Cultivating Leadership in the Church

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by returning guest and friend of the show, Dave Miller. With a background in worship and creative arts ministry across Las Vegas, Kentucky, and Michigan, Dave now leads Leadership Pathway, an organization focused on helping the next generation of church leaders take their healthiest first steps into ministry through two-year residency programs, training, coaching, and consulting.

How can your church build a sustainable pipeline of future leaders? Tune in as Dave unpacks the critical role churches play in mentoring Gen Z and why the old models of leadership development just aren’t working anymore.

• Sit with Gen Z to lead them better. // Gen Z isn’t just another version of the generations before—it’s an entirely new cultural landscape. Dave challenges church leaders to see this generation as an “unreached people group,” calling us to sit with them, learn their language, respect their customs, and lead with empathy. Rather than forcing them into old systems, we must dignify their contribution and shift from transactional leadership to relational investment.
• Leadership development starts with slowing down. // One of the biggest barriers to Gen Z development is our pace. Middle managers in churches—often overworked and overwhelmed—struggle to prioritize leadership development. But if we truly want to raise up the next generation, we must slow down. It’s about presence, not productivity—FaceTiming between flights won’t cut it.
• Residencies are the future of staffing. // With ministry hiring taking longer and churches often “settling” after months of searching, Dave encourages churches to proactively invest in residencies. His new book, Who’s the Next You? A Call for 1000 More Churches to Invest in Gen Z Through Residency, outlines a practical framework for launching effective residency programs. From onboarding and legal concerns to mentoring rhythms and developmental milestones, the book equips churches with tools to build a leadership pipeline.
• Seven ingredients of leadership development. // Drawing from years of coaching and residency work, Dave outlines seven essential ingredients for leadership development: training (sermons, small groups), spiritual formation, soft skills (emotional intelligence), best practices, ownership (clear responsibilities and expectations), mental wellness (planning and support structures), and developmental conversations (beyond content delivery). Many churches stop at training, but it’s the deeper relational and emotional investments that shape lasting leaders.
• One size fits one. // Through Leadership Pathway, Dave and his team have worked with over 150 churches and more than 160 residents. What works for one young leader may not work for another. Whether it’s moving across the country or mentoring a senior pastor’s child, every residency journey is unique. The key is listening, adapting, and avoiding the “stupid tax”—learning from past mistakes so the next leader doesn’t pay the price.

Learn more and pick up Dave’s book at www.leadershippathway.org.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Listen, today, I really do want you to lean in. We have got a return guest, which you know, we don’t do that often, and a friend. This is like a legit friend, somebody that I know from the real world who has got something for you today that I want you to take action on.

Rich Birch — We’ve got my friend, Dave Miller, who served as a Worship and Creative Arts Pastor in churches in Las Vegas, Central Kentucky, and Western Michigan, and also has spent a bunch of years helping churches on a variety of topics from strategy to technology and facility design.

Rich Birch — However, the thing he is the most passionate about is helping young leaders take their first, healthiest steps into ministry. He leads an organization called Leadership Pathway. They offer a two-year residency program for future church leaders, as well as training, coaching, and consulting services. Plus, he’s a great guy. Dave, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Dave Miller — It’s great to be here, Rich. Thanks for the opportunity.

Rich Birch — It’s so fun to have you back. Kind of fill in the picture there. You’re a return guest, so my mom, she listens to every episode, so she can skip ahead. But for folks that don’t, kind of fill in the picture a little bit.

Dave Miller — Well, my mom, she still asks me on occasion, do you have a job? What do you do?

Rich Birch — What do you do?

Dave Miller — Yeah, she has no idea.

Rich Birch — I love it, yes, yes.

Dave Miller — Fill in the picture. So the picture is, yeah, in ministry, thought I would be in ministry forever. Came, I don’t have one of those great testimonies about going to jail and coming back from the edge. I grew up in an amazing church, all that legacy stuff of my parents, what they handed me. An amazing youth group, an amazing high school experience, into college, and maybe I was an early adopter because upon graduation, I had no idea what I wanted to really do, but I knew I wanted to do something for God.

