unSeminary Podcast

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of unSeminary! A quick heads-up: Rich experienced some sound issues during the recording; thank you for bearing with us. Fortunately, our guest Yolanda comes through loud and clear, and you won’t want to miss the incredible insights she shares. Thanks for your grace and enjoy the conversation! Do you ever feel like your church’s decisions are more emotional than intentional? Is your church struggling with inconsistent processes or reactive planning? In this episode of the unSeminary Podcast, we’re joined by Yolanda Stewart, Executive Pastor at Mosaic Church in Tennessee—one of the fastest-growing churches in America. Tune in as Yolanda shares a practical, Spirit-led decision-making framework that’s helping Mosaic Church thrive at every level. Emotional leadership to strategic clarity. // It’s not uncommon for churches to make decisions based on emotion and urgency rather than shared understanding and strategy. Drawing on her military experience, Yolanda began equipping the team at Mosaic Church with tools for clarity—helping them work smarter, not harder. But instead of demanding change, she approached the team with humility, offering help and building trust. Define, Discern, and Decide. // Yolanda created a framework that her church has used that is called Define, Discern, and Decide. It is inspired the military decision-making model from an infantry handbook and was modified into three steps. Define. // The first step is to clearly define your problem or objective as well as your non-negotiables. Without clarity on what you’re solving for, teams risk wasting resources or solving the wrong problem. What is the ministry culture in your church? What has the pastor established as the non-negotiables? The collaborations should be within the boundaries that the pastor has set or culture has established. Discern. // Involve the Holy Spirit throughout the entire process. Leadership isn’t just practical—it’s deeply spiritual. Discernment guides when and how decisions get made. Decide. // Rather than defaulting to one idea, generate multiple potential solutions. Yolanda encourages at least three courses of action, but underscores it is critical to at least have more than one. Discuss pros, cons, and alignment with the vision before choosing the best course—or blending the best parts of each. Collaboration over command. // One of Mosaic’s core values is “we refuse to do it alone.” Yolanda emphasizes the importance of inviting the right people to the table—including those on the ground level—when making decisions. Collaboration leads to buy-in, richer insights, and stronger execution. Whether you’re the lead pastor or on the executive team, humble leadership and inclusive dialogue are key to implementing transformational change. Spirit-led strategy. // While structure and tools are important, they must be anchored in spiritual discernment. Yolanda emphasizes that “your spirituality is your greatest asset.” Church leaders must integrate spiritual maturity with leadership excellence to avoid importing secular strategies that don’t reflect the heart of the Kingdom. Even hard conversations should be framed with grace, humility, and the fruit of the Spirit. Download the framework. // Yolanda has created a free PDF outlining her Define, Discern, Decide framework, offering guiding questions and practical steps for church leaders. Whether you’re facing a big decision or looking to shift your church culture, this resource can help bring clarity and alignment to your leadership process. Learn more about Mosaic Church by visiting mymosaic.ch. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, Rich Birch here from the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. Today, we are talking about something that I know is going to be super applicable to all of us. We are often faced, how do we make decisions? How do we move forward? How do we push our ministries to what we believe God’s calling to us next and today’s conversation is going to help us think through those yeah those kinds of conversations. It’s going to be great. We’ve got Yolanda Stewart with us. She’s the executive church pastor at a church called Mosaic Church. It’s led by pastors Anthony and Julia Daly, it’s a multi-site church with locations in Tennessee as well as church online, it’s one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Yolanda, so glad to have you here – welcome!Yolanda Stewart — Rich, thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.Rich Birch — This is an honor. Thank you for taking time. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the church and tell us about your role, maybe a little bit of the background, ah help us understand a little bit about Mosaic.Yolanda Stewart — It’d be my pleasure. So Mosaic, you mentioned it earlier, is a multi-site church, and we are mission-focused. Many of the things that we get to do for the kingdom happened outside of the United States, outside the walls of of our church.Rich Birch — Love it.Yolanda Stewart — So we have ministry in Africa. We have ministry in Honduras, ministry in China. And of the things that is near and dear to us is reaching people who are ah the underserved, if you will, those who are, there’s not a lot of people in mind to help those types of people. Rich Birch — Love that.Yolanda Stewart — And and which we feel a mandate for us to to to do that. And so we are we are entrenched in missions and we love it. Also, Mosaic is very busy making an effort to impact our community. And so we have several nonprofits that we are are the pioneers for, and in they are in partnership with the city of Clarksville.Yolanda Stewart — Our there is that if the doors of our church close that the mayor would be beating on the doors asking what can he do to open our doors again? And so we we are busy doing that. We have a transitional home for ah foster care children. We do senior accessibility modifications so that they can age in place… Rich Birch — So good. Yolanda Stewart — …and we also have ah developed a community housing development organization where we’re building affordable homes, and I get the privilege to be the executive director of those three programs. Rich Birch — Wow. Yolanda Stewart — And so at the church, my role also includes executive oversight of discipleship, military support, pastoral care, um outreach. And yeah, so that’s what I’m busy doing.Rich Birch — That’s everything. Well, you’re busy. You’re not sitting around looking for stuff to do. That’s for sure.Yolanda Stewart — It’s an adventure.Rich Birch — Tell us. Yeah. Tell us that’s great. That’s so good. Love hearing about all the stuff that Mosaic is engaged in and the real difference, tangible difference you’re making in both here locally and internationally. It’s really great.Rich Birch — Tell us a little bit about your background. What what was your kind of life journey that brought you to Mosaic?Yolanda Stewart — Sure. Well, Rich, I’m a 29-year veteran. I served in the United States Army. Rich Birch — Thank you. Yolanda Stewart — And my last duty station was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is just right up the road from Mosaic. I was invited to Mosaic by a a friend that that I’ve I’ve been friends over 30 years now. Our children ah grew up together. But um My time in the military really cultivated leadership qualities that I didn’t know that I possessed, but um you know that was a a training ground for me. And it’s really cool how Uncle Sam prepared me, and leveraged the Holy Spirit ah to, excuse me, leverage my military experience. And then ah coupled that with the Holy Spirit, um I’ve been able to ah bring many of the things that I’ve learned, tools and disciplines, if you will, ah into into ministry. So from the from the military to the marketplace to ministry. And so I retired just a few years ago. I started as an enlisted soldier and went through ROTC, Wright State University graduate… Rich Birch — Very cool. Yolanda Stewart — …and um retired as a lieutenant colonel 2015. Rich Birch — Very cool. Well, you know, I’ve said in other contexts that I really do believe the U.S. military is the the greatest leadership development organization in the world, maybe outside of the church, but like doing amazing work, developing leaders. And it’s a, you know, it’s a real just incredible, you know, just a fertile leadership development kind of engine. And so I’d love to explore that a little bit today and, and talk about how, you know, and learn a little bit about how that journey from, um you know, the military to the marketplace, ultimately to ministry, how you brought some of those decisions along, maybe take us back to when you first joined the team and you were, you know, in that at Mosaic. When you compared the the kind of decisions that were being made, maybe in the military versus the decisions you were making at the church, how did they compare? How were they similar, different? You know, how did they, you know, how did that all fit together?Yolanda Stewart — It’s very different. I will tell you.Rich Birch — Yeah, I can imagine.Yolanda Stewart — The thing that stood out, and and our church was, the staff was very young and very small, was very small ah staff when I came on board. But it was very different in terms of how decisions were made. And what what stood out to me was that there was no ah real framework. It was, it was emotional. It was ah perhaps, um ah you know, opportunistic maybe. You know, and ah it it just, it it made for a very frustrating process for me, having come from an organization that is very structured in how we make decisions.Rich Birch — Right. Yes.Yolanda Stewart — And and so that really stood out to me that, hey, this is an emotional decision. It’s not a well thought-out decision. It’s spontaneous. Fly by the seat of the pants, last minute, you know? Rich Birch — Right, right. Yolanda Stewart — And it resulted in a lot of of frustration… Rich Birch — Yep. Yolanda Stewart — …wasted resources, missing the objective, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And so, yeah, that stood out to me. Very, very different than what I come from.Rich Birch — Yeah, well, that I think you’ve described, and this is why I’m excited that you’re on the podcast today. You’ve described a lot of churches. That’s where a lot of us are at. We’re in this kind of, like you’re saying, you know emotional, opportunistic. We just kind of, um there’s like a “ready, fire, aim” you know, kind of mentality. Let’s just go.Yolanda Stewart — Yeah.Rich Birch — And, you know, we could, we might understand at a theoretical level, yeah, we need to have some sort of framework. Help me think through when you kind of started thinking about, hey, we’ve got to bring a framework here to make these decisions. How did those conversations go? What did were some of those initial kind of conversations to say, hey, we’re going to try to build a framework here for making decisions? Take us through that.Yolanda Stewart — And that’s a great question. Yes, it makes sense. um I will tell you just just a little insert in here. Coming from the military, going to the marketplace, and then coming to ministry, boy, each of those were were culture cultural differences that really, really stretched me as a leader.Yolanda Stewart — And so in in ministry, um because of just the mindset of ministry, it was it was a challenge for me to remind myself, these are not soldiers. And, you know, they’ve come from so many different backgrounds that I needed to take my time. I needed to throttle myself, if you will, and change my perspective and my approach. Yolanda Stewart — So I didn’t do it right the first time, you know, first you know because in my mind, I was the I just that it was the wrong approach. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, and I’m just telling you, the Holy Spirit is underrated. But with the Holy Spirit, it’s like, it’s not what you say, Yolanda. And it’s not that what you bring to the table isn’t valuable and meaningful and and suitable for this organization. You have to you have to deliver it better.Yolanda Stewart — And so once I worked through that leadership lesson, they were very receptive when I offered…offer. Not, let me tell you what you need to do to be better. It was like, hey, this is a tool that I’ve used in the marketplace. They were amazed. They thought, does everybody in the military make decisions like this? Well no, but listen I got wind of this tool many many years ago and I thought, hey, this works. And so I used it in the marketplace. And so I offered. And, um, pastor was very receptive, very receptive. The staff was very receptive. And to this day, and that was several years ago, Rich, to this day, I smile on the inside when I hear a staff member refer to a course of action, which is, you know, elements of the decision-making model that we’ll talk about. Rich Birch — So good.Yolanda Stewart — But so they were very receptive. And, I was able to do a presentation to the entire staff and and all the pastors came as well. And yeah, that’s how we navigated it. I offered it, and then they accepted my offer.Rich Birch — Love it. Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. Well, that that’s great coaching there even um and um I want to make sure we dive into the the actual framework here for a second, but I think it’s good to pause and even just talk about how how you ended up kind of rolling this out. That’s a great insight for us, kind of regardless of what we’re trying to come with as from the second seat or executive pastor, you know we’re not necessarily the lead or not the lead pastor. And so we’re trying to, to offer help and assistance in a way that, you know, that is seen as help, not like, Hey, we’re trying to come down on you and, and clip your wings or whatever.Rich Birch — Well, talk us through the framework, help us understand ah what what is this framework that you’ve, you’ve installed that has been so helpful?Yolanda Stewart — Yes, it’s my privilege. And I did prepare a PDF… Rich Birch — Perfect. Yolanda Stewart — …that you’ll be able to make available to to your listeners.Rich Birch — Yeah, we’ll link to that in the show notes for sure.Yolanda Stewart — One hundred percent. So, so I call it, and this is, this is something that is so ingrained in me. It’s not like I, I pull my sheet out, you know… Rich Birch — Right. Yolanda Stewart — …but I did my best to capture it on paper because this is just what I do. I just, you know, it’s second nature to me now. But I call it Define, Discern, and Decide. Rich Birch — Okay. Yolanda Stewart — And and I what I did was I, um this tool is inspired by ah the military decision-making model that I adopted from an infantry handbook, mind you.Rich Birch — Love it.Yolanda Stewart — I was a medical service corps officer and so they we heal them. That’s kind of just what we say in the army. But I got wind of this and and what I did was I modified it into three steps.Yolanda Stewart — Essentially, the first step is to clearly define your your problem or your objective. And you can’t sleep on this step, Rich, because it’s anchor for the whole ah process of making a good decision. And if you’re not clear on your objective, then you risk wasting resources, missing you know the the intent of the whole conversation, if you will, hold the whole collaboration, if your objective is not clear. So you’ve got to ah do the work to, take your time, not rush through it. Rich Birch — So good.Yolanda Stewart — You’ve got to clearly define the objective. And the the second step that that I lay out there in the in the document that I prepared for your listeners is to clearly define the non-negotiables. Because sometimes, and this is from experience, too often, one, if you don’t clearly define the objective, and if you don’t, secondly, clearly outline the non-negotiables, then you run the risk of, you know, collaborating and getting all excited about things that your pastor is like, we’re not doing that. Rich Birch — Right.Yolanda Stewart — We’re we’re not doing that. Rich Birch — Right. Yes.Yolanda Stewart — Now you’re frustrated because you didn’t consider what we call, and and they’ve adopted this term in in ministry at Mosaic, but we call it the commander’s intent. That’s what we call it in the military. So so you’ve got to know your pastor. You’ve got to know what has your pastor established ah that are non-negotiables or what is the ministry culture that should function as guardrails or boundaries, if you will, so that your collaboration is within the confines of the boundary that either your pastor has set or the culture has established. Does that make sense?Rich Birch — Oh, that makes that makes total sense. I’m familiar with the commander’s intent idea, but I think that’s really good to early on, why is that immediately after the kind of the problem? So clearly understanding the problem and then next clearly identifying non-negotiables. Why what’s the interplay between those two? Why is that so important right up front?Yolanda Stewart — Right up front, it’s important because it sets the the the the restrictions, the guardrails, the boundaries.Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — If you start outside of the boundaries, you’re never… Rich Birch — Right. Yolanda Stewart — …going to make the the type of decisions efficiently without going back and and redoing and going back and redoing, if you don’t start with those two keys. If you don’t start with clearly defining the objective or defining the problem… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — …and if you don’t, um then establish what those or identify, because they’re already established, but identify those non-negotiables, you’ve already started on the wrong foot.Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — Does it make sense?Rich Birch — Makes sense. Total sense. Yep, absolutely. For sure.Yolanda Stewart — Yeah, and so then from there, and let me just go back just for one micro moment to talk about the non-negotiables and talk about the importance of knowing your leader. Discernment is important at all three steps. And also just, you know, discernment, not just from the standpoint of your experience, what the pastor has said, um what the culture dictates, but what is Holy Spirit saying?Rich Birch — Very good. Very good.Yolanda Stewart — And and and I am I am sold on the necessity of the Holy Spirit.Rich Birch — Yeah that, which is good. That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — I’m entrenched. It’s too late to change my mind now, you know.Rich Birch — Well, and this this, I’d love to double click on this because this will actually, you’re pre-thinking a question that’s bubbling in the back of my head, which is, I think that there can be a really beautiful coexistence of a fairly defined process, not rigid, but defined process, while at the same time, a high value on pursuing what the Holy Spirit wants to do and holding those two in harmony. I think sometimes we think, or there may be leaders who think that those are in opposed to each other.Rich Birch — Maybe talk to a leader who who is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m all in on the Holy Spirit, but why do if I’m all in on the Holy Spirit, why do I need to do all this other stuff? Why do I need to have this? You know, how do those two kind of coexist together?Yolanda Stewart — That’s so that’s such a great question. It it made me think, immediately, when you began to elaborate on that question, I thought about a physician. Okay, a physician at spirit field. He still needed to go to school.Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good. Yep.Yolanda Stewart — And he had to garner the knowledge, the education that was necessary for him to perform that function. And so don’t negate the the the education that a physician and the continuing education necessary for that physician to achieve the objective.Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — What the Holy Spirit does is he’s able to ah be the governor how that education is applied, how, what you do, how you do it, and leverage all that you have experienced by way of education, by way of practice and, and, and, and so on and so forth to achieve something far more than just the, the, the tangible, the, you know, the physical, you understand?Yolanda Stewart — And so for me, I am, I am a spirit-filled Christ follower that have been called to leadership. They’re not I’m not two different people. And for me to think that I can function in excellence and please the Lord in a place where I have to choose whether I’m going to apply the Holy Spirit, give Holy Spirit access, give Holy Spirit influence, it makes absolutely, I can’t even make sense of it. It’s like, I need the Holy Spirit and I want, and I invite him to, to, to partner with me. I bring something to the table. I bring education. I bring my due diligence. I bring my experience. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yolanda Stewart — And what I’m asking Holy Spirit to do is to leverage, do what only you can do… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — …you know, that is bigger than me. Rich Birch — Yeah, 100%.Yolanda Stewart — But i’m not, and so what we do, Rich, sometimes is we idolize our intelligence so much so that we diminish the necessity of the Holy Spirit.Rich Birch — So good. So good.Yolanda Stewart — You understand?Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. So good.Yolanda Stewart — I don’t know if I answered your question.Rich Birch — No, you did. Absolutely. No, that was super helpful. That’s that’s great. Okay. So I understand kind of commander’s intent, clearly identify the non-negotiables. Then what’s the next step in in the process? Then I want to ask a couple kind of follow-up questions.Yolanda Stewart — Sure. And then the the final step is to begin developing the courses of action. Rich Birch — Okay. Yolanda Stewart — And so I do go into um more detail on the document that the tool I’ll refer to. There’s some key identifying, um excuse me, key considerations and and ah ah guiding questions that serve as just, you know, some good insight for a person that is new to this process. Rich Birch — Yep. Yolanda Stewart — I kind of do them in my head and sometimes I will capture them on the agenda and the in the the tool that I’m using when I’m leading a meeting or leading a collaboration, but it’s develop the courses of action. And my encouragement is always, and I’ve learned this from the process, is having more than one course of action is crucial.Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — And so I always encourage three, but always more than two, more than one, excuse me.Rich Birch — More than one.Yolanda Stewart — Three ideally, but more than one, because it’ll stretch you. It’ll cause you to, it’ll force you to think outside of the box, be innovative, not get caught in this rut of this is what we’ve always done. So you, you know, you’re afraid to do new things. And that collaboration of, ah that takes place when you’re developing the courses of action. When you invite key people to the table, In collaboration, one of our core values at Mosaic is collaboration. Rich Birch — Yep. Yolanda Stewart — The tagline to that is we refuse to do it alone. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yolanda Stewart — When you collaborate, you get access to people’s experience, you get their buy-in, and you get to leverage their insight and their innovation to help you make a good decision. But developing that course, the three courses of action, ideally three, more than one always, is is going to give you the opportunity to stretch, give you the opportunity to weigh the the pros and the cons and help you go to this through this, excuse me, critical thinking process. So when it’s all done, you’re able to identify, hey, we thought that was a good idea or a great course of action until we developed or identified the pros and the cons. And do they ah speak well to the non-negotiables? Do they marry with the commander’s intent? So now you’re able to go through these processes of of elimination. And when it’s all said and done, you’re able to land on either one course of action… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — …or an amalgamation of the three to make a decision.Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Oh, I love that. And man, I think that that right there is gold. I think so many times we get caught in binary thinking as church leaders. It’s like, well, we’re either going to do this or that. I love the idea of let’s force to three, or maybe more even, to try to get us to think outside the box, even if it’s at the front end seems like that’s a ridiculous, that third option is ridiculous, but let’s actually go down the course, figure it out, pull it apart. And and we might you might find some gold there that we can then apply ah you know, even to some of the others. That’s that’s fantastic. Rich Birch — So as you’ve run this process multiple times and helped you make some decisions, could you give me an example of how this process helped you make a clearer decision that that felt like hey, we’re we’re not just reacting, we’re we’re making a better kind of long-term, you know not emotional, not necessarily opportunistic, although it it may have emotions and opportunity involved in it. But how do, give me an example of of something that you feel like, hey, this process helped make better at Mosaic.Yolanda Stewart — Oh, that’s so good. Well, I’m in it right now. Rich Birch — Love it. Yolanda Stewart — And this is the the second iteration, by the way. And so so Mosaic, I’ll just preface my my example with this: Mosaic grew exponentially over the last few years.Rich Birch — Yep.Yolanda Stewart — And when I ah ah came to Mosaic, I want to tell you that we were about 150 people. Rich Birch — Wow.Yolanda Stewart — We have since grown to, I think we’re around about 2,300 regular average weekly attenders.Rich Birch — Yep.Yolanda Stewart — That that include… Rich Birch — That’s amazing. That’s huge growth. Yolanda Stewart — Yeah. And that includes around 600 or so children. Rich Birch — Yep. And oh there there were um areas where it’s like we we crafted, I say we, but it predated me, but we’ve crafted these narratives that we weren’t quite achieving them. So let me say say use this as an example. So our our vision mission statement, if you will, was we make disciples and we release ministers. And so here I come along and I say, well, how? How are we making disciples?Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — And um the answer was inadequate because the answer was we do it through connect groups. And so then here I am with myself, you know, coming along and being the challenge to to just provoke us, right?Yolanda Stewart — I said, okay, if if if there’s if there’s a very low expectation for connect group leaders. If anyone can be a connect group leader, if you’ve been saved 20 minutes, you can be a connect group leader. Then tell me how a baby Christian who is just motivated to lead a group can be called a disciple-maker, when we have no way of of certainty that they’ve been, well, we do, but when they’ve not been discipled.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.Yolanda Stewart — And so I said, we need to do better. So let’s come to the table and let’s talk about what we can do to raise the level of expectation, rather raise the standard for what it looks like to be a group leader. And then let’s build what I call a transformational leadership pipeline. Rich Birch —That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — Let’s build a real process, a framework that at the end of it, we’ve got to make sure it’s simple because that’s our pastor. He’s like, look, don’t complicate stuff to where now it’s a deterrent, right?Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — But I’m okay with it being robust enough to be effective, but it can’t be too too robust to be a deterrent for people. But I said, let’s build framework that’s simple, measurable, and meaningful so that at the end of the day, we can stand back and say, okay, we truly do… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — …make disciples and release ministers. Here’s the framework that we do that. Here’s the process. It’s measurable. There’s accountability in there. Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — There is benchmarks, if you will. It’s simple and achievable and effective. And so anyway, I’m in the process. And and this, I said, it’s the second iteration. We’ve already made some progress, but we’re not done yet. Rich Birch — Okay.Yolanda Stewart — But the culture that we’re in, I had to give my pastor time to to digest where I had already gotten us to. Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — And so now he’s at the place where because of my approach and you’ve got to be humble, Rich, when you’re bringing ideas that is going to shift the whole paradigm of a ministry.Rich Birch — Yeah.Yolanda Stewart — If you come in—I learned this the hard way—if you come in with the wrong approach, it could take years for you to achieve a good momentum…Rich Birch — that’s goodYolanda Stewart — …you know, unnecessary delay because your approach your approach was wrong. And so I’m in the middle of taking a team of leaders that I invited to the table and we have identified our objective. Our objective is to establish a transformational leadership pipeline… Rich Birch — That’s so good. Yolanda Stewart — …that we can roll out to group leaders and group coaches that when they are gone through this process, it’s not a transactional process, it’s a transformational process. It can’t be classroom setting. Rich Birch — Right. Yolanda Stewart — So we we are identifying, we identified the objective and you’ve got to do one at a time, but we identified the objective. Now we’re putting the meat on the bones… Rich Birch — Love it. Yolanda Stewart — …and and what I call building the gooey center… Rich Birch — [laughs] Yolanda Stewart — …building the gooey center…Rich Birch — So good.Yolanda Stewart — …so at the end of it all, we will have a framework that we have gone through this process of different courses of action and we will land on what we know is is effective, simple, measurable, and transformational.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, when you think about these steps, is there one of them that seems to be the place that things get stuck? Is it that it’s like, or or is there a common pothole with one of them that, man, we want to make sure we avoid as we think about ah these these three steps?Yolanda Stewart — It’s step number one.Rich Birch — Right, okay. Not being clear on what the problem is we’re trying to solve.Yolanda Stewart — It’s not being clear on what… Rich Birch — Yeah. Yolanda Stewart — …because it becomes emotional. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yolanda Stewart — And you you’ve got to focus on the objective that you are trying to achieve or the problem that you’re aiming to solve, not what you feel or what you’re experiencing. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Yeah, I can see that.Yolanda Stewart — So so that seems to be a common pothole where people get stuck.