts people in the community to the church and the gospel.
WASH program. // Living Water International is currently working in 18 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. In each country they work in they identify a “WASH program area” – WASH is an acronym for Water Access, Sanitation, and Hygiene. These designated areas include about 50,000-100,000 people and are 50-100km across in the lowest income, neediest environments. LWI does a baseline analysis of who is there, how many churches exist, how they engage, what is the community’s water access, how healthy people are, and what is their hygiene. Then LWI invests in this location for 5-7 years with churches so that everyone has clean water, and sanitation and hygiene have been transformed.
Genius of One. // To foster unity and collaboration among churches, Living Water International organizes the “Genius of One” conferences. These conferences bring together churches at the local, district, and national levels, inviting them to work together across racial, economic, urban/rural, tribal, and denominational lines. The goal is to promote unity and reconciliation, emphasizing the prayer of Jesus for believers to be one. Churches come away with a vision for what they might be able to do together for their communities.
Three pillars. // Mike and his team introduce churches in the United States to what churches around the world are accomplishing through WASH. They do that by focusing on three pillars: growing in our knowledge, expanding our experience, and co-investing for impact.
Growing, expanding, and co-investing. // Growing in knowledge includes educating church members about the extent of the water crisis and the impact it has on communities. Expanding our experience is encouraging churches to go on mission trips and engage in hands-on activities related to water and sanitation projects. These experiences open people’s hearts and minds to God’s work and create lasting change. Then the more people invest their minds, space, time, and money in ministries that change the spiritual and physical reality of others, the more we want to experience and learn and invest.
Finding Adventure. // Mike’s book, Thirsting for Living Water: Finding Adventure and Purpose in God’s Redemption Story, started as a personal journey to rediscover God’s presence when Mike found himself in a dark night of the soul. Over time it developed into 12 stories of God’s faithfulness intended to encourage and inspire the reader. The book also serves as a ministry, with all proceeds going towards the work of Living Water International.

You can learn more and connect with Living Water International, as well as pick up Mike’s book, at www.water.cc

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey everybody welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Super excited for today’s conversation – um, this is going to be a great one with my friend Mike Mantel. He is the CEO of an organization called Living Water International. If you don’t know Living Water, they’re a faith-based global humanitarian organization, and they link arms with churches around the world to serve thirsty communities through access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene. You know they really are an incredible organization. I’ve had a chance to travel abroad with them and Mike’s a great guy. We’ve had a chance to interact over the years. Prior to his time at LWI he spent 17 years working for a little organization called World Vision—maybe you’ve heard of them—and nine years in the marketplace. Ah, he’s also authored a recently authored a book that we’re get a chance to talk about today. But Mike, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Mike Mantel — Rich, what a delight – thanks for inviting me on the show, and it was great to see you a couple weeks ago at the XP Conference.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that was such a fun time. We were down there. It was yeah, such a good time XPS. It was so good. Glad to glad to hang out a little bit there too. Why don’t we why don’t you kind of fill in the picture there either your picture, or you know Living Water International. What did I miss? Kind of bring us up to speed.

Mike Mantel — Living Water International has been around for 33 years. The impact that the Lord has made through Living Water and the church has been significant. We believe that about 7.3 million people are drinking safe water today…

Rich Birch — Wow!

Mike Mantel — …have experienced the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we’re currently working in 18 countries. We have about 340 staff, most of which are national staff leading the countries in which they serve. And we got a global team in the United States, centered in Houston Texas, but we got folks around the country.

Rich Birch — Yeah it’s so so cool. This is ah this is a fantastic organization, and like I said I had a chance to travel a number of times actually to some some Living Water projects. And I remember years ago, like one of the things you talk about it, and we want to really drive into that today, is this idea of linking arms with churches, having churches, you know, linking arms with existing churches. And I remember I was on the field, we were in Haiti and I was speaking to one of those national workers, and ah and it was like a dawning moment. And you know this idea this epiphany that struck me they were talking about we were in a very poor community, um an open ah, open sewers which is a you know a polite way to say feces in the streets. Um, you know this a tough community. Um and probably the poorest community one of the poorest communities I’d ever been in. And I remember this worker we were talking about you know, just even the strategy of how Living Water does what you do. And they said something that really struck me. They said, you know, if you you look around here, there’s no one else here. The government is not here. You know, there’s there’s no other infrastructure here. There’s no businesses here. The only people the only kind of organization that’s here is the local church. And so obviously you want to work with the local church because you’re a Christian organization. But even if that wasn’t your aim, man that that is such a there there’s such a strategically important organization to work with. I’d love to unpack that. Help me understand how does, and how has, LWI work with churches ah, on the on the field in the 18 countries that you are currently serving in?

Mike Mantel — Well, it’s been an evolution for us. When we started, like most startup ministries, the organization of Living Water wanted to help people access water in the name of Jesus. It was a is a group of drillers, construction guys, church leaders and they they wanted to drill a water well wherever they could, acquire ah a few resources, some volunteers, some drilling equipment, and then move on to the next place where people desperately needed water.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Mantel — But over the years we discovered that the church of Jesus Christ at that local level preceded us. They ah they were active, engaged in their communities. They they had networks of volunteers. They had a vision to love the the thirsty, to love the hungry. Um, they were honorable. And they would be there after we left.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Mike Mantel — And so we began to say, Wow, you know, the church as a institution. It’s more like ah a network of ah, bodies of believers – that church proceeds, engages, and then succeeds us as as we move. And then we said, you know, what we really need to do as an organization is commit long term to a broader geographical area, and let’s discover who’s in that footprint. You know we discovered churches. We discovered municipal leaders. We discovered other nonprofits. But always at the center of this work was the church. And we said, let’s just invite all the churches to link arms and engage with each other and become visible. And become relevant to address a basic need of that community. And the church showed up.

Rich Birch — Amazing.

Mike Mantel — It began to organize its brothers and sisters and other churches. It began to link with community leaders. It it it it went to training ah sessions to learn about church envisioning. How do you communicate the gospel through simple stories? What sanitation and hygiene are all about and what’s their roots in the gospels and in the bible as a whole? And and so the church became central.

Mike Mantel — And so fast forward in the last ten years of our existence we identify and work through the collective body of Christ in that local community, which is really a ah complex institution. It’s it’s multi-denominational. It’s multi-ethic. There’s multi-languages engaged, but what holds us together is the spirit of Jesus Christ. And then we equip that church to be the salt and light with the most fundamental intervention in human development, which is water. And so living water the physical and the spiritual living water together is what the church is now able to bring as ah as a unit within these low income communities. It’s absolutely amazing. What the church is doing around the world.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s incredible on the ground to see, you know, like you’ll be in a village and um, you know you’ve partnered, there’s been a bunch of work that’s been done there. And you know when you think about it at that level here’s a community that that hasn’t had access to clean drinking water. They they maybe they haven’t had a you know sanitation and hygiene program running there. And the church takes the lead on that. Man, what a powerful witness in that local community. Like man, what they become even more so the center of the community. Maybe kind of talk about it at that level like what what kind of impact does that make ah, you know to that church, to the community, you know, when the church is in the middle of this? And why is that better than maybe I don’t know like a business running it or somebody else alternatives to the church running it.

Mike Mantel — Well for the the community they see their aunts and uncles and cousins, their neighbors at the center of the decision-making where will this water access point be drilled. How is the education training delivered? Who represents the community you know within a broader dialogue with the municipal leaders with other NGOs. The the church just becomes visible. And in many places in the world, our churches often see their role as inviting people to follow Christ but to remain distinct from the world. You know, that we’re all working our way towards heaven, but you know, let’s not roll up our sleeves together and address the issues in the world.

Rich Birch — Okay, sure.

Mike Mantel — But but but what happens when the church embraces that water produces health, healthy kids are in school, educated kids can begin to develop their economies. When the church provides those resources, that encouragement, people become attracted to the church. And so it’s it’s the action and love of Jesus Christ that helps that church grow.

Mike Mantel — So a church I was on maybe the outskirts of a social community now moves to the center of that social security.

Rich Birch — So good.

Mike Mantel — And by meeting the most basic needs in that community then the church becomes attractive. And relationships can develop, conversations can be had, and that’s where life comes and that that church begins to grow.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that That’s so good. And you know to see that on the ground. It’s just it’s amazing. It’s amazing to see that ah roll out. Now when you’re thinking about there’s this idea of churches partnering together in a region, you know, in a community. Can you talk to me about what that looks like, you know, in the countries that you’re working in, and I’d love to talk about it on a state side as well. But let’s start with, you know, in the countries that you’re working in. How how are they working together? What is that… I kind of understand that at one level like in a a particular community. But what does that look like across say a region?

Mike Mantel — So we start with a country definition. So we work in the 18 countries you mentioned in latin America, the Caribbean, in Africa, and in South Asia. Within that country we identify something we called a WASH program area. And WASH is an acronym—Water Access Sanitation Hygiene—a WASH program area, which is about 50- to 100,000 people 50 to 100 kilometers across. It’s it’s the lowest income, most needy environments. And we commit to stay in that footprint for 5 to 7 years.

Mike Mantel — We go in and we do a baseline analysis. Who’s in this footprint? How many churches? How are they engaging? What’s the water access? How healthy are people? What are their hygiene and sanitation practices? And then we systematically organize and invest in that footprint for 5 to 7 years so that everyone has water, all practices around sanitation and hygiene have been transformed, kids are healthy.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Mike Mantel — And then the church begins to ah be more visible and engaged. So it’s really how is the church perceived in its community. So then what does that look like is we start now with ah what we call the Genius of One conference. And that’s usually coordinated by a national association of, let’s say evangelicals in Zimbabwe, with the great talent from ah The Crossing Church in St Louis. Actually we’ve had 25 of these Genius of One conferences…

Rich Birch — Ok.

Mike Mantel — …where ah Greg and his team ah, engage with our team and the evangelical networks. And we put on a two and a half day conference. And we invite all the churches at the local level, the district level, and the national level and usually we get about 200 to maybe a thousand churches that come together.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Mike Mantel — And it’s and it’s a powerful invitation to link arms across the lines that divide us – our our racial lines, our economic lines, our urban/rural lines, our tribal lines, denominational lines. And let’s begin to think about um the prayer that Jesus made right before his arrest and crucifixion that we might be one…

Rich Birch — Yeah, unified. Love it.

Mike Mantel — …so that the so that Jesus becomes visible. And so there’s ah Greg and his team and and local moderators do this powerful ah presentation on the unity of the body of Christ.Nobody has to give up their tribal distinctions, or their denominational traditions, but they can begin to see that the crisis calling us to be unified.

Mike Mantel — Secondly we talk about reconciliation and forgiveness or really forgiveness and reconciliation. We talk about the poison of gossip and there’s there’s a number of fantastic ah sessions where pastors, who many don’t know each other…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — …many don’t trust each other, begin to talk about the things that are most important to them from a scriptural basis. Every time, you know across 14 countries I think we’ve been in front of maybe 3700 pastors, every time the Spirit of the Lord moves, people are repenting across the aisles and they begin to get a vision for what they might do together. Because one thing we learned is that churches of different traditions and perspectives have a difficult time being together unless they’re working together.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Mike Mantel — And if they’re working together in a community that desperately needs, in our case, water, that’s that’s a place in which they can intersect.

Rich Birch — Because they can agree on that. Hey, this is an issue we all know in our community, in this particular WASH area, using your definition. Hey, this is, man, if we could get this to people in our communities, the whole community’d be better.

Mike Mantel — That’s exactly it. So no, nobody needs to change their perspectives. They just say as followers of Jesus Christ let’s work together. And and so once ah, an agreement is made, Yeah, let’s consider this. And then we invite pastors to an envisioning workshop. What might that look like from a water/sanitation/hygiene perspective? And does that resonate with you? And does it resonate with you as a collective around this table? And if so, let’s organize. Let’s create some…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — …ah additional training sessions. Let’s go a little bit deeper in how your church might engage with others in training sanitation and hygiene, or sharing the gospel through oral discipling means, bible story and or or what it might look like to continue to maintain this water point? Because once you drill a water point, but for the ownership within that community, a supply chain to that community, local repair possibilities linked to that community, and ongoing resources to so to support that project. Unless there’s an enabling environment that water project will not continue.

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — When the water project continues, there’s a platform for the church to continue to engage across our lines that divide us and become visible within the communities. The result is the church grows.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. Yeah, I love this. So friends, if you don’t know water is kind of the foundational developmental, you know, step. Like you can’t, it’s the thing if a community doesn’t have access to clean drinking water, it’s very difficult, if I understand correctly, it’s very difficult to move on to anything else. Education, you know, whatever other things you you might be interested in. So that’s why it’s so and critically critically important. I love this focus of, you know, sustainability. I love even the history, you kind of hinted to this, like when LWI started, it was… at least this is my impression of the stories I’ve heard of the early days. It was like, you know, a bunch of entrepreneurial type guys from Texas, hey let’s let’s buy a rig and go somewhere you know punch a bunch of holes in the earth. But but there’s if there’s nothing, the only thing worse than not having access to drink clean drinking water in a community is having access to clean drinking water and then having it go away. You know that it was we had it for a season, but we weren’t able to sustain it.

Rich Birch — And I love your focus on long-term, the like, hey we’re going to try to do this over, you know, many years, but then we’re going to back out and ultimately, you know, the communities are going to have to take care of it. Do you have an example of one of the WASH programs that has kind of gone through its entire cycle. That you know, you’ve been able to step out of that you could kind of talk us through what that looks like?

Mike Mantel — Absolutely, and and you really understand this process, Rich. And it’s it’s true that the intervention starts long before…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Mantel — …the water well is drilled, or the pipes are are connected to a spring, long before. In building ownership, in organizing teams, in envisioning what the community might do together, long before. And then long after. You know, unless we’re committed to space and partnering with the institution that remains, the church, it’s impossible…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — …to produce health long term…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Mantel — …because healthy water allows kids to be healthy, to stay in school and develop their economies. So unless that happens um the water well will break in the first nine months, there’ll be a major intervention that’s required in the first two years.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Mike Mantel — And if if people don’t have access to those resources, human resources, you’re right – they’ll lose their water source.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Mike Mantel — Secondly, is if they only have one clean water source—let’s say at school—but they don’t have one at home or at the hospital, health doesn’t accrue. You you need to have water across that community…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — …safe water across that community. And if someone has clean water and they don’t wash their hands, or segment human waste, it… health still doesn’t accrue.

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — But to get to your question, we’ve now engaged in about 18 of these WASH program areas. It was a flyer ten years ago. We said, how do we sustain this work and how do we engage with the church and how do we really see results? And we we thought about this WASH program area and and a significant supporter a Christian family said we’ll back you on this. Let’s see if it works.

Rich Birch — Nice.

Mike Mantel — And so we we did our first one in Uganda – I guess it’s been about twelve years ago. We did a second one in another location in Uganda and then we did a new set in Zambia .and then we crossed the pond back to Nicaragua and now we’re about 65% of all of our work is in a WASH program area.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Mantel — And so there’s a there’s a half a dozen that have been completed where we we we go in and that baseline study might say, you know, there’s a 36% access to safe water maybe 20% of the people are using appropriate sanitation and hygiene. The church is really not engaged physically, but it’s somewhat engaged spiritually, to 5 to 7 years later, 100% access to safe water

Rich Birch — Wow, wow.

Mike Mantel — …or let’s just say 85 to 95% access to safe water.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yes, yes.

Mike Mantel — You know, nearly 100% hygiene practices transformed. And the church is perceived as being an active player in the health and vitality of that community, and is growing. And so ah, there are many examples. It’s a big investment…

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s an incredible.

Mike Mantel — …big investment.

Rich Birch — Yes, right. And that’s why you have a job; that’s job security for you. You know trying to helping, you know, motivate that. You know, when we first got when I first got um, connected with Living Water, it was when I was at Liquid Church in New Jersey fantastic church – love, love Liquid. I’m not there anymore, but just you know love their mission. And you know I saw it from my side as a as a pastor in a local church, you know, state side where this is a very understandable problem. Like there is not um, you can explain it. It’s clear. It’s it’s not um, and it’s not really debatable like it’s a very open thing to talk about as a church. Like you know people aren’t going to disagree with hey we want to help people on the other side of the world, or you know on our side of the world, get access to clean drinking water. And I saw time and again I saw our people get engaged. You know they were like wow. They just got fired up. I know that continues to be the case you know at ah at Liquid. But let’s talk about that you know on the the state side. How how do you engage with churches? You mentioned ah Greg you know, are there what does that look like? How how are churches kind of saying yeah we want to be a part of this? What’s that look like ah, here?

Mike Mantel — Rich, again, there’s there’s there’s an evolution. When we started we asked churches and members of churches to help fund a water well and bring life in the name of Jesus to a thirsty community. It was ah it was a funding relationship. Over the years what became clearer and clearer is that by engaging in important global issues that the the donor becomes an advocate. The advocate becomes a disciple in what our our mind began to shift a little bit from helping Living Water fund a project to introducing churches in the United States to what churches around the world are accomplishing through WASH, and join what God is doing globally. So it it kind of shifted from help Living Water with some money so that we might change the world, to the church is changing the world. Help.…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — Let’s work together to introduce the body to the body.

Rich Birch — Love it. That’s beautiful.

Mike Mantel — And so so that’s what we’re doing. So like in these WASH program areas. We’re organizing at the at the community level, aligning strategy with church denominational bodies at the district and national level. And then we’re trying to introduce the church in the United States to what that church is doing, and we’re we’re doing that through ah 3 pillars over the course of 3 years.

Mike Mantel — So we’re saying all right, my dear friends at Liquid or Crossing or Grace Presbyterian Church, your church body is involved in building disciples at home and pursuing the great commission at home and abroad. Let’s join in what God is doing, and let’s do so by growing in our knowledge, expanding our experience, and co-investing for impact.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Mantel — Going back to your first point, growing a knowledge. Yeah I I used to work with a colleague, Bob, at World Vision. He said if people knew better, they’d do better. The the fact the fact is few people know…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — …that 771 million people are drinking out of puddles, and that they’ll never get healthy. And that 2 billion people don’t have an ongoing source to safe water. People just don’t know. And they don’t know about the multiplier effect that if if if people had safe water consistently and sustainably that they’d get healthy. They would. Their kids would have a chance to learn and develop their communities. We call that the multiplier effect. People don’t know that. And when the church is at the center of that intervention, the church is able to evangelize and disciple in ways that they’d never imagine possible. People don’t know. So what we want to do is is grow in our knowledge together through ah introductions and resources on the water crisis. The solvability of the water crisis the interplay of water and sanitation and the role of the church. Let’s grow in knowledge.

Mike Mantel — And then the second is expand our experience together. Everybody I know that’s an activist in the world has crossed some dividing line. A geographical dividing line – we call that a mission trip. A ah racial dividing line, an economic dividing line, ah some philosophical dividing line – because when we move outside of our comfort zone somehow we’re more open to God’s whispers.

Rich Birch — It’s true.

Mike Mantel — We’re more open to reflection. You know we’re going to go back into the buzz of every day, but when when we’re on the other side of that line, we’re a little bit more open. And so all activists, all tremendous leaders that I’ve met have had that experience – many of which are ah going. Some of it is organizing. So expanding our experience. We we do water walks together. We do, you know, it’s ah marathons and mountain climbing together. We do vacation bible school together. We take trips together. And we do take trips to ah, implement a project, to drill a water well, to put in a pipe system, to teach sanitation and hygiene. But it’s really a part of the discipling experience for the goer.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Mantel — It’s a opening up of the heart of the mind of the goer, and then you can’t shake it. I mean the newspaper comes alive.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Mike Mantel — You’re you’re talking about it with your spouse. You’re praying about, you know, what you’ve learned. And sooner or later, sooner or later you’re going to move more deeply into that discipleship journey. But but it’s because of experience.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yeah.