Dave Miller — And the local church was really important. I don’t think I would have even said that when I was 22, but looking back, I’m like, I never really thought about the family business or doing something else with my life. And I thought I would do it forever. And then I was found myself at a church that was closing. And yeah, which is a, we won’t go down that exit, but I was like, what happened? And someone invited me to go on a consulting trip, which I didn’t even know in those days.

Rich Birch — Yeah, what is that?

Dave Miller — What is it? And he said, we’ll figure it out, which was a foretelling of what was going to happen over the next few years. And I literally in those days, I’m like, okay, I think this will pay the bills for six months till I figure out where I’m gonna go.

Rich Birch — Right, what’s next?

Dave Miller — And that was 20 years ago now.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s crazy.

Dave Miller — So I mean, that is crazy to say 20 years. So anyway, that’s kind of the…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool.

Dave Miller — …that’s kind of the high level story.

Rich Birch — The thing, there’s lots I love about you and love about Kristen, your wife, and you guys do lots of amazing things. But one of the things I love is you’re consistently passionate about not even next generation. It’s like, I don’t even sure what the best way to say that. It’s like this gen, people that are leading today…

Dave Miller — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …that has been a consistent drumbeat for you. And I realized, so I was born in 1974, the bottom of the bust. The lowest, I am classic Gen X. I literally at that lowest, the lowest birth rate year of the 20th century, the pill was just kicking in well, wide adoption, do not have a lot of people in my cohort. And so I’ve spent a lot of my career either interacting with boomers and helping them do their thing. But now I realized, I clicked over one of those ages with a zero on it. And I realized I’m increasingly—a mutual friend of ours, Carey Nieuwhof, we joked about this—I’m like, increasingly, we’re the old guy in the room. Like increasingly look around and I’m like, oh, I’m now that guy, that’s my role. I’d love to kind of dive in on Gen Z specifically today.

Dave Miller — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Cause you are a thought leader. You’ve got real things to say. Plus you have actual experience working with dozens of leading an organization that works with dozens of Gen Z leaders. What are we getting wrong when it comes to leading Gen Z folks? What is the church, you know, you take the average church in America, we’re not doing this right. What’s the thing that we’re not doing right on that front?

Dave Miller — Well, first of all, a big change for me in the last eight, we started eight years ago. We’ll be eight years old this summer.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Dave Miller — And a big change for me is the realization that there’s a lot of churches doing well. And by a lot, I mean, I’m gonna say hundreds. You know, I take a look at some associations that are going around around the country. I look at groups that help interns and residents raise money, see how many postings they have. And you just kind of total it all up and then add 50% to try to be positive. There are hundreds of churches doing well.

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

Dave Miller — Eight years ago, in fact, I was digging out some old documents that we’ve done to pass to give to someone. And I would have said eight years, we’re only gonna work with the best and the biggest and the most cutting edge. And you know, there are churches of 150 that are some of our favorite people…

Dave Miller — So there are great churches. It kind of boils down to that senior pastor. Are they a developer? Do they naturally, not naturally, I don’t use that word. Are they a developer? Have they grown in such a way that they see as part of their mission of doing this?

Dave Miller — And so whether they’re a church of 60,000, 40,000 or 100, there are churches doing well. To answer your question, fundamentally, what are we getting wrong? I liken it to Mike Shealy in Indianapolis said in a masterclass that we do, a training. He said, I liken this—he’s a youth pastor, veteran youth pastor—this generation is like an unreached people group. We don’t conquer unreached people groups, like we used to.

Rich Birch — Right, yes.