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s… Yolanda Stewart — I’ve been stuck there before.Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Well, no, I can see that. Or you get it’s that whole, know, you’ve you’ve climbed up the ladder and realized the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. It’s like we’re solving a problem and get halfway there and you realize, oh, this isn’t actually the right problem to be solving. That, you know, that makes that makes a lot of sense.Rich Birch — Well, when you think, let’s, you know, let’s think I’m maybe an executive pastor or a lead pastor that’s leading it, that’s listening in today. And they’re thinking about, Ooo there’s a decision coming up. What advice would you give them for some initial steps to try to help build a stronger alignment around maybe even understanding what that problem is? If the first if step one is the critical piece of the puzzle, how can what what advice would you give to us on defining the problems that we should even push through a process like this? How how do you how do you help us help us think through what that could look like for us?Yolanda Stewart — That’s such a great question, Rich. Collaboration. Invite the right people to the table.Rich Birch — That’s good.Yolanda Stewart — That’s my advice. I mentioned that I started my military career as a private. If you know anything about the military, the private is the voiceless person, right? So we’re polishing pipes and doing, you know, police calling, picking up trash and things. But what I learned as a sergeant and what I learned as a cadet and what I learned as a colonel a commander, is that that private is the key to my success.Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.Yolanda Stewart — I’m the ideator. I am the person, you know, at certain levels of leadership. Sometimes my head is is, you know, at the 30,000 foot perspective. And like I’m not aware that the the the real challenges are, you know, fill in the blank because I’m not at the execution level. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s goodYolanda Stewart — And if you don’t invite the right people to the table, then you risk, you know, the the the you you forfeit the the the beauty of their contribution and the importance of of its influence to the outcome.Rich Birch — No, that’s good.Yolanda Stewart — And so my my encouragement to leaders is humble yourself, humble yourself exclamation. And look around. Refuse to do it alone. Leverage the experience, the perspective… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — …of the folks who are going to be most impacted by the decision that you’re about to make. Leverage the the insight of the people who are going to be expected to execute, communicate, coordinate, if you will, the decision that you’re about to make. Invite them to the table… Rich Birch — That’s so good.Yolanda Stewart — …so that they can get buy-in, you can get their buy-in, and you can get the benefit of their experience and their perspective. So that would be my advice.Rich Birch — Well, Yolanda, this has been great. I can see why God is using your leadership at at Mosaic. This has been a rich conversation today. I really appreciate this. And thank you for this handout. Super helpful for ah for people. As we’re kind of coming to land the plane, anything else you’d ah you’d like to share with us today?Yolanda Stewart — Yes, and and I want to circle back because I think, you know, what one of the things that we say at Mosaic is your spirituality is your greatest asset. And um sometimes, especially leaders at the level that I’m leading at, sometimes they come from the marketplace and they have been indoctrinated by the culture of of the secular, you know, market, if you will. And I want to just say, as as spiritual leaders, we cannot lose sight… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yolanda Stewart — …of the importance of our spirituality being the greatest influence in all of the things that we do, especially our leadership. We are being trusted to lead. We have been positioned and assigned to lead. And if we choose to do it independent of, of total dependency on the help of the Holy Spirit and our spirituality, we risk many of the, the, the what I think are counter-kingdom, counter-kingdom consequences ah in church because leaders bring secular culture into the church and and and leverage those types of things to be leaders. And we lose lose sight of servant leadership, what that really looks like.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.Yolanda Stewart — And become transactional leaders, you know, disconnected versus transformational leaders.Rich Birch — So good.Yolanda Stewart — You know, people are used as tools and we ah we exploit people. And this just mindset from the secular world, my my encouragement would be just be careful as a leader. Don’t forget that your spirituality is your greatest asset. Bring it to the table every time, even when you’re bringing correction. You know, you should bring a basket of fruit. Galatians 2 conversations, the hard ones, you know, bring the basket of fruit and don’t lose sight that you are a disciple-maker. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good.Yolanda Stewart — Even when you’re having the hard conversations to bring corrections. So there’s good insight from the secular market. But we must not allow the secular market to influence our dependency on our spirituality to lead God’s people.Rich Birch — Well, this has been fantastic. So helpful today. First, just want to honor you for your service. Thank you so much for what you’ve done in the military and then how you’ve brought this with such wisdom and insight and applied that to Mosaic. It’s just been fantastic. If people want to connect with the church or with you, how do how do we do that? Where can we point them online to connect with the church?Yolanda Stewart — Yes, mosaicchurch.us is how you find us. And we are in the process of of uploading some of these tools that we are developing in-house.Rich Birch — Love it.Yolanda Stewart — And um I’m looking forward to the opportunity for those things to be available online as well. But just to hear some messages and just to get some inspiration, that’s how you can find us online.Rich Birch — Love it. Great. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Thanks so much, Yolanda. I appreciate you being here today.Yolanda Stewart — Rich, thank you so much. Bye-bye now.

Many churches yearn for a significant impact during Christmas but often find themselves disappointed. The key lies in a structured invitation strategy rather than random efforts. A full system is essential, as simply adding more tasks won't suffice. Passionate communication from the congregation can ignite growth, while repeated messaging fosters momentum. Utilizing tools like the Christmas Invite Accelerator can enhance outreach, ensuring that the invitation process is effective and engaging.

Devin Goins, Executive Pastor of Strategic Development at Biltmore Church, discusses the challenges of aligning staff in a rapidly growing church. He emphasizes that growth brings complexity, requiring constant adjustments and preparation for future needs. Devin introduces a diagnostic tool to evaluate team alignment and shares insights on engaging with volunteers for clarity in communication. He also presents a framework to assess emotional zones within staff, advocating for a culture of appreciation and teamwork to enhance organizational health.

Discover how churches can leverage Christmas for growth! Learn about a Texas church that ignited excitement with a pre-Christmas service challenge, inviting attendees to bring friends. Explore a California church's VIP experience that enhanced first-time visitor engagement through digital promotions. In Canada, a church created a competitive volunteer program encouraging outreach and spiritual growth. These innovative strategies show that Christmas can be more than a tradition; it can be a powerful tool for community connection and expansion.

Thanks for joining us at the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Mike Winger, Executive Pastor at Mosaic Christian Church in the Baltimore-Washington area. What does it take to launch a bold new vision while carrying the weight of financial obstacles? Tune in as Mike unpacks the multi-year process that led to Mosaic’s Unlimited campaign—one that wasn’t about buildings, but about unleashing ministry by removing financial barriers and reigniting the church’s collective imagination. See the community with fresh eyes. // Mosaic’s transformative journey began with a simple question: What would it look like if Maryland resembled heaven? The team began viewing their community with fresh eyes, noticing the stark contrast between wealth and poverty—even in their own backyard. Mike and Lead Pastor Jonathan Moynihan were stirred by the suffering happening along Route One, an area plagued by human trafficking and hourly motels. Their conversations led to a renewed vision of spiritual and physical restoration in their region. Vision first, then strategy. // Mike’s role as Executive Pastor is to turn vision into action. While Jonathan cast a grand vision, Mike focused on the how. They reverse-engineered a plan by identifying bottlenecks and brainstorming long-term steps to remove them—eventually deciding to launch a financial campaign. But unlike traditional efforts tied to buildings or facilities, this campaign was about removing the “weighted vest” of debt to unlock greater impact. Prayer walks, not just planned meetings. // Before casting the vision to the church, the team engaged in prayer walks and “vision tours” through the affected neighborhoods. They asked God to open their eyes and hearts, and invited staff and volunteers to see the problem up close. The campaign’s purpose became clear: not just to raise funds, but to inspire spiritual growth and collective dreaming. The vision is more important than the campaign. // Generosity campaigns aren’t about raising money for money’s sake. They’re about reaching more people with the gospel. Like past campaigns that helped Mosaic, this effort was merely a tool to advance the mission. Teaching from Jesus’ example, Mike explained that God could have provided everything miraculously—but He invites people to be part of the story through generosity. Corporate goals and individual goals. // Mosaic encouraged everyone to dream both corporately and personally. The church asked, “What dream has God placed in your life?” and “What blocks have you allowed in your life that you want God to open up?” As people considered giving, Mike challenged them to see their gifts as spiritual steps representing their faith in God to move in their lives, not just financial contributions. Results and reinvestment. // Though not tied to a building or campus expansion, Mosaic’s Unlimited campaign raised over $8.5 million in pledges—well above expectations. Just eight months into the 25-month campaign, the church had already received $4.4 million. Mosaic committed to giving 10% of all campaign donations to partner with 10:12 Sports, a Christian organization mentoring underprivileged youth in West Baltimore. The funds will help renovate space for them to further this work. A Generosity Guide to rally everyone. // To keep the whole church aligned, Mosaic created a comprehensive campaign guide integrating sermons, devotionals, small group resources, and personal reflection tools. The church paused all other ministries and aligned every group to journey together. The guide provided a day-by-day roadmap and gave group leaders materials to help people connect their personal timelines with the broader vision of the church. Visit Mosaic Christian at mosaicchristian.org. Plus, check out their campaign website and download their generosity guide here. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! 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: Risepointe Do you feel like your church’s facility could be preventing growth, and are you frustrated or maybe even overwhelmed at the thought of a complicated or costly building project? Are the limitations of your church building becoming obstacles in the path of expanding your ministry? Have you ever felt that your church could reach more people if only the facility was better suited to the community’s needs? Well, the team over at Risepointe has been there. As former ministry staff and church leaders, they understand how to prioritize and help lead your church to a place where the building is a ministry multiplier. Licensed all over North America, their team of architects, interior designers and project managers have the professional experience to help move YOUR mission forward. Check them out at Risepointe.com/unseminary and while you’re there get their FREE resource “10 Things to Get Right Before You Build”. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Really looking forward to today’s conversation – this is to be a great one. I know it’s going to be helpful and challenging. It’s the kind of thing we should be leaning in on. Excited to have Mike Winger with us. He is the executive pastor at a fantastic church in the Baltimore, Washington, D.C. area called Mosaic Christian. They were started in 2008, and it has consistently been one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Mike, super glad to have you on the show. Welcome.Mike Winger — Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. Really pumped.Rich Birch — Why don’t you kind of tell us a little bit about Mosaic and maybe the impact you’re experiencing as a church? And also, how does, ah you know, what’s the scale, the scope of executive pastor? I know it looks different at every church. And so it’s always good to kind of hear how different people have sliced up that role.Mike Winger — Yeah, so like you said, we were started in 2008, so we’re like 16 going on 17. And like our vision statement is that we want to be a church for people who don’t go to church. So everything that we do needs to be contextualized for someone who has never stepped foot in a church before.Mike Winger — And that’s really important to us. And so we like I said, we we we’ve kind of gone through the journey of like meeting in a movie theater, then going through different spaces. And now it’s just been awesome to see what God’s doing. Rich Birch — Love it.Mike Winger — My role has shifted every single year. I think being on staff from being like the junk drawer, I came on staff and I was the junk drawer person.Rich Birch — The junk drawer.Mike Winger — Yes, I had to do like facilities, students, missions, the office and all the things. Rich Birch — That’s hilarious. Mike Winger — So then I got more focused with creative arts.Rich Birch — Yeah.Mike Winger — And now I’m back to the junk drawer position of like the executive pastor role because everything just kind of comes back to me. So I’ve seen God kind of use every single step on the chapter of my existence here at Mosaic and it’s all come full circle at this point.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. I’ve never heard the executive pastor role referred to as the junk drawer. I might steal that. I might steal that, Mike. Mike Winger — It’s so true. Rich Birch — That’s true. It’s true, yep. Mike Winger — Because I’ll go from like a budget meeting to like a pastoral care to something else. I’m like, you got to switch your lines all the time.