Mike Mantel — The third pillar’s co-investing. Mind, space, time, and money. When we start investing around ministries that are making a difference, that change both the physical and spiritual reality of of people, the more we invest, the more we learn, the more we want to experience, the more we learn and experience, the more we want to invest.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yep.

Mike Mantel — We tell our friends. Let’s let’s get engaged. And and so we we see those 3 pillars as a way for churches in the United States that perhaps structure a component of their discipleship program their missions program. And and don’t be in a hurry. You know, let’s just learn together. Let’s experience it.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yeah – that’s great. I love it.

Mike Mantel — And and I’m beginning to see what what’s been fun these last nine months is, you know, talking to pastors—lead pastors, executive pastors—and they say well how do we how do we start? I said well if you got a missions program, where’s your map. Let’s look at the map. And then let’s take Living Water’s map and put it right over the top, and maybe there’s a geographical intersection.

Rich Birch — Yeah, overlap. Yep.

Mike Mantel — When there’s an overlap we can align resources. And then let’s grow in knowledge, let’s expand our experience, let’s co-invest. And and a part of that is let’s go.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Mantel — You know, coming out of Covid, everybody was frozen, right? Lot of people change your jobs. There’s a lot of new people. A new new position. But we’re all frozen.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Mantel — And we want to get back on mission. We want to get back engaged with people. We want to, you know, be in the same room. We want to adventure. We want to travel. And but it’s hard to get over that lump or that hump. So I’m just saying, let’s just go.

Rich Birch — Right. Nice. Love it. Love it.

Mike Mantel — Let’s just go.

Rich Birch — So good. Well and I yeah I’ve had a privilege of being on a number of LWI trips over the years in a number of countries. And one of the things I appreciate about the on the ground experience, and it’s been years since I’ve been on one, but you know I I know there are folks, and I have been one of those in the past, that are like I would say skeptical of the kind of mission trip experience. Let’s take 12 Americans and go somewhere. Like are we really making a difference? Like what’s that actually look like? Um but the thing I love about an LWI experience is you’re getting a chance to see right up close a you know a WASH program in action. You’re getting a chance to see ah a ah, well being drilled, and you’re you know you’re a part of that experience. Um, and at the end of that you’re changed because you’ve been up close. You’ve seen these leaders. You’ve seen the church doing its good. You’ve kicked a football or soccer ball around with kids. Um. And your heart has been changed.

Rich Birch — One of the trips I was on, we um, you know, our our well was not going well. It was a tough week and it was not happening, and ironically that that’s the one that bubbles to the top of my mind. And, you know we made a decision as a group. It was like well we could you know a lot of these trips are always like the fun day we go and do something you know, kind of enjoy the culture, I think cultural day or whatever. And so we made the decision hey we’re not going to do that. We’re going to stay here and you know the the dynamic shifted from us doing a lot of work, to like the experts, the people that actually know what they’re doing. But man we were praying and we were you know and to see that actually to see us actually complete that project was amazing. It was incredible. Transformational. Um and man I’d love more people to have that kind of experience. That’s a hard thing to um, you know to to shake. It it just gets inside of you.

Rich Birch — The other thing I love from ah a pastor’s point of view, from a leader’s point of view is this is an exciting issue to be a part of because we’re seeing progress, like there is actual progress happening on, you know, this issue. When we first first started talking about this we used to always say 1.1 billion people don’t have access. Now, it’s, like you said, 771 million. That’s that’s incredible to see. Um which there are lots of issues that don’t have that. Now I know the next you know the next 250 million are going to be harder. And the 250 million after that and the 250 million after that are going to be even harder. But but, man, what ah what an exciting time for churches to get involved.

Rich Birch — When you think about… now you wrote a book. Actually I want to talk about this because I think a practical way on that first kind of getting exposure to this could be church leaders to pick up this. It’s called Thirsting for Living Water: Finding Adventure and Purpose in God’s Redemptive Story. Ah talk me through why you wrote this book. There’s a lot of work. You’ve got lots of other things to do. Ah, you’re busy person. Why did you, you know, pull this this resource together for church leaders?

Mike Mantel — Well you and all of those that write stuff know that it is a heavy lift, and why I initially started thinking about writing it, to how I endured writing it, to the impact that it’s having has shifted a little bit. So initially, yeah, four years, ago five years ago, when I started thinking about the church, I said the church in the United States really needs to see how active and how life-giving the church is. You know the church was getting a lot of bad press. You know the church is shrinking. You know it’s no longer relevant to young people. Um, it’s boring. Um I don’t really need to go. Yeah and then it’s kind of like I can watch online at my leisure. You know like and I was thinking, you know, that’s not been my experience.

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good.

Mike Mantel — So what I wanted to do was just say, hey that’s not not been my experience. Where I’ve seen churches alive and active is when…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — …they are identifying what God is doing and they’re participating in that. So that’s where I started, like let’s ah, let’s talk about what’s right with the church. So then I’m in I’m in the game, right? So then I’m writing, I’m thinking you know we’re collecting stories, we’re talking as a team. And and then ah it was a very difficult period of time, and that became the chassis of telling this story of the church, is my my father died, my wife got cancer, Hurricane Harvey wiped out our town, we had economic challenges. And and and so then I started enduring ah this writing process in the middle of what really became a dark night of my soul.

Rich Birch — Wow.

When I was younger I was absolutely convinced thatGod was the master strategist inviting us into his work. And I experienced 30 years of miracles, mind-blowing God shows up and doing great stuff. In my dark night which is really you know over a few years of the writing process, I began to doubt that.

Rich Birch — Oh wow.

Mike Mantel — You know, is God the master strategist?

Rich Birch — Right. Wow.

Mike Mantel — Is he showing up? Can I um, confidently move forward and lead an organization when things just don’t feel good, and I’m not really hearing the Lord as clearly, and the results aren’t there? So then it it became well a discovery of the stories in my life, and other people’s life that sustained me through that dark night. And and it shifted the book shifted to being a series of 12 reflections recalling God’s faithfulness. And when when things got really really hard and in you know the hard lift and the emotional lift um in my personal prayer time what sustained me was just what I felt was a divine whisper: tell people of my faithfulness.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Mike Mantel — Tell stories of my faithfulness. Because you know how often does God tell us through scriptures, remember. Remember the Savior of your youth. Remember the Lord that took you out of Egypt. Remember. And as I remember the stories while constructing this book, I began to see glimmers of hope, and I began to reengage emotionally, and mentally, spiritually with the Lord. And I developed a rock solid certainty that God is in fact, the master strategist calling us to join him in what he is doing as he redeems and reconciles the world. And it’s a great adventure.

Rich Birch — Yes, love it.

Mike Mantel — You can find purpose and adventure.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Mantel — And so that’s where it concluded where, along the way, we talk about strategy.

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Mantel — Along the way we talk about ah leadership. Along the way we talk about what God is doing through his church in Latin America, in Africa, in South Asia, in the United States. And my hope is that when people pick up the book and read it that ah they will be encouraged And they will have practical tools to move through their dark night, develop their strategy, and determine their approach to missions. And and so the book itself became a ministry. So it’s all proceeds, you know, go to the work of Living Water organizing churches…

Rich Birch — Oh love it. Yeah. Love it.

Mike Mantel — …and it’s found some it’s found some connection to pastors.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. Well yeah, this to me I think would be a great ah well two things, friends, if you’re listening in and you’ve made it this far in, you really should consider connecting with Living Water International. Like they’re they’re incredible people. They’re doing great work. Ah, Mike and his team, every time I interact with a different person at LWI I’m always like these are amazing people, like and they you know love the Lord, and they’re they’re smart and they’re trying to make a difference, and they’re being good stewards, are thinking long-term – all that. So yeah I would strongly endorse, you should talk with them.

Rich Birch — You know a practical next step could be, hey this why don’t you buy 10 of these books and read them as your as your staff team. Maybe it’s like ah one of those book study things you do ah you know in this this next year. And it may not be that hey you and your conclusion is well therefore we’re going to, like you say give a piece of our kind of missions expression to that. But maybe it inspires you in some other way, which is wonderful. That’s that’s great. I know Mike’s a big enough guy doesn’t you know he really is concerned about the big “C” church. And so ah that I think would be a great next step for you.

Rich Birch — Well just kind of as we’re coming to land as we’re landing the plane, um anything else, you’d like to say, kind of final thoughts for folks as their listening in?

Mike Mantel — Well the the big thought I have is that the church of Jesus Christ can end the water crisis…

Rich Birch — Amen.

Mike Mantel — …as it pursues the great commission.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Mantel — That they’re not separate. They’re integrated. They’re integral. They’re they’re the two sides of one coin. That as the church comes together in a unified expression of love and action, a doubting world will see that unity, will see that love, will see that action, and millions will come to follow Jesus. And, you know, when we talk about the multiplier impact of water, sanitation, hygiene with them through the church I see a multiple multiplier impact of working together. And solving a solvable problem that is the most fundamental challenge facing the world today, and in the future.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Mantel — And so as we link arms, solving the water crisis we will pursue the great commission. And that’s worth doing. That’s a life worth spent. And so I just encourage people to consider that. And as Rich said, I am happy if you pursue your mission through micro-enterprise, through food, through justice, through um trafficking it, as long as you’re crossing a line that divides us and God is inviting you into doing that. But if water seems to be the thing that God is whispering in your ears, let’s just link arms together. Let’s do it together because I am convinced that we can solve this problem as we pursue the great commission.

Rich Birch — So good. Mike Mantel everybody. So good. Mike, where do we want to send people online to connect with you or to connect with Living Water International? Where do we want to make sure they they they head to?

Mike Mantel — Water.cc

Rich Birch — Easy.

Mike Mantel — Water.cc – come online, all of our resources are there. They’re open-handed, public-sourced, whoever wants to utilize them are free to utilize them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, love it.

Mike Mantel — Reach out to us on our church page. We’d ah, be delighted to follow up with you to do something custom together to link arms, to grow in knowledge, expand our experience, invest for impact. If you know you can buy this book on Amazon.com; if you don’t have any money just email me and I’ll send you one.

Rich Birch — Okay, that’s great.

Mike Mantel — Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a ministry.

Rich Birch — Love it. Yes, love it. Yeah I was going to ask you that. We obviously can get the book at Amazon, you know, anywhere else we want to send people online? I love that – email find is you’re going to have to dig around on the on the website find but—you can find it—find his email address and and reach out, but anywhere else we want to send them to pick up copies of the book?

Mike Mantel — You know, but you could always go to thirstingforlivingwater.com…

Rich Birch — Okay, great.

Mike Mantel — …and you know or michaeljmantel.com – either one of those. That’ll give you all kinds of resources um, all kinds of information as it relates to this book. But the easiest thing that is just water.cc and you can find me. And like I’m serious if if you don’t have any money you want to read this book if God’s putting up on your heart I’d be delighted to send it to you.

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Well thanks so much, Mike. I appreciate you being here today. You’ve just been just a blessing to us. I really appreciate you spending time. Thanks so much.

Mike Mantel — Rich, thanks for everything you do. You are a good man.

Nurturing the Spirit of Advent with Families at Your Church: Chris Pappalardo & Clayton Greene on the GoodKind Approach

Rich Birch — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. I’m talking with Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Greene from The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina. Chris is Editor on the Creative Arts team and Clayton is the Summit Collaborative Director.

Have you started planning for Christmas yet at your church? Are you looking for a way to help your congregation embrace the true meaning of the holiday amidst the hustle and bustle of the season? As co-founders of GoodKind, Chris and Clayton share how Advent Blocks, their most popular tool, is a unique and tangible way to help kids and adults anticipate Jesus during the holiday season. Listen to the episode learn how you can use it at your church this Christmas.

Engage and connect. // The challenge during the holiday season isn’t that families have no context for what the Christmas story is, or that they haven’t spent time reading those Bible passages. Rather it’s that in December it can get lost with everything else going on. When Clayton’s daughter expressed that Christmas felt like it was more about presents than Jesus, Clayton reached out to Chris to create something tangible that would build the anticipation for Christ’s arrival. Advent Blocks provide a visual and interactive experience that keeps the focus on Jesus throughout the season. They capture kids’ attention and make them excited about turning the blocks each day.
Walking through the whole bible. // Rather than starting with Mary being visited by the angel as most Advent calendars do, Chris and Clayton decided to use the blocks to tell the story of God’s presence throughout the entire bible, with the finish line being Christmas. In the stories, the participants see how sin drives God away and are constantly asking the question, will God ever come back to stay? This refrain helps build the anticipation of Jesus ultimately coming to bring the help and hope we need for the problems we’ve encountered since Adam and Eve.
Simple and fun. // The impact of Advent Blocks on families and their Christmas celebrations has been incredible. Families have embraced Advent Blocks as a meaningful tradition, with children eagerly participating. Chris and Clayton have made it simple to start so adults can just pick up the guide and begin. The visual elements of Advent Blocks, such as turning the blocks each day and the star representing God and Jesus coming to earth, add to the excitement and anticipation. The repetition of refrains and playful language in the stories keeps everyone engaged, from young children to older family members.
Participate together as a church. // Churches can also benefit from using Advent Blocks as a resource for their congregation. The Local Church Program on the GoodKind website allows churches to purchase Advent Blocks in bulk and give them away or sell them at a discount to their people. It’s a way to do discipleship together as a church community. Additional resources, like a guide targeted to adults apart from the blocks and sermon series starter kit, are also available to enhance the community experience and create momentum in your church.
Sermon series starter kit. // Every year Chris writes a sermon series starter kit that coincides with the story and blocks featured on the Sundays of Advent. The original design files for the blocks are also included so that a church’s design team can incorporate them into the teaching and prep for the series. Pastors can then use this kit to bring the whole church into alignment during the Christmas season.

To find out more about the Advent Blocks Local Church Program and get 50% off a sample set, visit GoodKind’s website.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey, everybody welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Super excited for today’s conversation you know most weeks we bring you one leader who will both inspire and equip you, and today we’ve got two! This is amazing! We’ve got Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Greene. They both serve at Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina. If you do not know this church, I do not know where you have been. Chris is the Editor on the Creative Arts team; Clayton is the Summit Collaborative Director. Together Chris and Clayton started GoodKind with the goal of helping people develop the good kind of habits and holiday celebrations.

Rich Birch — They’re best known for a tool that we’re going to get a chance to talk about today, Advent Blocks. It’s a tangible meaningful way to help kids and parents anticipate Jesus ah, not just presents but Christmas and this is important at this time of year because I know many of us are starting to have that Christmas thing bubbling in the back of our mind, and we’re thinking about gosh, What are we doing? What are we doing to get ready for that? And I want to talk about how, you know, they’ve seen this help in so many churches. So welcome to the show. So glad you’re here, guys.

Clayton Greene — Thank you for having us, Rich. We’re we’re really excited to be here. And that introduction, man, you you you nailed it – that that’s us to a T.

Rich Birch — Yeah, Clayton, is there anything there that I should fill into my picture, like what did we miss about, you know, the the introduction?

Clayton Greene — We’ll get into this – Chris and I are actually friends too. We’re co-workers. We’re coworkers at you know at our day job. We were cofounders at our, GoodKind, I guess you know we call it side gig in the in the business but um, and also we’re friends – we we like each other too.

Rich Birch — Nice.

Clayton Greene — So that’s that’s always fun when you’re working with people that you like.

Rich Birch — So first question for you, Chris. Is Clayton just overstepping there? Is it really that you’re friends with…

Chris Pappalardo — Wow.

Rich Birch — …that he’s friends with you but you’re not really friends with him? Just kidding.

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, I love that you you dove right into this. and you’re just just you’re trying to get a yeah trying to get a…

Rich Birch — Hard hitting. It’s hard hitting ah journalism here.

Chris Pappalardo — …DTR for us, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah yeah, um, like.

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, Clayton, Clayton is a good friend. I, you know, I don’t rank them I, like in my mind I want to rank them and I recognize this is not a healthy thing. But if I were to rank them…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Chris Pappalardo — …he’d be near the top. So.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Clayton Greene — But, Rich, it’s a fair question. Because we actually on our podcast., we do something called holi-yay or holi-nay.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Clayton Greene — And it’s where we go through these random holidays and we decide if they’re good or not.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Clayton Greene — There is a holiday, I believe it’s in June?

Chris Pappalardo — It’s in June, yeah.

Clayton Greene — …every year where it’s best best friends day.

Rich Birch — Oh.

Clayton Greene — And last year it’s the second time we’ve talked about it on our podcast and it’s such an interesting day right? because do you only get one, can you have multiple. And so Chris is one of my best friends. I’m like ah I’m like an elementary school age girl in terms of I have lots of best friends, and Chris is one of them.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, Clayton,I’d love to hear about so I had heard about this this tool, this Advent Blocks tool. And it captured my imagination, I think man, there’s something here. There’s what what a cool idea. Ah talk to me kind of a high level. What is Advent Blocks? What is this?

Clayton Greene — Yeah, Advent Blocks is a Christmas practice that helps families engage with their kids and everybody in the home all throughout the Advent season. Um, you know, we we made it because there’s this in building anticipation, kind of all throughout the fall, especially all throughout December. And in December inevitably it ends up being about all those presents under the tree, right?

Rich Birch — So true.

Clayton Greene — So there’s this building in anticipation. There’s music. There’s lights. There’s everything and we wanted to make something that would rival like that anticipation. And Advent Blocks, it ended up. ah, being just that for us.

Clayton Greene — In fact, it was actually born out of it was an accident so to speak. Um, many many years ago. I forget what year it was at this point so I won’t even try. But ah my daughter Kara who was 5 at the time said to me on December 23rd I think, 22nd maybe, she said, Daddy, Mommy and Daddy. You say that Christmas is all about Jesus, but it feels like Christmas is all about presents, right?

Rich Birch — Ooh ouch.

Clayton Greene — And what a knife in the back. So…

Rich Birch — Ouch!

Clayton Greene — And we have no time to recover.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Clayton Greene — We have zero time to recover that year. So fast forward a year. It’s in November and I’m kind of scouring the internet trying to find something that would be tangible in the middle of the home that would actually drive us towards Christmas Day to be thinking about Jesus and not just the presents. I’m not taking the presents away, but wanted a drive towards that. And I I just couldn’t find anything that quite tangibly and beautifully kind of like kind of built anticipation in the same way.

Clayton Greene — So I kind of started drawing some blocks and how they might move. I like working with wood. I showed my wife three options. She pointed at the 1 in the middle and said that one. And it’s 95% of what she pointed at that day. That same day I texted Chris and said, hey Chris…

Rich Birch — Let’s do it.

Clayton Greene — …like I want to I want to do a ah creative writing project. Let’s do an Advent thing that we do with our families, and immediately Chris said yes.

Rich Birch — Chris, I’d love to hear more. So the thing to be honest when I looked into this I the thing I immediately thought of was Elf on the Shelf. And you know Elf on the Shelf, what a ah like it’s amazing because that kind of came from out of nowhere. I remember when that first showed up I was like the way they presented that product was like it had been around forever. And it did. It became like this big kind of phenomenal thing, but it it focuses on the same thing, which is like, hey, presents, presents, presents.

Rich Birch — I loved how this your tool here really drives back to the story. It ultimately drives people back that drives families back to scripture. Chris, can you talk me through how do you do that? How was that function look like? How how is this going to help families actually wrestle with the story of Jesus coming?

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, so the challenge here with with Advent, at least in our experience is not that families have no context for what the Christmas story is, and have spent no time like going to those passages and trying to read them. Like we know the story pretty well. Like Clayton was saying, the challenge is in December it’s just a blitz of everything else. And so we need something that the kids really wanted to do.