Dave Miller — The stories of the way Christians has done this, right? Go in, make them sit in rows like Southern Baptists in Dallas in the jungle and teach them Sunday school curriculum.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Dave Miller — No, no. We go in and we sit with them. We learn their customs. We learn their language.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Dave Miller — We understand, we give them dignity, by the way. We give them little wins. We let them serve us as we’re serving them, right? And you can experience pieces of this. I’m not a missions expert, but I’ve experienced pieces of this on old missions trips to Haiti, where all the white people were doing the work and all the people that we should have hired standing around the edge.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Dave Miller — Just totally taking their dignity from them. We don’t do that anymore. No, we know better than that.

Dave Miller — If you can sit with this generation and learn their customs, learn their language, seek to understand, would be a boomer way of saying that. Then you’re gonna have a shot. If the goal of an internship or residency is just to get the kids working. Let’s get them on our page. Like we would have done, Rich.

Rich Birch — Yes, yep.

Dave Miller — I’m just a couple of years ahead of you. There was this assumption. You went to college, no matter who was paying for it. You got that degree, you showed up. And then I don’t think we, you and I might’ve said this, but we probably did not like our boss, but we were just waiting for them to move on so we can take their job. This generation does not think like that.

Dave Miller — And Dr. Tim Elmore, Gen Z Unfiltered, is like a book that has meant so much to us. He’s a great friend. And he talks about just the fundamental differences of the world they’re coming from and how they view their bosses, how they view their coworkers.

Dave Miller — And it’s not just church.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Dave Miller — So I think sometimes church people, we all think it’s our fault or it’s not. It’s not. Just hop online and start reading up in Forbes and reading up in journals and things and business. It’s not going well out there. And it’s not going well for the 35-year-old middle managers.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — That’s who’s not doing well. And in the church, that’s who’s struggling. My peers are the senior pastors who are beginning to think about legacy.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Dave Miller — You said you’re the oldest guy in the room now. Even though they’ve changed their glasses and they have cool shoes. And the bald ones, the bald ones are the coolest because you can’t, is he 35 or 60? We can’t tell. And maybe a little eye work done, but let’s not get into that.

Dave Miller — The oldest guys in the room, they understand legacy. They understand. They’re beginning to think things like you and I think. Like if I sit still, who were the eight people from age 22 to 25 that just did, they meant everything to me. I still talk to a couple of them.

Rich Birch — Right, right, right.

Dave Miller — They’re beginning to think about legacy. They’re slowing down, getting their eyes on the horizon and all this. The 33 to 40-year-old middle managers. And in church world, these are the next gen directors and the kids’ directors and pastors and worship leaders.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes, yes, yes.

Dave Miller — They are running hard. They are running fast. And now enter something new to their world, which is: you must slow down. You must sit down. You must listen and talk. And these people are amazing people who for 15 or 20 years have run at a pace. And then people like us are saying, you gotta sit down. And they’re like, I don’t have time to sit down and talk.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — That’s the long answer to what are we not doing well? It’s a systemic small business, right? Small business. And even large churches are small businesses.

Rich Birch — Yes, that’s true.

Dave Miller — I mean, a church of 5,000 with 50 employees, that’s a small business. They do not have systems and processes. They do not think like this. They think get the job, hit the ground running. If you survive for three years, we’ll advance you or something. And that’s just not gonna work. It’s not working, period. It’s not working anymore. And it hasn’t worked for a long, and we’re just awakening to it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — That’s what we’re getting wrong. And so this book that’s coming, this book that’s coming, Who’s the Next You? Like literally answering that question. And I was with an executive pastor this week. Like, hey, if your kid’s pastor walked in and just quit, not in a mean way, but God called her to go do something amazing.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — Or her spouse was transferred. A lot of this is like very positive reasons. What would you do?

Rich Birch — Yep, yes.

Dave Miller — And he’s like, well, I’d hire one of the firms and we’d probably take a year.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Dave Miller — Like all of my friends’ churches have taken a year and these job postings, and then we would settle.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I was gonna say that because that’s the real trend there. It’s not just that it takes time. Like we go into all these hiring things and we have this like ideal scenario. We’re gonna find this incredible person. And we go an entire year. And then really what we do is negotiate with ourselves at the end. And we’re like, well, this person from this other church.