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s that’s true. I’ve served for years in that role and it it does have that feeling of like, it’s like constantly shifting gears and trying to think about, okay, you know and has a lot of that. Obviously, that’s why we call it stuff they didn’t teach in seminary because there’s lots of times you’re like, I never thought I’d be dealing with this in church world, but here it is.Mike Winger — Oh yeah.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Mike Winger — Oh yeah.Rich Birch — Well, Mosaic’s a fantastic church, prevailing church over an extended period of time. It’s always been about making an impact. But I kind of want to bring us up to speed. You know, you’ve talked a little bit about something, there was something stirring in your team that you needed to, you know, realize, hey, we’ve got to maybe change some things, think about the next level, think about where we’re going next. Kind of bring us up to speed on that part of the conversation.Mike Winger — Yeah, so back in ’22, we went through a pastoral lead change. So our founding pastor stepped down, went back to his home church. And then our new pastor, who was on staff with me for the previous 10 years, his name Jonathan Moynihan. So we were serving together for a long time and we’re both born and raised like in the area. So we’re from Baltimore. We didn’t parachute here. So like we know Baltimore because it’s in our DNA. Mike Winger — And so we live in a very wealthy area, part of the country, sandwiched right in between Baltimore and DC, but like it’s the haves and the have nots. And it’s not even just the case that’s like the inner city of Baltimore is the have nots. It’s like in our backyard here, outside of the city as well. And so as we’ve continued to want to like make an impact in the lives of people spiritually, like that’s the main thing. The win is when someone gets in the tub and gets baptized.Mike Winger — But we also didn’t want to turn a blind eye to like, the plight that was going on down the street where there’s hourly motels where human trafficking, sex trafficking, and everything is going on down there. So was like, we’ve started asking questions. What would it look like for Maryland to look like heaven? Rich Birch — So good.Mike Winger — And asking those questions, seeing our community with fresh eyes, what would it look like? How can we make a bigger impact? So that just started a lot of conversations between Jonathan and myself. And he did a staff retreat. This was all like one of his sessions.Mike Winger — So then I come back to him and I’m like, hey, if you’re really about that, we need to have like some deeper conversations to make that possible because you have really big, grandiose ideas. But where I come into play is like, how can I make those happen? So he sets the vision and um my job is to figure how are we going to get there? And then that comes with dollar signs and all of that. Mike Winger — So that kind of got us on this journey to say, Hey, if we have a vision, what’s the bottleneck to this vision? How can I open it up? And so that’s when I started pitching to him the idea of doing a financial campaign. But that was still two years in the making before we would even launch anything like this to accomplish what we want to do long-term in our community.Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I love the, well, there’s there’s a ton there to unpack, but I love this idea that, well, first of all, there’s a tool, a video that you guys have produced that caught my attention because right from the beginning, I think the opening line of the video is, you’ve probably all thought about leaving Maryland sometime, right?Mike Winger — Oh yeah.Rich Birch — And which I was like, what? Like, what a way to to lead out. Let’s kind of stick on this idea just for a little bit around, let’s make Maryland look like heaven. When you were casting that, like kind of before we got to the campaign, as that was kind of bubbling around, what was it that had you thinking like, oh my goodness, this is this is a big deal. This isn’t just like, oh, we’re going to rebrand some stuff. Like what what kind of led you to that thought?Mike Winger — Yeah. So I would say a lot, Jonathan’s very passionate about leading our church and growing up spiritual muscle. That was definitely like atrophied, the spiritual muscle prayer. So we even just started doing like prayer walks and vision tours up and down what we call route one, where a lot of those hourly motels are. So just getting our people, our staff, our volunteers, people that call Mosaic home around, the what’s going on in our community to get them to see the problem.Mike Winger — And we needed them to feel it, even before we even publicly talked about how can we be a part of the solution. So we just ask God to like open our eyes to these problems and just see them, and do what we could at the time, the best that we could to serve those within our own reach. But we just tried to say, God, what’s what open our eyes beyond just our own four walls.Rich Birch — I love that. That’s good. You know, this idea of getting our people engaged, starting with prayer, I think this is fantastic. So then bring us a little bit farther along. You know, I think we’ve all been there or if you’re in the executive pastor seat, we’ve been in that conversation with our lead pastor where it’s like, Oh my goodness. Like that, like what you can just hear the dollar signs in your head start going off. But I think some people could at that moment try to pull back, but you’ve chosen to lean in and say, no, let’s actually look at that. Talk, take us through that conversation. What did that look like?Mike Winger — Yeah. So as we were like praying through it, we’re like, what would it look like for us to buy one of these hotels and turn it into like a dream center? And in my head, I’m like, dollar signs are just going up and up and up. But I’m in the position where I’m not trying to like stifle vision. Like the how can totally stifle the wow. So I’m just like embracing this wow mindset. Mike Winger — And I’m thinking, man, wouldn’t it be awesome if we did have a dream center where we can start empowering people with job job training? and teaching people how to manage money and to bring families together instead of splitting them apart. Like, what would it look like for this building that was cause for division and actually have it be used to bring unity instead?Rich Birch — Wow.Mike Winger — And so just asking, having that long term vision, what would what would need to be true of us in order to make that happen? And so if we just started with the end in mind, with that clear vision of what could be, then we could reverse engineer and say, well, this needs happen and that needs to happen and that needs to happen.Mike Winger — So then our, Jonathan and I, the lead pastor, we just started asking the questions. Well, this needs to be true. This needs to be… And we started reverse engineering. And this isn’t like six months of like what needs to be true in six months. This might be what needs to be true in 25 years. Rich Birch — Right. That’s good. Now what, what, so love that. I think we can jump so quickly to the, the campaign. We can jump to like, okay, let’s get into the tactics… Mike Winger — Yeah. Rich Birch — …and there’s, we feel that rush, but I like that you slowed down and say, no, like, let’s, we gotta be really, it’s what the vision is more important than the campaign.Mike Winger — Yeah.Rich Birch — And it’s really easy for those to get confused. How did you keep the campaign from becoming preeminent rather than the vision being preeminent? What did that look like for you?Mike Winger — Yeah. So we’ve done many campaigns in our history. And so when I started gathering a team of people, the campaign team, I just called it quick timeout when we started like, giving out the task and the roles and all of that. And I did a reverse, I said, what was Greater for? And they said, oh, that was to get us into a building. And I said, what was whatever the other campaign name was?Mike Winger — And it was, oh, it’s to get us out of the movie theater. And so then I I called the timeout. I said, we need to readjust our mindset around those. Those were all tools. All of these campaigns were to reach more people. It wasn’t to get a building. It wasn’t to get out of the theater. We wanted to reach more people. We thought that getting out of the theater… Rich Birch — Right. Mike Winger — …or we thought that a permanent 24 seven space would be the best tool for us to reach people. So I said from the jump with this campaign, we need to teach people that we want to continue to reach more people. And so we’re going to do the campaign in order to reach people. Mike Winger — And so we we kind told the story of like Jesus, has he’s all powerful. He has everything at his fingertips. He could have looked at the dirt or sand and said, become money. And he had some money to go do his ministry… Rich Birch — Right. Mike Winger — …but he didn’t. He actually included women to fund his ministry, his gospel preaching tour that him and his buddies were going to go on. And he invited people to go in through generosity in order to enable him to go preach the gospel and do his ministry. He didn’t just say, “sand become money”. Mike Winger — So we would try to, how can we position ourselves to say, hey, we want to continue our ministry and ask God to do more. And we’re going to show him that we mean what we say through our actions, through a campaign. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Why I love that focus of, you know, the engaging people is a part of what he wants to do. It’s actually, you know, he could just write in your case an $8 million dollar check and just give it to you. Or he could engage a whole bunch of people to be involved. And I remember and last year, I got a call from a donor who had a very large sum of money and they could just solve a problem for their church.Rich Birch — And he was like, well, do you think I should give that money to church? I was like, well, you got to wrestle that with the Lord. But I said, if you’re asking me, I would say no, like, don’t just solve the problem.Rich Birch — Come alongside the church, find a way to like, what if, what if there was a maybe God’s got an even bigger dream for the church and you’re just one piece of that puzzle. And, you know, ask this bigger question to stay focused on, Hey, what is the vision of the church? Not just like, Hey, we were trying to do this tactic.Rich Birch — What practical steps did you take to kind of, to both craft and then clearly communicate this narrative to keep your people focused on the bigger thing rather than just giving, what did that look like?Mike Winger — Yeah. So there’s the aspect of like the corporate goal, but also the individual goal. So the individual goal is going to feed into the corporate goal.Mike Winger — And so we really try to say like, we have a problem as a church. We want to reach more people, but we have this debt that’s on our hand that we’re going to apply the campaigns for. But then we try to twist the story and make it like…let me start over.Mike Winger — We were saying like, what would it look like for us to dream again as a church? We kept on going to the dream analogy. And so we’re trying to open up, but then we went back to the individual: what would look for you to dream in your own life? Like what is being, what, what blocks have you allowed in your life that you want God to open up?Rich Birch —That’s good. That’s good.Mike Winger — And so we started hearing stories like on the individual level what people sacrifice would be. And it’s not just a dollar amount that they’re giving to so the church can accomplish a goal or reach a vision. But it’s saying, Hey, God, I’m asking for you to do something in my own life. And I’m showing you with my hands, with my wallet that I want you to do something through it. So there’s tons of stories of people sacrifice that really hit. And that is like the culmination, the collaboration of, of, of the corporate campaign.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, let’s jump ahead to ah the results side. How are you, you know, so where are we at in the process? How are you feeling that’s gone, um you know, on both sides, both the ability to raise the resources that you’re hoping to raise and then also the engagement with individuals, you know, people actually taking this more than, hey, this is a financial thing. It’s like, this is ah an opportunity to dream of what God wants to do in my life.Mike Winger — Yeah, so ah the people responded so well to this, we were really kind of blown away. The campaign that we did, ah our coach called it the phantom campaign because we weren’t doing a campus. We weren’t doing a new building. We already had that. We had enough space. But we weren’t we felt like we were running a marathon with a weighted vest. And we were like, what if we could run this marathon without this weighted vest? And our weighted vest was the debt.Mike Winger — And we could continue to ministry as a way we knew how to do it and keep going. But we said, what if God wants to do something a little bit more, but the thing that’s standing in the way is our own selfishness and not doing a campaign. So I just wanted to ask the church, what would it look like for all of us to sacrifice and see how they responded. Mike Winger — And they coached us through, like they were saying for a 25-month campaign, you could probably expect 3 to 6 million above and beyond like normal giving. And so we did the campaign series and at the end, our church committed almost $8.5 million dollars.Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. Praise God. That’s incredible.Mike Winger — So that was in October. It was unbelievable.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s incredible.Mike Winger — Like we were really, really, really, really shocked. And so that was October. So we’re about um seven or eight months into the 25 months. And so we’ve, people have already given 4.4 million.Rich Birch — Wow. Wow.Mike Winger — It’s unbelievable.Rich Birch — That’s amazing.Mike Winger — And so to really to show that we wanted to because we didn’t want the campaign even to just be about what’s coming in to like pay off debt. Rich Birch — Right.Mike Winger — Like we really fought hard, because we’re not like anti-debt. Like we may need to go into debt in the future. But to really say like, hey, we want to make a difference in our community in the future, but we want to make a difference in the community now. So we are taking 10% of what’s coming into this campaign and we’re partnering with an organization called 10:12 Sports.Mike Winger — It’s a Christian organization that serves underprivileged youth in West Baltimore, primarily men who grow up in like fatherless situations and they use sports to reach out to this community, whether it be football, basketball, whatever. And they do memory verses, they do sports, all the things.Mike Winger — And so we’re coming alongside of them because they were operating out of the the the president of that organization they were operating out of his basement. Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Mike Winger — And so they were actually able to buy three row homes across from where they do ministry because there’s so many vacant row homes in Baltimore, so you can buy them for like a thousand bucks. But they didn’t have the money to do any renovations. So we committed to give 10% of the overall of the campaign to them. So we’re going to renovate and just come alongside and help them run further and faster than what they could do on their own. And we want to prop them up to be the heroes in the community and make a difference. And so, like I said, we want to make a difference in 25 years, but we also want to make a difference this year.