unSeminary Podcast

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking today with Erik Henry, the Executive Pastor of Central Christian Church in Wisconsin. Data is critical to accurately understand what’s happening at your church and what’s changing over time. Listen in as Erik discusses the importance of using data to make informed decisions at your church as well as best practices for creating a survey that collects the needed information. Data allows you to make decisions. // As church leaders, we can rely on our gut feelings when making decisions. But what if we could use data to make more informed decisions? Data allows you to make decisions based on what is really happening, but it’s only as good as the question it answers or the decision it helps you make. Behavior and self-reported spiritual maturity. // It’s difficult to measure spiritual maturity because it’s so complex, individualized, and often cyclical. However we can measure behaviors and self-reported feelings about spiritual maturity. While this data isn’t useful on its own, tracking the changes to these measurements over time can help you determine what’s working and what needs improvement. Create surveys. // Surveys are a useful tool for gathering data and tracking changes over time. However there are also limitations of survey data and we need to interpret it carefully. For example, when measuring the self-reported feelings about spiritual maturity of church members, it is important to consider the sample of the church that is willing to take the survey. Erik warns against overstepping the difference between causation and correlation, as pastors may push certain behaviors as the mark of spiritual maturity, leading to a new kind of legalism. Focused and brief. // Erik emphasizes the importance of keeping surveys simple, clear, specific, and brief, with no more than 10 short questions. Each question needs to be directly aimed at something you want an answer to. The surveys at Central Christian Church are sent out via email and use Google Forms which most people are familiar with. Determine what to ask. // What are the key performance indicators for your church as a whole? Focus your questions on measuring your KPIs to get the most useful data from your surveys. Survey Fatigue. // Incorporating surveys into your communication strategy is a helpful assistant in the decision-making process, but be cautious about overusing it. Central Christian limits churchwide surveys to twice a year. After surveying your people, consider distributing the results and connecting it to your decision-making. You can learn more about Central Christian Church at www.centralwired.com. Plus check out examples of their surveys below: Central Check-in // A churchwide survey that assesses Central Christian’s people and finds patterns that may help the staff to help the congregation grow in their faith throughout the coming year. Central Check-in Results // Charts of the 305 responses to the Central Check-in survey. Example Staff Satisfaction Survey // Used to build healthy staff culture at Central Christian Example Volunteer Satisfaction Survey // Used to assess the volunteering experience at Central Christian. 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: Chemistry Staffing One of the things that they never teach you in seminary is when to move on from your current church. Over the last couple of years, we have been having a TON of conversations about this with pastors all over the United States. Of all the ministry decisions you make, leaving your position will be the toughest. Download this two-in-one resource that walks you through the decision-making process. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in today. You know every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you. Today is definitely going to deliver that for you. We’ve got Erik Henry with us. He’s the executive pastor at a church that you should be tracking along with, Central Christian Church. Now there’s only one of them in the country;I know this is one of those names of churches – there’s a lot of them out there so which one are we talking about? We’re talking about the one that’s kind of in the middle between Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee. This is a fantastic church or a multi-site church with both English and speaking congregation. Ah, one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Erik, so glad you’re here. Welcome to the show. Erik Henry — Thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate that. Rich Birch — Yeah I’m honored that you’re here. I’d love to love your church. Love what God’s doing there. Can we start with kind of tell us about, for folks that don’t know, fill out the picture tell us about Central and then tell us about your role. What is what do you do as an executive pastor at your church? Erik Henry — Sure. Yeah, Central is a it’s kind of a… yeah I talk to executive pastors all the time and all of us say that our churches are weird. Um, every… Rich Birch — Mm, so true. Yes, very true. Erik Henry — Every church is not like any other church and so ah, but… Rich Birch — But yours really is. Yours really is. Erik Henry — Ours really is. Rich Birch — Love it. Erik Henry — But you know we we live we’re a large church in a small community. You know 35,000 people in our community and um, it’s not in a big city. It’s not in the suburbs. It’s not in in a growing area. It’s actually in a semi-depressed area, and so you know a lot of it’s very blue collar. It’s not white collar. You know people working in um, in executive roles. It’s it’s very blue collar community and it’s it’s just a different place. And so um I love it. I’ve been at Central for 23 years. I was actually teaching math, high school math… Rich Birch — Oh wow. Erik Henry — …and I I was on just coming to church here. They asked me to come on staff and start ah, young, ah like a Gen X Ministry, back when that was a kind of the thing. Rich Birch — Oh yeah, Gen X. Gen X, remember that? That was like all the cool and hip. Erik Henry — Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. That’s when we were young. Rich Birch — It’s going to happen to you, Gen Z friends. It’s going to happen to you someday. Erik Henry — True story. Rich Birch — But you’re going to look back and laugh and say, remember when they used to pay attention to us? Well they never paid attention to Gen X. I’m Gen X as well. So. Erik Henry — Yeah. Rich Birch — But yeah, that’s great. Love it. So you started there and then kind of works your way up. Erik Henry — So anyway so I started there. I’ve been here 23 years… Rich Birch — Yep. Erik Henry — …and I just kind of I can’t decide whether I kept getting promotions, or I just couldn’t keep a job. Rich Birch — I love it. Erik Henry — But I went from um I went from Young Adults to ah Worship Pastor to Creative Arts Director to Discipleship Pastor to a Campus Pastor. Rich Birch — Wow. Erik Henry — And then now I’m the Executive Pastor. I and I got into this role in February or a January of 2020. so I thought I was hopping right in at the perfect time… Rich Birch — Perfect. Erik Henry — …and then a month later you know what. Rich Birch — A vision for a new decade. You know, got 2020 vision we know exactly… all those churches that had clear vision for 2020, we know exactly where God’s going to lead us that year. No, not true. Erik Henry — Bingo. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Erik Henry — So um so yeah anyway so it’s it’s been a blast. I’ve so I’ve got 3 years under my belt as Executive Pastor. Rich Birch — Love it. Erik Henry — Um I you know we we had wanted this to be sort of ah a more of a ministry use ah, focused Executive Pastor role. We were going to hire on an Operations focused Executive Pastor, but you know with everything that happened um that I’m filling both of those roles right now. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — And so um, but truthfully I love it. I enjoy it. I but I am doing a job that I was never trained for, especially on the operation side. And so I’m I’m going back to school. Rich Birch — Love it. Erik Henry — I’m getting my MBA right now… Rich Birch — Oh very cool. Erik Henry — …in data analytics. Rich Birch — Data. That’s cool. Erik Henry — And so so it’s something something that I really enjoy. You know I’m a math guy; I’m a geek and so um, so the the data thing is exciting to me. I’ve been really enjoying. I’ll graduate with my MBA in December. Rich Birch — Right. Congratulations, congratulations on that. That’s so good. Erik Henry — Yeah, thanks. Rich Birch — Well you know data is interesting. I know a lot of we have a lot of executive pastors or executive pastor wannabees that are listening in ah and when you said data I know that people perked their ears up and said, ooh this one’s going to be a good episode. I’m excited about that. Because we do we think about… a lot of executive pastors see the world through spreadsheets; we that you know the world is just a series of spreadsheets, different tabs. Um, but you know talk to us about data. Why why is data important for us as church leaders to be thinking about? Erik Henry — Yeah, great. You know I love this stuff. Data for me, and I think it should be for everybody, data is all about making good decisions. Um, data is only as good as the question it answers or the decision it helps you make. Um and so ah, part of the problem that I see in church a lot is that churches and leaders in churches usually make decisions from their gut. You know? The the sense. Rich Birch — It’s so true. Erik Henry — So and and I’m not I’m I’m not denigrating that. There’s there’s a place for that. And and not just your gut but also your spirit. You know there’s a there’s a place when you are um, following and and listening to the Holy Spirit. There’s a place for listening and and ignoring data. But I think I think we do that a little too much. Rich Birch — Are okay. Erik Henry — And I think, you know, part of what I think is important about data is it allows us to make decisions based on what’s really happening not based on a gut feeling. Um and the reality you know as well as I do ah a lead pastor is going to hear what the people want him to hear. They’re gonna he’s gonna… Rich Birch — Sure. Erik Henry — …he’s going to hear what ah because people love him. Rich Birch — Yes. Erik Henry — People want to love him. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — People want him to think that they’re really on his side. And so sometimes even though a lead pastor can feel like they’re in the know and they get their people. Um it is not exactly that clear because they have a skewed understanding because people show them what they want him to see. Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. You know I’ve said for years, there’s there’s no bad information. There’s just information we don’t like. We want data. We have to get, ah you know, the the real information on the ground. But let me play the the you know the negative voice. Ah you know, listen come on, Erik, we’re in a spiritual game here. We’re we’re trying to help people grow spiritually. You can’t get that onto a spreadsheet so don’t even bother. Why would we do it at any level? Isn’t it just all about like you say you know how you know how the Spirit leads, but you know at its core, you know, we can’t; we can’t. The core thing that we hopefully do in our churches, see people take steps towards Jesus, you can’t get that onto a ah spreadsheet, can you? Erik Henry — And I agree with that, to a point. Rich Birch — Yes. Erik Henry — I do because there are things that we can measure and there are things that we can’t. Um and and so I’d like to, you know, first off the bat the first thing that I know that every pastor would love to be able to do is measure spiritual maturity. I can measure if you are where you are when you come here. and then I can measure how spiritually mature you are as you ah go through all of the programs or whatever of our church. My opinion, and this is just my opinion, you cannot measure spiritual maturity. Rich Birch — Right, right, right. Erik Henry — It is way too complex. It is it is so clearly ah, an individualized um thing. It’s also it’s it’s circular. It’s cyclical, and it is not an up and to the right trajectory. Rarely is it that. Rich Birch — Right. That’s a good insight. Erik Henry — Also it has so so often it has so little to do with our church. The way that people grow we think it’s going to be our church that grows them. But the reality is the way that people grow is when they lose a loved one and they walk through that, and it’s painful, and in the end they see that they have gotten closer to Jesus as a result. Erik Henry — Now I’m not I’m not saying that there are no, there is no role for the church. Of course, there’s a huge role for the church at this. But to say that we can measure spiritual maturity. Um I think is a little ah overstating. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — But there are things that we can measure. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — We can’t measure maturity, but we can measure behaviors, and we can measure self-reported feelings about spiritual maturity. Rich Birch — Interesting. Okay. Erik Henry — Now I want to I want to suggest that those are two different things. Spiritual maturity is different, actual spiritual maturity, is different than self-reported feelings about spiritual maturity. Erik Henry — Because we’re not always um as self-aware as we want to be, as we wish we were. Rich Birch — Right. It’s so true. Erik Henry — And so um and so as we measure these things, it’s just really important that we are are clear and careful about describing exactly what we’re measuring. Um and mathematicians and statisticians, that’s what you’re about. We don’t want to overstate. Rich Birch — Yes, right. Erik Henry — We want to be very careful everything that we say is only what we can prove through the numbers. Rich Birch — Right, right. Erik Henry — Pastors, on the other hand, are not very careful. Rich Birch — God bless them. God bless them. Erik Henry — I love them; I’m one of them. Rich Birch — Yes, exactly. Exactly. Erik Henry — But we are not careful, usually, about how we use data. And it’s not because we’re… Rich Birch — Right. Well… Erik Henry — Go ahead. Rich Birch — No I was going to say like that’s like one of those standard running jokes, right? Like in fact I think it might even be in my bio where I talk about the sizes of churches I’ve worked at, and I even make the joke I’m like those are not senior pastor numbers. Those are actual numbers. Like because you know we all we all and I’ve… listen, the senior pastors I’ve worked for amazing gentlemen… Erik Henry — Yeah. Rich Birch — But they all this the guys I worked for had this propensity of like yeah, there’d be a room of whatever a thousand people, and there’s like there was at least 4000 people there today. And and so and that and we all have that – obviously they’re easy to make fun of. But we all do that. I do that. You know we we kind of skew what we see kind of fits our story. We’re constantly, there’s ah ah you know, ah a confirmation bias that we have. When when you talk about behaviors and then self-reported feeling, can you give us some examples of those? Erik Henry — Sure. Rich Birch — Let’s pull apart that a little bit; talk to me a bit about behaviors. Erik Henry — Sure, absolutely. Rich Birch — What are some of the behaviors if we’re trying to get at? Look under the hood, what’s actually happening in our churches? Erik Henry — So questions like, ah how many times a week do you read the bible? That’s a behavior. Rich Birch — Yep. Erik Henry — Um, that’s something that we track. Ah another so that there’s sort of the on your own behaviors. Then there’s also the ah are you a part of of participation in some of our church programs, like for instance, are you serving on a serving team? Yes, or no. That’s ah, an important question for us. Erik Henry — Are you um are you taking advantage of any of our classes or small groups. That’s another question, you know, that we’re trying to track. So those are behaviors. Am I doing a thing; am I um am I participating in a program? But then when it comes to self-reported feelings. It’s how how connected do you feel to other believers? Now that is a very soft number. Rich Birch — Yes, yes, yes. Erik Henry — Do you know what I’m saying? That’s a 0 to 5 how connected do you feel to other believers at Central Christian Church. That the number 4 means almost nothing. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — Now what it what what it does do is you can start to track over time where that number moves to. So if if on average you’re 2.1 this year, and a year later you’re at 4.2 – whoa! Whoa! We did we must have done something. Something happened. Or you go the other direction. Ooo we’ve got a problem. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — But the first time you measure it a 4.0 means literally nothing, you know? Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, it’s just a… Erik Henry — And so those are the when it comes to self-reported feelings about spiritual maturity, you’re measuring the change. Not the actual number. Rich Birch — Okay, that’s good. I love that. Now, so a part of what I hear you saying is actually really driving to doing more surveys, asking people to reflect on their their own. Erik Henry — Yes. Rich Birch — There’s obviously a couple different kinds of data – one is just like how many people are in groups. But another one is like are you in a group? That’s two different ways to look at it. Help me understand what place do surveys fit in in the way you’re using data, where you’re gathering gathering data, and then how that helps you in, you know, making decisions at the church. Erik Henry — Surveys are huge for us. Um, because trying to to, you know, you can you can count the number of people who go to your classes in small groups. You can count your attendance, you can count other things, but it doesn’t doesn’t give you all that much information actually. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — So there’s a difference between um, the number of people who show up in seats and the amount of times per month on average your your person, your people attend church. So how many times per month do you… you can’t get that in any way other than a survey. Um. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — There’s no real way to pull that off. So surveys for us are really important. We’ve gotten we’ve decided that we’re doing two surveys a year. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — We’re doing one every six months. So for me, there are there are four things that we are really careful about with surveys. Number one simplicity. It’s got to be simple. It’s got to be… Rich Birch — Yep. Erik Henry — …clear and easy… and the second one is clarity. got to be absolutely clear with your question. They can’t be they can’t have to think about it like, what do they mean by that? Specificity. Each question has got to be directly aimed… Rich Birch — Driving behavior. Yep. Erik Henry — …at a question that you want an answer to. And the fourth one, and I’m this might be the most important one, it’s brevity. You cannot ask more than 10 questions. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — And they but it better be very simple short questions if they’re 10 of them. Um, because people will not fill it out. Rich Birch — Yeah I… Okay, let’s talk about these two. Erik Henry — Yeah Rich Birch — Let’s keep pause here and drive driving on this a little bit. So you’re doing two big surveys a year. Um are you doing those like on weekends, slowing down the service, speed bump. Okay guys, either take out your phone, or you know here’s a piece of paper. Talk us through functionally what does that look like. Erik Henry — Yeah, yeah, we do. Um we we do two things with each of those surveys. Number one we send out send it out on email to everybody. The truth is we’ve decided Google Form is the best way to do it. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — I mean there’s lots of other things [inaudible]… Rich Birch — Yeah, there’s fancy stuff but um. Erik Henry — …Survey Monkeys, but what we found with our people because we are blue collar um, church, our people are like if you’re going to want me to learn a new thing to take a survey I’m not doing it. Rich Birch — Right, right, right. Okay. Erik Henry — And so everybody knows Google; everybody knows Google Forms, so we just send a link to a Google form. Click, click, click, click, click – it’s less than a minute usually that it takes to do a survey. Rich Birch — And what and what um, give me a sense of maybe a couple stories around stuff that’s changed at the church because of these surveys. That like, hey you know we we learned something here or it confirms something that was going on, um you know, that ended up kind of driving a different behavior. Erik Henry — Yeah, one one of the main there was a huge shift post pandemic in that number that I just talked about when it comes to how many times people come to church. It used to be less than two. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — Um, now we’re over three, so which is a major shift. So we have ah you know our our numbers are still not… in-person numbers are still not quite back to what they were pre-pandemic. Um, but the people that we have are coming more often. And so that just changes your communication strategies. It used to be we had to say something for four weeks… Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — …before everybody would hear it. It’s not the same anymore. Rich Birch — Right, right. Erik Henry — So that changes our communication. That’s a small one. But they’re just other things. Rich Birch — No, that’s a good example. Erik Henry — Yep. Rich Birch — Okay, so now I so ah one of the churches I served in, um, they had 2, 3 decades of they did an annual survey which was a great great practice. And we worked very hard to not change the questions… Erik Henry — Yes. Rich Birch — …because what we were trying to do was to try to get year over year, talk us through that. Ah, what does that look like? Erik Henry — Very important. And I’m sort of with our staff I’m like, hey what we have is what we have. Rich Birch — Yeah. Erik Henry — Don’t don’t suggest more. Don’t don’t… because that’s the there I mean listen, and it’s not their fault. Rich Birch — Yeah. Erik Henry — They’re like, oh man this is great. We’re getting all this information. I would love to get more information. Rich Birch — Yes. Erik Henry — I’d love to get different… I’d like to hear and that’s a great thing. You can’t do it. You gotta say, what is the stuff that matters the most? Because you cannot get people who are like, another survey are you kidding me? Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah. Erik Henry — Or a 25 question survey? Never gonna fill it out. You know? Rich Birch — Yeah, I wonder if um, would you be willing to share us like a PDF or something that shows that… Erik Henry — Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Rich Birch — …whatever the 10 questions you use – that that’s great. We’ll put that in the show notes, friends, so you can see that because you should be doing this is a best practice. Rich Birch — I I want to come back to something you said there, ah because it connected to another idea I was thinking about which was, so you’re saying, hey you’re seeing that people are saying that they’re coming more. They’re actually their average ah number of times a month has gone up which is actually, I would say if you were to ask pastors across the country, they would say it’s gone the opposite direction. Erik Henry — Right. Rich Birch — So you’re seeing a trend that’s different now I actually think the deeper point is most people don’t know, they’re just guessing. Erik Henry — Right. Rich Birch — They’re blaming their lower attendance on that. Erik Henry — Yep. Rich Birch — Um, but you actually know that. How have you seen… how have you used the data to compare to national trends? Erik Henry — Yeah. Rich Birch — I’m sure that’s a part of the conversation of you know the way you’ve thought about these things. Erik Henry — Yeah, so one of the other things that I think is really important is you have to um, you have to think about the the skew of all of your data. So everything that we do, because we do in-person in the services we allow people to do it right in the service and we do email. Everything that you get, we had 305 responses to our survey this last survey. Um every one that you get is skewed because it’s somebody who is willing to fill out a survey. So there is a correlation… Rich Birch — Yeah. Erik Henry — …between someone who’s willing to fill out a survey and someone who’s willing to come to church more times a week or a month. Rich Birch — A month. Yeah. Rich Birch — And so ah so if you… for us to compare our 3.1 number with the national average, which I think right now is 1.6 or 1.7… Rich Birch — It’s just under 2. Yeah, yeah, yep. Erik Henry — Yeah um I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — Because usually it’s Barna who’s doing that research and they know what they are doing. And they are getting very ah um, they are getting sample sizes that are absolutely random. We are not. And so… Rich Birch — Right, right. Erik Henry — The the the statistician in me is like we can’t compare those two numbers. Our 3.1 is not equal to their 1.7. because… Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, your 3.1 is compared to, you know, friends that maybe are aren’t tracking along, the 3.1 is most relevant as compared to your 2.4 three, four years ago. Erik Henry — Exactly right. Rich Birch — Because that tells you that difference. It’s it’s hard to make that comparison to other churches and understand, you know, what does that, you know, what does that look like it. Erik Henry — You know and it goes back to it goes back to the question of what being very careful about what you’re saying you are measuring. Because we’re not actually measuring our whole church. We’re we’re measuring a sample of our church… Rich Birch — Right, right. Erik Henry — …that’s willing to talk to us. Um, and those are that’s a different question. And it goes back to also to you know what do you do with the information? The pastor always has the best of intentions. Rich Birch — Bright. Erik Henry — But you know I hear all the time I hear them saying things like, you know all you have to do is read your Bible every day, pray every day, um join a small group, give, and you know here’s this list of 5 things and you will be spiritually mature. And um, that sounds great… because what they do is they see this data and they’re like hey people who are are spiritually mature are doing all of these things. And so they think it’s a cause and sometimes it is. But the reality is they’re they’re overstepping. There’s a difference between causation and correlation. Rich Birch — And correlation. Yeah. Erik Henry — And so um, when you have those those ah the pastors who want to push all of these um behaviors, if behavior is the is the mark of maturity, you end up in the end with a little bit of a new kind of legalism. Rich Birch — Oh that’s a good insight. Erik Henry — Because it’s like if if you just check the boxes then you’re good. And that’s not how Jesus led. Rich Birch — Yeah. Erik Henry — That’s not how he taught. And it’s much more complicated than that and so but data is wonderful. It can be used in a way that can end up getting you to a new kind of legalism. Rich Birch — Yeah that’s a great insight. Very, very good insight there. You know, I’ve similarly I’ve struggled with this tension of um, we do want to be clear. And so lots of churches, we all have the like whatever the five things are. You know, these are the you know, get on a team, give, be in a small group, you know, attend services, bring a friend – something like that. And ah you know for years I’ve said that that is super reductionist, and is actually not that high of a bar. Like when I when I would look at what Jesus says he says you know, follow the narrow road. Erik Henry — Yes. Rich Birch — And like give it all up and follow me. I’m like that doesn’t sound easy. But we have to come up… There’s a tension there because we do want to we have to communicate something… Erik Henry — Right. Rich Birch — …that helps people take a next step… Erik Henry — Correct. Rich Birch — …but it it can be super reductionist. So let’s look under the hood a little bit on on questions that you’ve asked. So I’m going to ask you either extreme. On one side ah, question that you keep asking that you’re like we probably should stop asking that question because it’s it’s not helpful, like we’ve had the same answer for so long. It’s it’s not helpful. Erik Henry — Yeah. Rich Birch — Or what’s the one question that you don’t ask today that you’re tempted by your team. You’re like, oh maybe we should put this one in here. Do you have do you have anything on either side that that would kind of stretch our thinking a little bit? Erik Henry — Ah sure. Yeah I can give you the one like the first one where you you… Rich Birch — Yes. Erik Henry — …we asked a question for a little while that was that had to do with the fruit of the Spirit because we’re thinking okay maturity will produce fruit. Rich Birch — Yes. Erik Henry — So love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness – the whole thing. Um and so what we started doing was having people rate on a 0 to 5 how those fruit are being lived out in their lives. Again, this is a self-reporting thing, right? So this is self-reported feelings about the fruit in their life. And we did that over time and guess what? Nothing ever changed it. What what I what you… Rich Birch —Oh interesting. Erik Henry — What you found was that the it was just an average of how people feel about themselves in general, and that just doesn’t go anywhere. Rich Birch — Oh interesting. Erik Henry — And so it just turned out to be a a waste of time. Rich Birch — Right. One to cut off the list. Oh that’s good. That’s interesting. Anything on the other side that you’re tempted to be like, oh or or the one, or maybe another way to phrase that, is is there a team member that keeps hounding you that like we’ve got to do this. Like, you know, we’ve got to have this, you know, this question in that you’ve resisted, you know, is there’s anything on that end? Erik Henry — Yes. One of the thing that comes to mind is ah is marketing. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — So marketing is such a difficult thing to measure, the the effect of marketing. And so when we talk about marketing, we just desperately want ah data. And so we were like what about a question that is about how you were invited to church. Or what you used to invite someone to church. And the problem is it just changes so much. Rich Birch — Right right. Erik Henry — And and it’s different we have different strategies all the time. And so I know that there’s there are some people that would love for us to add some of those kind of questions. Um, but I just don’t, again, you just have to make the the call about what are you trying, what is the most important thing. Erik Henry — And we have, you know, I don’t know if if your your church or other churches you use KPIs – you know, key performance indicators, and and our goals. And so we have KPIs for our whole church. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — And so most of our questions are directed toward measuring our KPIs, not just whatever’s out there. But but what are the things that are most the key performance indicators for our church as a whole. What are those things, and we that’s what we use ah to to decide what questions we ask. Rich Birch — Love it. Um, when you ah survey—so you come up those to twice a year—what’s the tenor of the staff environment? Are people excited by this? Are they looking forward to it? Are they nervous? What do you do to ensure that, you know, that that your your team kind of is prepared and then buys in – what does all that look like? Erik Henry — Yeah, the plus is we got a fricking great staff culture. Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Erik Henry — I mean our staff culture is fantastic, and so everybody loves it. Rich Birch — Okay, great. Erik Henry — Nobody’s… I think there’s a little bit of of nervousness because this isn’t the only surveying we do. We actually do ah volunteer satisfaction surveys… Rich Birch — Okay, right. Yep. Erik Henry — twice a year as well. Um, part of the thing is you know you don’t know how volunteers are feeling about your staff because, again, they love them. And I always tell my staff I say listen, if you can’t make your volunteers like you, there’s a problem. You know what I’m saying?. Rich Birch — Sure sure. Erik Henry — Like if you can’t get a volunteer volunteer to say, hey I think that this staff member is great… Rich Birch — Yes, yeah. Erik Henry — …that’s like that’s the highest priority… Rich Birch — That’s base. Yep. Yes, yep. Erik Henry — …that’s bare minimum your volunteers better like you. Rich Birch — Yep, yep. Erik Henry — And so um and so I I do think there’s been a little bit of nervousness surrounding those. But we’ve now we’ve now just this year moved to a single volunteer satisfaction survey that goes to every for every staff member. It took us a while to come up with the questions, and I can share those too. Rich Birch — That would be great. We’ll take it. That’d be great. Erik Henry — Um, but you know, what what questions were would work across the board um, that would actually give us an understanding of how a staff member is doing, that kind of a thing. So. Rich Birch — Um, yeah because I’ve struggled. We’ve struggled, and so we have combined kind of both of these together into one. Erik Henry — Yeah, okay. Rich Birch — And um, have done that kind of, for lack of better word, customer satisfaction stuff and that has driven um decisions around staffing stuff. Erik Henry — Yes, absolutely. Rich Birch — And so we’ve tried to not like, hey friends like don’t freak out about this. It’s good. Again, it’s the same thing – there’s no bad information. There’s just information if we don’t like. But we’d rather know so that we can improve. And and there was a season—it’s not so much, you know, it’s not all the time—but there was a season where it was like that kind of freaked people out. They were like oh my goodness. What. Because people are worried. Erik Henry — Yeah, yes. Rich Birch — And I’m like well, you know, it’s it’s going to be… In in one way I kind of took that as a compliment because I was like okay that means that people are taking it serious and they realize we’re taking it serious. Erik Henry — Right. Rich Birch — We’re not just this isn’t just like here’s a bunch of random ideas, and like okay well we’ll go back to doing the things we did the way we did it before. So… Erik Henry — Exactly right. Rich Birch — Interesting. Are there any other surveys that you do that you might be kind of interested to kind of touch on? This has been a really helpful conversation. Erik Henry — Honestly I think we we try to keep it at that. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — Those are the two main things. Otherwise we’re we’re going to end up with a ton of… Oh, the other thing that will always happen is the lead pastor is always going to be like, hey we’re thinking about this decision, let’s do a survey. Let’s let’s do a survey. And so unless it is unbelievably important I push back on that. Rich Birch — Okay, and why is that? Why is that? That seems like a good use of that. Erik Henry — Right. Survey fatigue. Rich Birch — Okay. Erik Henry — I I want to make sure that we continually when we do them um… Oh the other thing I’ll say is that we we feel like we we have dropped the ball, and are going to are trying to do better at finding ways to release the information that people have given us. You know, they don’t want all of the details of every little thing. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — But to be able to say, hey thank you for taking this survey, here’s what we found out. Um, we have we’ve dropped the ball on that and this year we’re really trying to to turn that around. Rich Birch — Yeah, because people are more likely to give us information if we if they see, oh look they they… You know it’s like any conversation, it’s a conversation – you talked and now we’re responding. Erik Henry — Yep, exactly right. Rich Birch — We’re saying oh yeah, we heard you say this and here’s some changes. Well this has been just so good. What a rich conversation. And you know hope, friends, as you’re listening in, you’re catching a little bit. There’s a ton we could talk about here. Ah but super helpful. I appreciate you sending us those. We’ll have those links in the in the show notes. Anything else just as we’re kind of wrapping up today’s episode you could share or you’re thinking about, Erik? Erik Henry — Ah, yeah, like I love your the the unSeminary concept, the you know what do you wish… and I you know I was thinking about that as I prepared and I thought to myself you know what I really wish? I’m not a seminary graduate. Um I’m a math teacher; I’ve been in ministry since I was twenty years old. But um, but I I feel like the people who come out of bible college or seminary sometimes now don’t really understand the complexity of ministry. Rich Birch — That’s true. Erik Henry — That um, that it is so much more complex than we like to make it in a classroom. I mean the ah, part of the complexity comes because your your life becomes revolved around this ministry as a pastor, Executive Pastor, whatever you are, which also means all your friendships are part of this. Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so true. Erik Henry — And all of the people that you lead are are part are friends, and those dual relationships are so complex. So I have to lead this person who’s who’s also the person that is my friend, or my wife is best friends with his wife, and now I’ve got to I have to lead… Rich Birch — That’s so true. Erik Henry —…and and challenge and make decisions surrounding these things. It is just so much more… and you you have the relational side, but then you also on the other hand have what I call running the church machine. You know? Rich Birch — Yep. Erik Henry — As an executive pastor part of your job is to keep the machine running. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Erik Henry — To make decisions that make sure that you have ah a future as a church. Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Erik Henry — Um, and so but sometimes that is a tension with the relationships. And learning to live in the tension is one thing I really wish I had known earlier in my ministry, was basically first of all everything takes longer than you think it should. Rich Birch — True, that is very true. Erik Henry — Everything takes longer than you think it should. But if you do the right thing, I know that sounds so stupid, I know that sounds so obvious, but man the right thing is is sometimes a hard thing to find when you’re living in the tension between the relationships, the people that you love, the people who are mad, the people the ah the machine of the church that you are responsible for, it gets very very complicated. And you have to ask yourself which voices matter in that conversation. Rich Birch — Right. Erik Henry — What priorities matter in that conversation. And and in the middle of it, we can convince ourselves what we what what we think is right because it’s easier. Or other people can help us help convince us of what we should do. But there is this thing I find more often than not, that if I quiet myself I can normally find what’s right. And if I just am willing to do the right thing and give it time to work itself out, everything does. Rich Birch — Yeah it’s so good. Well and there’s so much, particularly I find in our roles as Executive Pastors, there’s there’s a lot of decisions that we make that are um, they do get at the the very core of why do we exist as an organization. Um and they’re really important but they’re not necessarily seen. They’re like, you know, they’re kind of like secondary or they’re behind the scenes… Erik Henry — Yes. Rich Birch — …or they’re… but but man, if we if we cut the corners there, if we um and you know there’s extreme examples of that, obviously, where organizations get into fraud and all kinds of super, you know, bad stuff. Erik Henry — Right. Rich Birch — But you know you’re not ah nobody listening in is doing that. But we can make other compromising decisions that aren’t the right decision that aren’t the right thing that aren’t pushing us towards the kind of church God wants us to to be. And yeah, that’s just a really good word. I really appreciate that, Erik. Rich Birch — This has been a fantastic conversation. I thank you so much for being on today. If people want to track with you, track with the church, where do we want to send them online? And friends I would encourage you to do, this is a fantastic church; Erik’s a great leader. Where where do we want to send them online? Erik Henry — We’re at centralwired.com and and then we got all the you know Facebook, Instagram, all those other things too. Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Erik Henry — But um, in general that’s that’s kind of the place to catch us. Rich Birch — Love it.Thanks so much, Erik. I appreciate you being here today, sir. Thank you so much. Erik Henry — Thank you – really appreciate it, Rich.

Thanks for tuning in for the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Tim Hill, executive pastor at Bear Creek Church, located at the crossroads of West Houston, Katy and Cypress, Texas. Every zip code in America is more diverse today than it was ten years ago. And it will be even more diverse ten years from now. Listen in as Tim shares how Bear Creek Church paid attention to the opportunities around them and the practical steps they took to serve their changing community better. Serving the community. // As Bear Creek grew over the years, they noticed their demographic changing and they developed a significant Hispanic representation in the church. This group of people spoke Spanish as their primary language, but had children that were speaking English as their primary language. So the church arranged for listening devices that could be used during a service, enabling a Spanish speaker to listen to the sermon being translated to their native language. A growing Spanish Ministry. // The need for Spanish translation kept growing as the community outside the church saw more Hispanic people come to the area. So Bear Creek decided a separate Spanish service was needed not only to serve this people group better, but also to help them fully connect with the church. Before launching a Spanish service, they made sure they had Spanish speakers as a part of their leadership throughout the ministries of the church. Initially for the Spanish service the church utilized guest preachers, but as they continued to grow they hired a part time Spanish Ministries Pastor. Spanish Service. // To ensure that they are one church with two different expressions, the Spanish Ministries Pastor preaches the sermon one week behind from the English services. He gets the written sermon so he can review and personalize it for the people in his congregation. One church. // Rather than having separate English and Spanish versions of every ministry, translators are placed in each ministry so they can communicate with Spanish speakers. Kids ministry, for example, is in English, but there are always Spanish translators available to interact with parents or help where needed. Take a look at the budget. // To ensure that the Spanish Ministry feels fully a part of the church, Bear Creek makes sure that the budget for that ministry is meeting its needs, whether it’s for more staff, a bigger meeting space, or the latest technology for the service. The budget is growing as the ministry is growing. Lead change, don’t introduce change. // Introducing change can freak people out if there’s a sudden culture shift. But leading change will offer you the opportunity to cast vision to your church. Do the research and determine whether the change will be a minor shift or a bigger shift. What are the opportunities there? Come up with a plan and be strategic about what you communicate. Set goals to determine your next step. // It’s natural to use attendance as a goal marker, but figure out what is the story behind it and what is your next step. Once Bear Creek moved from Spanish translation to a full Spanish service, they saw that attendance continued to grow. That marker told them that their part time Spanish Ministries Pastor needed to be moved to full time. It also signaled the need to set goals for communications, additional staffing, and raising the quality of their Spanish service. As you seek to serve your community better, pay attention to what an increase in attendance might be signaling for you. You can learn more about Bear Creek Church and reach out to Tim at www.bearcreek.church. 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: Portable Church Industries Doing Church in a Rented Facility can be a Challenge. Questions about Multisiting or Portability?Click here to connect with our Multisite Specialist for a free evaluation. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Well, hey, everybody welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation, been looking forward to this one for awhile. We’ve got Pastor Tim Hill with us. He’s the executive pastor at a church that you should be tracking with, Bear Creek Church. They started as a bible study in the late 70s and currently is one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Ah, they have and they’re located at the crossroads of West Houston, Katy and Cyprus, Texas – fantastic part of the country. We’re looking forward to learning from you today, Tim – welcome to the show. Tim Hill — Hey, thanks for having me. Rich Birch — So tell us a little bit about Bear Creek, kind of give us the the flavor if people were to arrive this weekend, what would it look like? Kind of fill out that picture a little bit. Tim Hill — You bet. So Bear Creek sits right at um, an intersection where you find people shopping and buying their groceries ,where they’re doing life, but right around that it’s all communities and neighborhoods where people live, ah schools near us. We have four or five major elementary schools, two or three high schools. So lots of families live right where we are, and so they do life together as they come to church. When they ah when they arrive we’re we’re really a ah multi-ethnic church. We have um around 25 or 30 different countries represented, both within the Hispanic community, but also quite a few people from the continent of Africa. Rich Birch — Oh very cool. Tim Hill — And so they’ll even be wearing those colorful outfits that they wear when they dress up and go to church. And um… Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — Anyway, it’s just ah, a place where everybody feels welcome and warm and loved and that’s really important to us that we create that environment and that experience. We have multiple styles of worship services. We’ve got activities for every age group going on at the same time. So… Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — …everybody can find their place to fit in and and enjoy worshiping and and growing in their faith. Rich Birch — So good. Now you know it seems like the executive pastor—we love executive pastors here, executive pastors here at unSeminary; I’ve spent a lot of time in those roles—but every executive pastor you talk to, their role looks a little bit different. Tim Hill — Yeah. Rich Birch — Ah, tell me about how you frame up that role. If somebody at a church says executive pastor – what is that? How do you explain that? Tim Hill — Yeah, well really the the simplest and easiest way is the pastor casts the vision and sets the direction for the course. The pastor and I have a great relationship, but then he leans into me to make sure that I am. working with the staff and driving the church that direction. So… Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — …I lighten his load. I am his number one servant is the way I look at it. And so um, he he he… Rich Birch — So good. Tim Hill — Yeah. He leads the church, and I run the church. Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Yeah, in another context I’ve talked about how, you know, executive pastors lead at the intersection of vision and execution; kind of where do those two things intersect you find an executive pastor. Tim Hill — Yeah. Rich Birch — That’s so cool. Well you are one of the fastest growing churches; you lead within one of the fastest growing churches in the country. When you think back to the last, I don’t know number of years, what would be some of those changes or areas of growth or development that you’ve seen at Bear Creek that might be interesting for us to kind of kick around and explore today. Tim Hill — You bet. So like a lot of churches the last few years have been crazy and we’ve had a lot of churn. And so there are times we look in our church and it’s a whole different group of people than what it was say even 5, 6, 7 years ago. Rich Birch — That’s so true. Tim Hill — One of those areas is as we just watched the demographics within our community adjust and change, we have a significant um Hispanic representation – folks that in the home Spanish is their primary language but yet their kids are growing up ah in learning English as their primary language. So we we saw as a church that we needed to adapt and adjust. We had always had a little bit of a Spanish ministry, but it was not very friendly to that culture… Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — …and that and that group people. So they would come to church. They could go and pick up some really some listening devices. They could go into the service and while they’d be in an English service, somebody live was sitting there translating the pastor’s message while he was preaching it. Rich Birch — I love that. Let’s let’s dig into this. So what would be some of those signs that you noticed, oh there’s a shift happening in our culture, that you know, you start to say oh there’s you know we’re seeing different folks arrive. What were some of the, you know, some of those things that were kind of telltale signs of that? Tim Hill — Yeah, so one was the people that we had coming we, just with our relationships with them, were listening and they were letting us know of folks coming in. The other is we have a great relationship with our school district. We have the ah, we sit within the third largest school district in the state of Texas. Rich Birch — Wow. Okay. Tim Hill — Over over 100,000 kids are a part of the school district and the school system is excellent. We can go look at each school near us and identify what is the makeup in that school. And we started seeing that the kids going there were were coming from homes where Spanish was being spoken. So they were identifying themselves as Hispanic. And so as we saw that, like and then when I say grown, several of the elementary schools over half the kids identify as Hispanic coming family wise. Rich Birch — Wow. Tim Hill — So so as we saw that, we knew there was an opportunity there. When we think when I think about challenges or problems or I just I immediately think, Okay, where’s the opportunity here? What can we do with this? Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Tim Hill — Is there something we can do with it or not? And if we can, what does that look like? So I just that’s how I go at it is ask those kind of questions, and that’s how we identified the opportunity there. Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. So then you’ve add you added Spanish translation. We’ve done this as as well at our church. Talk to us about kind of that process. What did that look like um as you started to add that in, and then what impact did that have on the folks that you know you’re reaching? Tim Hill — You bet. So the Spanish translation, ah we had folks that were the pastor’s voice in Spanish is how we did that. Rich Birch — Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Tim Hill — So there were a couple of people the pastor would have to he scripts out his message. So now it’s it’s fairly rough; I mean he’s obviously going to deviate sometimes in the midst of that, but they would sit in a room with a device watching and listening the service, and then looking at his script, and then doing that for those folks. Now in order to give something a little more personal, we did have a bible study in Spanish at an alternate hour. But as we saw that growing, I’ll tell you we we shifted just before the pandemic and then we almost had to relaunch it after the pandemic, and that is a full out Spanish service. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — So we consider ourselves, instead of multisite, we’re like multisite within our site. So ah, we added at 11:00 at the same time that our English, one of our modern services going on, we have a service entirely in Spanish. Rich Birch — Okay, I love that. Tim Hill — And so that led us to have to… oh go ahead. Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. So let’s talk about that transition. What led… because I think there’s a lot… So first of all I’ve experienced exactly what you you what you’ve done. We’ve added Spanish in and have found, you know, it’s it’s a fascinating um ah, transition. It came about as we really tried to engage with Hispanic leaders in our community, people that were part of our church, and saying hey that would be a great add. But then obviously you saw that start to meet a need and then what led you to think, Okay, now we want to take the step to a full service, and then let’s talk through what that service actually looks like. Tim Hill — You bet. So in that first stage with listening devices and people following along and engaging, when we saw that number growing from 20 to 30 to 40, we just knew that in listening to some of those folks, they wanted to worship in Spanish. That’s their heart language. That’s how that’s how they grew up experiencing God in their life. And yet they wanted their kids growing up English to be able to be a part of the church. Tim Hill — Now, a key focus for us, we’d watched other churches do this. It was really important that we stayed one church, but with different languages. So in order to do that, we strategically started thinking about leaders, like several of those Spanish ah, Ministry leaders, they serve as deacons in our church. They serve on our finance committee. They serve on our personnel committee. And so we made sure that they were a part of um, all the areas of leadership. Um, then we I approached to this just like if you were launching a church. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — So if you in all the research of the preview services—so we started off at an Easter—you pick a big day and you launch with a service on that day. Prior to that we did a one just to almost like a practice run. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — Is our technology good? Are we in good shape? Because it’s a different service. Our our media and worship guys, they all had to work at finding Spanish worship leaders so they had their ah end of that. So we did a kind of a early test trial run service, then we did the Easter service and then from there we did a once a month Spanish service. Um… Rich Birch — Okay, love it. Tim Hill — And we did that in our student building so we had to flex a little bit with our student ministry but use their worship space to help us. In the process of doing that, we started ramping up to use our gym and create it just like if somebody were going into a school. It’s it’s portable church in the gym. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — And we built up to where we could do that every Sunday. Also in that process it was creating an invite strategy for those folks, a promotion strategy to the Spanish speaking families in our community. So that’s where we went. We started with a part time Spanish pastor. So early on the the pastors preaching in those services were just guest… Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — …preachers coming in in Spanish. But then we knew we had to add a staff person. We started with a we actually started with a part time Spanish Ministries Pastor. Um… Rich Birch — Okay, so… Tim Hill — And then it grew from there. Rich Birch — Yeah, love that. Talk to me about how… so I’d like to dive in on this whole area of um, how do we ensure that we’re one church in really two different expressions. What does that functionally look like? Because for folks that aren’t listening in this is one of the we’ll call it challenges, difficulties, opportunities that can come up with churches as they’ve added any kind of second language ministry is it can start to feel like, oh we’re two separate churches meeting in the same building. So how do you… let’s talk about maybe at the functional level, you know, the services. How do you ensure that it feels like, hey these are kind of two expressions of the same thing? How do you integrate teaching or do you even try to integrate teaching? You know how do you integrate the you know the worship experience, all that? What what does that look like? Tim Hill — We do. So the Spanish Ministries Pastor, he preaches our pastor’s message one week behind. Rich Birch — Okay, yep. Love it. Tim Hill — So he personalizes it. So he has the text, he has the outline, and then he can personalize that so that it’s applicable and relational to the people in the Spanish ministry service and their culture. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — So that’s how we keep that as one church at a teaching level. Now on a weekly basis, one thing as a leader um the Spanish ministry’s pastor, and the pastor, and myself have a weekly meeting so we’re keeping him really close to us… Rich Birch — Yeah Tim Hill — …and tied into our vision, and where we’re going, and and maintaining a strong relationship. On a weekly basis in the service it is not unusual for me… obviously the services are at the same time so it can be real hard for our lead pastor to get in there, although he does get in there from time to time and we juggle some scheduling around between the services. But I’m in that room every single week. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — Whether I’m on the platform or not. When I go on the platform, the Spanish Ministries Pastor, he he translates for me. Now a lot of the people in that service are bilingual. I wish I were bilingual but um Spanish with an East Texas boy’s accent does not go real well. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — So I can understand it way better than I can speak it. Rich Birch — Right, right. Tim Hill — But he does a great job and he translates. So we make sure that they see the all the staff. When they do their their gatherings of new members or membership gatherings to bring people into the church, we as an entire staff, both the Spanish Ministries Pastor and and their leaders, and all the English leaders in preschool and children and students, we all come in and introduce ourselves and they see us. So we’re, from the very beginning, highly focused on identifying and everybody seeing us as one church, one staff, in it together. Rich Birch — Okay, I love that. And are you doing um kids ministry in Spanish? Ah or is the is the goal to have, because of the kind of first generation/second generation thing, kids ministries in English? Is that… and maybe talk through that decision a little bit because that might not be self-evident for people that haven’t explored in this area. Tim Hill — You bet. Yeah, our our goal was not to create every single ministry in Spanish and replicate everything. So every ministry there are ah Spanish Ministry volunteers from the Spanish Ministry that are bilingual and so when people come, if the parents are need to speak in Spanish, we have folks there to help them. Ah the the lanyards that those leaders wear are different colors so we can identify who our bilingual leaders are. Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. Tim Hill — But those kids are growing up English. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — They’re going to school ah, with everybody so we know that the dynamic in the home is even sometimes those kids will come and translate for their parents when they talk to us. So but they want to be involved in the English activities. Plus that’s also where their friends are. That’s where everybody they see at school ah, is part of that. So ah, and so when they come and they’re there with their friends. So that’s just the model we adopted, doesn’t have to be the only way to do it. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — But for us that’s what we decided and it’s worked really well. I can tell you that just to give you an idea that Spanish ministry, prior to the pandemic had reached about 170 people in worship on Sundays. Rich Birch — Okay, yep. Tim Hill — And then it dipped down and it got hit real hard by the pandemic. And we came back. We were 40 and 50. We brought in a new Spanish Ministries Pastor; that was one of the turnovers in staff at that time. We’re now up to running 250 in our Spanish service… Rich Birch — Wow! That’s great. Tim Hill —…on Sunday mornings. So… Rich Birch — Wow, that’s great. I love that. And you know that’s um, yeah so cool to hear about. So hopefully our relationship can sustain this. I’m sure it can, Tim, because you’re a good guy, you know, but talk talk to me about how we ensure, in the spirit of hey we’re trying to be one church you know in a under in a couple different expressions, how do we ensure that the Spanish ministry doesn’t feel like, you know, the the you know the redheaded stepsister, or the you know the the second class citizen the you know they don’t get as much as as the English ministry side. How are you trying to address that? That I’ve seen that as a real issue in some of these scenarios where it’s like we we want we want to ensure that um, you know, this ministry that kind of gets everything it needs. And so talk to me through how that how do you think about that? How have you tried to work towards that? What’s that looked like? Tim Hill — Yeah, so we we we are conscious of that, I can tell you. And we ask that question so we really work to ensure that the budget for the Spanish Ministry is growing as they’re growing. It’s meeting the need when where’s the need for an additional staff, we’re adding that staff. When they need an event that’s unique to them, we’re resourcing their ability to do the events. One of the things that I can tell you one of the next challenges we’re facing is because it’s growing, we foresee over the course of the next year it’s going to outgrow the gym. So we’re looking ahead at that service moving from 11 to probably at a 12:15 or 12:30 time slot. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — But moving into our main worship center. Rich Birch — Okay. Tim Hill — Which means they will have access to all of the exact same resources. Now while they’re in the gym we are providing as great a resources as we can. Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Tim Hill — And their worship and the leaders that are there and and they have paid leaders and volunteer leaders on the platform. So that’s how we’re doing that. We’re just we’re super conscious of that. And by incorporating them into as much of the other church activities and events and mingling with them, we’re we’re really tackling a lot relationally but also just some of those things that they can see and feel… Rich Birch — Totally, totally. Tim Hill — …and then where it’s gonna go in the future. You know they’re a priority to us and we stress that to them all the time. They are the church; they are Bear Creek in Español and… Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Tim Hill — And so we want them to know that and feel that and that’s us a lot of it just relational being there and saying hi all the time and greeting them. So, yeah. Rich Birch — Are you still doing English translation, or you know, Spanish translation in the English service, or did you get rid of all that together? Tim Hill — We got rid of all of that. Rich Birch — Okay, so that this is the option there. That makes total sense. Okay, that’s great. That’s great. Now any kind of surprises as you know now that you’ve been doing this for a while and, you know, obviously, man, that’s incredible to see the growth that you’ve seen is amazing. Love seeing that. That’s so good. Any kind of surprises, things that struck you as like oh this is maybe a little bit different than we anticipated when we first stepped into this area? Tim Hill — I’ll tell you here’s what’s surprising. We know that the Hispanic community is out there. The way we promote our church in English, being able to get mailing lists and sending cards out and new movers lists and and having all that, it has been much harder to find that information in Spanish. Now we have found it… Rich Birch — Interesting. Tim Hill — but but it was not as easy to go out there. And several of the those companies that we resource out to sometimes when we would ask them, hey do do you do this for Spanish so we can specifically target Um, the Spanish in our community? And the answer was no. Rich Birch — Interesting, interesting. Tim Hill — Um and so that was a little bit of a challenge and a little bit of a surprise and we found workarounds for that. But… Rich Birch — Yeah, very cool. Tim Hill — Um, but that but that was a little bit of a surprise of, knowing how significant that community was, how hard it was to get the word out there that um we were church. You know so we’ve got a big building, sits on the road, people see it. Ah we had to make sure we had signage out on the ah along that road that was in Spanish so that people knew that. That that was just a little bit of a challenge to overcome that barrier. Some people it was intimidating for them to look at that big church and they just thought it was a big English church. Rich Birch — Right, right, right. Tim Hill — So that was a little bit of a barrier but, you know, not a surprise to us just one we had to work through. But getting the word out was ah was challenging. Rich Birch — Has been challenging. Interesting. Well I I just love this. What a great story. So cool to hear. Um, you know I think all of us ah, every zip code in America is more diverse today than it was ten years ago. And it will be more diverse 10 years from now. And I love this, you know, this story of you know your church seeing this opportunity, stepping in, taking practical steps. I love the idea of like hey we tried this thing and it you know seemed to get a bit of traction and then we grew that. Rich Birch — What would you say to a church leader who’s listening in today, and maybe specifically on, you know, they they look at the demographics of their community. They’re like, hey there’s a growing Hispanic community in our ah, you know, either around us or even in our church. Um, what would you say to them if they’re thinking about, maybe we want to take some steps. Would you suggest they they take similar steps? Is there anything different you would do knowing what you know now? Tim Hill — Yeah, I I would encourage them, you know, so when I think about this I know the way we did it. It’s really important to lead change and not introduce change. Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. Good insight. Tim Hill — You know introducing change or announcing change, that that can freak people out. Particularly something as significant as a a little bit of a cultural shift within your church. Because that’s what will happen is there’ll be a shift there. So um, thinking about strategy and how you do that. Identify those pockets in your community um, and if there’s an opportunity there. But the way that I go about that is I I kind of view view what those opportunities were and then we start praying about it. Rich Birch — Right. Okay. Tim Hill — We seek we seek what the Lord’s direction is there. We’ll even, as we start to do that, ask our some of our key spiritual leaders—staff, and even lay leaders—to start praying about that with us. So that’s just a way of seeking God, but also introducing the idea that there may be an opportunity here. Tim Hill — Then um, while we’re doing that is the research, and figuring out what what is it gonna take? What might it look like? Is it is it a minor shift, like a translation service, or is it um a service in and of itself? Is there another church in the area that’s doing this and are they struggling and can you merge? And I will tell you in merging that you’re going to run into a whole different set of problems because I’ve been in a church where we did that. And when a church comes to you already thinking they’re their own church and if you want to have the idea that we’re one church, two languages, that is a big barrier to overcome. It’s not insurmountable, but it can be really hard. So the way we did it, launching our own we could set the culture right from the beginning. Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — Um, when you do run into things that are challenges, I always try to be solution-focused. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — So how how are we going to deal with that? You know we we do set some goals in our Spanish Ministry. Um, it’s you know, recognizing the population, but but you got to be real flexible with that and be realistic because it is some of the, for us, the unknown there um… Rich Birch — Yeah, what what if some of those goals look like; how have you kind of cast those out? Tim Hill — Yeah. Rich Birch — What if what is that lean on what’s that look like? Tim Hill — So, you know so we we kind of set some goals. When you think of so attendance is always the first one that a lot of us in my role and even, you know… Rich Birch — Yes. Tim Hill — …we we go straight to attend… but attendance, I I try to figure out what’s the story behind the attendance and what is that telling us to to do next? So with with the launch it’s kind of like I said when we were when we were just um, listening devices and we saw it growing, there’s an opportunity there. What what would be next? So then it’s launching. So then it’s smaller part time. So then at Easter in the promotion, you know, had an attendance right off the bat of like 60 people. But we were already at 40 people on listening devices, so you know it was… But once we launched into a service and weekly and we saw, you know, there’s there’s a hundred people coming every week, that part time person he really needs to be full time. Rich Birch — Right, right. Tim Hill — So so that was kind of a goal of we need to get him to full time. And full time means, man he he gets all the same salary and benefits that any other pastor on our church gets. So there’s a significant investment there. But also, you know, what 100 people coming. we got to make sure we’re continually raising the quality of the worship. So. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — We need to expand the praise team. They need you know some additional singers. We need to make sure they have good technology on the walls and can do things. We’ve we’ve got to expand communication because all of our communications got to be both English and Spanish. And so who how are we going to get that done? So so there’s all those all those things going on. And so goals around that of you know of really staffing, expanding the quality of things, striving for excellence. Um, but a lot of it was attendance driven. Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. Love that. Talk to me through the um, you kind of mentioned in in passing there. There’s this tension, and this is true with any ministry. This is not necessarily unique to your Spanish ministry. But there’s always this tension between we want to have timelines for goals, like a goal without a timeline is just a dream. Ah we want to have timelines, but we also want to be flexible on those things. We know that there’s going to be, you know, what was that? You know that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face – was that a boxer said that? You know it’s like, you know, we we all think things and then it’s like okay we then we go into the real world and and we live, we have to… How have you worked that through, maybe in the church in general, or specifically in the Spanish ministry, trying to have hold those two things in tension? Tim Hill — Yeah, so so with goals, setting checkpoints so, you know, along the way. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Hill — So we would you know the goals were short term sometimes, you know, it was… Um, or if even if it was long term, well you know we’re at 50, we want to see it get to a hundred, and at a hundred we can do these things. And the leader that was part time moving to full time, he was well aware of that and we’re meeting with him. We’re saying okay hey we’ve got to 60, how’s it going? What do you need help with? You know is there any ideas, you know we want to get you there as fast as we can. And so um, you know we we check along the way. Um, but ah I know there’s been times where in those goals we realize this this just is, one, we might be looking at the wrong thing. Rich Birch — Right, right. Yep. Tim Hill — Um, you know it’s um, ah you know, where with the attendance we backed up and said man how many first time guests are they having in the Spanish service? So where are those first time guests? How do we get the word out to them? How do we reach them? Do we you know, creating a culture of inviting within there. So helping the pastor shift some language of teaching, but then what can we resource? Will they work with invite cards? Will they use that when they’re at the store and they’re inviting folks, or you know at school or wherever they’re at? Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — Um so that’s that’s just kind of how we adapted and adjusted when we would see, Okay, this… we’re struggling here. What’s what leads us to that? Again when we think goals we’ve got the goal, but then we think lead measures. It’s what are the behaviors. The ministry things that we’ve got to do to get to that goal, and that’s where we would go back and start looking at those things. Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Well this has been just a great conversation. I know so many of us are, again, I think so many of us are looking in our community and saying man, what can we do? And I love that you’ve provided just real practical steps and a real clear picture um, you know, vision forward. Rich Birch — Um, as we’re wrapping up as we’re kind of looking to to land, how has the Spanish Ministry how’s that impacted the English ministry, kind of the fact that you’ve added this, has that had some kind of ah you know positive, you know, impact on the rest of your ah the rest of your community? Tim Hill — Boy it sure has. Our our church is… so our vision statement, and we tell our people, we vision to be a gospel-centered, disciple-making community for all people. Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Tim Hill — And if we’re gonna live that out, um it is important for us as we reach our community um that we reflect that. So so they’ve bought into that vision and so when we celebrate like um when we baptize people, the Spanish pastor will come over into that 11:00 service and baptize folks in Spanish so our English folks get to see what’s happening. We’re constantly reporting in, hey right now at 11:00, you know, we’ve got our Spanish service going on. And so we’re sharing the story of what’s happening. They’re doing the same thing over on the Spanish side of what’s happening in the church. So… Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Hill — …just those celebrations and casting the vision and so people are just excited.And of course they’re they’re in the same part of the building. So we’ve intentionally set things up where they worship and where they go to groups that they have to walk through the hallways. And they’re not in the closest rooms but sometimes even rooms that take a little while. And so it’s just creating community. Um, even in those in-between service times where they’re walking in the hallways together and seeing each other. Rich Birch — Yeah, so good. So good. Tim, this has been so helpful. Great conversation today. Anything else you want to share just as we wrap up today’s episode? Tim Hill — You know, I would just ah I would just encourage, you know, all those leaders out there. As challenging as times can be for us as believers that we may feel there are still so many opportunities. People are so hungry for ah, God’s life change that he could make in their life. And I would just encourage leaders look for those opportunities. Pray about that;be open to that. And then as they identify those things, allow God to lead them to see where where he might expand their vision to to to reach out and share the gospel and help make disciples of those folks. That’s what that’s what we’re striving to do all the time. Rich Birch — Love it. So good, Tim. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them online? Tim Hill — Yeah, if they just want to go to bearcreek.church… Rich Birch — Love it. Easy. Tim Hill — …that is our that our website just go to bearcreek.church – they can see us there. They can watch services. They can see our ministries, they can link to us as staff, they can email me from there, or contact me. Anything I could do to help, that’s the best way. Rich Birch — Thanks so much, Tim – really appreciate you being on the show today. Tim Hill — You bet. Thank you, Rich.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’ve got Terry A. Smith with us today; he’s the lead pastor at The Life Christian Church (TLCC) which serves the New York City metro area. He recently wrote a devotional called, The Lord Bless You: A 28-Day Journey to Experience God’s Extravagant Blessings, and today we’re unpacking a story Terry tells in chapter 13, titled “Resistance Training”. Resistance Training. // “To actualize any God-inspired calling, we must overcome conflict.” Terry begins chapter 13 of his book sharing about how God placed a dream in his heart to open a new location for the church in some of the last undeveloped land in the urban area where the church served. This dream took 10 years to find fulfillment and Terry said that every bit of that journey was hard. There are practical steps Terry took to lead his church to persevere in accomplishing this dream, and it led to God’s blessings in the end. Develop friendships. // Terry knew in his heart this would be TLCC’s property and he began praying to that end. He surrounded himself with people who would believe with him, but he also started developing relationships and friendships with the power brokers and political leaders in his community. Terry set up meetings with each member of the town council, told his story, and asked what the church could do for the community. Connecting with local leaders helped them recognize the value the church brought to the community. Build connections. // In the bible, even prophets who were in exile needed to be known and trusted by the ones in power in order to speak with them. You may not agree with everything that local government and political leaders support, but you can look for what you do have in common. Find a way to serve people and recognize that you both want your city to thrive. Let them say yes or no. // When talking about big ideas such as purchasing land to build a new location, Terry would speak about it in a way that would give his board, elders, and church leaders the opportunity to offer feedback, critique, and have the power to say no. Make it all clear. // When Terry brought the idea about the property to the board, he shared his heart and cast vision in a way where he wasn’t putting his finger on the scale, but made it clear that he was willingly submitting to them. He didn’t want to move forward without their blessing, and would accept whatever decision they made. Don’t act like you’re giving someone the ability to say no to you if you’re not willing to receive their no. Celebrate the steps. // After casting the vision, the real question is how to keep the momentum going over years of work. Have a strategy in place. TLCC developed a 12-step checklist to work toward their new location and each time they took one of these steps forward, they would celebrate as a church. Tracking these steps and celebrating over the years helped keep people engaged and encouraged. In addition, they opened their 53,000 square foot building in phases to keep people from burning out on this project. Find local leaders. // Outside of local government leaders, pay attention to the business leaders and the other religious leaders in your town. When you’re a new church in town and you’re posturing yourself to serve the community, look for the Rotary Club, Lions Club or Kiwanis in your town. Making those connections is a powerful way to work together to bless your community. You can click here to read the introduction and chapter one of The Lord Bless You: A 28-Day Journey to Experience God’s Extravagant Blessings by Terry A. Smith, Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, ©2023 by Terry A. Smith. Used by permission. Plus download the free sermon series kit for The Lord Bless You to use in your church. Learn more about The Life Christian Church at https://tlcc.org/. 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: Leadership Pathway If you are trying to find, develop and keep young leaders on your team look no further than Leadership Pathway. They have worked with hundreds of churches, and have interviewed thousands of candidates over the past several years. They are offering a new ebook about five of the core competencies that are at the heart of the leadership development process with every church that they partner with…just go to leadershippathway.org/unseminary to pick up this free resource.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re having a great conversation with Eric Schroeder, the president and CEO of CDF Capital, an organization that helps churches grow in order to transform lives and communities. Financial matters, like spiritual matters, are very personal. And when you’re dealing with something personal, it can be hard to develop a trusted relationship with the right people. Listen in as Eric shares what to look for when choosing a trusted financial partner for your church, and how to build a positive working relationship with your church’s financial institution. It takes time. // When it comes to dealing with finances, we all want to have a trusted relationship with the people we work with, and that goes for our church too. When looking for a company to work with the church, remember that it takes time to develop that trust. Ask yourself is the person you’re talking to on the other side of the table for you? Do they understand the needs of your church and have its best interests in mind? Transparency and communication. // It’s important to be honest with your church’s financial institution. Share your annual budget or plan with your financial professional. Communicate with them often. Outside of the financial focus, build your relationship with them. Invite them out to lunch and ask them about their family. Help them to see who you are as a church. Develop the relationship. // When it comes to finances, church leaders can feel the tension between wanting to be good stewards while taking advantage of a great opportunity for the church. However, in these interactions with their financial institution what church leaders sometimes fail to steward well is the relationship aspect. If the relationship with your church’s lender has been developed strongly, the lender should loyally stand with the church whenever challenges arise. It’s important to be building a relationship that will be sustained for the long haul. Know the endgame. // Bankers can be skeptical about whether a church’s financial growth will continue or decline when the economy hits rough patches. What is your church’s growth strategy? How are you using debt effectively? Debt can be used as a tool if you’re growing and expanding, but ultimately your lender should be helping you get out of debt. There needs to be an endgame for debt. Build a strong team. // If a church is built around a strong team then it will be successful no matter what it faces. Lenders are nervous when they evaluate a church that is known because of its “celebrity” pastor because they know that when the pastor leaves the attendance in that church will decline. But churches that really impact their community stand out to lenders. Mission-focused. // If your church is looking for a financial partner, CDF Capital has been working with churches for over 70 years. They are passionate about helping churches grow and have strong expertise in the financial operations of a church. Plus, CDF is mission-focused by helping plant new churches through their partnership with Stadia. Three pillars. // There are three pillars CDF believes are essential for church growth: spiritual capital, leadership capital, and financial capital. CDF is committed to praying for church leaders and seeing the church further its mission. They pour into leaders by providing them with the resources to be effective and do what God has called them to do. The spiritual capital and leadership capital must be strong before financial capital can come into play. You can learn more about CDF Capital at www.cdfcapital.org and reach out to a member of their field team to see how they can help your church grow. 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: CDF Capital Since 1953, CDF Capital has helped Christians and churches embrace their part in this story by providing the 3 kinds of capital every congregation needs for growth—Financial Capital, Leadership Capital, and Spiritual Capital. At CDF Capital, we care about each of these components. When a church is properly resourced financially, spiritually, and in leadership, lives are transformed. Sign-up to learn more about CDF Capital and how we can help your church grow. Receive a 50% discount on a monthly subscription to the CDF Capital Subscribe & Save Bundle. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Super excited that you’ve decided to tune in. Today’s going to be a great conversation I’m really looking forward to. We’ve got Eric Schroeder with us. He has 33 years of banking related or banking adjacent experience. And in 2021 assumed the leadership of a great organization, CDF Capital, fantastic organization that if you’ve been around unSeminary for a while you’ve heard us talk about. Well, today we get the man behind it all. Super excited. He’s the president and CEO of CDF ah, they were founded in in 1953 with really a simple mission to help churches grow. And you might know them for the lending that they do, but they really do so much more than that. They want to get in your corner and help your church grow really ah help your church with sustainability. Super excited to have you on the show today, Eric. Welcome – so glad you’re here. Eric Schroeder — Well thank you, Rich, I’m glad to be here. Um, so to just tie a bow around what you said. Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yeah – fill in the picture. Eric Schroeder — First of all, first of all I’m a Christ-follower, husband, father… Rich Birch — Love it. Eric Schroeder — …then banker. Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Eric Schroeder — So I’m kind of I’m kind of a banker by trade, but I’m really you know a Christ-follower first. And I ah grew up in the church; I love the church. And um I love what CDF Capital gets to do. So thank you for that intro. Rich Birch — Yeah, so good. I’m so glad that you… and you’ve been involved with CDF for quite a while, even before you were you know took the big chair here. You were on the board for a while, right? Going back to early 2010s, something like that… was it that am I… that true? Eric Schroeder — Yeah, that’s correct. I was on the board of CDF Capital since 2010, so I’ve been… Rich Birch — Okay, great. Eric Schroeder — …you know around the organization for a long time. Rich Birch — Yeah that’s great. Well I’m looking forward to today’s conversation, and you know we’re friends. So you know if you’ve been listening for a while, friends, you know that CDF Capital are our premier brand partner. Literally every single episode of CDF of the unSeminary podcast is brought to us because of our good friends at CDF because they’ve leaned in. They want to get in your corner. So if you think of all the good stuff that you receive regularly, it happens because CDF has chosen to sponsor. So I really am thankful for ah, for Eric and the entire team. Ah, but but we’re friends, so I want to start with maybe an inappropriate question right off the top, you know. Eric Schroeder — Oh no. Rich Birch — What is it what is it with finance people? What is it with banking people? Why why do you make us so nervous? You know why are are can we even trust you can we trust a finance or are you just trying to get money out of, you know, are you trying to take our you see us as a market? Do you just see us as something to extract revenue from? Ah you know obviously I’m asking that in a tongue to cheek manner, but ah, but yeah, tell us why is that? Why are finance people just why are they so hard to trust? Eric Schroeder — Rich, that’s a great question. So um, if you look at who are the most trusted professions. Gallup has done a study on this – they’ve done studies on this for several years. Do you know the number one trusted profession in 2021? Rich Birch — Um, maybe nurses or teachers something like that. Eric Schroeder — Correct. Nurses. Rich Birch — Oh nice look at that. Eric Schroeder — Teachers are second. You’ve done you’ve done your research, Rich. Rich Birch — Nice. Eric Schroeder — And bankers are right smack in the middle of that. Rich Birch — Okay. Eric Schroeder — And you know who’s right there with bankers? Rich Birch — Church leaders. Eric Schroeder — Pastors. Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. Eric Schroeder — So if you think about it, um I think the reason is because we’re dealing… financial matters and spiritual matters are both very personal, right? Rich Birch — Yeah, very true. Eric Schroeder — So when you’re dealing with something personal, it’s hard to develop that trusted relationship in some way. So my banking career, that’s what it was all about. If people didn’t trust me, they were not going to come be a client of the bank I was a part of. They weren’t going to invest in the bank that I helped start. Um, a little bit about my background, I did help start a bank in 2007. Rich Birch — Okay. Eric Schroeder — And it had great success, went public in 2019. But it wasn’t because of me; it was because people trusted me and we had a great team that served our clients well. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — So it’s always been about that trusted relationship. And, Rich, you know this – it takes time to develop. It doesn’t doesn’t happen overnight. Rich Birch — Yeah, so I’d love to, you know, do this; I’d love to kind of drill in on this a little bit for the people who are listening in. Friends, we’re not trying to convince you to you know, connect with CDF. We’d love for you to, but I want to try to tap on Eric; he has graciously agreed to come in to really tap on this issue around trust. How do we how do we, on our side as church leaders, What can we do what would be some of the kind of telltale signs of lenders that we should be looking for, you know, that really do have our best interest in mind? Like when we’re when we’re evaluating, whether a CDF or other other people, what should we be looking for? What what would be kind of the the types of things that we should be considering? Eric Schroeder — Yeah, and that’s that’s a great question and this is not about CDF Capital. Rich Birch — Right. Yep. Eric Schroeder — This is about the church, and church leaders, and what is best for them. That’s that’s always going to be our approach is what’s best for the church and what’s best for church leaders. So drilling into that, is the person you’re talking to on the other side other side of the table, are they for you? Do they understand your needs? Are they trying to push something? Um, you know, we are not very I would say salesy. We’re more consultant… Rich Birch — Yes, yeah. Eric Schroeder — …from their approach. Rich Birch — So true. Eric Schroeder — So we’ll direct a client to the appropriate lender to the right solution for them even if it’s not at CDF Capital. That’s that’s always been what we’ve been focused on is what is best for the church. So I’d encourage church leaders to really look at, okay, being transparent with your banker, being overly communicative. Rich Birch — Ok. Eric Schroeder — If you have a [inaudible] coming down the road, be talking to your your lender about that, or your banker. Be inquisitive. Ask questions. Find find out if they’re using the banking services, all the banking services that are available to them, and in their appropriate ways. So there just become a learner of how to be a better bank client or better lending institution client is what I’d recommend people to do. Rich Birch — Love it. Let’s talk about that overcommunicating piece; unpack that a little bit more. When you say I… because I do think are oftentimes, there are some leaders who look at their relationship with whatever bank or lender that they’re dealing with, it’s almost like an adversarial thing. It’s like I’m going to try to only tell them I’m going to make it look real sunny. I’m going to try to you know, spin it in a way that um you know things look amazing. And that’s obviously not helpful long term – you want the most you know, kind of clear picture on both sides of the table. But what would be some of those things we need to say about over, you know, overcommunicate with your your lender or or with a banker, you know, um, on either side. What would you what would be some of those things that you’d be you’d be talking to or you’d encourage people to talk to their, you know, their institutions about? Eric Schroeder — Well church leaders and churches are always, every year developing an annual budget or an annual plan. So I would share that strategic plan with your your financial professional, who you’re working with. I would share the budget with them. Um, and I would you know have periodic interactions with them. Go have lunch with your lender or banker. Um go meet with them on a regular basis and establish that personal relationship. Ask them about ask that banker about their family. Um, you know, that is making it more less transactional and more relational is always better. Because, Rich, you know, CDF Capital, banks I mean lending institutions, financial institutions, we’re all dealing with a transactional product, right? Rich Birch — Right, right. Eric Schroeder — And so how do you take that transactional product and make it relational? It’s hard work. It’s tough, and it just takes time to be overly transparent with your bank or lender and just um, making sure you’re you’re communicating with them often. Rich Birch — Yeah I know… this wasn’t this wasn’t a banker this was ah someone who we ended up being um you know doing a we rented space from them. They were landlord. We ultimately ended up buying the property from them. And in that transaction we had this little interaction that reminded me how important relationship is in these things. We had pursued this building multiple times. And um, they kept brushing us off. They kept and you know this was in the northeast, and they kept saying oh go away, go away, go away. And I think it was because their perception of what a church is was different than what we were doing. You know we’re a large church 4- or 5000 people. Lots going on. And and they and, you know, this was a big facility, 150- 160,000 square feet, and they were, you know, I think they were like there’s no way, right? Well lo and behold one weekend we were running a special event down the shore. Um, and we had rented out this this thing right off the the beach and it was in the summertime. Great thing. And literally that one of the principles of this organization was riding their bike on the boardwalk past our thing, and saw signs for us. And they called their real estate agent and they said, is this that church that, you know, but keeps bugging us about stuff, you know, about that building? And they said absolutely that’s that’s the same organization. Lo and behold wouldn’t, you know, Monday or Tuesday we got a call back from that broker who was like, hey um I would love to hear a little bit more about what you’re talking about because they saw obviously we had whatever 4- or 5000 people down the shore. They were like okay, that’s a different thing. Rich Birch — The thing that reminded me in that—and that became actually a great transaction for the church—the thing that reminded me was going above and beyond relationally, trying to connect in a way and that the fact that they saw us, you know, in our environment made a huge difference. You know, I think doing the same thing with our banker, trying to you know, bring them in on the conversations about what’s happening around, you know, and and then but like you say vice versa understand what’s going on in, you know, on their side. So critically important. Rich Birch — Talk to me about the transactional nature of what we’re doing. You know, I think that can degenerate into into that, and my experience has been if it’s just about interest rates, if it’s just about, you know, where I can get the best here or there, um, if things ever go sideways or if things get a little tougher, ah man, that makes it really difficult. And obviously we all, you know, we all don’t wish those things didn’t happen but sometimes things get tough. We have to figure out how to, you know, redo some stuff. How do how can we push against the transactional nature of this kind of relationship, try to you know, develop more ah, relationally? Anything else on that front? Eric Schroeder — Oh absolutely. And and trust me, I feel the tension. And I don’t use that word “trust me” lightly, but um I do feel the tension that church leaders have with being good stewards and making sure it’s a great opportunity for the church. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — However, you know, what I think people fail to sometimes steward well is their relationship, relational capital. So the relationships, if they’re stewarded well too, you know, as you said, Rich, when that church may run up against a hiccup, that relationship has been solid. That lender should stand with that church. So that’s where the loyalty comes into play. That’s we’re not always shopping for the best rate – I wouldn’t always recommend that. But I would I would definitely hold my lender, you know, accountable to make sure that is this rate fair and competitive and competitive in today’s marketplace. And explaining why that rate is is what it is. So trying to, you know, unhitch that, you know, is action from the rate and hitch it up to more the relationship piece I think is really really important for the long term health of the relationship. Rich Birch — You know one of the things I’ve run into with—and this again is this is not with CDF Capital this would be with with other, you know, with particularly on the lending side—um, with other lenders is you know, I think when when banks look at us or lenders look at us, it’s it’s hard for them to get their head around what our business is. They can look at the the spreadsheet; they can look at they they see this revenue. Um, but I’ve had lenders say, you know, almost these exact words when we’re in dialogue where they’re like, so how do you make money again? Like what how so people just give you this money? And what and so what makes you think they’re going to continue to give this money? This is particularly a problem in growing churches when because you’re seeing, you know, you maybe in the last three years your revenue has doubled or is tripled in the last couple of years, and a lender looks at that. You know, I always thought, well isn’t that a positive thing? They look at that suspiciously. They’re like that’s going up, but… it goes up quick, man it could come down quick. Unpack that for me from, you know, again, taking the the CDF hat off a little bit, just a traditional lender point of view. What are they thinking in that moment? How can I help them understand ah that trends? Or or ah or should I just ignore, you know, more traditional lenders and talk to CDF, frankly? Ah, but help help me understand that. Eric Schroeder — Now that’s that’s another great question, and one of the things that lenders wrestle with all the time. Um, so thinking about this from the background, and I go back to I grew up in the church. Um, ah I jokingly say I was born on Sunday and I was in church the next Sunday and kind of… Rich Birch — Yes. Eric Schroeder — Um now I’m not perfect; I’m I have missed some Sundays, folks, so don’t think that um… Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — But but anyhow the the model where growing up, the plate is past passed every Sunday. Eric Schroeder — So there’s revenue coming in every week. And if you look at that model, you know, and in healthy growing churches the trend should follow growth, you know, additional additional revenues. And you know bankers or lenders are skeptical about, you know, is that going to continue? What does an economic downturn, how does that play into? Um and you and I both know that, you know, people that are really connected to the church, that impact doesn’t wane in in an economic downturn, for those that are really connected. Eric Schroeder — Now um, there is some decline in giving during an economic downturn. And if you’re I’ve seen this in capital campaigns, if there’s a capital campaign and you have a sudden economic downturn, that capital campaign may not be as effective. So um, what I have really just talked to, you know when I was on the side of a banker finding out what’s the church’s growth strategy, and how how did they use debt effectively. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — Debt is a tool. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — And churches that use debt effectively, it is really good to ah, to know an endgame. You know in CDF Capital, as a lender we’re working to help churches get out of debt, not get in debt. So that that’s our mantra is, hey we can use debt as a tool if you’re growing and you’re expanding, you’re out of space. We can help you with those options. A lender can help you with those options. Not not to have something long term though. Eric Schroeder — So churches that are growing, if the lender understands there’s an endgame to that debt and there’s a way to get out of debt, I think that’s where it makes a lot of sense as well. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. This is such a funny dynamic because I think again for particularly for folks who maybe don’t come from a church background, it can be difficult when they kind of look under the hood. Because a part of it is they start to understand the dynamics and they’re like, okay well a lot of this seems to rotate around there’s like somebody shows up on Sunday and talks. It’s like people like hearing that person talk and so they give. And they’re like well what happens if, you know, something goes sideways with that person then then what goes on. And and you know it’s an interesting and’s just it’s interesting, having been across the table trying to explain what we do from a business point of view um, you know beyond just the numbers. Because that is a part of the lending equation – at least that’s been my experience. That’s a part of the equation. There’s ah, there’s ah there’s the numbers piece, but then there’s also the do they understand what we do piece. Is that true, or am I just making that up? Is that true? Eric Schroeder — That’s that’s absolutely true. And it’s understanding the leadership of the church. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — And it’s um, if a church is not built around one leader. CDF Capital is not built around me. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — It’s ah built around a great team. And if the church is built around a really strong um, team, the next church is going to be successful no matter what. I think lenders when they evaluate a I’m going to use the word celebrity pastor… Rich Birch — Yeah. Eric Schroeder — …that would make them nervous… Rich Birch — Yes. Eric Schroeder — …because if that pastor leaves, is the giving going to really decline? Rich Birch — Yes. Eric Schroeder — Um, the other gauge that we look at, Rich, is—and you mentioned this and when you were talking about um the story with the the bank and the real estate broker—is churches that are impacting the community. Those are the ones that, you know, people can, a lender they can say, I see the impact you’re having in the community. Eric Schroeder — And we hear story after story of churches that we’re working with that are impacting the community, and that that’s just pointing people to Jesus. And that’s that’s we love that we get to be a part of what God is doing through the local church. Rich Birch — Love it. Now can we talk a little bit about CDF specifically? I would like to I’d love for you to kind of unpack that a little bit. Help me understand when you think of kind of the core differentiations between CDF and say some other, either lender or bank, place where I could put my deposits. What would be some of those key differentiations that you’d say, hey this is um, you know, this is what makes us different? And and by different I mean better. What is it that… I’m asking you to brag – you’re like a good christian, Eric; you’re not going to brag, but I’d love you to do that. Kind of tell us a little bit – why why would we choose CDF? Eric Schroeder — Well I think people would choose CDF if they’re mission-focused. And there are a lot lot of great opportunities out there for people to really get connected to a mission. We we’re focused on the local church. Across the United States we’re focused on helping churches grow. And you know, if you’re going to make an investment with CDF Capital um, you’re being a part of what God is doing through the local church in helping churches grow. Eric Schroeder — If you’re one of the churches coming to us for council, you’re you’re helping um other churches. And we’re a ministry; we’re a nonprofit. So the the dollars that we make is different from my banking background. So that the dollars we made went back to the shareholders, you know? So they’re creating shareholder value. Rich Birch — Yep. Eric Schroeder — Um, which what CDF Capital gets to do now is create eternal value and kingdom value by um, helping plant new churches. So that is one of the biggest initiatives of CDF Capital is using the resources that we generate through our our business model—you can you can’t see the air quotes I’m doing… Rich Birch — Yes. Eric Schroeder — …um but “business model” is really focused on helping helping plant new churches. Um, so that’s what we’ve been excited about. Um. Rich Birch — Tell me more about this. Because I think there’s people that don’t know anything about this part of what CDF’s involved in. Unpack this whole thing about how you have been helping plant churches. Eric Schroeder — Well um, so we have part of our net assets are really part of a quasi-endowment fund which is the church planting fund. And so Stadia has been one of our great partners that we have partnered with for the last 20 years that they’re doing a great job of helping plant new churches. Um, so Stadia was actually a sister um is a sister organization of CDF Capital. Um, so anyhow, it’s it’s been a fun process, you know, to be a part of the church planting effort, you know. Because you and I both know when when I hear the numbers that Barna puts out that the church attendance is in decline, that people are walking away from their faith, that really, you know, Rich, that doesn’t scare me, that challenges me and our team more that we have a lot of work to do. And that we’re going to do our best to make sure we can do what God is calling us to do to turn that tide. Um, so Stadia has just been a great partner um, that we’ve had for several years years in those efforts. Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Yeah, this is one of the things I love about CDF is I keep bumping into, I learn about more about your organization, I keep bumping into all these great things that you guys have done to help and support. This is, you know, one of them obviously helping, you know, Stadia and there’s you know there’s lots of different ways that you have stepped in and and tried to help other, you know, ministries which I just think is amazing. Like and I think that can get lost in in the the communication stuff because, you know, we help churches grow – I think there could that’s actually what you do, which is I know it’s shocking to say, but it’s like it’s not a marketing term, friends. It’s not like oh this is like ah that’s like a slick thing to say when you’re trying to reach churches. It’s like no no, this is actually what you know CDF is all about. Is there anything else on that front when you think about when you say you know “we help churches grow,” um, what else comes to mind when you think about that, you know, that that kind of catch phrase? Eric Schroeder — Yeah, so um, the three pillars that we believe are essential for church growth, and I would I would say in this order: Spiritual Capital. So are we pouring into the spiritual lives of church leaders across the country? Are we praying for them? Um you and I both know through covid and through the pandemic it’s been tough on church leaders. So spiritually we want to pour into them to know we are for them. Eric Schroeder — The the second um pillar is really Leadership Capital. Um, that’s another part of really CDF Capital – we’re we’re pouring into leaders, um, making sure that they have the resources to be effective and to do what God has called them to do. Um, you’ve mentioned I heard um the previous podcast you did – the XP Summit that’s coming up at May in Dallas. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Eric Schroeder — I mean that’s a way that we can pour into um, young leaders and a leadership capital component of what we do. Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Eric Schroeder — Ah and then the you know the the third one is the Financial Capital. Rich Birch — Right. Eric Schroeder — And really we’re not going to get to that piece unless there’s strong spiritual capital, strong leadership capital, then the financial capital comes into play. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Eric Schroeder — So um, that’s that’s really the three pillars that we’ve used to help churches grow. And really God is used, enabled us to help churches grow. It’s all it’s all him, Rich. Rich Birch — Yeah, I really appreciate that. And and friends that are listening in, this is true. Like you know my interactions with CDF, this is very much the way this is what they bleed. Like there this is not like a some sort of like weird marketing thing where they’re like, well we’ll tell people we pray for them and then we won’t actually do that. And before today’s call we prayed for you as we were, you know, kicked this thing off. It is, you know, it’s it’s Eric’s heart, it’s the whole team. Everybody I’ve interacted with um that is they they live this stuff out. And so yeah, just just fantastic. Rich Birch — All right, Eric, I’m going to push you on one other thing here. So I want you to get real crystal clear. So we’ve got 4- or 5000 church leaders listening in. Um and there are people that this has tweaked oh you know maybe I should be thinking about we’ve got some funds. Maybe I should be thinking about putting them somewhere else, putting them in a different kind of savings vehicle or something like that. Or we’re thinking about a project in the future that, you know, our our reach is a little bit beyond our grasp. We need to, you know, I was talking with a church leader recently, a church planner about this, and I said because he was kind of bummed about um you know some financial stuff. And I said well this is the problem. You know, we we always have to we have to have more seats than the people we have today. So we’re always trying to figure out how do we do that? How do we get more places, more spots? How do we create capacity for people? And so if I’m, what kinds of churches are you looking for? What’s kind of the middle of your bell curve, the kind of ideal this is the type of church that we’re looking to work with on either of those sides? So like hey you maybe have a church that’s looking to put some money on deposit, or a church that’s um, you know, interested in lending. Um, how would you describe them? Because because I would love people to actually reach out and connect with you guys. Eric Schroeder — Absolutely. So, Rich, it’s it’s both/and. Um so we’re looking for investors, church leaders that want to be a part of what CDF Capital is doing across the country. So those investments are how we’re able to fund the loan opportunities that come up, and then the interest income generated from that is what goes into church planting. So if you look at it from that that business model standpoint, investments, loan Interest, church planting. So investors that want to be involved in that journey with us, we’d we’d welcome that. Check us out at cdfcapital.org. The… Rich Birch — Um, are is that mostly is that mostly individual investors, or is it institutional like organizations? Eric Schroeder — It’s it’s individual and [inaudible]. Rich Birch — Okay, both/and. Okay, great. Eric Schroeder — And for church leaders that are listening that think, okay, we’re out of space; we we we have or we’re leasing a building. What we do a really great job of is helping churches get in their very first building. Um, we step in when most banks um, when it’s a riskier loan opportunity for a bank where it’s maybe the first building, they don’t have the track record. We’re stepping in and helping churches um a lot with with their first building. So reach out to one of our field team; reach out to Mark Briggs. Um and cdfcapital.org – you can find the field team representative in your area on that website. And they they’re truly what God is using to make a change across the country in helping churches grow. Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. And and so, friends, you heard him say churches that particularly are looking for to get into their first space. Um, you know you might be there today, thinking hmm that that could be us. I would encourage you to reach out again. That’s just cdfcapital.org. Um, it’s very simple to navigate, easy to understand website, easy to find what you’re looking for. Ah you know, just step in there and you know you see right on the front page: church loans and more. You just click on that explore button and you know they can go through that. Rich Birch — Is there when you talk about like, and I know every church is different so this is a little bit dangerous asking you this question, but are there like size of budgets, you know, that you’re you’re kind of is a sweet spot? You know I would encourage everybody to reach out to you, but is there you know, kind of a particular sweet spot and obviously you need to talk to people and get, you know, a custom thing and all that. But are there particular, you know, churches churches that are of interest for sure? Eric Schroeder — Well um, Rich, what I would say is if we’re not the right um lender partner for you, we can direct that person, that church leader… Rich Birch — Love it Eric Schroeder — …to their right partner. We’re happy to connect them to our friends in the marketplace that that can help them. Rich Birch — I love it. Friends, you so you heard that. Let CDF do the work for you you. You’re not sure who to talk with, call CDF, give them all your information. If it doesn’t work there, ah, they’ll help point you in the right direction to so to somebody else. Man that’s a huge help, a huge assistance ah, particularly if you feel a little bit stuck you know in this area. So so good. Well, Eric, what else what else would you like to share just as we kind of close up today’s conversation? Eric Schroeder — So Rich, this is February 10th that we’re recording this and so my Chiefs are going to be playing – I live in Kansas City, Missouri, or actually Lees Summit, Missouri suburb of Kansas City, so my Chiefs are playing this Sunday so as I thought about really kind of what are the four quarters? What if you were thinking about a game plan for CDF Capital? So some things I think people should know um, CDF Capital has 70 – first quarter: CDF capital has 70 years of serving churches, have 70 years of experience doing that. Rich Birch — Wow. Eric Schroeder — Second quarter, CDF you know the mindset would be CDF Capital has strong expertise in the financial operations of a church. Rich Birch — Yes, so true. Eric Schroeder — We’ve we’ve seen this you know over 70 years. Um kind of the third quarter game plan would be we care about church leaders which is why our ministry cares about spiritual and leadership development. We care deeply about the church and church leaders. Um, and the fourth quarter, and this is where kind of the winning strategy comes into play, um, we care about the future of the church and church planting. Rich Birch — Yeah, so true. Eric Schroeder — And the reason is we know this is God’s plan A; there’s no plan B. And we know plan A wins. So um, we’re really excited about the future of the church. We’re here to help church leaders. Rich Birch — Love it. And we’re just we’re just excited to be a a part of what God is doing. the mantra that I kind of tell our team all the time is work hard, have fun, and give God all the glory. Rich Birch — So good. Eric Schroeder — And we as an organization are here to give God all the glory. Rich Birch — So good. Well, Eric, this has been a fantastic conversation by the the magic of traveling into the future, friends, you’re listening in you knew who won the Super Bowl. So regardless of whether the Chiefs won or not, we know that that’s a 4 part winning strategy for CDF. So really appreciate you being here, Sir. Again, thank you for your support of unSeminary. We really we appreciate It. We couldn’t do it without you. So I really appreciate that and thanks for all, you’re doing to help so many churches across the country grow, whether it’s church plants or, you know, church looking to get into buildings, all of that. So really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Taleah Murray, the Executive Pastor of Ministries at Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, California. One of the areas Taleah oversees at Crossroads is offering talks and using video to share the impact that the church’s generosity is having as people give. Listen in as she talks about finding stories of life change, and how to use storytelling to increase generosity and spread culture at your church. Celebrate the good things happening. // Talking about the offering can be our least favorite part of weekend services. But it doesn’t have to be awkward, or feel like you’re begging for money. At Crossroads Christian Church, every week during the services a video is played or a story is shared leading into the offering time. These stories are a time to celebrate the good things happening at the church which are made possible when people give. By highlighting stories of life change, or the impacts of various ministries, the church connects people’s generosity to what the church is able to accomplish. Look around you for stories. // If the thought of finding 50 stories to tell throughout the year feels overwhelming, begin by taking a look around you and asking what’s happening at your church because of people’s giving. Taleah suggests to start by looking at the events you’re doing and missions opportunities your church is involved with. Ask your team members where they are seeing stories in the lives of their volunteers, or in their own lives. Share stories from people getting baptized, or tell the story of a big day like Easter or Christmas. How many people visited, and what happened? Then connect these stories to the giving at your church. Find help with videos. // If you don’t have a videographer on staff to help with offering talk videos, look for companies or people in your area who film and edit videos. Build a team of volunteers at your church who know how to record and edit videos. Ask the young people in your church who are familiar with using YouTube, Reels or TikTok to see if they can help capture and edit footage. Even if you aren’t able to do a video every week, tell stories of life change using photos on slides. Make the connection. // Taleah recommends not going over three and a half minutes in your videos. Even if you capture a lot of footage in people’s stories, zero in on how the church helped them get to the point they are now. Then during the offering portion of your service, work with your host so they can communicate to the congregation the role they’ve played in giving and how it is contributing to the work of the church in people’s lives. Create culture through storytelling. // When you show stories about the people in your church, especially if your church is larger, it helps people identify with each other and makes the church feel smaller. Plus as you share stories of life change, it also helps to create a culture of welcoming brokenness. Reuse stories. // Beyond the weekend services, Crossroads also shares the stories they capture on social media. In addition, at the end of the year when giving statements are sent out, the senior pastor will write a letter reminding the church of stories shared throughout the year. This helps to remind people where their money goes when they give. Letters are also sent to first time givers with a reference to what was talked about during the weekend they gave. You can learn more about Crossroads at their website www.crossroadschurch.com or at their Instagram page at CrossroadsCA. Plus check out examples of their offering talks below: Boldly Bless // It’s amazing what a church can do together by each giving just $1. Chad’s Story // Incredible story of finding Crossroads and getting involved with his family. Liz’s Story // How Crossroad’s Spanish ministry is impacting her.  