Dave Miller — These are some of my best friends in some of these groups, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah, 100%.

Dave Miller — In the time of that work. And how many times the first handful of candidates pass on, oh, there’s gotta be something better. Nine months later, I’m literally…

Rich Birch — You’re back at the same conversation.

Dave Miller — And I would call him a guy that worked for us for a while. He’d call it dumpster diving. You go dumpster diving and you’re like, how about this one? We tossed this one away. It’s so great to think about people that way.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — But now we’re back. And actually that was the best person we’ve looked at. Let’s call them back and see if they’re still available. Of course, typically they weren’t, they’d moved on.

Dave Miller — So I would just say this thing of going, it’s just sort of a principle, isn’t it? Like you have to go a little slower so you can go faster and farther. And this shows up big time on this topic. It shows up in every area of our life, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — People, what is it? Exponential, we’re gonna develop leaders like Jesus did and like Paul did. I’m like, well, they walked everywhere, man. I’m like, hey, Rich, let’s go hold a revival eight miles down the road. We’d get there at three o’clock. We started walking. You would not need a therapist. You would not need a coach. You would not need marital help. We would work it all out.

Rich Birch — Yes, lots of time to talk.

Dave Miller — So like to compare ourselves to that or Paul on these boats that took weeks to get where he was going. How many conversations could you have?

Dave Miller — We would be amazing leadership developers if we did not have any AI. Sorry, Kenny Jahng. If we had no modern tools, we would be amazing because we would be talking.

Rich Birch — Right, we’d slow down.

Dave Miller — And one thing we’ve discovered, when a residence, there’s always a quit moment or a get fired moment in the first six months. And when we start digging, we start picking at that as coaches. We run towards the smoke is what Kristen, you know her coaching.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Dave Miller — Run towards the smoke. Is it a barbecue or is the house on fire? We gotta run over there and figure it out, right?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Dave Miller — And like, well, but tell us about your one-on-ones. How have they been the last month? And you start digging in. They’ve not been in the physical presence of the resident or their down-line hire. Because of vacations and conferences and running fast and it’s summer. So you’re just like, okay. So to develop someone is not FaceTiming from the back of an Uber between airports or something.

Rich Birch — Yes, or sending them a book and saying, you know, like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Miller — And I think of my own trends. I think of me, age 25 to 33, thinking I was developing leaders, right? Developing.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — And it’s just a different, it just doesn’t work anymore. My intern, my intern, when I…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Dave Miller — She knew she had to sit there.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — She had no options.

Rich Birch — She was compliant.

Dave Miller — This was probably, she thought this was as good as it was ever gonna get. And I just think we’re in a, we’ve got these amazing, highly leveraged, highly talented, smart, you know, all of these adjectives. We’re trying to flip the script on all of this stuff. Flip the script.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Dave Miller — Changing the narrative on who this generation. They don’t, the biggest option is not doing it. It’s not becoming an astronaut or a doctor. The biggest option is they’ll just fall back on their 40,000 Instagram followers and monetize that and do what all of their friends, all of their, go make three times as much money.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — Through their 20s.

Rich Birch — And have more control and all that.

Dave Miller — Have more control and their weekend’s off and they can do what they want. Anyway.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s interesting. So my daughter, she’s been, you know, we’ve worked in and been led in, you know, great churches, large churches, and I would say healthy, thriving environments. And she’s working for our city, which is, you know, is like exponentially larger organization, our city, than the largest churches we’ve worked for.

Rich Birch — And I’ve worked for, you know, whatever, 3-, 4-, 5,000 person churches. And it’s interesting watching her, the thing that she’s loving is this development piece. It’s the, you know, when she talks about it, she talks about that her department head, who is two tiers up, coming down, sitting at the end of her desk, having a conversation at the end of the week, reviewing, hey, what, how did this go? How did that go? Here’s some stuff I would have done different if I was you.