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. What do you have a sense of, and this may be unfair. I didn’t tell I was going to ask you this question, a percentage of the church that participated or like any of that to get a sense of the, the depth of the, you know, the engagement.Mike Winger — Oh yeah. So it’s all written down. I’m so bad remembering the stats off the top of my head, but it’s it’s it was…Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fine. No, no, that’s fine.Mike Winger —…it was pretty high. I’m gonna see if I can find it after keep talking. Rich Birch — Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s…Mike Winger — But it was it was a it was ah it was a large amount of people. Like I look at it in terms of family units that are giving. Rich Birch — Yep.Mike Winger — And so we had 557 family units commit.Rich Birch — That’s great. That’s great. That’s amazing. Dude, that’s incredible. That’s, ah yeah, that’s that’s great to hear and great to see, you know, what God’s using to kind of push this forward. That’s that’s amazing. Rich Birch — Now, I’m sure, so that’s all the good news, but, you know, campaigns do get resistance. Mike Winger — Yeah.Rich Birch — There is the like, why are we doing this? It’s not all just, you know, hear we love the punchline, but there’s always usually some stuff we’ve got to push through there. What were some of the objections you or fears you heard from people? How’d you address them? What does that look look like? You know, how did you deal with that side of the equation?Mike Winger — Yeah. So when we were doing this for a year prior, we knew that we were doing this in October of going into November of 2024. So in our nation’s history, that’s election time.Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.Mike Winger — And we live in like Washington, DC.Rich Birch — Yes.Mike Winger — Like it’s like the world news is our local news.Rich Birch — It is going to be it. Love it.Mike Winger — And so we, we, we had some people advise like, you don’t know, like we, maybe we shouldn’t do it. You probably not a wise time to do a campaign. And we heard that. And we just said, what if we want to tell a better story than the typical narrative of people being anxious about something that really can’t control outside of their one vote. But what if we can actually cast the vision to our church that doing it during the campaign to actually make a bigger difference is going to be the perfect time to do it. And people responded to that. Mike Winger — So that was kind of one early on. Should we do this campaign during an election season? And then there’s always people that are going to ask questions like, is this the best time to do it because, you know, the economy.Rich Birch — Right, right.Mike Winger — But like, what does that even mean? Rich Birch — Yes. Mike Winger — Who can actually really even say what the economy is anymore? Rich Birch — Right.Mike Winger — But like, so we kind of joked about that. We heard some people say, well, we just did one of these like eight years ago. Should we be doing it again? And I’m like, well, we’ve had so much turnover in our church. Rich Birch — Right. Mike Winger — There’s probably only 25% of our church who’ve actually even been through one.Rich Birch — Right. Right.Mike Winger — So we just coached a lot of people through it. And we had so many great conversations with people. And I could stand in front of people in integrity and say like, hey, if you and your spouse, because I would meet with people individually. And I was like, if you and spouse are at odds about like what the total amount should be, give the lesser amount. Rich Birch — Wow.Mike Winger — I’m not after your, I’m not after your money here. Rich Birch — Right. Yes.Mike Winger — Like, I want to know like, what’s the heart story? What’s the sacrifice story that the money is representative of?Rich Birch — Yeah.Mike Winger — And so we constantly had those conversations like what, okay, tell me the dollar amount, but I want to know what are you trusting God what is this number representing?Mike Winger — And so we’d had constant conversations with people. There was one single woman who her husband left her many years ago and I had a conversation with her and she just wanted to like write a bigger check, but the man who helps with her finances to keep her organized was kind of, he’s not a Christian and was a little leery about like saying you should give X amount.Mike Winger — I said, you know what? I’m going to tell you to give even lesser than what he said, because I don’t know what kind of influence you’re going to have in his life. But if he hears that a church said, take even less, maybe that’s going to be an in for him to trust the church.Mike Winger — And so my mindset from the jump was just like, Hey, I’m going to trust God for the end results. And I’m just going to just tell people to like, act in integrity with what they’re going to do. And like, let’s hear the stories of trust that people are going to be building through this experience.Rich Birch — I love that. I want to underline what you said there. I think, my experience has been when we come up against these opportunities that our mindset as leaders is so important and how we approach people is so important. And um if we say this isn’t about just trying to get money out of you, but then all the signals we give them are about just getting money out of them…Mike Winger — Yeah.Rich Birch — …people read that from a mile away, right? Mike Winger — Yeah. Rich Birch — And we’re asking them to take a faith step financially, but we’re also taking a faith step and we have to exercise exactly what the kind of thing you’re saying. Like, hey, maybe you should take, maybe give the lesser number like that. I just love that. I just want to honor you for that. I think that’s fantastic. Rich Birch — The other part I want to underline for folks that you’ve just kind of rolled over, ah which makes sense because it’s it’s your lived experience, is the amount of time that this campaign has taken from like the initial conversation through to the kind of whatever the big pledge date was. That’s like, that was like a couple years of discussion, right? Mike Winger — Yeah.Rich Birch — Talk us through that piece of it. Cause I feel like sometimes there are churches that feel the pressure of like, we got to solve this now. But it’s like, that’s, if you’re feeling that pressure now, you’re probably too late. Like, you know, we you’ve got to start way out. Talk us through the kind of timeline, you know, how long did it take to work through it all? Get it put together, that kind of thing.Mike Winger — Yeah, so I remember being on the golf course with John and we were probably on like hole four or five. And I said, hey, like you’re just coming back from your study break. I’ve been doing some planning, love forecasting three years in advance. But do you remember when you said that you want to make an impact on Route One? And what if we had a dream center? What if we could change lives and all that? I was like, if you’re really about it, here’s what I think we need to do. We had that conversation probably in like June of ’23.Rich Birch — Yeah.Mike Winger — Actually, probably even before that… Rich Birch — Yeah. Mike Winger — …because we we pitched to our our board of, hey, we feel like this is where God’s leading us. Will you join us in prayer? So we pitched it to them in May of ’23. So John and I talked before that. We didn’t even make a decision as a board to move forward with this until September. So we gave our board of overseers… Rich Birch — Yeah, lots of time. Mike Winger — …a full summer to just pray and feel like, is this is the is the soil right? God, are you prompting, or is this just me coming up with an idea, saying that we should run after it? So we I did the due diligence to come up with a full outline of here’s the steps we would take. We’re going to pause and commit this to you. And if you we all come back together in September and say, yeah, we should move forward, then we will. That was still a year out from even executing the five week series.Rich Birch — Right.Mike Winger — So we were way far in advance of like prayers. We’re going to coat this thing in prayer. And then we’re going to start working in September through the next year to make that campaign actually happen.Mike Winger — So this was a really like a two, two and half year process… Rich Birch — Right. Mike Winger — …before we even get to the 25 months… Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Mike Winger — …of actually living in sacrifice.Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s, that’s pre the 25-month countdown. Mike Winger — Exactly. Rich Birch — So yeah, in the end it’s a four or five year process, you know, but from, from that golf course all the way through. Yeah. And I, I highlight that, listeners, because um you know, this takes time. And you know, there are, you know, there’s a multiplicity of steps before the public phase and, you know, you know, they’re, they’re everything from, you know, all the private conversations all the way up through this. It takes time. You cannot, you know, had a friend of mine said the bigger the plane, you know, the longer the runway, it just takes time. It takes, it you know, you can’t just do it overnight. It’s not the kind of thing you can wake up tomorrow and say, Hey, let’s raise $8 million dollars. It’s not going to happen.Mike Winger — Yeah.Rich Birch — You’ve given us your generosity guide. This looks fantastic. In fact, I would, we’ll just link to this in the show notes, but this is a great kind of inside look to the campaign and to the at least the public facing side of it. Talk us through this. Give us a sense of of this document. How might it be helpful for someone else who who’s been thinking about these kinds of issues?Mike Winger — Yeah. So from my experience of participating and leading other campaigns that we’ve gone through, one of my critiques has been, I hate handouts and getting so many different things at so many different dates.Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah.Mike Winger — And I was like, why don’t we just work ahead? Let’s work smarter, not harder. Rich Birch — Yep.Mike Winger — Let’s not overwhelm people and confuse them with, is it this handout? Is it that handout? It’s like, let’s just spend the four months before we go live and say, what is every single piece of paper document that we want and put it all into one spot?Rich Birch — Love it. Love it.Mike Winger — But this this guide isn’t just information about how to give or the tax implications and all this sort of thing. We wanted to integrate it with what the series was going to be about on Sunday. So on Sundays, we rarely even mentioned, like we talked about, hey, we have a financial goal, but the even the sermons were more about what’s God doing in you, and stirring up. And so then we made sure that all of our groups for the fall are all on the same thing. Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good.Mike Winger — We’re all we’re not doing a volleyball group. We’re not doing FPU. We’re not doing… We’re all doing these journey groups. We’re going to just come together and answer these questions so everybody’s pushing to it. And then we also created like a daily devotional.Mike Winger — So everybody like page by page, like, you know, for the next five weeks, we’re going on a campaign, but it’s really a journey together. And so there’s questions. There’s everything is 100% in order of like day by day, what do I want people to see when and how. And there’s we’ve gave these we’ve printed them out. We wanted people to bring them back. And like this is where you would take notes in the sermon and then have your daily devotional, but then also bring it to group. Uh, ’cause we were talking about like timelines, like what’s mosaics timeline then, but what’s, what’s God been doing in your own life and then bring that conversation. So we even equipped our group leaders with like big rolls of, uh, paper. Rich Birch — Love it.Mike Winger — And we said, make a timeline and then go through and have a conversation for the group of like, just introduce yourself and you and your spouse and talk about your family timeline.Rich Birch — So good.Mike Winger — So this guide was just so important to get everybody rowing in the same direction.Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great piece. You know, I, I love the, like throughout it, there’s, um, you know, like a little testimonies sprinkled throughout. Mike Winger — Yes. Rich Birch — There’s lot of content right down to like, here are the special events we’re doing. Here’s everything all in one place. There’s a ton of work that’s been put in up there. Are you using that kind of throughout the campaign too? Cause a part of this, I would assume a part of this is also, um, you know, you used as people who are, might be coming to the church new now. And they’re like, Hey, what is this all about? This could be a tool you could give to them as well.Mike Winger — Yeah, we could definitely dust it off and give it to them. We haven’t done a great job of like incorporating it since we’ve like gone live for the previous seven months.Rich Birch — Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Mike Winger — But we do have a plan like midway through of this fall doing a three week series of like a halfway point… Rich Birch — Yep. Mike Winger — …encourage people to keep going, give them an update, and then inviting people in who and may have joined the church or started coming since then. But we haven’t necessarily, like it was really just like for the 35 days of this campaign journey how are we all going to be on the same page?Rich Birch — Right. So good. Well, this is fantastic. Well, um there’s ah a lot here. There’s also a website we’ll link to, we’ll link to your, you know, the direct website, but then your church’s website, but then there’s also a campaign related website. It’s is’s super helpful. Lots of good. And that video I talked about earlier is on that ah site friends.Rich Birch — Anything else you’d like to share just as we wrap up today’s conversation?Mike Winger — I would say if I’m speaking to primarily executive pastors, I would say our excitement behind something like this is a lot of the how. I love executing. I love thinking of how to make a plan come to reality, but it has to come with vision first.Rich Birch — That’s good.Mike Winger — So you have to make sure that you know why you’re doing something and like what the goal is. Like I said, our goal was not to just raise funds. Our goal is to change lives spiritually, but physically as well.Mike Winger — And so that’s what I want to accomplish. It’d be like me going to the store, a construction store, go to Lowe’s and buying a hammer. The goal wasn’t to get the hammer. The goal is to use the hammer to build something.Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.Mike Winger — And so the campaign, I’m inviting people in to use a hammer, not go buy something.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good. It’s great. Super good. Well, I appreciate you being here, Mike. This is super great. Where do we want to send people online if they want to track with you or with the church?Mike Winger — Yeah, so mosaicchristian.org is our website, mosaicmd on Instagram. And I’m kind of not that active on Instagram, but it’s just mwinger87. So I’m right there.Rich Birch — Love it. Thanks so much, Mike. Appreciate being here today.Mike Winger — Thank you.