Chris Pappalardo — That the blocks the mechanism of the blocks makes it so that as a centerpiece in the home, it’s decorative, it’s playful. The kids are looking at it are like hey we got to turn the block, we got to do number 9. And there’s that accountability that’s that’s drawn in from the kids, which is just just beautiful. But I loved the challenge. When Clayton reached out to me and he said, hey want to do an Advent thing? I was like I’m in. I don’t I don’t even know the full idea. But Christmas is my favorite holiday. Let’s do it.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Chris Pappalardo — And so we took the the idea of saying like well if we’re going to do this over all of December let’s tell the story of God’s presence throughout all of the bible and have like that finish line be Christmas. Because that’ll help build the anticipation to say like, hey, this isn’t just a few stories about Mary and the Shepherds, which are wonderful. But it’s like you know there’s a problem in the very beginning with Adam and Eve is that they sinned and they had to leave, and God seemed far away. That was actually a problem with Noah and Moses and David and Hagar, and and so you see this problem crop up again and again, you’re like wow is God ever going to come back? Will God ever come back to stay? And that refrain which we have in the writing ends up driving a lot of the anticipation. So by the time they get to Christmas they’re like, this is it! This is! It’s exactly the excitement they should have like yeah what God came to earth? And like yes, this is this is what we’ve been wanting the whole time.

Rich Birch — Talk me through, Chris, like the like an individual day, like at the level of I’m a family doing that. So I I get the idea so like, hey, we’re talking about Noah today.

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Is ah does the tool provide, here’s like a scripture reading, here’s some thoughts on that. What how do we what’s that actually look like?

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, with everything we do, we try to make it as simple as possible so that when you get our stuff it’s just like like I’ve got enough things that I may be thinking about, please put everything in my hands so that I just sit with my kids and it’s all ready. I just open up and start.

Chris Pappalardo — So we’ve got the blocks that are lined up 1 to 25 and there’s an accompanying book that goes with it with 25 stories. So I’ve taken 25 of these stories from the bible and just retold them, condensed them down, put it in kid language like elementary school age language. It’s got the reference at the top of each day. So if you would open up and, you know, one of the ones in the teens you would see is the story of ah ah, maybe Saul, right? And that one’s called a very tall, very strong, very brave king: the story of Saul. And underneath it’s got the passage. So if you want to you can go later and you can read the whole thing with your kids. When you read it, it takes about ah, 3 or 4 minutes to read through. And it’s playful and fun and the kids are loving it. And at the end the end of each day it has this line where, you know like I said, God couldn’t remain, he seemed far away. So Saul and God’s people began to hope and to pray God will you come to earth to stay. That same little couplet or the triplet, I guess, at the end of each day where you’re getting you’re getting a digest of the story. You’re seeing, Okay, this isn’t just a story this guy made up. I can go read the original. And then the kids kids kind of have a handy way of of grasping what that is.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. Clayton, I’m sure um, you know, this has been rolled out for, you know, a while it’s you’ve had a couple Christmases through here. Do you have any stories of maybe a family or 2 that you know how this has become a part of their Christmas celebration kind of what that’s looked like? Or maybe even in your own family, what’s that look like?

Clayton Greene — Yeah I mean there’s there are tons and tons of stories. It’s it’s one of the things that kind of keeps us us going in it all, I will say the most consistent story um is probably similar to one that I had with my my friend who’s also on staff with us at The Summit, who we were at an event ah, in December, you know, out standing on the sidewalk, waving to people um the way Danny Franks told us to. I think Danny’s been on your podcast here before…

Rich Birch — Yes, love Danny. Love it.

Clayton Greene — Um so they’re waving at people and doing what we’re supposed to do and he says, Man, when I left the house tonight, my kids mean they were just begging me, don’t leave. We have to do the blocks; we have to do the blocks.

Clayton Greene — Or or what time are you going to be home because we have to make sure that we do the block tonight? It’s crazy. You know, ah a lot of this again was accident. Um, it’s like we’ve made the kids into little accountability devices.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Clayton Greene — If you give them something fun and they know I can do the fun thing, and my my grownups will do it with me. Like they they will beg to do it over and over and over again. So I think the most consistent thing that we hear from people is that it was, you know, I’ve started an advent guide before but I’ve never finished one. And I finished this one, right?

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, totally.

Clayton Greene — It didn’t drop off in the middle, it built it was building all the way through. Chris does this really neat thing on day seventeen where that refrain that he referred to changes a little bit. And so it just continues to build more and more and more through the new testament stories. And so it’s it’s the fact that they started and they continued, they started and they finished. As we kind of reverse engineered that, I think one of the things that um helps with that is, like Chris said the numbers, you know, you’re turning it every day. You you take the block, you turn in the number it shows an image that actually matches an image that is in the book, and you continue to turn those blocks every day and there’s a star that sits on top of the block of that day.

Clayton Greene — And then there’s a globe on the other end on the top of the 25. So this star is literally marching across the blocks…

Rich Birch — So cool. Yeah.

Clayton Greene — …day after day after day. And there’s this approximation of the star representing God and Jesus coming to earth to stay. And so there’s that, we built a song into it. Ad so our family that first year it really kind of blew me away how much on Christmas day, the the, and Christmas eve, the girls were just they were talking about the presents; that doesn’t change, right? It is not gonna change. But they also very much wanted to sing the song. They very much wanted to read the story. They very much were aware of and anticipating that part of the celebration. And not only the present part of the the celebration. It’s and and that story just happens time and time and again.

Chris Pappalardo — I think my favorite part…

Rich Birch — Yeah I love it. You know, Chris, what are…

Chris Pappalardo — I stepped on your toes, Rich, now.

Rich Birch — Yeah, jump in, jump in. Yeah, no go go jump in. It’s good.

Chris Pappalardo — My my favorite part is I think we accomplished something we set out to do which is to say like, how do we let people know what Christmas is all about? I’ve had not I have had kids and grownups reach out to say, Ah I I never realized that the theme ofGod’s presence and God coming to earth was all throughout the bible, or that was the kind of a key problem. Or I’ve never had somebody summarize the message of Christmas, hey God’s coming to earth this day so so well, and now my kids repeated it. And I’m like oh that’s that’s beautiful that they’ve got like they own that now and see that in a fresh way.

Rich Birch — Yeah I’d love to stick with you, Chris, around the thing to be honest, if I can tell you kind of my impression is I’m like there seems like there’s a lot going on under the hood here. The product is it’s visually beautiful to look at like it’s a nice looking thing. It’s the kind of thing that you um, you know it would look great on your shelf kind of thing. But then it’s also I have a friend of mine, Tim Lucas, who always says man we got to put the cookies on the bottom shelf. We’ve got to make the main thing the main thing. And and this seems to do that. It’s like driving to the message. Help us unpack that maybe at like ah what are all what kind of behind it as a designer, as a thinker, you know as someone who’s trying to teach some you know spiritual truth in a way through this, what are some of those things that you’re actually doing to try to make it sticky for people?

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, so I’ve mentioned the refrain a few times. And um the thing about kids curriculum I’m learning, anything with children, is this is the way like catechisms are or anything that seems very, very simple ah, is actually very difficult to get just right? You can make things memorable but to distill down a really complicated bible idea, a bunch of stories, in a way that’s simple enough that someone hears it and they say oh yeah, great, easy. It it comes off as easy, but it’s not easy to to create. Um and so to to like we did a lot of lot of workshopping on like, well what is the line? What is the one sentence we want? And I was addicted to school for a long time, and so I went to seminary for a very long time and so I’m trying to pour in all of the insights that I’ve got theologically, but then say like I’ve got to translate this down. Like you said, cookies on the bottom shelf.

Chris Pappalardo — So the refrain is one. There’s another recurring phrase that we use throughout the book. Um, the idea I wanted to capture was the idea of God’s justice and truth. In the end God God reigns. That’s language that’s ah, that’s a little bit too inaccessible for like a 5 year old, right? So I say the the promise is that one day God will come to take all the darkness and make it light, to take all the wrong and make it right. And it’s simple, it rhymes, it’s catchy, but underneath that is…

Rich Birch — There’s a lot there. Yeah.

Chris Pappalardo — …Hey there’s a promise that God’s justice and righteousness will one day make the world whole, which is a beautifully rich thing. So that’s that’s one piece of it. I see Clayton wanting to jump in here. So.

Clayton Greene — Yeah, Chris, well I just wanted to to kind of brag on you a little bit. I mean there there are things our family experiences Chris’s writing secondhand, right? Even though I’m part of the creation. My girls will pray those refrains. It’s not just the one at the end of every day but that one about the the dark things being made light. Our daughters, that’s a part of our family’s language now and it comes from the repetition from these stories. It also does… some my daughter Kara’s favorite thing, and this is not kind of this is cookies on the bottom shelf but it’s like you know, just because it tastes good. There’s this part in the Jonah story where it says he went as far left as he could. And then he went lefter. and and our girls just think that’s hilarious like his little play on words there.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Clayton Greene — Ah in the new in the new testament, one of the things he does in order to build the excitement is anytime an angel appears he uses this this phrasing, um it was too bright to be a person. It was way too loud to be a person. Um, and then I they realized THIS. IS. AN. ANGEL – all caps with periods. And it’s just things like that that just make it so that keep everybody engaged. We’ll tell people all the time, the sweet spot is like two to twelve, three to thirteen, something like that. But if you got somebody in that range and then somebody that’s 16 or 17 in the house or even the parents or you know a college student that’s back home. Those people pay attention to this story as well, and often will tear up at some point through it…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Clayton Greene — …because they see how meaningful it is. It’s it’s simple, but it’s not simplistic. And so there’s there’s a there lot of beautiful things that Chris does with the writing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that strikes me as well that this is one of those times a year um that we can as church leaders encourage our families to have spiritual conversations that does feel like it’s in sync with the culture, like it doesn’t feel like hey this is so out of you know left field. It feels like, you know, you still walk into Walmart and there’s still Christmas music playing. And a lot of that Christmas music is stuff we hear in the church…

Clayton Greene — It is.

Rich Birch — …and it encourages actually families because of the because kids are at the center you know of the consumer side of Christmas. It does kind of there there’s this underlying like, hey it’s good for families to do stuff together at this time of year. Man, if we could leverage that for these good things, that’s that’s incredible. You know, Chris, was that a bit of what was going on as you were thinking, how do we kind of leverage this for you know for what Jesus wants to do in people’s lives?

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, a hundred percent. Um you know, I was deeply influenced with this project by a couple of the story bibles that I’ve…

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, so true.

Chris Pappalardo — …you know ah am still reading to my kids. And there’s a number that are fantastic, but I think we all know and love Sally Lloyd Jones Jesus Storybook Bible. And part of the beauty of that resource is in addition to the phenomenal illustrations that the Jago did, but in the writing the beauty of it is kids really love the stories and how they’re written. But when a grownup reads those, they come to see the beauty of the gospel in a way that they haven’t before, and they’re like they’re blown away by it. And so that was it’s it’s ambitious to say that’s what I was aiming for. But that’s the target I feel like we should always be aiming for.

Rich Birch — Yeah, no, absolutely.

Chris Pappalardo — C.S. Lewis once said about kids stuff that if ah if a kid’s book isn’t worth reading by a grownup, then it’s not worth reading for a kid. And so that was part of what we’re trying to bring to this is like look, this can’t just be something…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Chris Pappalardo — …that a 4 year old likes. This has to be something that a 40 year old will say, wow thank you for for showing me that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that.

Chris Pappalardo — Um and I think I think we did it.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. You know we have I love that that story. But it was funny you were saying saying that because I was thinking about that as we were talking about this. We we lead, my wife and I lead ah a young married, or a parents with young kids small group. And we’re definitely not that our kids are college age but you know we’re quite a ways out of that. I wish it we were there but we’re not. And we have this one couple in our group who, you know, those people that um, they’ve just come to Jesus in the last couple of years and it’s it’s amazing to watch. And I love like there I you know often say like they’re our target, like as a church that’s who we’re trying to reach. And I love I’m going to get choked up when um, when we’re like opening the bible together as a group, I love the the dad, the man, the husband in this this couple, because like we’ll say oh you want to look at something in John. And I love it because he like goes to the index and finds, Okay John…

Clayton Greene — Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s page, you know, 1223 and then he flips to that and and like I just love that. But we gave them for last year at Christmas we gave all the families we gave them that ah Storybook Bible. And it was interesting because all ah a couple months later we were it just came up in discussion somehow. And 100% of the families and they’re really across the kind of spiritual spectrum so people have been walking with Jesus for a long time and then you have a couple like this. They all said man I’m seeing the story of God in a new way because I’m reading this to my kids, right?

Chris Pappalardo — Yes, yes.

Rich Birch — And, man what if we could replicate that for our people in our churches that would be amazing. That’d be incredible. Clayton, you know, I’d love to ask you this – so to me as a church leader… First of all I was hoping today’s conversation would kind of open this resource up for people. It could be a great thing for people that are listening to to take a look at it. But, really I was struck that this could be the kind of thing we could do as a church together. Like can’t can’t we, like you to 3 to 13 that’s a huge span, like are there churches that have ever got out and said, hey maybe we should try to offer this to our people or point them towards it? Have you ever done anything like that, Clayton.

Clayton Greene — Yeah, and I was so, absolutely. Um, you know and I feel the same thing. You know, before I was in my current role that you talked about before, I was an executive pastor of a church in Wilmington. And getting everybody to to do something together often creates a lot more momentum and and a positive experience among the whole group. And like we think about that organizationally but it also is something that is like insanely biblical as well, that the group is kind of moving and and is and is doing this together that it can’t be something that is done alone. So we make a resource that certainly is delivered to individuals, but positively what we’ve seen in our experience is a lot of individuals invite other neighbors and family members and friends in order to to do Advent Blocks alongside them. And then it started with our church maybe one or two others the the first year that they’re just like hey we’re just gonna get a whole bunch and kind of deliver them to everyone.

Clayton Greene — And so it’s kind of built on itself every year to the point that now we ah officially and intentionally have something we call the local church program.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Clayton Greene — You know we work in the local church and we believe in the local church, and so um this [inaudible] happens begins in the home, but it’s best than when done with the whole church. And that’s like something we believe in so much that we we do this program. We sell the blocks two churches in bulk for them to either give away or resell at a discount to their people. And we we do it at a price that our business advisors tell us is too low for what we should be doing…

Rich Birch — Sure, oh that’s amazing.

Clayton Greene — But we do that because we do that because we actually believe that this is this is gonna be the best place for these people to be doing it. So you can register for the local church program on the website. There’s a place specifically for local churches. You automatically get that that discount in bulk as long as you buy 12. That’s it. The reason it’s 12, just so everybody knows, is because that’s how many come in a big…

Rich Birch — Because the disciples, right?

Clayton Greene — Yes, because of the disciples is why is why.

Chris Pappalardo — Yes, that’s a hundred percent.

Rich Birch — Or the tribes.

Clayton Greene — Ah, that’s that’s how many come in like a a big box. Um, and so, yeah, we we even made a set that is specifically for them to make it as accessible to families as possible. Um, we there is a song I mentioned before, but we actually made the song into a lyric video…

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

Clayton Greene — …because you know sometimes in kids church to like put it up. And so it’s a lyric video that you can that you can use. You can watch it on Youtube for free with ads or if you’re a size church that you want to have without ads, there’s the opportunity for you to for one of those third parties in order to get it in that way. And we even we we added in something maybe two years ago called He is Here.

Clayton Greene — I mean like Chris just said, adults get a really good benefit from reading The King is Coming which is the name of the book inside the Advent Block set. But we wrote an adult guide, He is Here, that walks alongside the same stories and same theme, but it it can be done with or without the blocks, which is important. Because there are people in the church if this is going to be a big emphasis for the church that don’t have kids in the home, right? Single people, people that have their kids are out of school or the kids are kind of aged out of what this this is. You have grandparents. So there’s just tons and tons of people that if you want to kind of get the whole church into alignment, we also now have this resource for them as well. It’s called He is Here. Chris Chris wrote that. It’s it’s similar reflections with some some moments and some encouragement to prayer and practice. And so it’s it’s something that we put a big emphasis on. Chris every year takes the Sundays that line up with the the stories in The King is Coming and we write a sermon series starter kit…

Rich Birch — Oh wow!

Clayton Greene — …which says, hey here are the sermons that you could do that would align with that very specific day. And and by the way this is Chris this is Chris’s day job. If there’s anything we provide that you want, you want this sermon series starter kit.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Clayton Greene — Because this is what Chris does for J.D.…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Clayton Greene — …he and all the teachers at The Summit is help build the engine with which the research and the ideas and all those things are prepared for then the person who is teaching locally to contextually deliver that in the Spirit to those people. But yeah, so we just we try to just hook churches up like crazy.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing. So so if I catch this right, well first of all, that’s incredible. I think that’s amazing. Um I love the idea of like, hey this is going to be our December series, and we’re going to launch this Thanksgiving weekend maybe or something like that. Or somewhere we’re talking about it in November.

Chris Pappalardo — Yep.

Rich Birch — And the blocks are available for so for sale or for free. That’s even better. That’s amazing. Um, you know, pick up this resource and then we’re going to talk about it through ah through Christmas. Um, that’s that’s incredible. Listen, friends, I know I’ve worked with a lot of teaching pastors and I’m just going to say the thing that’s going on in your head. You know, that preaching at Christmas time is tough, friends, because people know the punchline. They know it’s going to be all about Jesus is returning. What if… or Jesus is coming. What if this year you did something totally different and and plugged this into your into your system into your approach? I think, man, that could be a real win ah you know for your people.

Rich Birch — Ah you know, Chris, talked to me about churches that have leverage this as a kind of a total teaching thing. Do you have any kind of sense of you know the the experience as at a church level kind of what difference that’s made for for them if they’ve done the kind of whole series thing in you know at their church?

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, I mean the executive pastors, teaching pastors, if you’re in leadership you you know how valuable alignment is. Like you can preach the paint off the walls for like 4, 8, 12 doesn’t matter how many weeks, and if it’s just the sermon going in one direction and everything else in the church is going in other directions, you just wait six months and if you want to take the wind out of your sails ask people what what’s been going on in the church, and then none of them will remember what you preached on.

Rich Birch — It’s true.

Chris Pappalardo — Um, but just add a little bit of intentionality get that alignment. So what’s going on in kids, what’s going on in small groups, what’s going on on the stage is all the same, and then years later people will say like, you know what series is fantastic? You know it really changed my life? And they’ll point back to the thing. The preaching may not have been any better, but you were aligned and so it got you moving.

Chris Pappalardo — Um, we’re we’re still kind of early in this and still building, but a friend of mine who left to be kids pastor at a church in Florida was sending me—they used our our the whole kit the whole local church program last year—and so he was sending me updates every Sunday and he was like yeah preach this and his wife is really crafty, incredibly artistic. So in addition to doing like the sermon on that passage and the advent block for day, say four, they took a huge like cardboard box and painted, I mean like six feet tall

Rich Birch — Wow.

Chris Pappalardo — …and painted it so that each day, each Sunday it looked like the little, you know, two inch block you have on the mantle, but it was the image from the advent blocks just up on the stage.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s so cool.

Chris Pappalardo — So everybody was looking at it and you know the kids loved it. They’re like that’s it that they got an Advent Block, they got a huge Advent Block. And so it it was really catalytic for the right…

Rich Birch — Why don’t we have the big Advent Block, dad? That’s so cool.

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, so that was just a lot of fun to see that.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. That is so cool. Well, can you give me a sense, so don’t talk about the amazing discount because I want people to to go and check out your website, drop by there and and reach out for you that. But what is the kind of retail cost of these things, like if I just want to buy one of these and get it shipped to my house, what what does that what does that cost?

Clayton Greene — Yeah, it’s $59.99 for our Traditions set.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Clayton Greene — So it’s a hardback book and a wooden box. It’s going to last for generations.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Clayton Greene — Then we have a Standard set which is I think $44.99. It comes in a cardboard box with a paperback book. It’s the same blocks. So still going to last really, really long time and and be stored really, really well.