Rich Birch — You know, it’s that advocating for. Let me test this hypothesis on you. I wonder if, because in the church world, we’re in the content business, like we make content. So, and particularly our senior leaders, they think of the world through content. They think of the world through 35-minute, you know, talks.

Rich Birch — And so we think of, when we think of leadership development, we immediately go to 35 minute talks. What are the, I just need to put together a great talk and we’ll get in front of people. But that’s actually, my experience is not, that’s not what you’re saying. You’re not saying let’s talk at them.

Dave Miller — No.

Rich Birch — It’s something deeper than that. Unpack that for me.

Dave Miller — Well, we would say there’s seven ingredients. There’s a chapter in the book, seven ingredients. You can get it on our website right now. Seven ingredients of what we would say is leadership development. So what you’re talking about really, a sermon is training, if you think about it. Like in a market sense, I’m gonna talk at you for 35 minutes. There’s four points. It’s very good. It’s inspired. It’s like Ted, Ted long Ted talk every, 52 times a year…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Dave Miller — …plus Christmas Eve and whatever. And I would just say, we call that training.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Dave Miller — Churches for a long time have done really, really well with training, right? It’s either it’s the sermon or it’s Sunday school. It’s even the AI delivered small group questions I get from my men’s group, right?

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Dave Miller — It is staff. When I say, do y’all do leadership development? Yeah. Tell me about that. And they start talking about your book or Carey’s book or Craig Groeschel’s book. It’s a book of the month. It’s conversation even. Now we’ve taken training and we’re still delivering the content, but we’re discussing it and we’re filling in blanks, right? And we do that.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Dave Miller — And, or spiritual formation. I had a well-known keynote kind of person. We just need to disciple these kids and get out of their way. And I was like, oh, neat. Actually we don’t.

Dave Miller — We did that once. It’s called the Jesus movement. I think that was the Jesus movement or the Jesus people in the early seventies…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Dave Miller — …which kind of mirrors what’s going on on college campuses, if you think about it. We don’t need to just disciple them and get it. We got to go with them.

Dave Miller — So training, spiritual formation, soft skills, which is the pain point of all the bosses, the emotional lack of intelligence of things. Those would be the three core ones. And then we have to provide best practices. We have to provide ownership, which is a big thing for us in our small business, small church world at the 12 month mark, when we’re saying, well, she just doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get, oh, what doesn’t she get? He just doesn’t understand.

Dave Miller — We talk about our downline people as if they’re executive leaders with 20 years of experience. It would be totally fine for someone to accuse me of something like that. But like when we think of sports, we don’t talk about individual players. We talk about the coaches. When the team’s losing, whose fault is it? As a lifetime Cincinnati Reds fan, we changed the manager. We don’t talk about number 78 and 14.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — When the team’s doing amazing, it’s about the player.

Rich Birch — Wow, wow.

Dave Miller — He’s killing it. She’s killing it. He’s killing it. When the team is losing, we have to own it similarly. This is on us.

Rich Birch — Wow, wow.

Dave Miller — Mental wellness, one of the seven things, mental wellness. If you can’t prove to me that you know, I’m not here giving you even a theological construct because we work with all sorts of churches that believe all sorts of things, right? But mental health, if you can’t prove to me that you have a plan at least, or you’ve thought about it, that’s gonna be a problem we’re checking in on.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — And then finally, developmental conversations. This is not delivered only through training, to your point.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Dave Miller — Rich, if content was the key, I don’t have to finish the con…

Rich Birch — We’d be fine, we’d be fine.

Dave Miller — From MDivs at the finest seminaries in the world…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Dave Miller — …not just the country, but the world, all the way down to hack your way to being smart for free online, right? Content is amazing. It’s what a world, what a world.

Rich Birch — Well, I know that as a coach in the coaching that I do with churches, that the problem isn’t the training. The problem isn’t me coming up with great ideas. In fact, one of the things I’ve said with the clients I work with this year, cause I had my own coach ask me that, they said, are you more interested in your client’s results or them liking you? Which are you more interested in? And I was like, oh no.