Is your church treating Christmas like the massive growth opportunity it truly is? In today’s solo episode, Rich explores why Christmas remains the most strategic moment in the church calendar for reaching new people, even in a post-pandemic world. Drawing on compelling stats and years of experience helping churches grow, Rich makes a compelling case for why Christmas shouldn’t just be a warm, nostalgic season—it should be one of your highest-impact outreach moments of the year. Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode: Cultural Opportunity: With 84% of adults celebrating Christmas, this holiday season still holds a unique cultural weight—even among those who rarely attend church. Rich explains how this opens the door for meaningful invitations and deeper community connections. The Power of a Personal Invite: Research shows that 57% of people say they would attend a church service if personally invited by a friend. Rich reflects on why this stat matters so much during Christmas and how churches can reframe their planning around it. Growth Mindset Shift: Many churches unintentionally miss the full potential of Christmas by treating it as a “maintenance” Sunday or simply a tradition to uphold. Rich unpacks why growing churches view it as a launchpad for the new year—and how that shift can change everything. What Growing Churches Do Differently: You’ll hear stories and observations from churches that have doubled their attendance on Christmas weekend—not because of gimmicks, but through strategic, intentional systems that align vision, volunteer culture, and invite momentum. Planning Starts Now: While it might seem early to talk about Christmas, Rich makes the case that what you do this summer determines how effective you’ll be this December. From team conversations to invite campaigns, now is the time to prepare. This episode is a reminder and a rally cry: Christmas still works when you work it. This episode is part 1 of a special 3-part series designed to help your church plan ahead for Christmas, starting this summer. Whether you’re looking to increase attendance, improve your systems, or reach more people than ever before, this series is packed with insights to help you make the most of the biggest season of the year. Be sure to catch all three episodes!

Charles Stone, a seasoned pastor, leadership coach, and author, brings a wealth of knowledge on managing stress and building resilience. He discusses the dual nature of stress, highlighting both external pressures and internal responses. Charles introduces nine biblical and scientific practices for resilience, including deep breathing techniques that can reset the stress response. Listeners will learn how chronic stress impacts leadership and discover actionable strategies to cultivate peace and adaptability through faith and contemporary brain science.

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Russ Ewell, Executive Minister at Bay Area Christian Church (BACC) in California and founder of Deep Spirituality. How can churches meaningfully engage and empower the next generation of leaders? With campuses across Silicon Valley and a deep commitment to developing future leaders, Russ shares the practical strategies BACC is using to integrate Gen Z into leadership while staying grounded in spiritual formation. Build for the future while leading the present. // Many churches struggle to reach Gen Z because they unintentionally lead only within their own generational context. Resist the comfort of the status quo and instead build a culture that invests in young people while still meeting the needs of the present. This mindset shift is crucial to sustaining long-term health and growth. Let relationship with God be the foundation. // The foundation of everything is a relationship with God. You can’t build the culture you need in your church unless everyone is focused on walking with God and obeying Him. Because the congregation at BACC was surrendered to what God wanted to do, they were eager to see the younger generation of leaders developed in the church. Create a church culture that welcomes the next generation. // Gen Z needs to feel seen and heard in church life. Examine everything from the worship experience to leadership opportunities. By inviting young people to write songs, develop areas of focus, and make decisions, you create a space where the next generation is shaping the future of your church. Make room for mistakes and growth. // Raising up young leaders means letting go of perfectionism and allowing space for failure. Russ models this by stepping back, staying quiet, and resisting the urge to micromanage. Through internships and mentorships, BACC provides young adults with practical experience and spiritual training—essential ingredients for long-term leadership development. Deep Spirituality. // With Gen Z’s growing skepticism toward organized religion, Russ created Deep Spirituality—a digital resource platform filled with devotionals, podcasts, videos, and tools to help people explore faith on their own terms. The Best Life series, for example, offers life skills like goal-setting and financial literacy through a biblical lens, meeting Gen Z where they are. Be intentional about developing leaders. // Bay Area Christian Church’s goal is for more than 50% of its leadership to come from Gen Z and Millennials. Russ is working directly with young couples and individuals to teach, mentor, and prepare them to lead. By investing early—in some cases, as young as 15—the church is building a deep leadership bench for the future. Be adaptable and innovative. // Russ’s book, He’s Not Who You Think He Is, reflects on his journey from focusing on the church and its structure to focusing more on God and how His Spirit was moving. He encourages leaders to be adaptable and innovative—especially if they want to remain relevant and impactful in the 21st century. Learn more about what’s happening at Bay Area Christian Church by visiting BACC.cc and check out the many resources Russ mentioned, including The Chemistry Lab newsletter, at deepspirituality.com. To connect with Russ and see what he’s doing with special needs kids, E-Life, and special needs adults, visit russewell.com. Plus, tune in to Gail Ewell’s unSeminary podcast episode, Beyond Accessibility: Gail Ewell’s Vision for Church Inclusivity. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So excited for today’s conversation because we’re talking with someone who’s right in the thick of a conversation that I know that you and I are interested in – something that all of our churches should be wrestling through, which is reaching and raising up the next generation of church leaders. Russ Ewell is the Executive Minister at Bay Area Christian Church and the founder of a few innovative companies as well. Russ, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.Russ Ewell — Thank you, Rich. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.Rich Birch — Oh, I’m so honored that you’re here. Why don’t you fill in the Russ Ewell picture, kind of tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us about your background, that sort of thing.Russ Ewell — Well, ultimately, it’s, you know, my life situation is always about team and family and people. So everything I’m doing in my life is doing with other people because that’s what God has done. Russ Ewell — I am the executive minister, as you mentioned, of the Bay Area Christian Church. We’ve got nine campuses here in the Bay Area so that just about anyone, anywhere can get to one of our services, which is exciting. We have two lead minister couples. My wife and I are the executive minister and she’s the women’s ministry leader here. But we’ve got two lead ministers and their wives who lead the day-to-day work now. So we’ve been in the transition to a leadership for the future for a while. And that plays in, of course, to our topic today.Russ Ewell — I started out, though, in being an agnostic. And eventually, through a number of circumstances, ended up finding the Bible and reading the New Testament for the first time in college as a sophomore. And that’s when I became a Christian. And it was a couple of years later, I decided not to go into politics and instead to do this. Rich Birch — Nice.Russ Ewell — And so part of that, I loved chemistry. I’ve just recently started the chemistry lab newsletter. I love chemistry and I wanted to be a scientist at first and then politics and then ended up in the ministry. So it’s a little bit of a journey. But that has led us to be in Silicon Valley. That’s where we are in the Bay Area. And we’ve developed, obviously built the church here and it’s been a great church. We have great people in our church, great leaders. Russ Ewell — But also, we’ve built an eLife ministry, which basically is for inclusion of kids and adults with special needs and the community. It includes sports, it includes all kinds of different things from tutoring to buddies to being able to go to our camps. And our camps are inclusive, our teen devotionals are inclusive, our campus devotionals are inclusive. We’re really into that. And that’s been a big part of helping our young, the younger people in our church, I think, find enthusiasm about doing good. Russ Ewell — And that’s really the basic focus and model of the Bay Area Christian Church, is we’re a church that believes in making God known and doing good. And you mentioned the company. I started one for my boys and people like them that have speech challenges, that develops inclusive software and utilizes tools in the market to be able to see how they can be part of being inclusive software. Russ Ewell — So there’s a number of different things we do. And Deep Spirituality, which I think we may talk about later, which is a place we’ve created for people who don’t go to church maybe or don’t know how they feel about God. They can learn about spirituality there and learn about God and learn about the Bible there. And do it in a way that is, I think we try anyway, relatable and relevant to their day-to-day life.Rich Birch — Love it. We’re definitely going to get to Deep Spirituality. I want to make sure we connect with that.Rich Birch — But we want to start, I want to start with the Gen Z question. You’ve said that churches often want to reach Gen Z or lead with Gen Z, have them a part of the conversation, but actually are struggling to do it. What do you think we’re missing when it comes to understanding this generation?Russ Ewell — Well, I think church leadership is a challenge. And I think sometimes that people outside of churches don’t always understand even how that works. But inside church, even sometimes people don’t understand how it works. It’s very difficult for a leader of a church to go outside of the demographic of his current membership, so to speak, or the body.Russ Ewell — So if he’s in a church that the median age is 40, then it’s going to be real difficult to do a great job reaching people who are 15… Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — …while also reaching people who are 50. And one of the reasons for that is that when you speak, teach, and put together everything you do to make the gospel known and to meet the needs of people in the church, oftentimes we as leaders, we speak to our own generation first because that’s the most natural. Rich Birch — True. Right.Russ Ewell — So I speak to a lot of people that are younger. So one of my favorite guys is Bruce Springsteen. I love Bruce Springsteen. Rich Birch — Yes. Russ Ewell — But when I mentioned Bruce Springsteen, you see blank faces. They’re like…Rich Birch — Sure, who?Russ Ewell — I think I heard about him and Washington and Adams and Hamilton. I think they’re the ones… Rich Birch — One of the founding fathers. Russ Ewell — Exactly.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s hilarious.Russ Ewell — Which I agree he’s a founding father. I’d put him right on it.Rich Birch — Him and Bono, all the founding fathers of rock and roll.Russ Ewell — That’s it. That’s how you figure it out. That’s how you know. Rich Birch — That’s funny.Russ Ewell — So part of it, I think, is understanding or getting the culture of the church to understand that you always have to build for the future. Historically, you see a lot of churches that can get to 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, or 500, 250. But then once the people who were the leaders of that church or the founders of that church, once they get old enough, they no longer can do that. Their generation ages out, and suddenly you see no young people and these churches die out. Rich Birch — That’s true.Russ Ewell — In fact, the building we own is a building that was a church that had, at one point done fairly well, but they had to sell it because once the current population of people got older and passed away or moved away, the church was no longer vibrant. So I think it’s essential that we do it. The challenges are, can we build a culture that says it is essential we build our future even while we build our present. Rich Birch — That’s good. Russ Ewell — And will you have a body of people who say what’s most important is that we reach out, then we always meet our own needs. Because one of the challenges in a church, any organization, a company as well, they may have a software that’s selling great now, but when AI comes into the picture, that software is not going to be super relevant. Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — So you either build for the future or you end up dying. The phrase in Silicon Valley used to be used all the time, change or die. And so I think a lot of the challenges are, can you get yourself, ourselves, to be able to relate to and build for future, and can we build a culture in the church that does that?Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I think a lot of church leaders, I think, would give mental assent to that. They’d be like, yes, that sounds like a great idea. I understand that the message of the gospel is one generation away from extinction. I’ve got to work to pass this thing on. I think you’ve done a good job at kind of outlining that problem.Rich Birch — What is it though that Bay Area Christian Church is doing to kind of structure in a way that’s actually helping to reach Gen Z and beyond? What’s that look like?Russ Ewell — So I think the foundation of everything, and I’ve listened to you before, so I know you agree with this. The foundation of everything, I think, is a relationship with God, and it sounds cliché, but the reality is that you can’t build the culture you need in your church unless everyone is 100% focused on walking with God and doing what God wants. And so the platform that we use, when I look at scriptures, 1 Corinthians 9, “become all things to all people”.Russ Ewell — And so one of the great things about our church is we have people that are 45, 55, 65 and older who believe deeply in the need to develop young leaders. And one reason they love it is it’s their kids. And so when you see your kids becoming Christians and then your kids contributing to leading the future, that’s exciting. So it starts with a relationship with God. Russ Ewell — Secondly, I think it starts with examining what does it feel like to walk into the church? I had a friend of mine come to church with me once, and he goes, man, all these songs are so old. Like, where do you get these songs from? I had never thought about that before, ever. Even when I was younger, I didn’t think about that because they’re classic spiritual songs and they are relevant and important.Russ Ewell — What we did during the pandemic when we were doing a live stream is we had a contest where we said, hey, we want to have a contest for writing new music. And we were going to give out prizes and awards for those who won. We had a top 10, I think it was. And what happened is about a half to three quarters of the winners turned out to be Gen Z people. Rich Birch — So good.Russ Ewell — And so we now sing in our church songs that have been written by Gen Z. The same with everything, themes, what we focus on, projects we take on. We try to allow people that are younger to be a part of leading us, and they’re involved in decision making. So that means that when you have one of the campuses, and one of the goals we have is to at least get to 50% here in the next few years where we have Millennial and Gen Z leading the campuses. And we’re close to that right now.Russ Ewell — And I personally am working with my wife with three couples who fall right into that category. And so we’re building all the time to develop leaders, but that means you have to allow them into the decision making. And I made a lot of mistakes when I was that age. So you have to also allow mistakes. So you have to have a church that’s resilient. And instead of being critical of young leaders, you encourage them and you help them develop knowing that the mistakes they make today provide the experience they’ll need tomorrow to build the church.Rich Birch — That’s so good. And I wonder, I recently was listening to a kind of culture person talking about Silicon Valley culture specifically and said, you know, one of the unique innovations of the part of the world you’re from is it introduced this idea that mistakes are good, that we’ve got to make some mistakes along the way towards, and that there’s lots of cultures in the world where that just is not accepted. Like it’s like we can’t make a mistake, but enabling a church to say, yeah, it’s okay for us to take on for the greater good to take on next generation leaders.Rich Birch — That means we’re going to make a few mistakes along the way. There’s going to be a few bumps, but that’s okay. I think that’s incredible. That would be a big change for lots of churches. Maybe double click on that. What has that actually looked like for you as you’ve given away leadership to the next generation? What are you doing to ensure that we’re making appropriate level mistakes that aren’t blowing the whole thing up, that aren’t pushing the thing over the edge? Talk about that.Russ Ewell — Well, first of all, I have to deal with my own perfectionistic controlling behavior… Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — …that has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit or righteousness. Rich Birch — Yes. That’s good. Russ Ewell — It just has to do with my sinful nature and my human nature. Rich Birch — So good. Russ Ewell — So I first of all, have to deal with that. And I’ve not conquered that. So I can get worked up, bent out of shape by things that aren’t done the way I would do them or the way I think they should be done. So I have to first tackle myself.Russ Ewell — The other thing is that our church has allowed myself and others to grow here because I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And one of the things I love about the church is I can make mistakes in things I say. I can make mistakes and have us going in a certain direction and then have to change that direction. I just try to change it quickly. Russ Ewell — And so I think they’ve already learned to do that because they’ve allowed those of us who lead here in the Bay Area Christian Church, they’ve allowed us to make tons of mistakes. And those mistakes have helped us develop the experience.Russ Ewell — And so I think part of what it is is more us, those of us who are older, being willing to say, let’s give the younger folks a chance to make mistakes. And so what it practically looks like, Rich, and your question is so great, is I have to be willing to stay out of the way, keep my mouth shut, not give off body language that says, “oh no”, not overreact, and be a great teacher. And that’s one of the things that I think has really challenged me, is that how great of a teacher am I? How good am I at helping someone maximize their potential and develop their skills and teach them from the ground up? How do you want… Russ Ewell — Like, for instance, this summer, we hired 17, what we call scholars and interns, men, young men, and 17 young women. And so we’ve got a total there of 34 this summer who will be interns and scholars, and they’re all Gen Z. And the whole idea is to give them a summer where we help them a little bit financially, but we also put them in situations and circumstances where they can be trained in how to be in the ministry. Russ Ewell — Now, they don’t have to go into the ministry. So we help them with their careers as well, their career path, but we’re trying to develop a group of people who have that experience. And so it looks like, I’ll just quickly enumerate it, one, me as a leader, letting go and not gripping and holding tight for control. Russ Ewell — Two, giving them the opportunity to make mistakes. Our church is already there, so we built that culture because we kind of have, as you said, Silicon Valley, but the whole Bay Area is pretty tolerant and friendly. And then three is giving them the financial support to be able to give them summers and years where they can have an opportunity to learn what it means to be spiritual and to make an impact on people.Rich Birch — Love it. Well, let’s pivot and talk a little bit about Deep Spirituality, this platform that you’ve launched and how does that fit into this whole idea of reaching a generation that lives online, that is, you know, is actively engaged, you know, on all things, phone, apps, all of that. Talk us through how does Deep Spirituality fit into this?Russ Ewell — I feel like you’ve already figured out what we’re doing. Rich Birch — Nice. Russ Ewell — So, I think that the statistics, the numbers say that in society in general, that people are gravitating more toward wanting to be spiritual and less toward the institution of church. I don’t think churches should feel bad about that. Every institution is being doubted in question right now. We’re just living at a time, or some people would like to say a season, of institutional doubt in question. So we know that. Russ Ewell — Gen Z is more among the nones, N-O-N-E-S, you know, when they give them options of the different churches they might go to, they say none of the above. Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — And so what we realize is that there’s got to be some place we meet people where they are, and spirituality is where they are. And I personally love the topic and love the idea and have really tried to learn a lot about it myself. Russ Ewell — So we create content there for people that may not be church goers, may not believe in God. They may come from a science background. That’s why I started a newsletter called The Chemistry Lab, to try to help people understand that science and God are not in opposition to one another. We have a Best Life series that we started specifically for people that are younger; the older people need it too. It’s basically life skills that are laid out throughout the year. We put, I think it’s 20 different ones together. Russ Ewell — And so you can learn how to build your finances, you can learn how to get self-awareness, and you go on there. And what we’re able to do is we’re able to have people partner up and be buddies and study and work on these things. And especially with the pandemic, it took people out of life development, not just educational development, life development. Especially here in California, where we were off the streets and out of social for a long, long time. Russ Ewell — And so we try to provide those tools so people can get the life skills they need socially, emotionally, mentally, in regard to work and education, to be able to have success in life. Because at the end of the day, if Christianity doesn’t practically change your life for the better in day-to-day experiences, not a lot of people are going to look to it for being able to help their life in even the crisis moments.Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I was actually, The Best Life, that series caught my eye when I was looking through your resources. You know, I’ve said in other contexts, following Jesus is best for you and makes you best in life or makes you best at life. And I love what you’ve done here, practically packaged up discipleship with really, I would say a fairly fresh new perspective that it feels like, yeah, like a fairly, I think pretty progressive approach that is helpful and packaged for a generation that’s looking for this kind of thing. Rich Birch — Oftentimes, you know, it’s talking about goal setting, planning, time management, effective communication, all from a biblical perspective, all from, hey, how can the Bible help you? The stress management, financial literacy. Talk to me why taking this kind of practical approach, is this something that you’ve seen as you’ve worked with Gen Z and beyond- this kind of a doorway to these kinds of issues?Russ Ewell — Oh, yeah. I mean, well, one, you’re seeing amongst Gen Z, higher, they say, the statistics say higher rates of anxiety and higher rates of depression. You’re seeing more ADHD diagnosis. There’s lots of opinions about that. One opinion I’m developing just antidotally is that they tend to be more comfortable talking about those subjects. So the question is, are they really having more cases, which I think that’s probably true, but I think that they’re also much more willing to talk about it, especially young men are more willing to talk about emotional issues.Russ Ewell — So in working with them, like all the time, which is what my wife and I do, and working with Gen Z, and especially again, because of the pandemic, they’re trying to figure out, how do I move out of my parents’ house and get roommates? Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — How do I pay an enormous amount of money it costs to live in the Bay Area? How do I go to school and work a job at the same time? They’re very practical things they’re trying to figure out how to do. How do I date? How do I build a relationship with a young man or a young woman? Those are real questions that people have that oftentimes we just assume they’re going to figure out. And the church ought to be a place where they can come and they can learn those things. Russ Ewell — And so, yeah, it’s been day-to-day hands-on work, and being in groups, having our scholars, our interns, these 34 kids, that’s helped us learn what they need. And they tell us, these are things we have questions about. How do I even have a budget? What’s a budget? My budget is called my parents. That’s my budget. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Russ Ewell — You know what I’m saying? Those are some of the ways we’ve learned.Rich Birch — To be honest, I was a little shocked as I went through Deep Spirituality. I’m like, where am I paying for this? This is incredible resources. It’s well done, well packaged, great design. It’s just available out there. How are you guys using this? How are other people using this resource? How is this fitting in? I’m trying to picture how this is actually being used. It’s very well done; compliments to you and the team.Russ Ewell — Well, yeah, and we do have a great team. And I think, again, it goes to our church. Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — The people in our church, they believe in doing good and in helping other people. Rich Birch — Right. Love it.Russ Ewell — And they believe in doing that regardless of what they get back. And so they support it. And I think locally in our church, for instance, I’ll give you a story. One of the guys in our church met with one of the professionals in our church, one of the (he happens to be single) and he was having financial trouble. He actually took, these are older guys, not old, but older than teenagers or college students, they sat down and had a time where they went through the financial literacy one. And the guy was blown away. This person in our church never looked at Deep Spirituality. Rich Birch — Right, right, right.Russ Ewell — He wasn’t looking at it at all, didn’t see the point. But once he saw it, he goes, where’d you get all this? He goes, it comes from Deep Spirituality. And so we give it to our leaders. We make sure they know what’s on there. So they can use it to help people in our church be able to conquer some of the challenges they might be facing.Russ Ewell — But we also have churches outside who will email us. We had actually a set of churches in Canada that reached out to us… Rich Birch — Oh wow. Russ Ewell — …and said, is it okay for us to take your stuff and use all your stuff? And we’re like, yeah, that’s what it’s for. And we’re not in some doctrinal debate or doctrinal. The point we have is the more we can spread and make God known, the better life gets for all of us. And if it empowers other people’s work, we’re really happy to have it happen.Rich Birch — Love it. Well, let’s loop back on something you said earlier that you just blew over, that I was like blown away when I saw this. It sounds like the kind of thing that people would say, well, that’s a good idea, but man, you guys are actually taking steps towards it.Rich Birch — You have a vision of having 50 plus percent of your church led operationally by Gen Z and Millennials. That’s wild in the very best of ways. I love it. That’s so good. How are you making that a reality? I know you’re taking steps towards that. What are you noticing about Gen Z as they lead differently? And what really can the rest of us learn?Rich Birch — I think that’s a noble goal for all of us to think about. How can we pass this thing on to the next generation? In fact, I was a part of, or was aware of, really more than a part of it, a group of leaders who had a similar pledge around, hey, we were going to hand our ministries off by a certain date. And only one of them did it. Most people continue to hold onto it and not give it away. So when I saw you’re actually doing this, I was super encouraged. So talk me through what that actually looks like.Russ Ewell — Well, one of the things I’ve tried to learn from Silicon Valley, from corporate world, is—in how they build and how they innovate—is the idea that, for instance, when I got here, all the technology companies from Apple—Facebook didn’t exist when I got here. And neither did Google.—But Apple and names of companies many people here wouldn’t necessarily know, they all called their corporate locations campuses.Russ Ewell — And so I went and visited and got to know people. And then that’s why I came down to Silicon Valley. And we started with a pretty small group and it grew because I went, I want to immerse myself in this and I want to learn from it. Because I’d come from DC, which is the opposite in many ways, culturally.Russ Ewell — And so one of the things I realized is they weren’t afraid of young people. In fact, they saw younger people as a way to be able to innovate, new ideas, new thoughts. Rich Birch — That’s so good.Russ Ewell — And so that’s part of what we do. So what we do is we start by trying to just teach them how to do basic things, get with people and help people. And that’s a lot of work. Like even in our own church, some of the challenges are people that are older who lead, they don’t like the hassle of having to work with somebody who’s still trying to figure out how to keep his gas tank full… RIch Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — …and get from point A to point Z on time. They don’t like that. But that’s what you have to do. So what we do is we look and say, okay, we got a 15 year old kid who’s got a lot of ability, just like a college football team or a college basketball team would be. They have a lot of potential. And so we look at it as: in six years, they’re going to be 21. And in eight years, they’re going to be 23. And they’ll be capable of leading a lot of people. So we start young and we try to give them opportunities when they’re young.Russ Ewell — So every year is about development, the spiritual relationship with God. That’s foundational. Relationships with people, that’s foundational. They have to learn resilience and to take input. And a lot of times it’s hard because a lot of the kids I work with, they have a lot of negative thoughts about themselves already. So if you tell them something they need to get better at, they can become defeated inside. And so you have to work, that’s something I’ve had to learn how to deal with. Russ Ewell — Now, here’s the positive thing. They’re collaborative. They tend not to be power hungry. They tend to like working together with each other. And sometimes one of these we have to work more on is them taking more leadership and directing and not just kind of waiting and that kind of thing.Russ Ewell — So it’s really, it’s a comprehensive effort to try to figure out how to develop them in their character, their faith, then how to teach them leadership. And so that’s a lot of what we work on and then giving them opportunity. So we’re about to hire another set of about three new couples that all have potential to be in that space where they can be a leader of the campus.Russ Ewell — And in some ways we’ll throw them in the water and go, okay, let’s see how it goes. Our church is great. Last thought on this is our church is great because we have older people who are more than willing to be the deep center fielder, to catch the balls that go over their head. And so it’s really a collaborative effort on the part of the young, the staff, and those who are older in our church to make sure they’re successful.Rich Birch — If I was to come like this weekend, I show up at one of your campuses, what would I notice? What would I see that might be like a bit distinctive that this is kind of working its way out? You mentioned the music piece, obviously you’re singing songs that have been written by folks that are in this demo. Are there other things I would notice that would be like, oh, this is a little different than maybe if I went to insert other multisite church in another part of the country? What would I notice, you think?Russ Ewell — I think the first thing you’d notice is that we’re deeply committed to the Bible. I think it would be a huge part of our culture. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good.Russ Ewell — The second thing, I mean, these are in no particular order. Rich Birch — Yep. Russ Ewell — You’d also notice the God-focus. People are very God-focused. The other thing you notice is when you come in, now every church has weaknesses and we do. So I wanna be clear on that. Rich Birch — Yep, yeah, for sure. Russ Ewell — But when you come in, people are gonna, they’re gonna meet you where you are. And we have people who’ve been going to our church for three or four years who don’t feel comfortable with being a member of a church and they’re a part of our church. We have people who are deeply committed and they become Christians and they’re deeply committed. It all forms a community and a culture that’s inclusive. Russ Ewell — So probably the biggest sort of relational thing you’d notice is the number of people with special needs and families with special needs who are included. There’s a children’s ministry aspect just for kids with special needs to make sure they’re included. But I think if a person walked in and this happens all the time, they’d go, oh, I’m accepted here. I can be who I am here, just the way I am. And whether or not I decide to believe in God or not, I’m gonna have friends and I can be participant in it. Russ Ewell — And the final thing you’d notice is we have a number of events like Easter egg hunts that are inclusive. You can come to our event. You don’t have to come to our service. Rich Birch — Right. Russ Ewell — You can come to one of our soccer things and you don’t have to become a Christian, believe in God. You can be Hindu, you can be Buddhist. You would definitely notice that.Rich Birch — Very cool. Well, I know you’ve also written a book, He’s Not Who You Think He Is. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I’d love to kind of include that into the kind of conversation here, as we’re chatting through these things.Russ Ewell — Well, one of the things I had to do is, and you’ve asked a lot of great questions and they kind of point to the book in a way. I had to change the way I thought about God. I had to change the way I thought about church and that meant I had to change me.Russ Ewell — I had to change some of the ways I was trained to be in the ministry. And the book in some ways explains that journey and explains how much I was people-focused, how much I was structure-focused and how much I was built in a way that I wasn’t focusing on God and the way the spirit was leading. I was focusing on the church and the way we were trying to structure and implement our structure.Russ Ewell — And I’m not saying you don’t have structure, but I’m saying you have to be adaptable and you have to be innovative in order to meet people where they are, 1 Corinthians 9. And a lot of that started for me in my relation with God, understanding that being legalistic, a lot of people out there understand that term. Some people who are not familiar with church won’t. Russ Ewell — Being legalistic is not effective. You have to be spiritual and you can be powerful and that way you can be adaptive. And so the book really is great for people who are maybe an agnostic, an atheist. Maybe they don’t go to church, but they’re interested in God. It’s a great book for them. But for people who are Christians that have been going to church a long time, I think it’ll help you consult and look and reflect on, do I need to change the way I think about God and change the way I think about church in order to make a difference in the 21st century?Rich Birch — Love it. Yeah, you know, I really do think your church, I think you specifically are the kind of ministry that people should be following and tracking with. I think you’re asking questions that, and finding answers to, that frankly, lots of us are wrestling with. They’re not even sure what question to ask. And so I wanna encourage people to track with you. Where do we wanna send them online to connect with you, to connect with the church, Deep Spirituality – where do we wanna send people?Russ Ewell — So the BACC.cc, Bay Area Christian Church, that’s a great place to go to find out everything we’re doing and keep up with what we’re doing. Deepspirituality.com is different, and it’s where all the resources are. And I hope you’ll take a look at the new newsletter called The Chemistry Lab, because it’s built exactly on what you’re talking about. And then any of the stuff I’m doing with special needs kids, e-life, special needs adults, you can find at russewell.com. So those are three places you can go, and you can find out probably everything you would wanna know about what we’re doing.Rich Birch — Love it, so good. Well, any final words that you’d have for leaders who are listening in? Particularly, we’ve obviously talked a lot about engaging next gen, engaging Gen Z in our ministry. Anything kind of encouragement or direction you’d give us today, just as we kind of land the episode?Russ Ewell — Well, two things I’d say to end. One, I don’t wanna give the impression that we’ve mastered all this. Rich Birch — Right. Sure.Russ Ewell — We’re in the learning mode, and we’re trying to grow and trying to understand it. The second thing is don’t get discouraged. Every single victory we’ve had started small, took time, and eventually was successful. And so be patient, and don’t get down on yourself and get discouraged and feel like, why am I not being successful?Russ Ewell — Pick one thing, work at it, and over time, God will come through. He’ll bless it. Rich Birch — Love it. Thanks so much, Russ. I really appreciate that. Say hi to Gail for us. Russ Ewell — Will do.Rich Birch — Great to see you guys. We were joking early on. I think this is the first husband-wife combo that have been on the podcast, but not at the same time. So, which says a lot. 800 plus episodes in to have a new combo. That’s pretty amazing.Rich Birch — So Russ, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. All the best in everything you’re doing. Appreciate you being here today.Russ Ewell — Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Jason Hanash is the founding and lead pastor of Discovery Church, one of the fastest growing churches in the U.S. He discusses how his church transformed from a small gathering to a thriving community of nearly 5,000 attendees. Jason emphasizes the importance of restructuring leadership as they scaled, shifting to a lean executive team model. He highlights the value of developing leaders from within and advocates for thorough training before taking on larger roles. Their innovative programs focus on effective communication and empowering the next generation through biblical teachings.

In this engaging discussion, Craig Smith, Lead Pastor of Mission Hills Church—a historic and rapidly growing multisite congregation in Colorado—shares insights on leading change effectively. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between purpose and mission, asserting that clarity is crucial for church alignment. Craig also explores how to navigate cultural shifts and growth limitations while maintaining a strong community focus. Furthermore, he advocates for preaching that drives transformation rather than just sharing information, ensuring that biblical teachings foster genuine life change.