High School Leadership // Helping the broader church get to know key staff.  Special Needs Prom // An event highlight video. (So great!)    Gave Away $215k In One Weekend? // You gotta watch this one.  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: Chemistry Staffing One of the things that they never teach you in seminary is when to move on from your current church. Over the last couple of years, we have been having a TON of conversations about this with pastors all over the United States. Of all the ministry decisions you make, leaving your position will be the toughest. Download this two-in-one resource that walks you through the decision-making process. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in. Ah, you’re going to love today’s conversation. You know every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you, and today is no exception. Super excited to have Taleah Murphy Murray—I said Murphy! Taleah Murray with us. She’s the Executive Pastor of Ministries at a great church that you should be following, Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, California. (I’ve have friends in Corona and I’m like it’s been a bad couple of years if you live in in Corona because of the name Corona.) It’s about 4000 people attending. They started in the 1890s, and they’re one of the fastest growing churches, now, in the country. Ah Taleah, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here. Taleah Murray — Hi, thank you for having me. Rich Birch — So glad you’re here. Yeah I know you must have, particularly early in the covered pandemic when it was all like the novel corona virus that you must have had that joke lots for sure. Taleah Murray — We did. We did. I was part of a coaching network and they um called me and they said where is where are you from? And I’m like I don’t want to say where I’m from because I don’t want to tell people I’m from Corona. Rich Birch — Yes, absolutely. That’s a beautiful part of the world though, if you got to be from somewhere. That’s great. Taleah Murray — It is. It’s great. Rich Birch — That’s great. Well, what did I miss? Kind of fill out the story, tell us a little bit about Crossroads. Give us the picture, you know, talk to us about the church. Taleah Murray — Yeah, so Crossroads has a lot of history. We’ve been around since 1892. Um, we’re in the suburbs of ah, you know, like we’re kind of um about an hour from LA. Um so yeah and it’s a megachurch. we’re about 4000, 5000 people. You know nobody knows what they are after covid. Rich Birch — Yes, exactly. Taleah Murray — Um, but ah, but yeah, we I love I’ve been there for 15 years now, and so um, it’s ah it’s a great church. Um, our pastor has been there I came over with our senior pastor who’s there now for a fifteen years ago, and we’re in the middle of um, a succession plan. And yeah. Rich Birch — Wow, that’s cool. That’s ah, lots of exciting things going on. Your role is Executive Pastor of Ministries; talk to us about that kind of what does that include? What is that framework, what what are kind of the pieces of the puzzle that you you think about all the time? Taleah Murray — So yeah, my role is Executive Pastor of Ministries. I’m over Children’s Ministry, Junior High, High School, College, Spanish, Care ministries. Um, and I also because I’ve been there for so long, I just get to do the things that I see that’s necessary… Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — …so I also um am the story curator ah for us. And so if that’s a sermon illustration that we need, a story for or um, a story for offering that we’re going to talk about today. Um, and I also do a lot of like the development of our communicators. Um, and that way. So yeah I get to do a lot of different things there. Rich Birch — So good. Love it. Well one of the things we want to talk about today is really has to do with story. And it’s this this moment in um, in the church in our in our services where we talk about the offering, or the tithes, or that kind of piece of the service. And it seems like and we were joking about this beforehand I was just a couple weeks ago was at a church that um it was like they just blew past that part of the service. Like they didn’t it was like whoever was, and I don’t think they were actually embarrassed, but it was like they were embarrassed. They were like, okay, and if you want to give, give now. And then they they you can give online. Actually they didn’t even say that. Um they just kind of acknowledge that it was that you could give, and and they moved on. But that’s not what you guys do at crossroads. Why do you think, before we jump into why you do what you do at Crossroads, why do you think so many churches are miss this moment in the service? They don’t… um, you know they kind of miss this opportunity. What why do you think that is? Taleah Murray — I think that um, it’s awkward for people to talk about money, and so I think that people are afraid to talk about money a lot of times. Um I also think that um it’s a little bit ah like unknown. What do we do, like where’s the the coaching around this section of and can we like just blow past it? Do we sit in there and look like we’re begging? Um, you know like it can feel like we don’t really have intentionality around it. Sometimes we try to make it, and it’s worship, right? It’s a form of worship. So then do we do the whole worship, and do a song through it? So I think we’re just really kind of and we don’t have a great strategy around that moment. Um, and also I think sometimes we’re afraid of that moment because ah we don’t want to look desperate. We don’t we’re thinking about people who invited their friends to church, and we’re saying, gosh what are they going to think if they hear we’re asking for money? So I think that’s probably the problem we have with it. Rich Birch — Yeah, that makes total sense. So why don’t you talk, first let’s kind of describe what you do at Crossroads. I would encourage people to watch online to, you know, dive deeper. You know when you see this in person, obviously you can only do so much to describe in this kind of setting what you do. But talk to us about what it looks like, and then let’s then we’ll back up and kind of pick apart the process, how do you end up there, and all that. So talk to us what a typical, you know you know, typical weekend what is the offering moment look like. Taleah Murray — Okay, so I’ll just describe to you our service because that will help a little bit. So we have um you know three songs at the top, then we we’re a church who does communion every week so we have a host that comes out and then does communion. Um, and then we’ll do like baptisms during the next song. So we’ll have another song. And then out of that comes the offering moment. and usually that’s a video. It’s some sort of inspiring story, either it’s a person’s story, it’s a story of a ministry, or an event that we just had, um and so it’s some sort of really great video moment. And then out of that a host will come up and connect what they just saw to people’s giving. Taleah Murray — So they’ll connect the, whether let’s say last week we showed a um video about kids camp ah kids ministry… ah, actually we’re doing that this week I believe, sorry. So they’ll come up and they’ll say um, because you give here, because of your generosity, 111 kids were able to go to camp this past weekend, and 15 of them gave their lives to Jesus. So if you want to join us in ah, generosity and making these kinds of stories possible, this kind of life change possible, you can join us by giving (and then we give them the way they can give). And then we’ll pray over the kids who made decisions at camp. And then Amen, and then we move off and a transition video will show. Rich Birch — So good. This is fantastic, friends. Like this again, what Taleah and the team are doing here, this is best-in-class. So If you’re looking to improve this part of your service, you should lean in and learn, you know, from her. So so every week you’re doing this? So you’re looking for 50-some odd stories. Let’s start there. How do you find these stories? What how are there 50 good things happening at Crossroads? Taleah Murray — There are! There are so many good things. I think you just have to mine for them. So now that um, we have a culture of storytelling, and because I oversee these ministries it makes it easier for me. I mean I’m I’m overseeing these ministries where there’s stories all the time. And my leaders are they they come to me. You know we have this story. You know we have this story. But I’m also looking at just the events that we do. Taleah Murray — We do a special needs prom; I know I can get two stories out of the special needs prom because we do one where we have um, people that were giving away dresses and giving away [inaudible] they had tried them on. And so I’m you know, looking for stories with that. Anything we do overseas with our missions partners, that’s because of people’s giving, so everything’s an opportunity. I’m like what happens around here because of people’s giving? Taleah Murray — So that happens and then um, just stories. I mean we have an invitation, you know, we’re a culture that does an altar call every week. And so… and we do baptism. So anytime there’s a baptism, I’m back there asking them, tell me how you came to know Jesus. Tell me what brought you to this moment. Um, and so there’s stories there. Taleah Murray — And a lot of times um, you know, our team members, because that’s the goal, right? Is to have we want people to serve in the church, because that’s where they find true life change in community. So I’m going to ask every single team member what their story is, how they came to start serving… Rich Birch — Okay. Taleah Murray — …what that looks like. So I’m constantly mining and there is something going on every, every week. Um, you can tell the story of Easter. You guys do, you know, every church does big Easter, right? Like get somebody to take b-roll of your Easter story. Tell how many new families came, tell how many baptisms you had that day. Um, there’s a story in everything. Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. So first of all I love that like, you know, this I would I would agree, you know, just having your kind of an antenna up for this, and creating the space of saying we’re going to tell one of these stories every week. Um you know you’ve got to find one. It’s got to, you know, it’s got to open up. Now talk to me about the video piece. I’m sure there’s people that are listening in that are like they’re already given up. They’re like there’s no way we can’t do video every week. Friends, I don’t want you to get lost on that. We’ll come back to that idea. But why are you choosing to do video. That’s a significant investment. Tell us kind of what’s happening behind that. Taleah Murray — Yeah, well video is the medium. Like I feel like video I mean everybody’s watching YouTube um; you know, you hear about the hours that people spend on YouTube. Reels are the thing on Instagram. It’s it’s the way. It’s the way people communicate and so it is a worthwhile investment. Taleah Murray — And there’s been a time when we didn’t have video people. And there’s people… and I get it I live in California; you know, Hollywood’s right down the street. But there are people you can contract with. And it’s every single time worth contracting. I’ve con… I mean I’ve gotten gritty, you know… Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — …to find whatever we can – whoever does video I will take it and I will direct that piece of it to put it together. Um, but I would say it’s really worthwhile. It pays for itself in the end because people are moved through video. They really are. And there’s young people in your church who do video on their phones and it’s amazing. And they can edit something for you to put together for the weekend. Rich Birch — It’s so true. Yeah. Taleah Murray — My son is fifteen years old and he’s loves video, and he’s shooting a lot of the videos that we’re doing today. And for free! Rich Birch — Love it. Right. Taleah Murray — He is my son. But yeah… Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yeah. Taleah Murray — But they want to learn and they want to… Rich Birch — You’re paying him in other ways you’re like continuing to feed him so, you know, yes. Taleah Murray — I feed him. Yes, yeah. Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — So but they they are willing because they want to get, I mean these young people want to be they want to do their craft. They’re doing YouTube on their own. You know, get them and ask them, hey would you make a video for me? You know, can you go to children’s ministry and video what’s happening this weekend and edit something together for us? So… Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — …I really think that you can do that. You can also tell this story um like some of the things when you said, how do you do 52 videos? Well there are sometimes where we are we’re not doing a video. It’s very rare, but we will pray for our missions teams that are going out, and we connect that story, and the work that we’re doing as we’re praying for them to people’s giving. Um, so there’s things like that too. Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — But but I would say video is a worthwhile investment. It really is. It’s paid for itself… Rich Birch — Yeah I love… Taleah Murray — …over and over and over again. Rich Birch — I love that. I know there’s some executive pastors that are want me to get to that question; talk about the financial impact, but we’ll get there friends but not yet. Um, so one of the things I’ve I’ve coached churches on this area if they don’t… so I do love the the your look at video and kind of how you’re doing that regularly. But but the thing that you might—I don’t want you to get overwhelmed by this, friends—even the the one step to say we’re going to have a picture every week that shows the vision of the church. So the example you used of like the the weekend retreat, the youth weekend retreat, even just showing a picture of that rather than just talking about the youth retreat, having a picture of that is like is way more effective, but too many of us miss that um, you know you know, images speak so much louder than just ah, you know, just words. Rich Birch — So talk to me about videos. I’m sure there’s some common things that you’re like make a great video, or there’s times where you’re like oh that didn’t really hit the mark. What would be a couple of those coaching things from you? You’ve seen a lot of these videos – what works really well um, you know, with a video that places in this moment in your service? Taleah Murray — Yeah, so you never want to go over three and a half minutes. Like a video that’s over three and a half minutes… Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. Taleah Murray — …is way too long, way too long. And when you have somebody that wants to tell a story… so a lot of times we’ll tell just one person’s life change story. So ah, let’s take, you know, um we told Toni’s story a couple weeks ago. Toni’s a girl. Um, she she talked about how um she was at this place in her life where she grew up with her dad, who was in in and out of prison, her mom who killed herself when she was ten months old… Rich Birch — Oh wow. Taleah Murray — …and um, she just had this life that was, you know, terrible. She was abused and all of these things. So ah, we told Toni’s story; we asked her about that. Then she came to know Jesus and she started coming to Crossroads um, when she decided to make a change in her life. She had known Jesus before, but then she came to Crossroads and was like I’m going to jump full full in. She got involved in life groups and in community. Um, and then she had this condition, and she went to our Ash Wednesday service and got prayed for, and God healed her… Rich Birch — Oh wow. Taleah Murray — …at this Ash Wednesday service… Rich Birch — Oh my goodness! Oh my good… Taleah Murray — And yeah, it was amazing and so she she’s like. Rich Birch — You got this all in one video? Taleah Murray — In one video. Rich Birch — This is amazing. Wow. Taleah Murray — So but that’s a lot of things, right? Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — So she’s talking about all the things. So I mean I have about 30 minutes of content… Rich Birch — Oh wow. Taleah Murray — …and I’ve got to get that down to 3 minutes. Rich Birch — Right. Taleah Murray — So when she’s telling this story you have to have a really good eye to say, and a cut you know, like hardcore, you know, cut to say where am I going with this story? And there’s an arc to every story. Give me the down, you know, what happened the before Jesus piece. Then give me the climax moment when you met Jesus or whatever the thing is – for her was the healing. And then tell me what the how the church because it’s always you’re trying to make the church the hero. Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — I know that Jesus is always the hero… Rich Birch — Right. Taleah Murray — …but we’re trying to make the church because we’re saying the people in the audience need to see, I did that; I was part of that. Um, and so we do that. So you have to be really cutthroat to say where do I want the story to go? What pieces are going to be important? And then how can I get to the roundup to say at the end of it, Crossroads helped me. So I usually ask them to finish this statement, tell me why you’re thankful for Crossroads. And they’ll say, you know, I’m so thankful for Crossroads because I found community; I found whatever here. Taleah Murray — Then I’m able to come up and hit the ball out of the park with the host piece to say because of you… Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — …Toni was healed, Toni found Jesus, Toni found family that she’s never had before. And you got to do that, Church, you know, because you give here. Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — So… Rich Birch — So good. How do you repurpose those videos? So I do you use them in other places? Do they show up on, you know, your social channels and all that? What what else because you know I’m I’m assuming you don’t just produce them and use them on the weekends, use them at other spots too. How else do you use them? Taleah Murray — Yeah, so pretty much every single one of them, you’ll find on our Instagram page. So um, our social media person puts it up on Instagram, so it’s content also, you know, for the weekend. Look at Crossroads; look at how you’ve helped Toni’s life change. So we use that. Taleah Murray — And that one we also used for um—I had them do 2 cuts of that one—so we use it for our women’s ah conference. And I asked a different question at the end of it because our women’s conference was called Flourish. So I said, Toni, tell me how you have flourished in this season. So she’s able to give me that ending, and then we’re able to get the Crossroads ending, you know, for the for the weekend service… Rich Birch — Still good. Taleah Murray — …so we can repurpose them that way. A lot of times these ministries too want to, like for the kids, can’t video. They’re going to use that to send a parents next year to say, look at how kids camp you know, send your kids to kids camp this year because look at what happened last year; look how fun this is. And so we repurposed them for almost like market target marketing for the events that we have. Rich Birch — Love it. Fantastic. So friends, you should go over to it’s just @crossroadsca on Instagram and check out. You can see some real live examples of this. Maybe I’ll have you afterwards, if you could if I could impose upon you one other thing, to pick out like here’s 4, you know, here’s 3 or 4 ones that are like, hey these are kind of like the best examples so that our people could point them to their video people, and say we need to make these kind of things. Um, you know that that could be really helpful if you’d be willing to do that for us, Taleah. um, so talk… Taleah Murray — Yeah I will totally do that. Rich Birch — That would be amazing. Talk to me about the hosting spot. So you kind of you kind of gave us an overview, but so we have an idea of what’s happening in the video. And then we come out on a live person stands on stage talk us through what that typically looks like – maybe you know common pitfalls, things that that people, you know, maybe don’t they when they fumble it, you’re like somewhere you’re you’re like oh they did it wrong. Or they’re like oh they really did it great. They… What what what makes that moment fantastic? Taleah Murray — Yeah, so um, the… I script everybody. Rich Birch — Okay, okay, good, good. Taleah Murray — So this is what really helps and now a lot of them do it on their own because they’ve grown, but when you’re building the culture, you’ve got to script them to teach them the language. And so I will make the connection for people from whatever the video is to… and so now they can do it themselves. I have all pretty much every one of our hosts – we have um like, you know, eight or something that can do this and they really well. But they understand they are connecting the story to people’s giving. And so there’s certain language that we use: you did this. You know, you made, because of you you made this possible. The thank you for your generosity um, you know. So some of them are a little bit harder because we’re trying to figure out. Taleah Murray — So um, another idea for a story type video we’ve started telling the stories of our staff members, like so people can see our staff members because… um, so we had our junior high, we have two pastors in our junior high, Katie and Zack, and we asked fun questions of them. Tell me how many, you know, kids you’re reaching, tell me what your biggest ministry fail is, you know, tell me. Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — But then we get down to, tell me why you love why is junior high ministry needed, so needed. And then it gets at the heartstrings, you know, and they’re telling these things about… Rich Birch — Oh that’s so good. Taleah Murray — …what they they love. And then the end we ended it with the like what’s a trend that’s happening right now on TikTok? And they did the tortilla slap and it was just hilarious, right? Like so… Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — And so with everybody laughing laughing. So now this host has to come up and tie that to giving. And so they tied it… Rich Birch — Right. Exactly. Taleah Murray — So the way they did that was just because you give here we have this ministry that’s reaching 480 junior high students a month. And these pastors are leading them and you see the need for them. They’re talking about all these lies these kids are getting. So sometimes it’s harder, you know, you have to help them make that connection. Um, but it really is only like the host spot afterwards is 30 seconds to a minute. Rich Birch — Okay, quick. Taleah Murray — Ah, we’re just making the tie real fast. We’re not trying to sound like we’re begging. We’ve made the you know… Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — …we’ve made the connection for them, and then we just need to always give the how. So text GIVE is our thing, you know, to this number. Or you know, go on our website, or we’re on Venmo, and but let’s pray over our junior high ministry right now. So and then we finish it with prayer. Rich Birch — Okay, love that. That’s good distinction that hey you’re looking for 30 seconds to a minute. And just to kind of pull one thing apart there that I want to make sure, because again I’ve seen churches miss this, particularly I think post-covid or corona since you’re here, post the corona the novel coronavirus. Um we’ve missed the it was more obvious when we were all of us were passing plates, or whatever, how to give. And we now have multiplicity of ways for people to give, and we might stumble that part of it. So you are telling people every week, here are the ways. Do you talk about all those ways every week, or you just to kind of feature one? What does that look like? Taleah Murray — So usually we have… ah so I have this script memorized but it’s usually… Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — …the 2 things. You know, so we tell people because there’s people watching online and in the room, so we say you can text this number to give. Or if you’re in the room and you brought cash or check, there’s offering boxes around the room that you can drop your offering in after the service. Rich Birch — Okay. Taleah Murray — Um and so that’s how we say it. We just added the Venmo piece and so we’re noticing as we say Venmo people are like we’re tapping into a different audience. Rich Birch — Interesting. Taleah Murray — So we’re kind of trying that right now. So we’re giving them the three ways. Um you know so… Rich Birch — Love it. Taleah Murray — But normally we wouldn’t do that. Ah, but because it’s new… Rich Birch — Yeah. Taleah Murray — …we’re doing it and we’re seeing how long we’re going to last with that. Rich Birch — And do you have any kind of associated graphics with that. Do you do like ah, you know, to stuff come up on the screen, or lower thirds to kind of you know, bring the number up on screen, all that? Tell tell me about that. Taleah Murray — Yeah, so we have a lower third that just has the “Text GIVE to” the number so that’s… it’ll show up while I’m talking. Um and it doesn’t show up during the video it shows up as soon as like the host comes up and starts talking about the how to give peace. Rich Birch — Love it. Okay, so let’s talk about outcomes. Let’s talk about the difference you think this piece is making. We’ll get to the finance piece – keep listening, people. But let’s talk about the non-tangible. Ah so for my as an outsider, I would say man this would have driven is driving so much great culture stuff at the church. It’s because you’re celebrating, this is what our church is about. Talk to me about the non-financial kind of benefits of doing this um, you know, to the church and you know the church culture has been what that what what’s been positive on that front. Taleah Murray — Yeah, so we’re a big church. We’re a megachurch, you know. Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — Like we’re talking 4 to 5000 people… Rich Birch — Yep. Taleah Murray — …and so it can feel really big. Now when you’re showing somebody’s story every week, or you’re showing your pastors, and you’re telling who they are, um, it becomes people identify with those people and say, I was an alcoholic too. Oh my gosh, this place welcomes alcoholics. You know, I was that too. Or I know that person is actually my preschool daughter’s teacher. I didn’t know that was his story. And so now they’re becoming small, right? So they’re coming and they’re seeing people and it makes people um more approachable, and it makes them human, you know. So I mean it just it really does connect people, but it also creates a culture of our church where we’re saying and, you know, we’re a church who welcomes brokenness. Um, and so it’s it’s a culture establisher. And then also with my ministry leaders, it’s helping them get to know people and their stories because they know I’m looking for them. So all of a sudden we become a church that’s small because everybody’s asking questions and they’re knowing they know we’re going to be asking for who who do you know? Whose life has been changed? What is your newest team member’s story? Taleah Murray — Um, and so we just become a church that knows people because we have to know them for their stories. Rich Birch — Love it! Yes. Love it. Taleah Murray — So it’s really changed us to be a culture of like people feel known, and and feel welcomed, and um, it really is a leadership development tool as well because you’re having your leader say you need to know people. So make sure that you’re you’re talking to people and asking them their stories. Rich Birch — Right. I love that; so good. We have a group coaching thing that we do with a church with about a dozen churches and they’re all over 1000. You know some 3 or 4000—in that range—and one of the things we come back to time and again, there is the real “competitor” of a church of that size or is, in some ways, is ourselves. But it’s this idea of um people, like the joke I always make is the only people that like big churches are pastors. Um, you know, we, you know, we we have to make our churches smaller. We have to figure out how do we make it feel more relational. And so this kind of thing you know you’re only telling fifty stories. I’m not and undermining that – stick with me here. You know that’s fifty stories out of 5000 people every year. That’s a ton of work to make all that happen. Um, but you’re doing that, wishing that you could tell 5000 stories, hoping that someday you’ll be able to tell all those stories. But that does in some ways it it shrinks the church makes it feel much more small it makes it smaller. Rich Birch — What about on the financial side? You keep doing this, you’re investing you’re investing a significant amount of your time. You’re investing obviously video time – we don’t have to get into specific specific numbers, obviously. But obviously you’re convinced internally that this helps financially, I’m assuming. You know, talk about that. Taleah Murray — Yeah, so um, we started this in 2017, probably November of 2017, we started telling stories because we had launched a campaign where we were um, trying to build ah buildings for our kids ministries and stuff. And so um, when we launched that, we decided we had to tell the story. So it became a priority for us. And at that time we were maybe telling one a month because we were just trying to keep vision in front of people. Um, and so it kind of ties into, you know, the campaign piece that giving went up, giving units went up, significantly. Taleah Murray — Then in um, 2020 we had to double down because we started realizing, oh shoot you know that was when nobody knew what was happening, and we didn’t know what that was going to look like we were afraid if we’re not meeting every week buckets are not getting passed every week. Are we going to make money? So we started telling a story like intentionally um, weekly because we were doing a lot of things, ah you know overseas, with our food pantry was growing. And so we just did that and we went up in giving all throughout 2020 with those stories. Rich Birch — So good. Taleah Murray — Um, and so it has really proven um, and our giving has not gone back down to pre-story levels. You know like we we kind of adjust… Rich Birch — Right. Taleah Murray — …you know a little bit since the campaign kind of but but we’ve gone up significantly since we’re telling stories. And we hear a ton of feedback from people who are saying, thank you for telling me where my money is going. Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — Because a lot of times people don’t see, and they don’t know, and so you’re telling them weekly where their money is going. Rich Birch — It’s so true. Yes, it’s so true. Taleah Murray — So um, they love that people love that. And they’re proud of their church so they will share these stories… Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — …um from Instagram they will share them to tell people, look at what my church is doing, you know? Um so it really is great for them. Rich Birch — I love it. Yeah, it’s so true. I think this is one of those things that we take for granted in in local church leadership is that, you know, we don’t have everybody that comes and sits in our rooms every week but we do have a large portion of them that do come and sit in front of us every single week. If we were any other nonprofit in town, ah man, they would kill for that kind of engagement. They would love to be able to have their people in front of them every single week. You think about, you know, the local food bank throws a a giant gala once a year that takes a ton of time, effort, and energy energy and they do that once, where we get to do it 52 times a year. We should take take advantage of that and get in front of our people. Rich Birch — Um, maybe could you talk a little bit about, and this is kind of it’s adjacent to the offering um the offering portion, the offering segment. What other things are you doing on the kind of donor development side that are kind of connected to storytelling? Are there other ways that you’re you know talking with with donors or people that give to the church, or just the church in general that that are using stories? Is there other ways that you’re kind of spreading this through the rest of that strategy? Taleah Murray — So the the way we we um will tell, you know, we’ll send statements to people. Rich Birch — Yep. Taleah Murray — Um, at the you know the beginning the end of the the tax for their tax deductible or whatever the amounts. Rich Birch — Yep. Taleah Murray — And so in that our senior pastor pastor will write a letter. And he’ll use a lot of the stories that we’ve told throughout the year. Rich Birch — Right. Taleah Murray — So you know we’re talking how many people we’ve served through our food pantry because of you. So when they’re seeing their tax statement, they’re seeing that story again, those stories retold um in that. And so and we’ll do that like in the middle of the year too, we send out these like, here’s where you are; you didn’t know. And then remember this is what you’ve done with your giving in a letter, a written piece. Um, at the end of the year a lot of times we’ll send a printed piece that’s like beautiful, you know, um pictures and all the things, but we’re using these stories again. Like people are, you know, we remember we’re using all the stories told, um throughout the year with the images and we’re telling people that as well. So that’s how we’re using the stories in those settings. We have somebody who is starting now to do like stewardship pastoring um and he’s praying and pastoring the people. Um, oh and also we’d send like a first time, when when the first time givers… Rich Birch — Yes. Taleah Murray — …we’re connecting, we’re sending them a letter and we’re telling them whatever the adjacent story was um, you know that that they just gave that week and because of you we were able to send these kids to camp, or you know whatever the case is. So um, the other thing that we do that’s kind of an align with a giving and it kind of goes to this place is we do this thing called boldly bless. Rich Birch — Okay. Taleah Murray — Where we ask people to get $1 more than they normally give. Um and then we bless the family and we tell that story. Rich Birch — That’s cool. Taleah Murray — And sometimes we’re not able to give that story on video because it’s one week. You know it’s within one week. Rich Birch — Right. Taleah Murray — And so sometimes we can run it over that fast. So we’ll just tell it and like you said show pictures of if the family lets us. Sometimes it’s not… we don’t want to exploit that and so Rich Birch — Um yes because of the nature of it. Yes, yeah, yeah, because the nature of what it is. Yeah yeah. Taleah Murray — Right. If we went shopping for a family we’ll show the staff shopping for them. You know, um in stuff like that. Rich Birch — Yep, Love it. Taleah Murray — So ah, but we tell the story that way. And then we’ll use that in our first time giver letter that week – because of you we were able to buy groceries for this family. Rich Birch — Wow. Ah friends, as you have heard, this is best in class. This is fantastic. This is just yeah, so great. This has been super helpful today, Taleah. What um, anything else you want to share just as we kind of wrap up today’s episode? Anything you know in this whole area that you want to ah, encourage people if they’re thinking about maybe stepping into this, thinking about taking some steps towards this? What would you say to them? Taleah Murray — Um, I would say that this is don’t, like you said this before, don’t leave money on the table. There’s so much that people can be inspired by and there’s different pockets that people give out of. So you’ve got your, you know, faithful obedient tithers that don’t need any inspiration. They’re just going to be obedient. But then you’ve got your on-the-fencers who just need to be inspired and you’ve got your skeptics who are saying, you know, I don’t know that I can trust this church. And what you tell them when you’re investing in this kind of thing is you can trust us. I’m going to show you where your money’s going. This is a wise investment. Rich Birch — So true. Taleah Murray — And that’s also language that we use with the host piece, like the church is the best investment. It’s you get the greatest return on investment at the church because you’re investing in life change and people’s eternal eternity. Taleah Murray — Um, and so I would say invest in this portion. Invest in a video person. Invest in coaching your hosts to be super intentional um, which is why I said like I script them. Because it needs to be succinct. We don’t need people to hate the offering portion. We want them to love it. Rich Birch — Right. Love it. Taleah Murray — You know to look forward to that portion of the service. Um, so just be really intentional and invest your time in it. It’s worth it. Rich Birch — So good. This has been fantastic, friends. Ah make sure you scroll down; check this check the show notes. We’ll have some links to kind of best-in-class ones from Crossroads specifically so you can kind of see that it would give you kind of a visual example of what we’re talking about here today. Taleah, thanks so much for being on. So honored that you took some time to be with us today. Taleah Murray — Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Kadi Cole who leads the organization Kadi Cole & Company which helps with leadership development, management skills training, executive level coaching and more. This time Kadi is taking over hosting the podcast as she interviews Rich on how men can open the doors to female leadership in the church.  Exposure to differences teaches us. // Different cultures, even around North America, look at genders differently. Growing up, Rich was exposed to different cultures as his family moved around often. Our experiences within churches, various denominations, different schools and neighborhoods can impact our views on women working in the church. Those who are exposed to more diverse viewpoints tend to be less locked in to one particular paradigm. Regardless of how we grew up, it’s important to be aware of and address our own biases. Learning from what you see. // One person who still stands out in Rich’s mind is a man whom Rich worked with early in his church leadership days. This man helped with tasks that might typically be left to women on a church staff. He honored and spoke highly of the women on his team, and modeled that to the other men in leadership. Most people learn from what they see, not necessarily what they are told to do. Different opportunities for men and women. // Rich and Kadi grew up in a time where men and women in church leadership had vastly different experiences. Decades ago when they were new to ministry, Rich and Kadi visited the same church on separate occasions and met with the same pastor. Rich asked to shadow his staff and had the opportunity to spend the day with him, even going to his house where they talked one-on-one with no one else there. Meanwhile Kadi took her sister to the church with her so that she was never alone. She didn’t go out with the pastor anywhere and never considered that she might be able to shadow his staff. This was the dynamic that they grew up in, and it wasn’t until years later that they realized how different the same experience was for men versus women. Ask for opportunities. // For women in church leadership, it’s important to learn and ask questions. Ask for the opportunities to learn more. As a female leader, offer those who are new to ministry the opportunity to spend time with you and learn from you. Invite someone along with you as you go about your work. Speak truth and encouragement. // Women in church can be held back by their own limiting beliefs. High capacity female leaders are perfectionists and know that there are few opportunities for them, so they put a lot of pressure on themselves. When godly, male leaders who are spiritual authorities speak truth to them about themselves, it helps women change their views of themselves. Speak encouragement to the women in leadership at your church. Let them know when they are doing a great job. Remind them that the gifts they bring to the table are important and needed. Advice for men and women. // Rich advises that for the men in church leadership, if these conversations around women leading aren’t already happening, you’ll probably need to start that dialogue. It will require some awkward conversations, but it’s worth it. For women, Rich encourages them to use their voices and to step up. Take risks and take advantage of opportunities. Offer the good gifts that God has given to you. Listen to the podcast Helping Female Leaders in Your Church Find Their Leadership Voice with Kadi Cole and learn more about Kadi’s book “Developing Female Leaders” at her website www.kadicole.com. 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: Portable Church Industries Doing Church in a Rented Facility can be a Challenge. Questions about Multisiting or Portability?Click here to connect with our Multisite Specialist for a free evaluation. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. We’ve got a different kind of episode today. Um I’ve got my friend Kadi Cole, a return guest, which you know whenever we have a return guest that’s a good thing, but it’s a different kind of episode. But let me tell you a little bit about Kadi. Kadi is an incredible leader. She spent 16 years at Christ Fellowship in Palm Gardens, Florida leading a whole variety of um areas. The church grew from about 3500 to over 20,000 which is incredible. Um, she, a number of years ago, stepped out and leads her own organization called Kadi Cole and Company. Ah she’s had key roles with organizations like Leadership Network, Replenish Ministries, Multi-site Solutions. Ah, she has a passion to help church leaders who want to do a better job, particularly on developing female leadership talent within their congregation. So super excited to have Kadi on because we got chatting and, so this is a little bit weird, but we got chatting and she said, hey Rich, I’d love to interview you on your podcast about that. And I was like, that sounds amazing. So so happy to have you on the show, Kadi. Welcome, or happy for you to have me. I don’t know how this works exactly. Kadi Cole — Yes, I’ll take over the host microphone now. So yeah, thank you so much, Rich, for letting me come in here. Yeah I I’m just always so fascinated as I work with churches and particularly male leaders around this topic of how do we do a better job developing female leaders, the talent that God’s brought to our churches, or even in our lives. And really male leaders are a huge piece of kind of shifting the conversation of that, opening doors for women, ah equipping, mentoring, challenging, sponsoring. I write a lot about all those different kinds of ways that men really have the power and they many ways hold the keys. And you’re such a champion of women. You’ve certainly been a champion for me; you’ve opened doors for me. I know you’ve done that for a lot of other women and a lot of other churches and places and even on this podcast. Kadi Cole — And so I’m really curious to hear about your story in this topic. Ah, what it was like for you, when did you realize this was kind of an issue. How have you navigated that? Um, what are some things you’re still working on? So that’s what I want to talk to you about today. And I have a feeling your listeners are going to be fascinated by what we learned. Rich Birch — Well, thanks. I’m looking forward to it as well. This is I was just looking up. This is episode 747 and we’ve only done this once before with my good friend, Carey Nieuwhof. So I feel a little bit nervous to be honest. I was like I was saying to Christine, my wife, I’m a little bit nervous; I don’t know what’s she going to ask. How’s it going to go? Ah, but yeah, no, this is a topic I am passionate about and super honored to get a chance to kind of chat with you today. Kadi Cole — Great. Well Rich, why don’t we start by kind of taking us back to the beginning. Talk to us about the context in which you grew up that informs so much of our ideas and frameworks around gender, who we are, who people of the opposite sex are, and how those rules kind of play out, particularly in our faith. So kind of fill us in on the context you grew up and um, some of the the things that when you look back now you start over like, huh, that’s different than maybe how I think now and here’s how I got there. Rich Birch — Yeah, great question. So um, when we were younger like, you know, like when I was in elementary school, that sort of thing, um, we went to church, but it was not um it wasn’t like ah it was ah definitely a cultural experience. I would say you know our family had this kind of great awakening at one point um, where you know church and kind of the things of Jesus went from those are interesting ideas that it wasn’t like we disagreed with them. It wasn’t that we were like oh it, it just wasn’t a huge deal to us. And and we were my my dad moved a lot when I we were kids. And in every couple of years he would move to a new place, and or we’d move to a new place, and they were super brand loyal to their ah particular slice of Christian world. And we would just literally go to the whatever the church was the closest the kind of brand that we always went to. And we were just about to move at one point and ah the minister at our church had an affair with another minister. And that was ah pretty profound for my parents. Um, they were like oh whoa like maybe we should really maybe take some time to consider when we move the next time what church we should go to because they felt kind of a little bit burned by that. And it’s a very Jesus kind of story because he’s good at taking bad things and making them great, and that was obviously a bad thing, but in our little family it was it was a great thing. Rich Birch — We we literally were just moving and um, my parents did end up going and looking at a number of different churches. I remember that as a kid. I was like this is like you know I’m in the you know grade 8 you know that kind of timeline. And um, we we ended up at this one church that was this great Presbyterian Church, you know, in hindsight and great evangelical presbyterian church. And I remember distinctly two things. First of all, they they talked about the bible like it was true, which was new was a new experience, like it was like oh like they think this thing’s actually true. And then they prayed like it was actually stuff was going to happen, like that was and even as like ah as an eighth grader that really did kind of stick with me, and it was really there that God got a hold of our whole our entire family’s life. And I would say that’s where we became Christians. I that I think ties into this because even from early days, the church that we were a part of there were there were women in leadership. That was a part of the equation of what was going on there. Um, now kind of over the time you know we shifted, we we moved again like as always happens we moved um a couple years later, and um we went and this struck me, so this is now I’m in high school. You know my parents go to um the the minister at our church and we say hey we’re moving to this other town. This is all pre-internet, right? And they’re like, hey can you help us find a church in the new community? And so he goes and and I don’t know what he did like calls people. What did you do before the internet? I don’t know what they did. Rich Birch — So they… and he comes back to my parents and says… Kadi Cole — There are these things called the Yellow Pages, Rich. Rich Birch — Yes! But he he comes back to them and he