Rich Birch — And my coach was like, you’ve got to be way more interested in their results. You’ve got to lean in and I can see this. I can out content my clients. I can out content the people I work with. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily make the changes that we’re talking about. I’ve got to actually slow down, ask the question, see them take a step. They won’t, if they take the step, great.

Rich Birch — If they don’t take the step, then I got to loop back around and say, hey, why did that? What happened there? Why didn’t you do that? What did you do that? Man, that’s convicting.

Rich Birch — So the thing I love, I had the honor of, assuming you didn’t delete it from your process. I had the honor of writing the forward for this book, which I just want to say thank you for letting me do that because I’m super passionate about this. I love the subtitle: A Call for 1000 More Churches to Invest in Gen Z Through Residency. That is a giant thing to put on the front of your book. Tell me about that.

Dave Miller — Well, so when I first, we used to talk about the 3% of churches. So it depends on who you read and which piece of content you click on. But how many churches are there? 3% of them are at, we would say advancing, right? Not just getting bigger, but advancing. And of all sizes, by the way. This church of 150 is definitely the one I’m thinking of in Atlanta. It’s definitely advancing. It definitely is. There are more people who know Jesus this year. There are these marks that we all would talk about. So 10,000 churches, 10,000 churches. So can we affect 10% of those churches? Can we affect a thousand churches?

Rich Birch — That’s amazing. I love it.

Dave Miller — The other reason it’s a thousand is I went to Bible college and I grew up in Eastern Kentucky. So I can’t really do complex math. So let’s keep it simple. But that would be an amazing thing. Now I will tell you, we’re turning eight. We’re turning eight and it’s taken us, we’ve worked with 150 at this point. So it’s 80 years.

Rich Birch — Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop this. You know what I’m gonna say. Did you hear yourself, Dave? Dave’s like, well, gee, I make fun of Dave all the time. I’m just a guy from Eastern Kentucky. I don’t really know. Gee shucks, we’ve only worked with 150 churches. We’ve only had however many residents. How many residents have you worked with?

Dave Miller — It’s 160 something at this point.

Rich Birch — Yeah, which is amazing. I put that up against anybody’s residency. Who out there has done this as much as you guys? You are the experts on this thing. And so I can’t just let that float by. I can’t let that float by.

Dave Miller — Thank you for that. Maybe your editor’s like, should I cut this right now? I would also then on the others, I would be like Kristen, who she’s now got, she’s onboarding coaches and handing work off, right? But she does about 40 a month. She’s been doing about 40 a month coaching sessions…

Rich Birch — Wow.

…which anyone who’s coached knows that when the Zoom turns off, there’s the text tomorrow and the email. So it’s not just 40 hours, right? So 40 of these things a month, which is if you’re at a great church with a couple of residents, that’s about what you’ll do in a year.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — So every month. So if you just think about it, my best AI is actually Kristen when I wanna know something because she’s just sitting there just curating all of this.

Rich Birch — Yes, in the conversations. Yeah.

Dave Miller — In the conversations. So, yeah, I would say she’s the expert. She really is the expert. And it’s not, it is forged through, you know, hitting potholes and then helping the next one not. If like a lot of, if churches would just not make the same mistakes that we’ve made. There was a resident who finished, he’s the only one. He finished a two-year residency and did not get hired. Said he wanted the job, I don’t know.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Dave Miller — And that was the last one that I coached. That was like number nine out of 167.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — He’s the one. And so if we would just not make the same mistakes as just avoid, just avoid the stupid tax. She says that over and over. Paige on our team says one size fits one. There’s a lot in the book about recruiting.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Dave Miller — There’s a lot in the book about predicting success, which is still the hardest thing. She does all the candidate stuff. One size fits one. So when a church calls and says, hey, have you ever seen the senior pastor’s son be a good resident? Yes. The answer will always, we’ve seen most scenarios at this point.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — But if you, if they ask, have you ever seen the senior pastor’s son be a complete disaster as a, yes, totally. Have you seen moving cross country? Gabby, one of our board members, she’s now been full-time through four years at her church. She moved cross country. Everything she owned, the trunk of her car. And I’m just like, this is crazy. She’s going from Virginia to Denver. And that same month we moved someone from Denver to Virginia.