Clayton Greene — And then the the church set before the really good discount that everyone’s going to go check out it it retails for about $34.99 um which is where it starts. But you’ll just have to go look and your eyes will go wide whenever you see what we actually will give it to churches for.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. And so if we want to we where do we want to send people just at goodkind.shop – is that the place we want to send them there, Clayton?

Clayton Greene — Yeah, goodkind.shop and you’ll see a tab there for the local church program. That’s going to be the the easiest way for you to find this.

Rich Birch — Yeah I think this is is what a wonderful tool. What a great way to ah you know to to wrap up or to really you know point your people to at this time of year. What time of year Clayton do people need to really get the ball rolling if they’re thinking hey I want to do this. Let’s say I’m a church of a thousand people where like you obviously have some sense of how many of these things you would normally sell, all that. Is that like ah it feels like we got to get going now like feels like we got to make this decision now. But but when do people need to connect with you guys, Clayton…

Clayton Greene — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …if they want to make that happen?

Clayton Greene — Yeah, it does but based on church and their planning cycles. There are some people beginning now. It’ll continue to increase through about August and then from August it’ll kind of go downhill from there. There are some people that find us later in the year, but they’re usually rushing a little bit.

Clayton Greene — The people who find us in the summer plan an event that will actually bring all the families together and make that gift or that that opportunity in order to purchase at a discount a lot more meaningful. And so I would say you know, hey think Christmas in July you know I mean you you need to be thinking about this now so that you’re primary teachers can have the content to be planning the teaching, so that your graphic designers if you have those you know can can be putting things together, which you can we will send you the original files of all of our designs…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Clayton Greene — …and blocks and everything so that they can kind of piece those things in as well and they walk in and it feels like your church created the entire thing. So yeah, but you’re right think Christmas in July. It’s about time.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, love it. That’s so good. Chris, we’re going to give you the final word just as we as we wrap up. Bring us back home to kind of the heart of you know, kind of behind all this. What are you your your local church people that are trying to make a difference trying to help people. Ah. Ah, bring us back to the vision. Why why you’re doing this kind of end us on that thought today.

Chris Pappalardo — Yeah, I think that’s beautiful. Um, you know we often say we call ourselves GoodKind because we want to cultivate the good kind of of habits and holiday practices. And one of the one of the ways we do that is making products that that take beautiful, profound really deep truths, and we make it simple enough that everybody can engage with it. We really think that there’s going to be more movement, there’s going to be more influence, you’re going to see more catalysts for change if everybody in the church does some really small thing, just all together one one tiny step, then if you have a few folks in the church who are really superheroes.

Chris Pappalardo — And um I really believe our stuff helps folks to take a step so that they can look at it a month later, or six months later and say, hey you know what we prayed a little bit more because of that. We actually made this Christmas about Jesus and um, that. I find that tremendously encouraging because the big stuff, the you know the impressive stuff can fade. But if everybody in our church is doing is knowing Jesus a little better, following him a little more closely than I think that’s that’s phenomenal in what we’re after.

Rich Birch — That’s so good. Well thank you guys so much. I really appreciate you being on today’s episode. And I and I hope church leaders that you’re listening in you’ll take action on this. I do think this could be a really cool. You know thing for you to inject into the life of your church into your people real helpful tool that like you say could for generations make a huge impact. Clayton, remind us one more time where do we want to send people online if they want to connect with you guys?

Clayton Greene — Yeah, look us up at goodkind.shop, goodkind.shop – you can find everything there. You can find our podcast, instagram, of course the local church program.

Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. And there’s so much there. you know we talked about one thing: advent blocks. But you guys do other stuff too. We’ll have to have another conversation down the road about those things. So thanks so much, friends. Thanks for tuning in. I appreciate you guys being here today.

The Resilience Factor: Insights from Léonce B. Crump Jr. & Warren Bird on Unbreakable Teams

Rich Birch — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for tuning in to the unSeminary podcast. Today I’m talking with Léonce B. Crump Jr. and Warren Bird. Léonce is an author plus the co-founder and senior pastor of Renovation Church in Atlanta. Warren is a repeat guest on unSeminary. He works for the Evangelical Council for Financial Ability (ECFA) and is also the author of several books.

Together, Léonce and Warren have coauthored a book with Ryan Hartwig called The Resilience Factor: A Step-by-Step Guide to Catalyze an Unbreakable Team. They’re here to talk about what it looks like to be resilient in the face of disruption, and practical steps you can take to build great teams.

How do we lead through disruption? // As leaders the great lesson we have to learn is that disruption is normal. For several decades we have enjoyed relative stability, but the reality is we will always encounter disruption. Building a strong, high performance team is essential to getting through these difficult times, but it also is a great challenge in churches today.
Learn to adapt. // If disruption is normal, then education, management techniques, tenure, natural skills and abilities won’t necessarily help you navigate through it. What you need is the ability to take the hard times and keep going. Become healthy, strong, and successful after a difficult challenge. Resilience isn’t just about surviving. Rather after you absorb the blows life gives you, you’re adapting and becoming something different in order to navigate the new reality before you.
Ask God for help. // The Resilience Factor is broken into eight blocks to help you build an unbreakable team, and the first step is to pray and assess your situation. Ask God to give you insight into the new reality you are in. We can have the best research and resources available to us, but unless God’s at work and you’re doing what he wants, it’s all for nothing.
Lead through others. // The strength of our mission and ministry can’t rest on one gift or set of skills. Preaching alone doesn’t build a great church, rather it’s the ability to lead through others. Letting others lead you in their area of expertise helps catalyze unbreakable teams. Léonce shares that one way he does this is by making space for others to speak first in team meetings. Allow others to share their ideas, thoughts and opinions before you add your own to the conversation.
Building trust. // The book includes team and individual exercises which help to increase resilience, such as an exercise on defining the team’s purpose in light of the church’s mission statement and comparing it with other team members’ answers. These exercises help with trust-building and create little wins for the team which build confidence to go for a bigger win together.

You can find out more about the book at www.resiliencefactor.info as well as order them in bulk. Keep up with the surveys Warren talks about at the ECFA website, www.ecfa.org/surveys, and connect with him on LinkedIn. You can find Léonce under the name @leoncecrump on most social media sites and learn more about his church at www.renovationchurch.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. You know, every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you, really help you as you lead at your church. But today, you’ve got a two for one special. We’ve got two incredible gentlemen here today who, uh, we’re gonna get a chance to dive into something that they’ve been working on for quite a while. We’ve got Léonce B. Crump Jr. He’s the co-founder and senior pastor of, uh, Renovation Church in Atlanta. He serves on a bunch of different nonprofit boards that promote human flourishing. He regularly speaks at conferences nationally, and globally. And he is the author of a number of books, which one of them we’re gonna talk about today.

Rich Birch — And we’ve also got our returning guest, our friend, Warren Bird, from the ECFA, Evangelical Council of for Financial Accountability. Uh, and he’s co-authored so many books I I’ve lost track. I just can’t, you know, I can’t, you know, don’t know about all those – there’s just a lot of them. Uh, and we love Warren. He’s been on the show multiple times, and we’re super glad to have him back. Together they’ve worked with our friend, Ryan Hartwig, and they’ve co-authored a book, “The Resilience Factor: A Step-by-Step Guide to Catalyze an Unbreakable Team”. And I just wanna put my bias right out there at the beginning – friends, I want you to pick up copies of this book for your team. We’re gonna dive deep in with them today. Welcome to the show, guys. So glad you’re here.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — So glad to be here, Rich. Thank you so much, my friend.

Rich Birch — It’s gonna be good. Léonce, why don’t we start with you? So, this is a ton of work, putting a book together. Man, it’s a lot of effort. By yourself it’s a lot of effort, let alone coordinating with two other authors – that’s like triple the work. Uh, so what’s the heart behind this? Why, what, what led you to say, Hey, we, we should write this book. You know, what, what, what pulled you to say, let’s put this together?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah. Um, I actually was invited onto the project, uh, by Ryan and Warren. And it immediately sparked my interest because coming outta the disruptions of Covid-19, I’ve realized, and, and we agree, and we actually put this in the book, that one of the things leaders are going to have to reconcile going forward is that disruption is normal. And the relative stability, maybe that we have enjoyed, uh, over a couple of decades of leadership is actually abnormal. Uh, in fact, we share a story toward the end of the book talking about hypothetically, what if you were born, uh, in a certain era, you would’ve navigated multiple wars, a financial crisis, the Great Depression right on the heels of each other. And so as leaders, I was, I was inspired and challenged to write this book with them, because as leaders, I think the great lesson we have to learn coming outta Covid, especially in modern times, is that disruption is our normal. So how do you lead when, when disruption is reality?

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s so good. That’s, well, I think that’s, that’s a really good insight for sure. And that it’s, it’s, you know, in some ways it’s fascinating that, and if you think of everything that’s happened in the last two or three years, it has been just one thing after another. Covid’s obviously a signpost, but there’s been, there’s been a number of things that just continue to, you know, wave over us.

Rich Birch — Well, Warren, well, part of the, the, the subtitle here is breaking is, is making an unbreakable team, really catalyzing an unbreakable team. And, you know, I would assume in that the kind of undercurrent of that is, man, maybe particularly in the church world, that’s not the norm. Like, that’s not, that’s not normal. Why is it that we seem to struggle with, you know, team development, building high performance teams in the local church?

Warren Bird — That is such a good question. After all these, Rich, you for years have sounded the, the alarm and the challenge of building a high performance, high quality, effective team. And so have many others and lots of literature. And by the way, we try to pull from the best of the research to—in in the book, uh, wrapped around stories—uh, of okay, what really makes a good team? But looking underneath, why haven’t we built good teams? And especially now, coming outta the pandemic. You know, on the one hand, everybody is like vacationing with a vengeance.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah.

Warren Bird — There’s, there’s just this pent up, Hey, let’s really go gangbusters. But, but we don’t see the same thing happening with teams. There’s, well, you know, you’re kind of, uh, worn out and I, I don’t want you to quit. And, and I don’t want you to, to, to have to take on too much and imbalance your life. So this idea of, of vacation with a vengeance applied to let’s, let’s, as a team seek God for something that only he could do, and that, that it would take all of us to do, and none of us could do by ourselves. Um, what might that look like and how do we build the, the resilience that when we get knocked down, uh, to be able to pop back up and say, no, no, no, we’re, we’re going for it. We’re working together. High trust, um, safe environment – how do we do all that? I don’t honestly know beyond… why that hasn’t happened beyond like the Ephesians 4:11 and 12, that, that the role of the pastor and leader is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. And yet we do it all ourselves. And here’s team throughout the New Testament, and yet, we tend to do it ourselves.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s, uh, that, that’s a very good insight. Léonce, um, you, the book title has resilience right in the middle of it. Obviously, this is key to, you know, making an unbreakable team. Unpack that a bit more. When you guys say resilient, what is a, what is a resilient team? What’s that resilient factor? What are, what are, you know, what does that look like? How do I know, you know, is my team resilient? What does that look like?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah. Um, the, the idea actually was born of a Mike Tyson quote that did not, uh, make it the book…

Rich Birch — Love it. We’re getting extra content!

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — I hoped that it would. But many of your listeners will probably recall Mike Tyson saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Rich Birch — Yes.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — And, and so as we were shaping and crafting this work, that idea is really what came rushing to the surface is, at the end of the day, if disruption is normal, right? If disruption is normal, uh, then education, management techniques, tenure—those things—natural skills and abilities—those things aren’t necessarily gonna help you navigate disruption. Uh, what you need, what what we see as the secret sauce to great teams and great leaders is the ability to take a lick and keep going. In fact, uh, one way we define it there in the book is, uh, resilient means that you are able to become strong, healthy, and successful after a challenge or a difficulty. So, so there’s a measure of flexibility as well as strength. Uh, and it’s an understanding that you’re not just surviving, but you’re adapting to the new normal. You’re, you’re becoming something different to navigate the reality in front of you after you’ve absorbed blows. Believe is, is going be the call to, to great teams going forward. Probably always has been. Probably the missing key to, to, to, uh, so many of the challenges we’ve experienced as, as teams and as leaders. Uh, but the ability to return to shape after being pulled, stretched, pressed, uh, and still be effective going forward. That’s what it means to be resilient.

Rich Birch — Hmm.

Warren Bird — And Rich, we haven’t seen that much about of it. And so because we don’t have that role modeling, we don’t know what to aspire to, to say, think that that’s even possible.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — That’s right.

Rich Birch — Yeah. So, Warren, sticking with you, this idea, it’s step by step. Uh, let’s, what is the first step? So if I say, okay, I want to, I want my, we’re not gonna be able to get to everything, but what is, you know, the first step that we need to take as a, as a team to, or as a leader, I need to take with my people to increase our, uh, our resilience factor.

Warren Bird — We broke the book into eight blocks, which are sort of a sequence. And the very first sequence is pray and assess your situation. Really to ask God, give me insight. And, and, and it’s gonna unpack with who should be on the team, who shouldn’t? Uh, what kind, why are my meetings kind of boring? Uh, how do we do accountability? How do we reproduce ourselves? All that begins with saying, Lord, you gotta do something. We, we can have the best research, the best books out there, the best everything, but unless you’re at work and that we’re doing what you want, it’s really all for nothing.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah. And I, I would add to that, Rich, we, we leveraged the Nehemiah story in that first movement. And one of the things that Nehemiah did so wonderful, uh, is understand the current reality in which he found himself as well. And, and so right outta the gate, even before we get to these different steps, we talk about the new realities that we’re facing as leaders. Number one, today’s world, generally distrusts leadership. Number two, uh, team leadership is here to stay. It is the way forward. Number three, for many of us, your team is largely a new team. Uh, number four, your new team comes with new expectations. Number five, the pandemic may be officially over, but its effects will ripple for years to come. So we kinda walk through each of these new realities as the foundation for saying, you know, if this is true, and, and I believe all signs point to it being true, then the very first thing we have to do, especially as spiritual leaders, is take a step back as Nehemiah did, and say, okay, the, the city’s on fire, the walls are burning. Uh, there’s not much strength or support. Where do we go from here? First to the Lord, and then to actually make a point.

Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. So, uh, sticking with you, sir. Uh, one of the things I’m, I’m sure as you’ve, you know, people have been starting to pre-read the book and you’ve started to share some of this content. Um, I’m sure there’s some of it that’s bumped up as being like, wow, this is like the most helpful. This is the part that people seem to be really be resonating with. What is that, Léonce, that they keep coming back to and saying like, oh, this, this part particular—I know all of it’s amazing, I know every part of it’s amazing—but, but is there any piece of it that particularly has been the most helpful, uh, as leaders have been engaging with these ideas?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — So, so my feedback, and, and I’m sure Warren can, uh, speak to this as well, but with the folks that I’ve had in my immediate circle read the book, the two things, um, that have really, uh, energized them the most has been the idea of clarifying your purpose, which is movement number two. We, we really, really find, um, that a lot of teams – now we may know the church’s purpose, but what is your team’s purpose within the scope of a church’s purpose? Uh, and then how to build a a great team -movement number three. We call it gathering all stars [inaudible] reminding people that you don’t have to settle. Uh, you can actually build a team of top performers if you’re intentional and strategic about it.

Rich Birch — Love that. Well, Warren, one of the things I love about your work, uh, is that it is often infused with these great stories, like you are, and even before today’s call, you were digging for, Hey, what about insights and let’s, you know, find stories, find people… Uh, is was there a story in this book that stands out to you that particularly typifies, you know, what the resilience factor looks like? Is there a story of a, a church or a team that, uh, you know, that kind of captures your imagination around what that looks like?

Warren Bird — The opening story is about a fire. And, Rich, how ironic I’m talking to you in Canada and in the news, uh, for quite some time, it’s been, uh, Canadian fires that uh…

Rich Birch – Yes.

Warren Bird — …the smoke has drifted, uh, to where I’m based in New York, uh, just outside of New York City. But, uh, Paradise, California – the town, uh, in essence burned down. And so many people left, but there was one church, Paradise Alliance Church, that said, no, we’re gonna stay. And all the rules are different about who we are, even as a leadership team, and what we’re trying, what our roles are. But we are going to, if you will, find the resilience necessary to take on the challenges of rebuilding the community. And, and for at least the first year, they became the community gathering point. They did meals for the community, they helped the community bond—those who stayed and all—and they demonstrated the power of resilience and, and the pains that that, that each team member of the church’s leadership team had to, had to deal with their own needs of, of grieving and, and adjustment, and of playing a new role on the team.

Warren Bird — And yet, looking back, they would all agree, together, God used us to do something far beyond what any of us could have imagined, and way far beyond what any of us could have done alone. And we have loved being on the team. It became a high trust, psychologically-safe environment, uh, to growing.

Rich Birch — Fascinating. Uh, good alliance story there too. I, you know, my childhood was in the Christian Missionary Alliance. Always good to get a, a plug in there for A. B. Simpson’s, uh, crowd. So that’s a good thing. Uh, Léonce, uh, one of the things that’s interesting in church leadership is, um—and I’d love your perspective on this—you know, you are clearly, you’re a dynamic communicator. You are, um, you know, the kind of person that people follow. And I think there is a misnomer that often, uh, churches that have dynamic communicators in the leadership position, it’s like, it’s all about them. That’s just not true. Like, that isn’t, a church doesn’t grow and have a kind of impact if, uh, leaders haven’t built teams around them. Uh, but maybe you could talk about that tension of how do you, as a, as a dynamic communicator, as a, you know, um, a dynamic leader, build a team of other people around you that are also, Hey, these are go-getters. These are stallions that want to get lots done, these they wanna, you know, make, change the world. How do you, how do you live that tension out? How does that, how do you attract those kinds of people?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah. I am a huge proponent of Ephesians 4, and, uh, and, and really do believe that the strength of our mission and the strength of our ministry can’t rest on one gift. Uh, it can’t rest on one set of skills. It can’t rest on, on, uh, you know, one leader’s capacity. And, and in fact, the bottlenecks that we’ve experienced over the years at the church, uh, and some that we’re still wrestling through now on the other side of Covid, you know, just to give you kinda our, our story arc. You know, we’re a scratch plant in downtown Atlanta. Three people in the living room, uh, before Covid, we were about 13- 1400 people. After Covid were half that and, and trying to build back to it. Uh, my preaching alone is not gonna get us there. Uh, in fact, I, I know some of the most dynamic communicators that I know are leading churches that are averaging 100 to 150 people. Uh, preaching doesn’t build a church, and even great leadership doesn’t build a church. It’s, it’s the ability to lead through others and even be led by them in their area of expertise and specialty that actually builds great teams. And so, I try to put myself in a position where, where I’m not a material expert or even the point authority over a particular area, uh, I put myself in the submission of the leadership of my team. Uh, and that makes us a stronger unit altogether.

Rich Birch — Love that.

Warren Bird — Rich, could I say something about Léonce that he probably won’t say? And that is, uh, as we were investigating doing this book together, uh, Ryan Hartwig, the lead author, and I went to his church and sat with his team, and, uh, and were wowed. And then as we worked together as authors, we not only had to figure out how do you do team with the three of us, but really each of our effectiveness was contingent on the team that was supporting each of us.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.

Warren Bird — And so it really, as we went, so they went and as they went, so we went. And, uh, boy was the idea of health in teams, uh, abundantly apparent as we worked together on this book about unbreakable teams.