Dave Miller — I’m like, this is so dumb. This is as bad as the headhunter.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Dave Miller — And she made it. She made it. She killed it. In the middle of COVID, all of this headwind. And she just, her origin story of growing up the way, she just was, she’ll be speaking at a masterclass with us in Denver next week. Success story.

Dave Miller — Have we ever seen someone move across the country and be lonely and completely implode? Yes. One size fits one, every time.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good.

Dave Miller — And so just at this point, as you know, in my work history, this is the first time I can say, yeah, I’ve been at this for eight years. The same job for eight years. I’m a big quitter, like a lot of good consultants. I’m just a good quitter. And so we’re living out of the abundance of that at this point, I would say.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Dave Miller — Will it grow and will it affect a thousand churches? I hope so. Man, I pray that the Lord puts enough opportunities in front of us and we stay after it. But we’re living the benefit of having now worked, we had our 1,000th applicant in December.

Rich Birch — Wow, that’s great.

Dave Miller — Amazing amount of talking and hearing people’s stories and digging into why their Enneagram plus their disc minus their whatever equals that. The predictors of these things. We’re living the abundance of that. And a lot of that’s in this book. We took, this book is, someone challenged us right when we, well, actually before we started. You gotta have a book. I’m so glad we didn’t write some dumb book because it would have said completely different things.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Dave Miller — Gen Z, don’t forget, is turning 28 this year.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Dave Miller — So this, I think four or five years, it has to change to Alpha if we’re gonna do this.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes, yes.

Dave Miller — So, we’re just living out of the abundance of that. We took our masterclass. That’s what I was gonna say. We do these two day trainings, deep dive all day. I don’t know how people sit there and do it, but they do. We took the nine sessions of that. We put it in a book, added a few things.

Dave Miller — So it really starts with what’s a resident? Why should we do this? Takes you all the way into the deep weeds of legal things, HR concerns, how to onboard and how to interview and how this is a little different than interviewing full-time staff. First 90 days, first day, first 90 days, the one year thing, the six month check in. It’s just a, from the beginning to the end, how do you launch them full-time in the ministry?

Rich Birch — Yeah, so good.

Dave Miller — So that’s what this book is. So, people will say, who should come to a masterclass? Well, if you’re kicking the tires, thinking about interns, you should definitely come. This is gonna be amazing. Just like the book, I would say. Or if you, we’ve had people who’ve been at, they’re a thought leader. They truly are a thought leader and have been doing it at a local church for a decade.

Rich Birch — Right.

Dave Miller — And they leave this thing going, this has been so great. How do I get my other staff leaders through this material though? That’s what this book is. So, front end.

Rich Birch — I would imagine, again, you’re the expert on this, not me, but seeing this kind of operate in a number of churches, it’s like, I would think you need like the subject matter expert internally. You need the person that’s gonna be the residency kind of flag bearer. Hey, we’re gonna run this thing.

Rich Birch — But then I also need everybody else to be on the same page. To be like, no, these people aren’t just free labor. No, these people aren’t. And this would be a great tool to kind of get everybody up to speed, to kind of give an operating understanding of what we’re trying to do.

Dave Miller — Totally totally. I mean, a residency director, once they get more than two or three residents rolling, they are dependent on half a dozen staff on their team to own this the way they own it. And right there, it break. It’s kind of like campuses. I forget, you’re the multi-siting one. What number does the campus thing break and you gotta reinvent it?

Rich Birch — Yeah, at like three or four.