Rich Birch — Yeah. I love it. And yeah, shout out to Ryan Hartwig. I just, he what a great guy. And he, even in my own life, he, when he when we were at Liquid Church, when I was at Liquid Church, and he came and spent some time with us, and, you know, he asked this haunting question there that day, which still haunts me to this day, which is, well, it wasn’t a question, it was a statement. He said, Hey, you have to lead with more questions. Stop answering so many questions. Like, stop, because all you’re doing is getting everybody to, you know, come to you. And I was like, oh, no. That is like, uh, it still bugs me. So, Ryan, you’re still in my head, uh, you know, effective, uh, piece of coaching for sure. Uh, definitely. So, Léonce, a book like this, as you’re working it, uh, you end up reflecting on your own leadership, your own, your own, Hey, like, what am I doing and how am I changing? The, the work of trying to, you know, externalize ideas changes us. Um, when, how did this book change your leadership? Was there something as you went through this that it was like, oh, hey, I, I maybe need to change my game a little bit, or, or, I’m growing, or maybe asking new questions. What does, what’s that look like for you?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah. It, it really surfaced for me a lot of great questions about our team and where we are and what we need and, and, and where there are missing pieces, where I’ve missed the mark on even, uh, applying some of my own principles that show up in this book. And so, um, much like a Sunday sermon from time to time, there was a great deal of conviction that as I was writing and advising, I was looking at things that I have not been doing consistently. Uh, and then getting the book in front of my team as well, uh, brought great new challenges because we realized that even as well as we function, and, and, and I, as Warren said, I wouldn’t say that about myself, uh, you know, to, to try and take care and not, um, not over, uh, uh, oversell my leadership or our team’s dynamics.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — But, uh, I found that there were gaps in congruence and incongruencies, even in our perspective on the vision. Like, we are, like, we’re sharing the vision, but, but how we’re looking at it, the angle from which we’re looking at it, we found gaps even as we worked through some of this material, uh, to operationalize it before we handed it out to the world. So it was really a growing and challenging time, writing with two other authors, trying to find a common voice, uh, realizing what my tendencies are and what they are not, uh, and what is most helpful and what’s not. Uh, all of those things kind of came to a, a, uh, boiling point there as, uh, as we did this work and, and, and really saw the effects of it across my internal team as well as the team of, uh, of Ryan and Warren and myself.

Rich Birch — And was there anything, when you look even like a specific behavior or…

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Mm-hmm.

Rich Birch — …you know, an approach that shifted, could you let us in a little bit insight on that?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — I can. Um, one specific behavior that I am, uh, diligently working on is not speaking first. Because when I speak, um, even at a table of, uh, of co-leaders, and I do treat them that way, uh, if I speak, it becomes a dictum. And so in order to, to actually draw the best outta the people I’m leading with, uh, I’m the last with a solution. I’m the last with a response. It creates a lot of awkward silence, uh, from time to time. Uh, but that is a very specific thing. I, I am, uh, are you familiar with the working genius?

Rich Birch — Yep, yep, yep.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — So, so I’m I.D. So, so I’m inventing, and then I’m discerning. So it’s very easy for me to get from A to Z without talking to anybody, because I’ve thought through, uh, all of the potentialities. Uh, but what that does is completely neutralize other people’s contributions and talents and giftings. So that was one very specific thing that surfaced during this time.

Rich Birch — Well, like that alone, friends, is gold – what you just heard. Uh, that’s great coaching for us to be thinking about. Hey, even just functionally in conversations, let’s not be the first to, let’s not be the first to answer. Let’s not be the first to jump in.

Warren Bird — So, Rich, you wouldn’t say this about you, but you had Patrick Lencioni himself…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Warren Bird — …on your podcast, talking about his, uh, latest book.

Rich Birch — Yeah, “Working Genius”. It’s great. Yeah, Patrick’s amazing.

Warren Bird — So insightful. Yes.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. So, Warren, one of the things that you promised in this book is a series of exercises, team exercises, individuals, uh, things that we can do. We don’t wanna make our listeners buy the book, although we do want to buy it. Give us a, a description of one of those kinds of activities that’s in it that could, you know, help us think about how we increase our resilience factor.

Warren Bird — Well, case backstory, we really argued, we, we held up, uh, max Donald Miller books to the publisher, and we said, this is what we want our books to look like with actually, like exercises in the book. And, uh, they translated that as, oh, like study questions at the end of the chapter.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Warren Bird — And that’s not it at all. These are, Okay, pause and talk about it. We have, we have group exercises to do as a team, and we have individual exercises that, you know, write down your understanding of your team’s purpose.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Mmm-hmm.

Warren Bird — And answer these questions about the purpose, and now compare that with others. And by the way, that exercise is just so rich, because as Léonce said a few minutes ago, so often the leadership team of a church just takes the purpose statement of the church and says, well, that’s us. Well, if you think about that for just a second, that falls apart because then you’re doing everything and the purpose of the church? Then why is anybody else needed?

Rich Birch — Right.

Warren Bird — And really, can you do the whole mission of the church? So you gotta figure out what our niche is as a team. And when we, when we read some people—you were in the same room on the same team, and this is the purpose statement that each of you wrote—as different as night and day. That’s a really helpful exercise. And we try to do it in, in a framework of psychological safety and, and trust. And we’ve got that, those elements, trust-building, sprinkled throughout the book. By the way, trust-building is not from doing trust falls and other…

Rich Birch – [laughs]

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — That’s right.

Warren Bird — Those, those create bonding. But it’s the little wins together as a team that actually creates the durable trust to now go for a bigger win as a team. And there’s an exercise on that too.

Rich Birch — Love it. So good. It’s like a whole training curriculum for, uh, you know, our churches. What’s such a, what a huge gift that you guys have put together. This is what I always find astonishing about books, is it’s like the amount of work that goes in to, to compress all of this down, to get it into, you know, and it’s tons of time and effort and research and thinking, and then it’s like 15 bucks or whatever you’re charging for it. Uh, man, we get to access all that, that what a gift that is to, uh, you know, to the church. I really appreciate you guys, uh, you know, pulling this together. Um, so Léonce, where can people get this book if they’re, I know you’ve got a website, resiliencefactor.info, uh, we could send them there. Are there other places that they could pick up copies of this book?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah.

Warren Bird — Well, Léonce, why don’t you tell ’em what’s on that website, because it’s, it’s not just a picture of you and me.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — And, and, and, uh, Ryan.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah. Um, actually, resiliencefactor.info is an interactive site. Uh, where we have provided some, some extra, or we have provided some extra tools and materials, uh, and things that will help to further your leadership. There’s also an opportunity to interact with us. And so, uh, we, we shot a little video on management versus leadership. We provided some, uh, worksheets and some other tools that, that go beyond the book itself. So the website will be a great resource no matter what not, not just to order the book. As far as getting the book itself? Anywhere books are sold, uh, it will be available. Order in bulk from IVP and, uh, take all of your teams uh through it…

Warren Bird — Well, and in fact, InterVarsity had this idea of, well, if this is a book about team building, then we should give generous discounts…

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — That’s right.

Warren Bird — …to people who buy them in bulk. So go to the InterVarsity site if you’re thinking, oh, I’ll get one for each team member or staff member or whatever. There’s some sweet discounts.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah. And that, that’s what struck me as I’m, you know, thinking about this, is I’m, you know, lots of us are looking for a training resource and we’re looking for, Hey, what, you know, you know, maybe we’re thinking about a Christmas gift even this time of year. Like, hey, maybe for the end of this year, or, you know, we’re looking for a fall training. And this really struck me as that. This would be a great resource to get for our entire team. Hey, let’s go through it. We’ve got some great activities here. Uh, it’ll push us, it’ll get us to ask those questions. So yeah, I’d strongly suggest again that that website is just resiliencefactor.info and the link to the IVP, uh, pages on there. So just go there. You can click through that if you’re gonna buy, you know, the, the bulk books and all that, you can just get that there. That’s, uh, you know, that’s amazing.

Rich Birch — Well, what’s, what are, what’s your hope here, Warren, with this book? What’s your, your dream? Like, uh, you know, what, what, when you’re, you’re hoping for transformation in the teams that are, you know, that are gonna read this, what did you have in mind as you were working with these two fine gentlemen to pull this together?

Warren Bird — Well, my second purpose comes outta my research hat, and that is, I wanna get good information for people about team dynamics and what does success look like, and how do you go from one level to another. And we really took the best literature in the field. We translated into very user-friendly ideas, and we built it into different vignettes in the book. So I, I love, you know, I’m kind of the myth MythBuster lover. And, uh, so to me, I’m, I’m putting good information. This is not just how our team did something. This is what the best research says. But even beyond that, I really want to challenge people to go beyond the, the mediocre. We, we so often doesn’t, I, I mean, when we got married, nobody says, well, I take you to, and we’re gonna have a mediocre marriage. But, but too often things settle down because that’s what we see all around us. But, but there’s a spark still inside us that says, no, there’s gotta be more. And I hope people read this book and they say, ah, I, I’ve always known our team could be a whole lot better than it is.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah.

Warren Bird — You’re gonna help us get there.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. What a great, what a great vision. And part of what I appreciate about your leadership, Warren, and your, your writing is, uh, you do push for, like, these aren’t just like soft ideas or like, like those are, it’s rhymes so it must be true.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — [laughs]

Rich Birch — You know, you’re trying to find based stuff on research, and have pushed me in my own work and have been in a very kind way, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this publicly, but in kind way you’ve given me feedback that’s like, Hey, you know, you could do better. We didn’t quite say it like that, but you could do better. And, and that I think gets, that’s why people come back to you time and again, Warren. I just want to honor you in front of, uh, you know, in front of everybody today, cuz you do such a good job on that.

Rich Birch — Well, Léonce, we’re gonna give you the last word as we kind of wrap up today’s episode. Is there anything else you want to share before we close up today’s conversation?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah, I, I just wanna encourage all of the leaders out there, uh, to not be discouraged. God’s hand is still on you. There’s great work for you to do. Don’t take the disruptions as a sign, uh, that things are coming undone. Take ’em as an opportunity. Uh, something that our team has been talking about recently is reframing the situation and saying out loud, God chose us to lead through this time. What a privilege.

Rich Birch — Amen.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — And, uh, and I hope the book will be helpful in cementing that [inaudible].

Rich Birch — That’s so good. That’s so good. Well, um, Warren, if people wanna track with you, where do we want to send them online? Do wanna send them to the ECFA, uh, website or, you know, how do we, if they want to kind of continue to follow the Warren Bird story?

Warren Bird — ECFA for Evangelical Counsel for Financial Accountability, which I was so impressed you said. So just rattle it off, Rich.You, you’ve got my wow book early on here.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Warren Bird — ecfa.org/surveys – and then you can find the stuff that we’ve done like, uh, The New Faces of Church Planting, which Rich, you were so good in helping promote the largest ever study of, uh, in nor across North America, not just, uh US of what’s happening in church planting, including, uh, through the pandemic. Uh, so that’s the best place. And then I’m on LinkedIn is I’m probably, that’s my most active social media.

Rich Birch — Love it. And then Léonce, where do we wanna send people, if they wanna track with you or track with the church?

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — @leoncecrump, uh, on any social media, uh LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, I’m there. And then @renovationatl, uh, on Instagram or Facebook.

Rich Birch — Love it. And I, I was on your website earlier and I noticed that you had your workout regime on your website and I was super intimidated. I was like, man, I gotta step up my game. So I, uh, I appreciate that you posted that publicly. That’s a great thing. So…

Warren Bird — And those of you who are listing and not seeing, uh, Léonce is a former NFL football player and also former wrestler. Uh, so he, he literally picks up a lot, including me, in…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great

Warren Bird — …one of our gatherings.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Well, I appreciate you gentlemen being here today. I really hope this book helps. I know it’s gonna help tons of people. I hope lots of people pick it up. So thanks so much for being, uh, here today on the show.

Warren Bird — Thanks, Rich.

Léonce B. Crump Jr. — Yeah, thanks for having us.

Long-Term Vision, Lasting Impact: Curt Seaburg on Strategic Vision in Church Leadership

Rich Birch — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Curt Seaburg, the lead pastor of Victory Church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

While it’s important for church leaders to learn from each other, when it comes to vision, it’s critical to know yourself and the God-given calling for your church within its unique community. Listen to this episode where Curt shares wisdom about setting the direction of your church, creating longevity in ministry, and orienting your life around the natural rhythms of your church.

Start with vision. // If you don’t know where you’re going as a church, nothing else matters. Figure out what you bring to the church as a leader. Don’t just grab onto the vision of other churches and what they are doing. Rather, learn from other church leaders, but know what will work for you and the community where your church is located. What are you going to do? What are you going to be about? Then, what’s the strategy?
A strategy for your community. // It’s very important to know what’s going on in your community. The church that meets the needs of the community will be the church of the community. If you are a multisite church, your strategy can be different at each location so each campus is tailored to the individual community’s needs. Don’t be afraid to take risks and be open to new ideas.
Be a long-haul leader. // Curt has had the privilege of leading Victory Church for about 20 years and has been blessed to see it become one of the fastest growing churches in the country. When the church and community see a pastor leading through life’s ups and downs and the challenges that come up in ministry, you gain a lot of respect. Plus leaders with longevity have the opportunity to connect with families in the church on a deeper level, walking with them through the seasons of life.
Pastor your family too. // Part of the blessing of being at Victory for as long as he has includes Curt seeing his children love the local church. As you pastor in your church and minister to the people around you, remember to also pastor your family. When your kids are young, let them know that they too are in ministry. Curt and his wife have tried to communicate to their children that being a pastor at a church isn’t just about “going to work” but ministry is about loving people. That mindset has helped them leave a legacy and made all the difference when ministry has demanding seasons.
Take sabbaticals to rest. // When church leaders have been in ministry a long time, they can get weighed down and lose momentum. God gave Curt a picture of this, comparing it to a boat loaded down with barnacles. So Curt worked with his team to create a policy for taking a sabbatical. Victory Church offers a 90-day sabbatical every seven years, and their team of pastors are now on a rotation for those sabbaticals. Offering sabbaticals is Victory’s way of taking care of their team and allowing them to rest and take care of themselves and their families.
Let the church know why sabbaticals are important. // When implementing sabbaticals, Curt brought it before the church and talked with the congregation about its importance and why it would be good for the pastors and the church. He encouraged the congregation to keep attending, giving and being involved in the church while a pastor they enjoyed wasn’t there during a sabbatical.
Dial back the workload. // When Curt took his first sabbatical, it led to him implementing a day of rest consistently into his weekly schedule. During a sabbatical it’s easier to see what parts of the church you don’t need to be so deeply involved in. That will allow you to dial back your workload moving forward, and give you time to make space for seeking clarity and direction. Lastly, rather than trying to find balance in ministry, seek to orient your life around the rhythms of the church. When things slow down over the summer, ride that wave until things begin to pick up again in the fall.

You can learn more about Victory Church at www.victorychurch.org.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well, hey everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You know, every week we bring you a leader who we know will both inspire and equip you. And I’m super excited for today’s conversation, Curt Seaburg. He is the lead pastor at a church called Victory Church, which was founded in 2000 by this incredible couple, Glenn and Linda. And they named the church Victory because they wanted people to experience victory in their lives through relationship with Jesus. Well Pastor Curt came to the church in 2004 was that began as the lead pastor in 2006. And and since then they’ve really been on a tear. Man, lots of good things have happened. They’ve launched new campuses. They’ve been expanding. And they really, you know, continue to have a real drive around mission and vision. And they’ve expanded a bunch of locations all around Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And they’re one of the fastest growing churches in the country. So I’m just so honored that you’re on the show today, Curt. Welcome – we’re so glad you’re here.

Curt Seaburg — Thank you. What an honor to be with you today, Rich. Man, I’m pumped.

Rich Birch — Yeah. This is so good. I, you know, there’s all kinds of jokes you can make about Lancaster, and I’m not going to make them, you know, I’m just going to let it just lay there. You know, you’ve got a computer, you don’t drive a buggy. You know all of those things. Well, just leave all those jokes there.

Curt Seaburg — That’s right. They’re all around us. But yeah, we’re good.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Victory? Kind of fill in the picture there. What did I miss?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah. So Victory, like you said, it started in 2000. And started out just in just in Glenn and Linda’s home, and just kind of grew quietly and slowly. But they brought on on the first lead pastor was about two… I think it was 2002 they brought him on. And he was a good friend of ours. And so he had reached out to us a lot. We were on staff together at one point. And we were youth pastors because we’ve been youth pastors for 17 years up to this point.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Curt Seaburg — We were full time youth pastors just living the dream. And we were living down in Lakeland, Florida at the time in a great church with Wayne Blackburn of Victory Church. And we just he just kept after us and after us to come on up and help him get this work going and things like that. And so in 2003, we said, Yeah, let’s do this.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Curt Seaburg — And so we moved up there in 2004 and came alongside. We were there for about a little over a year and a half. And then he had stepped away and they asked us to step in and take the lead of the church. And it’s just been it’s been amazing ever since then.

Rich Birch — So cool. That must be a work of God that you moved from Lakeland, Florida, to Pennsylvania. You know, they typically the trend is going the opposite direction. People are moving, you know, from Pennsylvania to Florida.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, exactly. Hey, but the reality is, man, you know, my wife and I are both from the northeast and we just missed the seasons. You know, I mean, when you’re Florida…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yes, yeah.

Curt Seaburg — It is always it’s either hot or hotter all the time.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Curt Seaburg — And so, yeah, we missed this. We did miss the snow, miss the fall time and things like that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, so good.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, it’s gorgeous around here. So that was it.

Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s a beautiful, yeah, beautiful. We were talking about this before we went on air. It really is a beautiful part of… it’s one of those parts of the country where I’m like, this might be what heaven’s like.

Curt Seaburg — That’s right.

Rich Birch — It’s quite nice. It’s beautiful.

Curt Seaburg — It’s the garden spot of Pennsylvania.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Love it. All right, so, you know, you’ve led for for a long time. You know, been been in the driver’s seat since 2006, and there’s clearly been changes, growth. You know, you’ve added multi-site, you’ve done a bunch of those different things.

Curt Seaburg — Right.

Rich Birch — I wonder if we could take a step back, help me understand kind of how do you think about setting direction and setting strategy? What is what does that look like for you? How is that kind of evolved over the years?

Curt Seaburg — Well, that is like that’s critical. That really is mission critical. If you don’t know where you’re going, you know, there’s everything else. Nothing else matters at that point.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Curt Seaburg — You got to have a direction. And so for us, it really took us some time to really figure out, okay, what Lord, what do you have for us? Because it’s not only for us as a church, but you also have to take into account what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses as a leader as well, because that’s going to play into it as also.

Curt Seaburg — You have there are some folks that you’ll just grab what somebody else is doing. You try to copy paste that and it might work for a little while, but after you go for a couple of years and it doesn’t work, and the reason why it doesn’t work is because it’s not you, you know? And so it’s great to learn from other people. And I am always learning. I got a best buddy of mine, Blaine, Blaine Martel, he’ll say, If I got eyes, I played your eyes. You know what I’m saying? But he’s just like, there’s always things to learn from other people. And so you always have to kind of keep your eye on the horizon, what’s going on. But you have to be true to who you are as well, and really leave those things for the Lord. And so vision very, very important. What are you going to do? What are you going to be about? And then what’s the strategy? How do you go about that point of the vision?

Curt Seaburg — And so for us, some of these things like took a little while for them to really develop, even though we we got what we thought was a really clear scripture verse in March of 2006 and Isaiah 54 about enlarge the place of your your meeting. And did not understand what all that meant. And so there was a continual I think we were probably into that for maybe maybe 2 or 3 years to really try to figure out, Lord, what do you have for us that’s going to be very unique for us? And we didn’t want to be unique just for the sake of, Hey, look at us, be unique. But we just wanted to be true to who we were. And so that’s what once we had that clear vision and that clear mission, man, it was just it was gangbusters after that. At that point, it was then figuring out the strategy, how do we come about and accomplish that vision and mission?

Rich Birch — I love that. Well, I think that I love this. I think you’re hitting on something that I think we often don’t think about, or maybe we miss a nuance there. It’s really this connection between, you know, ourselves and what God’s calling our church to be. It’s like you look around and you’re trying to assess what is the needs in our community.

Curt Seaburg — Right.

Rich Birch — You kind of where do we believe God is moving? But then that has to fit in context of, Hey, he’s also called you to lead. So when you say it took a while, help us understand that a little bit. Was that you was that you trying to self explore, understand yourself a bit more, or understand, you know, the mission a bit more? Maybe help us kind of pull that apart.

Curt Seaburg — Oh man.

Rich Birch — I’m intrigued by this, this idea of the connection between you as a as a leader and the mission or the vision.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah. What a what a great question that is. Because, you know, for me, it was, like I said, you know, we were youth pastors, you know? And so there was a thing that we did and there was a way that we did youth ministry, and it was and the Lord was really blessing it. To step into what it was like to be a lead pastor. And it was it was a small work at the time. There was only a couple hundred of us at that time trying to figure all that out.

Curt Seaburg — So you’re exactly right, Rich. I mean, it took a while for me to figure out me, but it took a while for me to figure out our church as well. And not only the church, but the scripture verse in Isaiah 54 that talks about enlarging your house and building an addition. We know that for us, that really was our multi-site, that had to do with multi-site, which would come a couple of years later. And so all of those things interplay is really what took it for…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Curt Seaburg — …as long as it did really to help to develop that. And you wanting to bring the people along with you at the same time. We wanted them to own it as well. And so there’s a lot of, when I say they, it was more of a leadership team to own the direction that we were going in the buy-in as well…

Rich Birch — Love it. Yeah.

Curt Seaburg — …because it was different than really a lot of things that anybody else was doing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. So a part of this process is obviously knowing your community, knowing where you’re kind of the both your church community and the church are trying to serve…

Curt Seaburg — Right

Rich Birch — …or the community you’re trying to serve. Talk to us about how do we do that? How do we how do we try to get to know, how do we how do we learn about them? How do we what is that or what’s that what has that look like for you over the years? Because obviously your community has shifted and changed even since 2006. Right?

Curt Seaburg — Oh big time.

Rich Birch — Things have changed in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. What does that look like for you?

Curt Seaburg — In some ways, it’s changed. In a lot of ways it’s still very much the same. In our area, we are in Lancaster County, Lancaster County is a unique kind of a place. Because if you’re living in the county, the communities are very much all about the communities. So if you’re from Lititz, you’re from Lititz.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Curt Seaburg — If you’re from Manheim, you’re from Manheim, you know? You can only be a couple of miles apart, but you are in those communities. If you are in Ephrata, you live in Ephrata. But if you see some people, like in Florida, and they’re from Pennsylvania and they’re from one of those communities that I just listed, it would be like, Hey, I’m from Lancaster County, you’re from Lancaster County too?

Curt Seaburg — And so like, we own the county when we’re away, but when we’re in the county…

Rich Birch — That’s a good nuance.

Curt Seaburg — …it really is very nuanced, but it’s really played to our advantage. Because our sites that we have—there’s six of them that we have right now—they’re all in these communities. And they’re they’re not that far apart where I have, you know, I got a lot of friends, you know, their sites are maybe 30 miles apart or 40 miles apart. You know, our sites are like eight miles apart, ten miles apart. But they are incredibly distinct, meeting the needs of the people in that community in and of itself. And so it has really played to our advantage to be able to focus just on the communities that are close by.

Rich Birch — Okay. I’m going to push you on this a little bit, because I know you’re a smart leader and you’ve thought about this. So one of the things that in from a multi-site point of view I’ve always kind of struggled with is this balance of kind of we have a unified vision. We have one thing we’re pushing towards, and we have like a unified culture. Like there is by definition, you know, you go to a Victory Church in Ephrata or in Manheim, like there’s obviously some common things. That’s why you’re multi-site as opposed to just church planting.

Curt Seaburg — Right.

Rich Birch — And balancing what you’re saying, which is, okay, we’ve got local realities that we want to kind of nuance to. It should, it should feel like it’s in Manheim when it’s in Manheim or wherever we are.

Curt Seaburg — Right.

Rich Birch — How do you balance those two out? How do we make sure, because in some ways they feel like they’re maybe at odds, like the kind of common approach, you know, Victory Church is Victory Church. And then, oh, we’re also trying to figure out how to be very much in our communities. What’s that look like?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, the in our community. That’s a great question. You’re smart, Rich. There’s it’s very, very important that you know what’s going on in your community.

Right.

Curt Seaburg — So that you can meet the needs of the community. The church that meets the needs of the community will be the church of the community.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.

Curt Seaburg — That’s that is a big, big deal for us. The way that we do outreach, the way that we do groups, how we’re meeting the needs of, the individual needs in that community is very intentional in the way that we go about things. But when you pull back, people still want to be a part of something that is big and growing and overall it’s healthy and successful. And so that’s where our vision and our mission sits and our strategy sits. So everything else underneath that is very distinct to that area. The groups, now we do all we all do the group same way, you know, but it’s very distinct to that community that we’re in. Does that make sense?

Rich Birch — Yeah. Can you give me some examples of what that how, you know, some of those distinctives how that would kind of work itself out? I get the idea, like the overall strategy point of view is common, but then how, how do you allow some or have some nuance, not really allow, but have some nuance, you know, at a local level?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, it’s the way that we’re meeting needs in that area.

Rich Birch — Okay, okay.

Curt Seaburg — So it would be like one of our locations is, is in Colombia. Colombia has typically been the poorest community in all of Lincoln County. So there’s things that we’re doing in Columbia, maybe that some other churches have started and we’ve come alongside and been a part of it. You know, Hands Across the Street. We’ll do things in helping to meet the needs there that we won’t do in a more affluent area, and something like a like a Lititz. So if we’re in Lititz, we’re really focusing in on on finding out, okay, when they gather together and when we have celebrations, or whenever we have parades or stuff going on, there’s this big park. So we’re engaged there, making sure that people are seeing us, that they know that there is a church in the community. We’re also very involved there in the school system, which because that’s a big deal for that community…

Rich Birch — Right.

Curt Seaburg — …the people in that community are very involved in the schools. And so that’s so that’s a little bit different. So they’ll push that at our Lititz campus where our Columbia campus, they’ll do more of feeding, taking care of of of actual physical needs that people have. So those those locations actually take on the feel of that community.

Rich Birch — I love it. So one of the things for a leader like yourself that has been serving, you know, for more than five years, let’s say. So there’s some there’s some line in the sand where we have to keep reinventing ourselves. We have to keep growing. We have to keep you know, if we get stuck in stagnant, then like shocker, the church we lead or the organizations we lead will become stuck and stagnant. And I, no doubt you’ve led over all these years, you know, going on almost 20 years in the same church. You know, there’s lots of people that that haven’t been able to continue to do that. How do you do that? How do you keep growing? How do you keep learning as a leader, about these things are just in general, what’s that look like?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah. You know, we’re not afraid to take risks. And I think some of that is the youth pastor in you, too.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Curt Seaburg — You know, you’re always looking to do the next awesome thing. You know, what’s something that’s really going to be that’s going to be impactful for people. And so we’re not afraid to do things. So one of the big things that we do is we had never done it before, but we did a biker blessing.

Rich Birch — Okay, that’s cool.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, that’s a couple of years ago. And so, I mean, that thing just like took off. And we were so pumped, so excited about that. And then we’re like, well, what are some other things that we can do? And so our kids pastor at the time, he’s like, What if we did just like this huge splash day, invited all of our communities to do this huge water slide. And there were thousands of people that were showing up for that on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon. And so always looking, listening to the people who are around, some of the ideas that they’ve got, some of the things that you’re hearing about going around in the nation, you know that things are doing, the people are doing. I think it’s not getting so just tunnel visioned into your own thing, but always being open to to new ideas and relationships, conversations, to kind of keep things fresh. There is something absolutely beautiful about being in the place, though, for as long as we have.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Curt Seaburg — You know, there’s there’s a lot of beauty in the long haul, you know?

Rich Birch — Well, yeah, yeah. That’s one of I was I’d love you to talk more about that, because one of the things we see, we’ve done a lot of work on studying growing churches, fast growing churches. And one of the common traits you see is they are pastors, like yourself, that have been there for a decade plus there.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And that’s one of those answers that people don’t like. It’s like, how do you have a growing church? Well, first, spend ten years there. Next, you know, and talk to us about that. What do you think some of the advantages of being a long haul leader, you know, in a location, you know, what are some of the advantages? What does that look like?

Curt Seaburg — Oh, you get, the respect that you really do gain…

Rich Birch — Right.

Curt Seaburg — …from the people that you’re leading because they’re seeing you through all the ups and downs. And a lot of people are here for a couple of years. You know what that’s like. And we’ll spend three years in one place. They come to a difficult situation, they’ll move and spend three years in another place. And they say they got six years of ministry experience. No, they don’t. They got three years in two places is what they got.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Yes.

Curt Seaburg — You know, and so I think being around people that see you going through the ebbs and flows and the ups and the downs, weathering the different storms and being a part of of of dedicating the child to Lord, and then you’re marrying that child off later on.

Rich Birch — Wow, wow. Yes.

Curt Seaburg — You know there is…

Rich Birch — A privilege.

Curt Seaburg — Oh, it is. There’s such a connection, you know, that really happens there as well, because they know at the end of the day, because they’re living life, you know, 24/7. But at the end of the day, if they’re going through difficulties, they know that there’s some stability and they look to their pastor for that stability. And that’s been earned over time to be able to have that. And so, yeah, I think it’s one of the joys that my wife and I have had is to be able to be here as long as we have.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I love that. What a great that’s a great word for people. You know, as we’re thinking about, you know, how do we how do we lead? You know, a part of this is, hey, we should be hunkering down. And so we’re going to be here for a while. And so and I know that there’s so many friends of mine who have led in real, thriving churches that they’re like, they’re not going anywhere.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — It’s like it’s, you know, we just keep plugging away. That’s that’s so good. You kind of relate…

Curt Seaburg — [inaudible] to Rich. I’m sorry. Our kids are really involved also. And so we’ve got four of them. They’re adults. They’re all married right now. We’re not saying they’re married, period. But we got most of them have kids right now.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Curt Seaburg — We’ve got our daughter and her husband, or hopefully now we’re believing God for that. But we got grandkids. And so they’re all a part, too.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Curt Seaburg — And they’re really anchored into their faith, or anchored after all these years., they still love their mom and dad, you know, who have been in their entire life. They love the local church. And that speaks a lot [inaudible].

Rich Birch — That’s huge.

Curt Seaburg — Well, and so not only pastoring your church and loving and caring and leading, but making sure, number one, that you’re pastoring your family…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Curt Seaburg — …and you’re loving and you’re caring and you’re doing that with your wife. And so that has helped us too, I think, in the longevity is because we want to leave a legacy, not only for us, but now our kids and our grandkids to be able to follow after.

Rich Birch — Yeah, we weren’t planning on talking about this, but you went there, so I’d love to hear more. So my my own kids, we’re like, we’re one or two phases before your kids. So my daughter just graduated from university. My son’s in university, in college. And they both love the Lord, they love the church. And like I always say, by God’s grace, like it’s amazing, you know.

Curt Seaburg — Yup.

Rich Birch — You know, but what would your coaching, what would your advice—we’ve got a lot of young pastors that are listening in—what would, you know—and unfortunately, the stereotype is there’s a lot of kids that end up our age who have been kind of the pastor’s kid thing. What would be your coaching and advice, you know, to parents as who happen to also work in a church?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah. You know I think a couple of things that, looking back, that we did, and I’m really thankful for we stumbled on, is our kids, we always told our kids, you know, you’re you’re in ministry until you’re 18. You know, God chose for you to be born to this mom…

Rich Birch — To this family.

Curt Seaburg — …to this dad.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Curt Seaburg — And and you and we’re in ministry. We’re called the ministry. And so that means you are to. When you’re 18, you can make your own decision. But until then, we’re going to church, you know, and you’re going to be at youth group. And so and we made that we didn’t make that rule when they were 14 or 15. You know, when you’re going to have to struggle, it’s going to be a struggle at that point. We led them there early on.

Curt Seaburg — And I think another beautiful thing, too, is that, you know, you put a lot of hours in when you’re a pastor. And there were oftentimes, you know, where the kids would cry and say, oh, daddy, can’t you just stay home? And things like that. We would always tell our kids, my wife was really, really good with this. And Pam would say, Well, Daddy’s going to love people. He’ll be back in a little while. It wasn’t, Daddy has to go to work. Daddy has to go to church. You know, Daddy’s going to love on people. And when he’s done loving on people, then he’ll be back. That was a constant that we said to our kids early on. And I think that really helped our kids to love people as well.

Rich Birch — Right.

Curt Seaburg — And to realize the church wasn’t taking dad away, the church and the people there he’s going to love on those those folks. And that’s a good thing. And so those are just, you know, a couple, oh, boy, we could talk about, we could have a whole podcast and [inaudible] my wife on it…

Rich Birch — That’s a whole conversation. Yeah, yeah.

Curt Seaburg — And and she could write off all kinds of things that we had done. And we didn’t do everything right, obviously.

Rich Birch — No, no.

Curt Seaburg — But those were some things that we did early on that really did help to set up our family to be able to succeed.

Rich Birch — Okay. Kind of in a related area, did you ever do a sabbatical ever during that…

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …you know, that 20 years, or is it coming up? I feel like there’s a lot of guys who are like, it’s coming up, year 42…

Curt Seaburg — Oh my goodness.

Rich Birch — …but what does that look like?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, we actually did. So our first sabbatical, and the only sabbatical we ever took, was in 2017.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Curt Seaburg — So we had been in the ministry, at that point we were it was 30 years that we and we had never taken a sabbatical or anything like that. And so I had talked to our our leadership team at that point and just said, Hey, I know that we’ve never done anything like this, but I’d really like for you guys to consider me going on a sabbatical.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Curt Seaburg — And so I wrote a whole sabbatical policy and gave it to them. And I’ll tell you, the thing that really just spurred me on toward this was this word picture that the Lord had given to me. And it was this picture of a boat that was gliding across the water in this endless ocean. And sometimes the waters were calm and sometimes the waters were rough. But the boat just continued just to keep moving, and keep motoring along. Along with the driver of the boat was enjoying the ride, loving the view, enjoyed the passengers that were in the boat, and they all loved to be together and they loved the scenery. Most often the throttle was wide open, but sometimes the boat actually would stop along the lake and rest for a bit. But then to be back up to speed again.

Curt Seaburg — And this boat had been traveling on this endless ocean for years. And unknown to the driver, the boat had slowed down a little bit. And this is the whole picture that the Lord was given to me. The driver doesn’t even notice it because he’s still making great progress. He’s still loving the view. He’s still loving the people that he’s with. He takes care of the engine, continues to to work hard, but the throttle is wide open. Yet the boat seems to be bogging down a little bit. And when the driver finally takes the boat to the Marina, they pull the boat, they dry dock the boat, and immediately they notice what the problem is. They notice that though everything looked great from the waterline up, below the waterline, all these barnacles had attached themselves…

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. That’s powerful.

Curt Seaburg — …to the boat, slowing it down from what it was intended to be used for. And so the Lord told me at that point that, and it’s just as clear as day, Rich, was just pastors collect expectations like boats collect barnacles.

Rich Birch — Oh wow.

Curt Seaburg — And you never know until you pull yourself out of the water.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Curt Seaburg — And when I shared that with our lead team, I mean, there was like, you mean everybody in the room is just, like, crying?

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

Curt Seaburg — I mean, it was a powerful moment.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Curt Seaburg — So we instituted a sabbatical policy at that point. And so every seven years, yep, our team goes away. And I can remember the first, I sat down with a buddy of mine at LCBC, Pastor Dave Ashcraft used to be the lead pastor out there. And and I share with him my whole what I’m going to be doing over these next 90 days of my sabbatical. And he’s looking at everything I’m going to accomplish. And he’s like, Curt, I think you’re missing the point of a sabbatical.

Rich Birch — [laughs]

Curt Seaburg — And he really, and he really helped coach…

Rich Birch — Crank it up.

Curt Seaburg — …you need to rest is what you need to do. And so, yeah, so we put all that stuff together and our team now is on a rotation to where we have different pastors that are going at different times now to make sure that they get a sabbatical. And it’s all tiered, you know, to where you sit on the leadership team, or the strategic team or whatever. But we really want to take care of our team by giving them sabbaticals.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s a great word. I love there the encouragement. And maybe you could speak a little bit more to this. Like one of the difficulties of being the first pastor that’s been there for ten years…

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …you know, at a church like yours, is like you are probably going to have to, which is what you did, have to raise your hand and say, hey, this is an issue that I think we need to talk about. And you did the, what an amazing gift you’ve given to generations that have come after you at Victory. But talk to us about maybe there’s a leader who hears that and is like, oh, man, that’s totally me. But I, I, you know, pastors are by definition, like they’re caring for other people. They’ve oriented their lives around other people, and that might feel really selfish.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — So help them, help us understand how do you flag that? How do you even kind of open that conversation up?

Curt Seaburg — Man, I am German Swiss. And so all of those feelings were coming out big time.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Curt Seaburg — You know, I’m in Pennsylvania Dutch country, for Pete’s sake.

Rich Birch — Yes. That’s hilarious.

Curt Seaburg — I’m not worried these guys are working 80 hours a week…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Curt Seaburg — …[inaudible] horrible. So what I did is I took a risk and I talked about it on a Sunday morning.

Rich Birch — Oh interesting.

Curt Seaburg — And I shared with our church where things were at as far as just just workloads and what that’s like, and why this is not this extended vacation or anything like that, and why I think I’m so deserving of all this time. But the importance of it and and the benefits that it’s going to bring to our church afterwards. And I had asked them during that time, I said, you know, as we’re getting ready to go, I’m encouraging not to don’t stop attending. We need you to be here and each to support; don’t stop giving.

Curt Seaburg — And so there were things I was asking them to do as well during that time. And when it came back, the first Sunday back, actually, Pam and I sat down and we just gave a whole report of things that we learned and things that we were walking through. And it was absolutely beautiful and it was seamless. Most of that, it wasn’t self-imposed in my own head. Like people are going to feel this way, but they’re really not. Oh yeah, they’re really going to feel that way. You know that why are you taking this extended vacation?

Rich Birch — Sure.

Curt Seaburg — So I think that’s why it’s important that you get out in front of it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Curt Seaburg — And you share…

Rich Birch — Call it out.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, you got to call it out because that’s what a leader does. The leader gets out front.

Curt Seaburg — And so, yeah, that was a real, looking back now, that was such a smart thing. And now when our team comes up for sabbatical, yeah, our church knows what we do for health.

Rich Birch — It just becomes a part of it.

Curt Seaburg — Health and longevity.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I love that. I think, and yeah, I totally get that’s a fun, you know, the Pennsylvania Dutch work ethic, you know, if you can do it there in that in that culture, man, lots of places in the country that would be fine. And I think, to be honest, I think most pastors underestimate, whoever they’re like, whatever they’re like the people they report to their board, their overseers, whatever that looks like…

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …they underestimate how much those people care for them…

Curt Seaburg — Yes, yes.

Rich Birch — …and you know that they understand like, hey, okay, that makes sense. Like, and it is like a there’s a Johari window there you have to open for them to be like, Hey, this is something that, you know, would love for us to think about. And I love that. What a great – that’s a great coaching.

Curt Seaburg — That is that is so true. And I didn’t realize too, how much I needed it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Curt Seaburg — It took me, no lie, I was going back and look over my notes. It took me five weeks…

Rich Birch — Sure, wow. Yeah.

Curt Seaburg — …until I finally was able to feel like, okay, now I’m relaxed, now at this point. So you need it more than you think you do.

Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. I have a good friend of mine is on sabbatical right now and he, I was cheering for him. I was texting him. Hey, man, good, good, like, I’m so glad. And he he’s a he’s a really hard worker and his, you know, his ethnic background is Korean and, like, very similar. And it was his reflection. He was like, it feels very odd to be taking it. But he said, you know, Rich, I’ve and so he’s 50. He’s like, I have never taken more than one week off…

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …one consecutive week, even between roles, has never done that for his entire career. And I think, even now I think coming post-COVID like we are post post-COVID now, friends…

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …there are people who are tired, and there’s they got a lot of barnacles on their boat that they need to knock off, get knocked off in the in the dry dock. I just love that. That’s good.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — How is that how did that impact your rhythm kind of beyond that? So you came back to that. Did anything change on how you structured your life and all that?

Curt Seaburg — Yes. Sat down with my executive assistant. I said, okay, let’s talk about my calendar. And she’s like, I already have a bunch of ideas for you. So we sat down and we really begin to map out, okay, what does the ideal week now look like for me in this new seat that I’m in. We worked really hard to try to set things up to where it ran really well, even while we weren’t there. And it did. But so there were a lot of things that I recognized during that time. A lot of weeds I didn’t have to dive down into that I could actually stay up out of. And so I wouldn’t have known that had we not taken the sabbatical and realized, Hey, all I need to do is just just need to be touch points. I don’t need to be in these things. That helped a lot in my calendaring and it really helped me to, to, to dial into the fact that I’m going to take a full day off. And so Friday is my full day off. And we would be sporadic about that, you know, to be very honest with you. For years, you kind of do what you had to do. Sometimes you’d have to, you know, work on that day or with…

Rich Birch — [inaudible] yourself, it’s not work.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah, so we take, ever since then, there’s been a true sabbatical…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Curt Seaburg — …I cannot think of very many weeks when we would have missed a true Friday off together that we took. And so, yeah, that’s really, for my health and for, um, just direction, for clarity in my mind. I mean, I’m in great health, but just for clarity in my mind, it has really helped to be able to do that, to see things differently. And to project what do I want this next half of my life to look like?

Rich Birch — So like that that connects that kind of is full circle back to, you know, clarity around direction and vision and all that and our we’re a part of that. How God’s called he hasn’t called just, you’re not a random widget that he’s called to lead this church. You’re an individual person.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And so a part of that is you’ve got to process all this stuff and work through it and and ask the Lord and and you know that a lot of that happens when in the in the slowdown, the silence, the when things aren’t quite so go go go all the time.

Curt Seaburg — Yep.

Rich Birch — So just love that; that’s that’s so good. What a great this has been a great conversation. Anything else you want to share just as we wrap up today’s conversation?

Curt Seaburg — You know, I think one thing that that we’ve learned, too, along the way that has really helped us a whole lot is just understanding how to do this whole balance thing. You know, we’ve heard we’ve had so many we have so many conversations with a lot of people, a lot of pastors, just about life balance. And what does it look like to balance your marriage, and ministry, and family, and your ministry, and and just all the ebbs and flows. For years, I would would just I would fight to try to find balance you know, in everything.

Curt Seaburg — And one thing that I had learned learned from a guy by the name of Bruce Miller, he wrote a great book. And and we were together at a pastors’ network probably about 8 years ago, 7 or 8 years ago. And he talked about rhythms, and the importance of not trying to find balance in things, but to ride the rhythms of your church. Know know what your church, the rhythms of your church and ride that. When you got to work hard, work hard. When your church is not in a busy time, don’t try to make it busy.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Curt Seaburg — Take that. Hang around down there, because it’s going to get busy again. There are natural rhythms. And so we have even our church, we diagnose this. And so the first five months of the year, they are like high, fast speed for us. The next three months are the lowest.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Curt Seaburg — Four months after that, it’s kind of like it’s right in the middle, you know?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Curt Seaburg — So the first five are high. Next three are the low, and then the next four are in the middle. And so we have kind of oriented our life around that rhythm and around that…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Curt Seaburg — …flow of our church rather than just trying to fight it all the time. Because you’re trying to fight culture as well. And so it’s smart just to just ride those rhythms. Don’t try to find balance and all that stuff.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. You know, I think that’s one of the things that we’ve lost as kind of our entire well, and maybe not so much in your part of the country, but as the general culture has shifted away from being anything agrarian that has this idea of there are seasons when you plant, there are seasons when you water, and then there are even seasons when you harvest.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And those all have different work paces to them, right? They’re all it’s not the same all the time.

Curt Seaburg — Exactly.

Rich Birch — And so, you know, we’ve kind of slipped into this like just keep working all the time rhythm, which is not really a rhythm at all. That’s interesting.

Curt Seaburg — Yeach, you’re exactly right. Because when you talk about that kind of terminology and you give those kind of illustrations in this agrarian culture that I live in, yeah, they dial into that really quick. So I guess I’m at a little bit of an advantage, maybe in some of that stuff…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Curt Seaburg — …but hopefully our listeners can listen to this and they can they can dial in, and take some of that stuff away. You know, how can I, how can I use that in my church and in my life as well?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. This has been a great conversation, Curt. I really appreciate your time today and thanks so much for leaning in and helping us. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them online?

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, so we got everything right at our church – just victorychurch.org.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Curt Seaburg — So everything’s there. I’m horrible on on Twitter.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Love it.

Curt Seaburg — You know, I’m I’m really not on social media.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fine.

Curt Seaburg — You know, a whole lot, it’s funny some of our, you know, some church people like, man, is everything okay? You didn’t respond back to me. You know, I sent you a message on Facebook three months ago. I’m like, I’m not even on Facebook. I don’t even think about it anymore or anything like that.

Rich Birch — Yes. Love it.

Curt Seaburg — But uh, just going really everything’s right at that at the church.

Rich Birch — Love it. That’s great.

Curt Seaburg — Yeah, so that’s the best place to do it.

Rich Birch — Well, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate you. Really appreciate you being on the episode. Thank you.

Curt Seaburg — I’m so grateful for you, Rich. Thanks for everything you do for the community of faith at large. And so you’re blessing for sure.

Rich Birch — Well, thanks, brother. Take care, man.

Hybrid Church in a Digital Age: Collin Jones on the State of Church Tech Today

Rich Birch — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Collin Jones, the chief ambassador at Resi, part of the organization Pushpay. Pushpay provides a donor management system, including donor tools, finance tools and a custom community app to the faith sector while Resi helps deliver reliable livestream solutions to churches.

Online services and live streaming have been on the rise for years, but the pandemic has accelerated the shift towards church online and hybrid models. Listen in as Collin discusses the reasons why churches are choosing to stay hybrid, plus other changes to church technology over the last year.

Hybrid is here to stay. // Before COVID, many churches were resistant to live streaming, but that changed when the pandemic hit. Even now when people have returned to church, there are still many people watching services online. According to the latest State of the Church Technology report, 89% of churches employ a fully hybrid model, with both in-person and online options available. While most churches accept that this is the reality, they probably don’t have a lot of energy to think about how to grow it.
Online is the front door. // Collin describes three different doors for people coming into the church. Church online is the new front door to your church. Very few people will pass by your church and simply stop by on a Sunday to check it out. Even prior to COVID, the average person would come to online church about 11 times before ever visiting in person.
Keep the side door open wide. // The side door refers to the people who are already in the congregation but are busy. They may be donors or volunteers or community leaders and many times they don’t make it to church on weekends due to conflicts in their schedule. By providing an avenue for them to watch services online, these people can still be invested in the church’s mission and have transformed hearts and lives.
Reach out through the third door. // The third door is digital because everyone a church wants to reach is online. The digital door is part of a funnel that might begin with social media shares or online ads for your church and directs people to your site to watch a livestream. People coming to your website to meet a felt need will hopefully take a next step to engage and come to the church in person.
A shift in livestreaming. // According to data from 2022, about 89% of churches livestream on social media. But when asked what channels they are planning to stream on in the future, only 47%, were planning to use social media in the next year. In the report, many churches are shifting to streaming on their own app or platform. Moving away from places like YouTube or FaceBook allows churches to have more control over helping people take next steps. In addition, it gives them access to important data and allows them to offer content without ads.
Do what works for you. // Overall, Collin emphasized the importance of churches finding the right technology solutions for their specific needs and goals, rather than simply following the trends of large outlier churches. When it comes to winning online, or on any channel that constantly changes, he emphasized three things. First, measure what matters and make sure everyone is clear about what’s being measured. Second, experiment within the boundaries that you’ve set. And third, do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t working.

You can take look at the study results of the State of the Church Tech report by clicking here. Visit www.resi.io and www.pushpay.com to learn more about what the organizations offer.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well, hey everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. You know, every week we try to bring you somebody who will, who really, you know, inspire, equip you. And today, man, is gonna be one of those times. Super, super excited to have Collin Jones with us. He’s with an organization called Pushpay. If you don’t know who they are, man, where have you been? Uh, Collin, uh, was with, originally with an organization called Resi, and right from the year it founded, and they really have led this incredible transformation of helping churches deliver reliable livestream solutions to churches and organizations all over the globe. But then since 2021, uh, after Resi was acquired by Pushpay, he has been with them, uh, really helping, and if you don’t know Pushpay, they include, they have a bunch of donor tools, financial tools, and let really a lot of different things to help your church move forward. Uh, today we want to get a chance to talk about Pushpay’s state of check Church Tech, uh, report that came out earlier this year. In his role, he’s the chief ambassador, which sounds incredibly I, you know, important. It’s amazing. And so, uh, looking forward to, uh, to, to talking with you again, Collin. Welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Collin Jones — Yeah, thank you, Rich. And fun to get to talk to you again.

Rich Birch — Yeah, why don’t you, you kind of round out the picture there. What did I miss? Uh, give us the, the Collin story. What did I miss about Pushpay or about Resi that you wanna make sure we, we know about?

Collin Jones — No, I think that’s great. Yeah, we started, uh, Resi kind of got to a size where it was hard to keep going on our own without a lot of the tool sets around it. So, the reason why Pushpay made a lot of sense is because of all the other tools that they have. So, like the app and donor management and church management systems, and a lot of the data that comes around that. And so the, the main vision of why we came together is so that, um, churches could know and grow their audience and, uh, and their, you know, congregation.

Collin Jones — And so I think like the, you know, we’re, we’re getting to work on a lot of cool things, like we’re, we’re working on a lot of media stuff together. So they’re the media and Resi and all of that. And the app is a lot easier. Um, that was one thing from the state of the church tech that surprised me, or that does, that didn’t surprise me. I knew that it was a trend, but the trend actually surprised me, um, which is, you know, more and more people doing their own apps. I thought, you know, five years ago I would’ve said, uh, you know, cuz people only do five apps, that may not be a thing. And then the other part is the analytics picture, so that you can help to know and then do custom triggers and actions, you know, to engage people. Um, and so, you know, I think, I think you’ve shared it too, you know, like, like you do the flywheel model, um, part of that means, you know, you wanna know and have, have data and insights, um, to how those people are moving so that you can send notifications to someone who, you know, hasn’t joined the community group before and, and you want them to, or whatever. And so Resi plus Pushpay helps meet that. I like to say like, Resi had the eyeballs and then Pushpay has all the data on the back end, um, and the front end kinda tooling to help them. So, um, yeah, it’s been a great partnership so far.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. We want to, uh, take advantage of the fact that you have a really good vantage point of churches all across the country. We want to, uh, take advantage of that and hear more. Uh, you know, I remember pre-pandemic, uh, I remember when you were just with Resi talking about how, you know, and I really got fired up about your product from a multi-site point of view, from, you know, Hey, how are we gonna do that? And you guys solved an actual problem that, you know, for so many churches. Uh, and then you were talking a lot about live streaming, and I remember thinking, yeah, I don’t know, like how many churches are really doing that? We’ve been doing it since 2009. Uh, but like, even pre pandemic, I remember thinking, there’s just a lot of churches that seem resistant to it. They were talking about it like, it was like this odd thing. And then the pandemic happened. Now you and I haven’t talked since then. Uh, so what’s gone on kind of from, you know, this vantage point when you look back over the last couple years, anything surprising or any insights that you’ve gained through all of that transition?

Collin Jones — Yeah. And I’d love to hear you answer that too, of, uh, and it’s especially interesting now, kind of that we’re post-pandemic, you know, maybe we can say that. I don’t, I think Canada, Canada, they just declared it, so it’s been declared in Canada.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes, yes.

Collin Jones — Um, so the, yeah, I mean, it’s been a super interesting, I guess three years. So now it’s May 22. And so obviously Resi, like a lot of churches did stream, like you said, but a lot of them didn’t. And then, yeah. And would love for you to tell too, your, your story with Resi. It’s, it’s always a fun one to hear and I’m sure it’s different now, but, and then we, we enabled kind of the same problems that people are having multi-site, which is, Hey, I need to get this [inaudible] so people would have to spend a lot of money on, you know, dedicated networks or different types of hardware.

Collin Jones — And so Resi made that possible for much lower cost. Um, and then the same type of thing for live streaming. And then the pandemic happened, and yeah, Resi grew a lot out of that period. Multisite didn’t grow very much , so multisite kind of stopped. And then live streaming grew a lot. Um, and now I think, uh, Resi supports well over, I don’t know the exact number, but well over 80 of the top hundred churches today, which is pretty cool. And so yeah, it does give you kind of a cool analytical picture across. And Pushpay has a, a lot of the top 100 too. I don’t know the exact number, but pretty cool . So we do get to have a unique picture, I think of, of what’s going on at, at that level, and a lot of small ones of course, too.

Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. Yeah, you know, the, the interesting thing… Yeah. So for folks that don’t know, Resi, you know, is a, a robust streaming solution. I remember, so I started in multisite, oh gosh, 20, it was early 2000, so 23, 24 years ago. And we were literally the very first that when we were delivering messages from one campus to another, we literally started with SVHS tapes that we were, uh, the very first iteration was we were recording S on an SVHS tape at the nine o’clock service, and then hitting eject at the end, handing it to a guy who then got in a car and drove about half an hour to our first campus. That was our solution, which is crazy.

Collin Jones — That’s awesome.

Rich Birch — And right from the right from the beginning, and, you know, as you can imagine, all kinds of problems. You know, the very first week we launched, like our public grand opening, our, our lead guy looked green, the video went all like, there’s something wrong with the physical tape itself. Um, all the way through, you know, been at every iteration from literally Sneakernet driving it to, um, at one point we were doing satellite, you know. We’ve done, you know, download files, all kinds of different stuff to try to make that happen. And all the way along, we used to always say, you know, eventually somebody’s gonna come along with a solution that does two magic things. One, provides a high quality stream and does it in a robust, resilient manner that won’t drop. Because it’s one thing if a, you know, zoom call hacks, uh, or if you know, you just say, oh, it’s fine, we’ll just come back on, uh, in a bit.

Rich Birch — It’s another thing if I’ve got, you know, at that point, thousands of people every Sunday, you know, in a multisite scenario. And Resi does that and does it for what I think is a really reasonable price. And so I’ve just been such a booster of you guys. I think you do such a fantastic thing. And then now to deliver that on the live streaming side, I know it’s just so compelling. The thing I, to be honest, the thing I love about it is at the level of, um, the volunteer who’s in a campus, receiving that video signal at a mult, from a multisite point of view, it’s just so straightforward to use. It’s not rocket science. It’s not, you know, when at one point when we were literally, we were doing satellites, so we were like, you know, it was crazy. Like, it was like, this is nuts. Why are we doing this? This is way more complicated than we need to be. Uh, but having it, you know, really simple and straightforward was just amazing.

Rich Birch — Now when you, you know, so over these last number of years, you said obviously you saw live streaming increase. What is that… are we seeing that like Wayne, is that going back, or is hybrid church really here to stay – this idea… I would say that’s been my experience. You know, the churches that pre-pandemic were suspicious of church online, uh, then they, you know, now they’re like, well, that’s like God’s, you know, tool for us. Uh, but what are you seeing from a hybrid church point of view?

Collin Jones — Hmm. Yeah, I think there’s been another iteration of that too. And that’s really fun to hear that story, Rich. So thanks for sharing. Cause it’s, yeah, we, we didn’t quite do VHS tapes, so you were before us there, [inaudible] the tapes, but, uh, yeah, I guess God forgives speeding tickets, maybe.

Rich Birch — Yeah, exactly. What could possibly go wrong?

Collin Jones — [inaudible] church only. Yeah, yeah, no, that’s, that’s cool. And then, um, yeah, the live streaming component, like, you know, for, I think we saw, you know, I don’t know what percentage of churches were streaming before. It was, I think it was a pretty high number, like maybe 50% or whatever of churches were streaming. Maybe it was a little bit lower or higher. And then, you know, it all of a sudden went to a hundred, like in one week.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — And then, and then I think like in the last year, you’ve kind of had people question that strategy. Like, I think, um, that first time everybody was, I remember our church, we did like free t-shirt weekend,. This was probably , this was in 2021 maybe. In August, we thought the world was gonna come back to normal. So we did free t-shirt weekend, you know, we’re all good. Covid is over, um, come back in person. And then, uh, like the Omicron or Delta…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — …or something like that hit and schools closed again, and everybody was like, oh, no. And then, so, you know, we didn’t give out as many t-shirts as, as we wanted to. And so then things kind of went back to online. And then you had, you know, the, the next kind of semester of school, um, every, just having a lot of kind of online fatigue. You know, at that point we had already kind of done it for two years. Um, and, uh, the, you know, not, not many people are in the room. And I think a lot of pastors started blaming online, like, Hey, this is the online space fault. And so we had a lot of that.

Collin Jones — And then I think there’s been a lot of acceptance around like, you know, we, we say three reasons to stream, which is front door, side door, digital door. And now I think most people accept that those are the reality, but probably don’t have a lot of energy or thinking around the growth of it. We have a few large churches that do, and a lot of intentional effort, but a lot that I think is just kind of the thing of like, oh, no, we gotta do this again, and talk about this again. Let’s just leave it, you know? And so from the data, that data that we had, um, from the State of the Church Tech report, which I encourage anybody to download it, it’s got some great insights in it. Um, 89% of churches employed a fully hybrid model. The way that that was asked was hybrid, in person only, and then online only.

Collin Jones — So there are some churches who are still online only, which is unique. Um, and then about the same amount, the way that we did the data was a little bit confusing on that, um, because, um, online only spiked like quite a bit. So I, I think it’s from, from looking at the data, it’s basically fair to assume almost a hundred percent of those chose it’s, that said that they’re gonna be hybrid again in 2023 from 2022. And so I think what that tells us is, you know, churches have figured out like, Hey, this probably is here to stay, and I can dive into the three reasons if you want. Um, but we probably need to do some more innovation around what, what’s actually gonna motivate people’s habits. So, you know, some churches think I’m doing the online thing just to get people back into the building, and it’s like a funnel or a flywheel, right? Um, some churches are comfortable with people coming online and that’s it. Um, and, you know, the strategies I think are different depending on, on which one you, you choose.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Let’s let, let’s talk through those reasons why to stay hybrid. Why would, why are churches choosing that? Why are they staying there? Um, yeah, what, what, what’s driving that?

Collin Jones — Yeah. So I think, you know, we say front door, side door, digital door. So front door is, online is the new front door to your church, right? It used to be people felt comfortable just coming in, they would pass it and see it. And that happens a much, much lower percentage of the time than it used to ten, twenty, however many years ago. Um, so I think like the stats before Covid, and I don’t know them now, but we’re like, the average person comes to your online church, like 11 times before coming to your building, which is crazy, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Like, it would be very common for our pastors to, to have people come over after and say, Hey, I came to Christ, you know, three months ago, um, I just wanna become in person. Ok, cool

Rich Birch — Well, and, and like anecdotally, I, in, in a small group that I’m in – Alpha group – um, you know, and so it’s, I’m just a helper there. I just sit and pray. Uh, and there’s a couple who, this is this el so we’re talking spring 2023, and there’s a couple in this group who they, their own kind of self story is, Hey, we, yeah, we attend the church. Um, they’re wrestling with what it means to follow Jesus. They would, they would self-describe as saying, Hey, they’re, they’re kind of pre-Christian, or, you know, at least early in their Christian faith. Interestingly, the husband attends in person, and the wife attends online. And she, and they have been attending for quite a while. And it’s, it’s a difference in, um, comfortability around all the covid stuff. And again, friends, this is spring 2023. For lots of us we’re used to being back in rooms, but there are people who, you know, through for whatever reason are there. That’s an example of, you know, where I’ve seen that even just anecdotally in a, you know, super close hand, uh, relationship.