Dave Miller — There’s a point at which it works. Like one-on-one and then the youth pastor at that campus or the worship leader or the production or guest server, I want one of those. At some point, we then hire a residency director who’s now over the residency. They spend most of their time chasing staff around.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Dave Miller — It’s kind of like an in-house version of us. We’re chasing them around, getting them to sit down, tell us what’s going on, trying to coach and handing this book to someone on the team, skim this. In fact, just skim chapters three, seven, and let’s talk. That could be an in-house way of helping bring them up to speed. Each chapter has a little case study, a little victory story of a resident that went through something and almost quit or almost got fired.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Miller — And now they’re still on the team. Or they got hired up the street or back in their hometown or whatever. So I think, I am hoping that the book is 30% inspiration, 70% instruction. There’s some tools in it, tons of QR codes to resources.

Dave Miller — It’s a lot like that masterclass. It literally, the first masterclass we did 18 months ago now and man, it was like our kitchen table was the war room for trying to like, all right, what are we gonna say?

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Dave Miller — It was so much work. And now we’ve done nine or 10 of them. We just roll into town and it works, right? I think this book was similar. Like, okay, let’s take that content. How do we put this in a couple of hundred pages that people will actually wanna read, honestly. Hopefully people wanna read it.

Dave Miller — Yes.

Dave Miller — I guess we’ll see, but.

Rich Birch — No, they will, for sure.

Dave Miller — Your mom will. Maybe your mom will get it.

Rich Birch — Yes, exactly. Yeah, so we wanna, we can pick these up. Where can we pick these up? We wanna go to your website, leadershippathway.org. I’m assuming we can kind of find all the links there. Is there anywhere else we wanna send people?

Dave Miller — Definitely go to Amazon. If you go to our website, there’s a big thing across the top of every page in obnoxious color that you can definitely find the book. That or Amazon and just search: Who’s the Next You? I think it’s the only book with that title, which is helpful.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that is interesting. As an author, that’s actually hard to do.

Dave Miller — I have a good friend who just released a book, his story. And when you search it on Amazon, be careful what you click on, because. We got none of those problems. So it’s out there.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Well, friends, I would strongly encourage, you’re like, I am biased. This is not like, oh, I’m the sober second voice. I don’t really care. I do on this one. I really think you should pick up Dave and Kristen’s book. Dave’s okay. Kristen’s even better. You’re gonna love this. It’s Who’s the Next You? A Call for 1000 More Churches to Invest in Gen Z Through Residency.

Rich Birch — It’s a fantastic resource. I think it’ll be super helpful. Even if you’re just on the fringes of thinking about residency, the reality of it is, I think for so many of us, particularly I’m thinking about executive leaders, executive pastors that are listening in. You get to any size and you are constantly dogged by your staff saying, I need to hire, I need to hire, I need to hire. And the reality of it is, man, what if we got up on top of that and said, what if we built a system for building young leaders that sure is not gonna deliver somebody today, but two years from now, it’s gonna deliver some people. Two years after that, two years after that, two years after that, we’re just gonna keep finding and cultivating next gen leaders. I really do think that this could be super helpful for you.

Rich Birch — Well, Dave, appreciate you. Where do we wanna send people online to track with you? Any other kind of final words as we wrap up today’s episode?

Dave Miller — If they just go to the website, leadershippathway.org, they’ll find all the stuff there would be the best.

Rich Birch — Thanks so much, Dave. Cheering for you.

Dave Miller — You’re such an encouragement. It’s like, if we could just put all of that in a battery, it’d probably be the last battery we would have to buy. And it was, you know what we would call it? We’d call it the, “hey friends!”, battery.

Rich Birch — That is true. The power of the world. You’re not the only person that’s made fun of me for saying, hey friends. I really mean it.

Dave Miller — I know, you do actually mean it. I’m like, have you seen Rich do, that’s actually if you meet him in the hall or you sit down with him and have lunch, he actually is like that.

Rich Birch — That’s funny. All right, well, thanks so much, Dave. Appreciate you.

Dave Miller — Bye-bye. Take care.