Collin Jones — Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And some of that, I’ve, I’ve heard it very common with social anxiety. And as church just becomes less a part of our fabric of a society, which all the data says that it has, um and Covid pulled that forward, uh, just like some of the live streaming stuff that it pulled together, the, kinda the cultural, it’s not very normal to be a part of any groups, much less churches. Right?

Rich Birch — Yep, yep.

Collin Jones — So it’s like you, you’re not a part of clubs anymore, you know, whatever. It’s just much less part of our society. Going to a building, it’s very, very scary. You know? Uh, we, when we moved to Denver, we tried out more churches, and I was, you know, I’m a pastor’s kid and grew up at church however many hours every weekend. And during the week a lot. And it’s scary for me, you know, and I like know people at these churches that I’m going, you know? And it’s scary going into a new church on a Sunday just with your family. Um, and it’s like, how much more scary would it be for someone that you just described, like in an Alpha group, you know, who hasn’t, um. So, yeah, I think the groups are, you know, I think that’s probably where the thinking from a funnel probably went away to a flywheel, which I think you wrote a book about.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Collin Jones — And the, uh, you know, where people are coming in at different stages of kind of the norm, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Collin Jones — Um, of the invite from a neighbor, but maybe it’s to come over to their house for dinner and do an Alpha group, and then watch online, then go to church. So I think like that side door… go ahead. Yeah, ask yours and then…

Rich Birch — Yeah, I was gonna ask that side door. Tell, talk to me about the side door. How would you define that?

Collin Jones — Yeah, so side door is, um, so side door is people that are already in your congregation, and they’re, uh, they’re just busy people. So like, culture’s changed, um, there’s now soccer games on Sunday mornings, right? There used to never be a thing, but now coaches don’t care, right? They’re not, um, you know, it’s not, it’s not as much of a Christian culture anymore. So this Sabbath isn’t as revered. And so this is, you know, hey, I’m going skiing on a, on a Sunday, I’m going to Florida in the winter, I’m uh, have a soccer game. I would love to go to church, but my kids have soccer games, so they’ve gotta decide between whether they play sports or go to church. Um, and oftentimes, which one wins?

Collin Jones — And so, you know, these are very active people. Some, most of the time, or a lot of the time, they’re community group leaders. They’re donors, they’re volunteers, right? Um, but, they’re the Sunday schedule for whatever reason, doesn’t always work. And so they watch online, you can get them invested in your mission more, their hearts and minds will be adapted by your sermons, right? And changed, transformed. And so then they’re following along with kind of the heart of your church if you do livestream.

Collin Jones — The third thing is digital. So everyone that you wanna reach is online, right? So there is a digital funnel that still, um, which is, you know, doing things like online ads, having people share um, on social media, um, and to their different friends, right? Um, and campaigns around that of, you know, people coming to your site because they’re searching for a felt need or, you know, whatever it is that if they’ll end, end up at your livestream, that’s where they’re most likely to, you know, engage and come. And that’s kinda the next step that they’re a lot more comfortable taking than coming to a building.

Rich Birch — Do you have a sense, or did this, the study pull out, um, any thinking around, or any kind of framework around how churches are thinking about what the ultimate goal is? Like, is so, um, you know, we, we had Jay from Saddleback on, and, you know, he was talking about, Hey, our goal is ultimately with all our online stuff, is to get to some sort of face-to-face. Now that doesn’t mean face-to-face on our campus. That could be face-to-face in a small group. It could literally be like, we want, we’re hoping people will have coffee with one other person who’s connected to the church in their, you know… So it, so how you define face-to-face is important, but any thinking that kind of where church leaders seem to be at, on, on that question?

Collin Jones — Yeah, the data didn’t go into it for the most part, but I think it does tell a story, um, from some of the, the figures. I think, I think the trend is that most people, a lot of people, um, are wanting it to come back in person at some point. So like, online and hybrid is part of the mix, right? And the fact that hybrid church stayed, um, so high is like, Hey, we value online for, for different things and for for maybe the doors that I talked about, maybe other reasons as well. Uh, but we’re wanting more in-person, you know, community. I think a lot of churches that, that I know of in my network, um, used to have, you know, like Saddleback used to have like the Saddleback Anywhere or whatever, and I dunno if they had that or not, but I think they did.

Collin Jones — Um, same thing with the Elevations and the, you know, different churches like, um, most church… and some of those actually have the resources to do it really well, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Collin Jones — That’s the really large ones. But a lot of the, the medium, the large size churches, um, used to have programs and say, Hey, it doesn’t matter where you are, you can be a member here. Um, we’ll get you on an online community group. And a lot of those programs and staffing around it have, have paused, and it’s been more like, let’s get you plugged into a local community. Or if you’re in person, let’s get you to come into, to come into a community group or, you know, whatever it is. I think there are still online only, applications that make a lot of sense. Um, and that, that’s when you kind of get into to the, the very strong opinions of both sides of that argument, you know?

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah.

Collin Jones — Online only versus, yeah. So the, the arguments I guess shifted. Like it used to be like, should we do online? And now it’s like, should we do online only?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — Like, should online only be our thing? Like everybody agrees that we should do online now. Like you don’t really have like… Like I used to do a lot of teachings around this, and you have a lot of, um, people argue about it, right? Of like, should you even offer online as a medium?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — And now it’s less of that. It’s more like, should you do online only? Which we don’t take a stance on. Whatever your strategy is, great.

Rich Birch — No. Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, pre pandemic, there was a, a church I was coaching, oh and I’ve done some work with them post -pandemic as well, but they, they’re one of the fastest growing churches in the country. And, uh, you know, they had a very funny interaction where, um, you know, this was, it was probably a year, like, it was probably spring 2021. I was talking to their lead pastor and he said, you know, Rich, it’s been such a funny journey over this last year. Uh, he said, you know, I pre-pandemic, I probably wouldn’t have got up and publicly preached against church online. Like, I wouldn’t have been the guy that’s like, that’s a terrible idea; we should not do that. But he’s like, I definitely thought it, and and I would’ve, uh, you know, we, and strat strategy wise, it wasn’t a part of what we were doing, you know, at all.

Rich Birch — And then, you know, he said, there’s that great moment there in March, 2020 where, you know, I, I see, he said, I still remember, uh, you know, it was, it was still early enough that we got, we could all get together in our office, and every, everybody came together and I was like, okay, friends, you all need to get a Facebook account today. And we all have to learn how to do Facebook live today uh, so that we can continue to connect with our, with our people. And, and now it’s like, it’s a part of their strategy, his own personal social media. It’s fun. I chuckle every once in a while cause when I see him doing video and, and, um, you know, and yeah all that, uh, it’s, it’s, you know, that’s been the change that’s happened. It’s, it’s been fun to fun to watch for sure. I think the side door things interesting…

Collin Jones — I think that brings up a great point too.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Collin Jones — Yeah, no, keep going. No, the, uh, the social media stuff was really interesting in the data, but we could talk about it later. And you go ahead.

Rich Birch — Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about that. What’s, what are people’s thinking on, uh, you know, this social media side of this whole piece?

Collin Jones — Yeah, so I’ll read the exact stat. So 89% of churches live stream on social media today, from the data from 2022. And then we ask them, what channels are you planning to do in the future? And so when only 47 were planning, 47%, we’re planning to do social media next year, which is pretty staggering.

Rich Birch — Interesting.

Collin Jones — I, I wasn’t surprised that that went down. I was surprised with how much that went down. That’s a lot. Um, this has been trended…

Rich Birch — That is a…

Collin Jones — …with churches that we’ve talked to, but that still surprised me.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that does seem that that does seem like a giant drop. Um, I guess are people counting, did you, did you qualify on what is a social network? Cause like YouTube is a, in some ways a social network. Obviously it’s built around video, but I understand the, like what they’re saying. Classically, I guess would be like, they’re not streaming on Facebook; they’re not streaming on, you know, Instagram anymore. Um, like, or they’re not planning on doing that. Uh, but yeah, any kind of, uh, that, that is fascinating. What, what do you think’s driving that? Why, why the kind of shift away from a public place? And I would assume what that means is they’re doing more kind of their own private channel somewhere, um, you know, on their, on their own page, or the church online platform, something like that?

Collin Jones — Yeah, we had a lot. And it’s, it’s good that you brought up YouTube because I think there’s a big trend towards which is, which is great. Um, YouTube is like a top of funnel place. Um, so YouTube as, you know, like the short video content, short form video content as a strategy around felt needs, et cetera. Um but I do think, I think a lot of people threw their audiences to social media and then are realizing that you can’t control them, or can’t control that media. So you’re, you’re basically giving other people your audience. And unless you’re a Transformation Church, or Bethel or you know, a Life Church or an Elevation, like, you’re probably sending your audience to those people, right? Um, which is, which is great, um, for that they’re still watching faith content, but a lot of times you want them engaging with your local community, et cetera. Or you’re sending them to cat videos or, you know, whatever.

Rich Birch — [laughs] Yes.

Collin Jones — So I think YouTube works, YouTube live works really, really well for the top 5% of churches or whatever it is, the top 2%…

Rich Birch — That’s a very good insight.

Collin Jones — …some of the largest. Um, but probably doesn’t for the, the rest, um, for live streaming specifically. I think that there’s still other great strategies for YouTube outside of ease of use. Like it’s easy for your people to go and find, which is great. And I think that’s why a lot of people do it too. Like on a tv it’s really easy to find it. Um, but if they’re on a phone or a laptop, um, then they’re, they’re probably getting distracted, right? And then they’re not clicking on the give button cause you don’t, you can’t even really have a give button. They’re not clicking on the connect in a group button or come in person button or, you know, whatever. And so I think that there’s a big trend to streaming on your own app, um, that increased by 3%, which from 35 to 38. Um, and, you know, doing things like your own, um, platform, um, and different, you know, kind of a trend back to your own platform, I think, which is kind funny. Cause it, it just, I think that’s pretty recent. Like it trended to external platforms like a year and a half ago, you know, and after Covid for a while and now it’s going back. Um a lot of churches that I talked to are, are trying to do it on their own platform just so they can control next steps and get access to more data and, um, not have ads, et cetera. So…

Rich Birch — Yeah. I love that. That’s, um, that’s a good insight. You know, the two things I wanna pull out there for us listeners, first of all, I like your distinction between, you know, there are those churches and we all have them in our movement—Elevation, Saddleback, whoever, you know, Transformation—that are kind of like, they’re the unique super outlier church. And you know, in my own coaching, and we’ve said it here before on the podcast, it is good to learn from those people, but it is a little bit like saying we’re gonna, if we, this was 30 years ago, saying we’re gonna build our strategy around what Billy Graham’s doing, cuz he seems he’s renting out, you know, he rents out the stadium, so let’s rent out the stadium next week and do that. You would never do that. You’d be like, why is that? There’s, and, and a number of those churches you, you mentioned are, they are just such a, they’re so, uh, they’re such outliers, they’re so different than all of us. We need to look at people that are just slightly above, you know, or slightly larger than us or kind of more, um, you know, in our kind of group.

Rich Birch — And then the other piece is this whole rented land issue, building your house on rented land, something like YouTube or Facebook. Um, the danger there is—and we’ve seen this, right—the, um, you know, something changes, they decide they’re not interested anymore. Um, you know, you that can go away if you push all your strategy just in one location, if you don’t have more control of that, or to your point, uh, you know, you’re just feeding them. You’re just, you know, you’re just feeding their engine. You’re, you’re literally the be the net benefactor of sending someone to YouTube is actually YouTube. It’s not actually necessarily your, your people. I think that’s a really good insight.

Rich Birch — Now, I did see something in, in the report that got caught my eye that I’d love to hear your thoughts on. Talk to me about Metaverse. Uh, what there is like some interesting kind of stuff there around, uh, around that, that I found a little bit surprising.

Collin Jones — Yeah. I’ll read the stat. Um, and then qualify it. So 25% of churches that were surveyed planned to offer Metaverse worship services in one year from when that research was done, which is very high, one outta four.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — Um, which also very surprising. Keep in mind that was that this, the survey I think was done right when, you know, Facebook, Apple and all of these companies reporting like tons of spend, kind of like, um, AI is today.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Collin Jones — Like if you ask churches right now, how many of you plan to do AI stuff, it’d probably be like, you know, a really high number, right? And then maybe a year from now, you know, it depends on how the trend goes. Maybe it’s the same, maybe it’s lower. My guess is that we’d have a lot lower, say if we asked the question right now. But that it’d probably still be higher than we think. I think there’s a lot of cool use cases for this. Jeff, Jeff Reed, who I think you know well, um, uh, The Church Digital is doing a lot of, um, Metaverse kind of, um, cohorts with, um, with a few different church planting networks, Leadership Network, one of them that, um, that does strategic content for them, um, with Exponential, et cetera. Um, and so he, he’s got kind of a lot of just really random, very cool God’s using use cases. Some of them are, you know, kind of the, the church model that uses it as another campus. Others are around kind of like a use case, like, Hey, we’ve got this gamer here that goes to our church who plays in VR every day, has a large audience, you know, or whatever. Um, that, you know, started a basically a church for us, right in VR. Some that are doing their own online churches only in VR. Um, and so I think that that’s, that’s a lot of, um, open space that, that we don’t really know how it lands. And the, the connection points probably that are going there are like the gamers that are in it today. You know, um, it is surprising, I think it, last time I looked like 8% of the United States, um, uses VR monthly. Um, which is a, a high percentage, right? And so that is like a great channel to reach people at.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Collin Jones — 8% of the, the United States is a big number, so.

Rich Birch — Yeah, there’s definitely that VR um, I’ve joked with friends… I’m a big Disney World fan, and, uh, you know, they’re, they had a VR headset at Epcot Center, I think it was 1988 or 1989. And, uh, it’s not fundamentally different than what we’re experiencing today. I understand that it looks way better. I get it, but it’s still like, it’s, uh, it feels like it still needs a, some sort of radical shift. And I know, I know Apple’s working on a headset this year. Uh, they’re supposed to be releasing one this fall, so it’ll, you know, it’ll be interesting to see what happens on that front. What’s Resi’s uh, what’s your kind of thinking on the Metaverse? Like, I know like Life Church has done the, like, you know, the campus in, um, you know, the Horizons I think it’s called, and they basically are streaming in, you know, a video from the, you know, from, from their actual, you know, whatever you call it in real life campuses. Is is that the kind of solution? Do you have any churches that are actually doing that kind of thing today?

Collin Jones — Yeah, we have quite a few. So, um, yeah, Sun Valley also does to, to Facebook to Facebook’s world. Um, yeah and I, I do think like with the Oculus, like $2- or $300 headset that did like, create like a big, like… I remember we, we had, I forgot what it was, but four years ago we had to put all of the kind of sensors in the corners of the room. We had to have like a really powerful machine running it. Aand then fast forward four years, and it’s just this headset, you know, that’s all you need. Um and it looks way better. So I, I was very surprised at how far it’s gotten in that many years um, with the hardware requirements being that low and the cost being that low. But I agree, like there has to be some… right now, the only real reason for you to go there is gaming, right? So like if you’re, um, but I could imagine like working there, um, doing a lot of different things there and how it would be better than, you know, components of life, which is, you know, a meta thing to even talk about. But the, uh, and, you know, have to feedback and all that, it gets weird quick.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Collin Jones — But um, churches are doing it. Um, often today it looks like just like a multisite. It’s like you’d have, you know, the screens sometimes even dual channel, you know, with like a person on the stage. Other times people will have like their own dedicated pastor for it. Um, and so they’re there. Um, and there are some interesting social dynamics that are different than, you know, in life or online um, that are interesting. I think like, like you can just walk up to someone and start talking to them, all the sermons going, and that’s, that’s a normal thing to do.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — So like you can have volunteers, you know…

Rich Birch — Right.

Collin Jones — …getting to know people, which you couldn’t do on a, if they’re on a screen, you know, watching your stream.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s interesting. I know Scott Galloway the thing, he, he is always punching on in the New York, uh, New York University professor, he’s always punching on Meta. And like, you know, he, he has a ax to grind there and his, this, the sound bite that he keeps rolling out is, um, so Horizons, which I think is what the Facebook thing is called, um, is, uh, his, his whole thing is like, let’s not forget, friends, that Horizon today has less active users as MySpace today. Um, that, you know, that current, the current MySpace site…

Collin Jones — Yeah, interesting.

Rich Birch — …has more people using it, uh, regularly than, you know, than Horizon. So I, you know, I, it feels like there’s something here. It feels like there’s, I I agree that down the road this, if this does feel like, oh, there, we’re gonna end up there someday. I’m, I was shocked by the one in four churches thing, but I, you know, I think you’re right, there’s probably a caveat there around, you know, you catch the hype cycle at the right moment and, you know, lots of innovators are like, we’re doing it! We’re doing it! Which is, which would be people that are attracted to, you know, talking with you guys.

Rich Birch — So well kind of as we come to, you know, come to land as we kind of come to, you know, wrap up this, first of all, friends, we’ve got a link to the, uh, study in the show notes. You know, pick it up. It’s fantastic. There’s a ton…we could talk for a long time on these. Are there any other kind of, uh, parting thoughts as we wrap up, uh, this conversation, uh, about, uh, the report or just technology in general and its impact, uh, in the church?

Collin Jones — Yeah, I think, I think something that I always try to offer when we’re, when we’re doing this is like, how do we, how do we win online? And I think it’s always experimentation, right? So I think like, you know, really the no-nonsense guide, the winning online or with any channel…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — …um, that’s constantly changing is, you know, experiment, like measure what matters. So measure your mission, measure what matters, make sure that everyone agrees and knows what that is and that it’s very clear, you know. And then two experiment. So make sure that people are empowered to experiment, and that they know the boundaries there and the lines. And then the third is just do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — And that’s really, you know, we all don’t understand online that well; we’re all trying to figure it out.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Collin Jones — It’s all, how can we reach people, more people for Jesus? And so I think, um, yeah, not, not, not feeling behind is a great place to start. Um, and just doing those three things, experimenting and, um, everybody is, you know, uh, in, in kind of the same spot of not understanding online. Um, and we’re all experimenting together.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, Collin, I really appreciate you being here today. Uh, again, we’ll link to the show notes. Uh, we’ll link to the study in the show notes, but if we wanna send people online anywhere to learn more about Pushpay, about Resi, where do we want to send them, or to connect with you? How does, how does all that work?

Collin Jones — Yeah, either of our sites: resi.io, so resi.io and pushpay.com, um, which I think everybody probably knows how to spell Pushpay, so I’ll avoid you [inaudible] that. And then the State of the Church report is, is has a lot of other insights too, not just on online on online, but a lot a lot of other digital tools and what people are buying and um, that I think is a great resource as well.

Rich Birch — Love it. Thanks so much, Collin. Cheering for you and the team. Uh, you know, you definitely got fans over here, so appreciate you being here today. Thanks for helping us.

Collin Jones — Yeah, thanks Rick, so much, Rch, so much. And yeah, I’ve loved your content for a long time and still keep up with it. Um, and love the main idea of unSeminary and this is very much in that realm. I don’t think there’s a seminary class on, uh, church online. Maybe there is now.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Collin Jones — Hopefully.

Rich Birch — That’s great. That’s great. Thanks so much, man. Appreciate you being here today.

Collin Jones — Thanks.