says, you know what? You shouldn’t go to the Presbyterian Church in in the town there. And at the time I didn’t you know like I don’t know what all that means. Um, but he’s like there’s this great church and it was a Christian and Missionary Alliance church. It was a different a totally different denomination. Rich Birch — And even as like ah as a grade 9 kid that really like struck me that here was this guy suggesting, hey you should go somewhere different. Um and because he was like I think you’ll find that is more—and you know I didn’t have the language for this at the time—but it was like that were probably more aligned with, you know, your experience here, what they teach about the bible than necessarily the Presbyterian Church did in the town we were moving into. Um now that kind of started the trajectory leadership change trajectory where I’ve spent most of my time, ironically, not in kind of more mainline churches. I’ve spent more of my time in what we would call you know more of the eventually the kind of. evangelical non-denominational world. That’s where I’ve spent most of my time. Rich Birch — But I do think those early years did impact particularly the gender thing. And the other thing too in I went to I did go to bible college, like I was one of those people. And the bible college I went to is fantastic – it’s ah, a school in Canada called Tyndale. And they’re they’re proudly what they call transdenominational, and they celebrate the fact that people come from a wide variety of of backgrounds. And that was really formative to me because I I um early on didn’t um like I was kind of like engendered in me in my leadership that like we should celebrate people who look at the bible differently. Like where I think there’s that isn’t necessarily the case with lots of people where I think there are people that are like if you’re not from my tribe, you’re not from my narrow group, then I can’t we can’t work together. And so um, very early on… Rich Birch — And then I took a great ah class, um Professor Elizabeth Daly, Dr. Daly’s class, on gender in school. I was thinking about this, preparing for this. I’m like wait where did that… and I still actually have the textbook. It’s one of the few textbooks I kept. Um her class really impacted me because I would say that was the first time that I actually thought about this issue that I was like oh like yeah okay, there are people who who think um, you know who are trying to maybe limit women’s abilities to lead. Um that was like ah even like a new idea even at that point. I was like oh whoa, that’s interesting like okay this is something to think about. And that you know I that for sure her class that class impacted my thinking around this whole area. Obviously we got into all the theological stuff. Um, but it it impacted even just practically how we how we even just even how my wife and I have our marriage. Like there was stuff that came out of that class around how she because she was it was all this kind of sidebar stuff around how her and her husband managed their kind of relationship that ended up impacting even how Christine and I manage our relationship. So those would be a few things I think from my early years that impacted my thinking around and just leadership around gender. Kadi Cole — Interesting. That that’s so fascinating to me because there’s a few things I want to highlight from your story. First of all, you moved around a lot, which means there was diversity even in the kind of cultures you were a part of, the kind of schools you were a part of, the neighborhoods you lived in, the ways families operated. And we do know that in different areas of the country, or in North America in different areas of the world for sure, cultures look at gender differently. Even bible believing really scholarly people we have different views around gender in our culture. And so that probably even ah, maybe shook anything that was sort of like locked in as a paradigm every time you move, you kind of get a new paradigm about those things. And then, like you said, some of these more experiences in churches and dynamics, this class, all of those things really form our view around this. Kadi Cole — And all of us carry biases along in life that we’re us unaware of. You know, hopefully we spend time thinking, and praying, and experiencing things that kind of bring insight and awareness to those. Ah, but we have seen that people who have a broad variety of diverse experiences tend to have more insight around those, obviously just because you get exposed ah, to so many things. Kadi Cole — Ah when you um, kind of look back on your leadership journey then, like in Ministry Leadership maybe in bible college or your first couple pastoral leadership roles, when did you realize that gender was kind of like a dynamic in your leadership? Like as you’re leading a meeting, or that maybe there are women on your team that have different backgrounds than you, and so they’re coming and showing up to the table differently. Or there are men who maybe have different views than you and they’re ah treating women differently, or or just that it’s a thing. I think sometimes people don’t realize it’s a thing and then you sort of go, man, there’s something here that’s affecting us. And it’s hard to put your finger on till you all of a sudden you uncover it and you’re like, wow this is actually sucking a lot of time and energy from our productivity. Rich Birch — Yeah that’s great. Great question. So I I’d love to say it was like super early on, I really understood this. Um, but actually it was it was one of these examples of like a small thing that has had like weird weird disproportionate impact on my thinking. Um I was serving at ah a great church in the Toronto area. And there was ah a leader who I deeply respected – who’s probably 10 years older than me, is just a little bit farther down the the road and it was this is like a silly stupid small thing, but it really did impact me. We were we were having a staff lunch. So at this point our staff probably had 30 or 40 people on it. I was a part of the senior leadership team. This other individual was also a part of, this guy named Darrell was also ah you know part of the senior leadership team. And um, we were just getting you know pulling everything together, getting this lunch ready. and um. You know the way it was being served was it was like you know there’s all this food sitting out and then there was a couple people standing behind the counter, serving the meal. And ah there was I think maybe 2 or 3 people standing behind the the counter. And again super small detail but Darrell he said to there was um, ah one of our assistants was standing there about to start serving out the meal. And he said to her hey, is it okay, if I don’t have you do that? Is it okay, if I step in? Because I just don’t always want it to be like, you know, there’s always a woman who’s handing out the food. Rich Birch — Um, and I it struck me. I was like that is an interesting um observation, you know, that and although you know it was ah it was a small thing and it was a um, it was a visual thing. Ah but I would say that was one of those early things that I was like oh yeah, that’s interesting, like even just who serves the meal. Who is like the person that’s always handing stuff out um can be perceived, can can say something without us ever saying anything. Kadi Cole — Mmm-hmm. Rich Birch — And so I’ve often thought back to that moment that ooh something turned in me that I was like, oh I need to pay more attention to this. You know I respected Darrell; I still respect Darrell. He’s a great leader. Um, you know and and even though it was a small thing… And then you start to notice it, right? Then you’re like oh, here’s a guy I lead and I notice; it’s not just about handing out food. There’s all kinds of things in his ministry where he’s trying to find ways to honor um, you know, provide opportunity for, speak highly of, um, you know, ah you know, cutting down other guys if they’re like, hey you shouldn’t be making a joke like that. That’s not a great joke. Um, you know those kinds of things that um, that you know, I had definitely had an influence on me for sure. And that was that you know that’s in my you know, kind of in those first ten years of ministry that that definitely stood out as one of those kind of turning points. Um. Kadi Cole — I love the intentionality of that. And those things really do first of all that it says something really significant to that woman. And it gives an example to people like you and other people who are watching. Ah, but the other thing is, and we’ve talked about this before the last time we chatted about this, is just how easy it is for our leadership decisions or our cultures or kind of our habits and practices don’t always exactly match our theology. And most people are picking up on our theology from what they see not necessarily just from what we teach. And oftentimes we don’t teach on this topic because it is kind of controversial and it’s not something you want to, you know, be talking about every other month. And so ah, those intentional movements really do carry a lot of weight. They have ripple effects. Kadi Cole — And it’s also really encouraging, I think it’s things all of us can do, right? It’s things all of us can be more aware of our surroundings, more aware of the way we program something, or the way a meeting operates, or who we delegate to without even thinking about it. We can really cause some ripple changes and bring more awareness just with that sort of intentionality. Rich Birch — Well yeah, and I love so the other thing so there was not I don’t like it was I think there was just the three of us standing there. Like there wasn’t a whole big… it wasn’t like he made a big show of it, right? Kadi Cole — Yeah. Rich Birch — It wasn’t like a he—and this is Darrell like he’s that’s him to a “T”. He’s like he’s an amazing leader. Um, and is always trying to you know he’s always one of these guys always trying to lift other but lift other people up which is great. But it you know it was one of those, oh wow, like that’s an interesting you know it was a kind gesture ah and and incredibly true, right? Like that it’s it’s one of those like oh yeah, like I would have if it’s always it’s always women handing out the food, that may not that may subtly communicate something that we don’t want to communicate. Kadi Cole — Rich, what would you say is one of your biggest lessons or stories about how leadership experiences can be different for men and women? Rich Birch — Well, so this is in a similar timeframe, a couple of years before the the lunch. Um I ah, you know our church was growing. We were, our church very similar… we have a similar our, your, my backgrounds – we very similar kind of background. We started doing multisite before we called it multisite, like it was it was we were doing this we didn’t even know what to call it. We’re doing this thing 35 minutes away. And um I was aware that I had heard through the grapevine—this is like this is 2000/2001—I had heard through the grapevine that Willow Creek was doing something similar, but I didn’t I didn’t really know, and I didn’t know anyone at Willow at the time. And so I literally dialed—you’ll get a kick out of this as a Gen Xer—I literally dialed 411. Like I was like I don’t know their phone number. I dialed 411 and I’m like Willow Creek in and I think I even said somewhere in Chicago, like I don’t I don’t even know where it where it was. Rich Birch — And so eventually I got through, and and got to the the person that answered the phone. And I and I explained this – I said you know there’s our church is doing this thing, I think you guys are doing something similar. Who can I talk to? And they’re like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. There’s this guy Jim; you should talk with Jim. I’m like great – put me through to Jim. And so I get Jim, didn’t answer his phone, and went to his voicemail. And I I said like hey, I explained a little bit about our church I’d love to chat, and here’s my email address. Um, and so he emails me back and so then I say this crazy thing – I said, hey I would love to come and spend a week with you. Can I? Ah, like I’ll fly down. I said you I you don’t need to do anything. Like I’ll just follow you around, I’ll follow your team around, I’ll sit in on whatever meetings. You don’t ah, you don’t need to book anything specific. I just want to kind of soak in everything I can. Rich Birch — And he’s like… so we get on the phone eventually and he’s like, that’s a bit odd. Um, but sure if you want to do that, that’s fine. And [inaudible] remember went down in like October and it was initially at the beginning of the week, ah like it was literally I just followed I just following his people around. He just has just gave me a bunch of meetings, and we sat in all that. Well eventually we start talking, and you know by the end of the week he’s like hey, why don’t you come over to my house and we’ll have dinner. And we’re we’re hanging out and um and you know I didn’t end up staying in his place, but was there for quite a bit, and you know we we became fast friends. Rich Birch — Now for friends that are listening, you see how these two things are intersect. I would say it took me 15 years after that event before I realized something happened at that that will not does not happen for for female leaders: me going over to his house, hanging out, like literally sitting on his couch. You know he was making dinner. Um his wife was away and we were just hanging out. You know the all the informal stuff there cemented our relationship to the point where, you know, I left that week I started that week I don’t know this guy. I left that week still to this day he’s one of my closest ministry friends. You know we we don’t talk all the time, but when we do talk, it’s like we’re right right back in it. And like I say… Kadi Cole — Well and you two have collaborated a lot over the years around multisight… Rich Birch — Yes, we’ve done a yes. Kadi Cole — …and yes, yep. Rich Birch — And that started from that. It started from his generosity of saying sure, hey why don’t you come in and hang out? But again I like I I wish I could say you know I realized that that was some sort of unique privilege I had. I didn’t I didn’t understand that. It was, like I say, probably 15 years after that until I realized, oh wait a second, like I’m you know what was your experience? You’re you’re friends with Jim. Like you know, tell me about that. Kadi Cole — Yeah, so yeah I have a I have a story also. And just for the record, I want to say Jim Tomberlin is one of the most amazingly generous leaders. Rich Birch — Incredible! Yes, incredible. Kadi Cole —And he has been a huge champion of mine. He’s opened a ton of doors for me, and I know I could call him with a request and he would do everything he could to help me. But this was twenty years ago and I was in the same place you were. Oddly enough I was ah kind of leading the multisite initiative at my church. Again, we didn’t know what to call it. I was looking up, I was on in magazines looking up church magazines… Rich Birch — Love it. Kadi Cole — …for churches that had more than one address… Rich Birch — Yes. Kadi Cole — …trying to figure out how to navigate this and we were hearing rumors of places. And I’d been to Willow Creek to some of their conferences a couple times. So I’m like they showed up in a magazine and so I ah called up there and emailed and just said in fact, my whole orientation to it was so completely different than yours (Rich’s) because I looked up their services; I just planned to go to a service. I stayed with my sister to save money because I didn’t, you know, I didn’t really have a department. I had a girl title that I worked for the executive team, and I was charged with researching this. Rich Birch — Right. Kadi Cole — I didn’t know that people could like request to hang out for a week. So I’m just going to go to a service at their campus. Rich Birch — Wow. Kadi Cole — And I did… I think I left a ah voicemail or email and just gave Rich a heads up – I had no idea who he was, and said I’m going to be there I would love to just grab 15 minutes of your time after service to ask you a couple questions. And I went and I took pictures of everything… Rich Birch — Yes. Kadi Cole — …and I you know jotted down all the notes… Rich Birch — Wow. Kadi Cole — …and learned how to hang a sign in from the ceiling of a school and you know all those early days. Rich Birch — Yes. Kadi Cole — Um and so it was great and he was really helpful. He’s probably stayed with us 45 minutes. I brought my sister with me because I didn’t want to be sitting with this guy, you know, just the 2 of us. I didn’t know what the dynamics would be. And so um and that was great. And then I didn’t talk to Rich again for probably 10 years. Rich Birch — Yeah. Kadi Cole — And ah when we were sharing this story one time a few years ago, that’s when I realized just maybe three years ago, that oh my goodness people had such different experiences. I didn’t even know to ask for those things. I didn’t even know that shadowing a leader at a church was an option. I certainly never got invited to someone’s dinner at their house till maybe five years ago when I wrote a book. Kadi Cole — And so and ah that isn’t Rich’s ah you know that wasn’t you, that wasn’t Jim, that wasn’t me – that was just the dynamic that we grew up in. And all of those sort of experiences and habits I would say one of my challenges as a leader has been to learn and ask questions, and then ask for those kind of opportunities. Every time I’ve asked someone says yes. And if I would have asked Jim, he would have said yes. I really just never thought of it. Rich Birch — Right. Fascinating. Kadi Cole — And not only that but to also offer that to people. Because when you grow up without a lot of those experiences, you don’t know to offer them. It’s kind of like parents who, you know, never said I love you, or never heard that from their parents, they have to work extra hard to offer that to their kids. And so even in my own leadership I’ve had to really challenge myself bring someone with you, invite someone to come, bring them to your house for dinner. You know, just all of those things that I think for many men this is just how you grow leaders and how you do leadership. But for women who are kind of breaking in, these are brand new concepts. And we don’t know that world exists. We don’t know to ask for it, and we certainly don’t know how to offer it to other people. Rich Birch — Um, oh um, yeah, that’s so fascinating to me. Like yeah, and it’s humbling. You know I think a part of that it’s it is um because I I don’t… so it was odd. It was odd that – it wasn’t like there was lots of other people doing that. I remember him at the time I met with some guy there and he and I was like this is amazing. Like I can’t believe that, you know, you guys, you must get these all the time. And they’re like… Because at that point multisite was like this weird thing that Jim was working on. It was like… Kadi Cole — Right. I would say though in church ministry people were doing that. If you were a youth pastor you could kind of like find the guy and go hang out. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. No that is very true. Kadi Cole — Yeah. Rich Birch — No that’s very true. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, that’s true. It’s interesting Kadi Cole — So Rich, um over the years then so you’ve kind of had this journey of of having your mind expanded, thinking about it, reflected, but I also know you’ve been a pretty intentional champion for women in different environments and churches that you’ve been in. What are some of the actions that you have ah considered and been intentional about and like purposefully done to open doors for women, or advocate for female leaders that you think of made a good impact? Maybe some of the things you did that actually were terrible ideas. I’m sure people would love to hear about what not to do. Rich Birch — Sure. Rich Birch — Just kind of teach us from your experience with 25 years in the game, like what have you learned about how to do this and how you can leverage your ah position and your authority to open doors for female leaders. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. So um, there’s been a number of things over the years. I think the general ah what I’ve tried to do is be a vocal advocate for women um both with them directly, ironically. Like I think there’s a um, like literally just today I was in a podcast interview earlier where there was an incredible woman that unpacked literally best-in-class stuff. Like I’ve never heard this stuff before. And after it goes off the air and and she’s like, oh was that was that any good? Like was that, you know, was this like? And and I’m like, oh I’ve seen this before inside. I didn’t say this to her. I’m like and so I was like listen what you just shared is the best stuff that I’ve ever heard any church leader share on this. Like this is this is a big deal, like it’s it’s amazing what you’re doing. And I know um you know I there’s I guess part of it with women directly I’ve tried to find those moments to be like I want you to know that what you’re doing is amazing, like it’s incredible. And and I want to make ah explicit what I know is implicitly true. Rich Birch — Um, you know I’ve also tried to be a um, a willing advocate and ally with other men, with other guys. Um, you know there was a church I who I dearly love worked for and you know love them and when we were engaged in the before I went and worked there, you know, your work working through all the different things that you’re, you know, trying to figure out. And um one of the things that I bumped up against was their um you know their theological conviction around women in leadership was different than mine. You know they they they wouldn’t use the word the title pastor with a woman. Um and they wouldn’t they limited, you know, the role of women in leadership. And so we talked about it before we went in, and before I started. I was like well I just disagree with you on this, and like so we need to talk about it. And we talked about it. We had like let’s open scripture and look at how we, you know… I said listen on my side I’m I’m willing to join because I don’t I don’t think, and don’t take this the wrong way Kadi, but like for them it wasn’t like a huge deal. It was just like this is what we think. And like we’re not, they’re not pounding it. But it is like ah but this is this is where we are. This is our conviction. And I’m like, okay well if you’re willing to hire me knowing that I have a difference, you know, of thought on this, and knowing that it’s going to be something that’s going to come up. Like I’m I’m going to talk about it, but I’m not going to talk about it all the time, like it’s not like every meeting we’re going to talk about these things. But don’t be surprised when we bring it up. Rich Birch — And so over the years, you know, there was ah there was a ah particular woman that was on our staff, and and this probably is I was probably not that atypical of it an experience, but she oversaw our kids ministry, and was probably the most creative person on our team. Like did um, just did amazing stuff. Like and so I started by saying like well she’s does an amazing job pastoring young, you know, or the next generation. And that was like what – what are you talking about? I’m like I know we don’t call her a pastor but like that’s actually what she’s doing. Like we we we may not like we may not use that word but that is actually what it’s happening. Um, and, you know, and she was the kind of leader who was not like I’m trying to you know she was not trying to go for the title. She wasn’t like, hey this is a really big deal for me. But I I was in that same kind of encouraging way like, man, you’re doing an incredible job here. Great stuff, all that. Rich Birch — And that led to a series of conversations over, it was probably—I was thinking about this before—like it was probably over eighteen months to 2 years, like this was not a like instantaneous thing. It was a protracted conversation. Um, where eventually it came to it came to a head where it was like, ok I either need to stop talking about it, or they need to fire me, or there needs to be some sort of change because it’s it’s not um, you know, we can’t just keep talking about this. And so I um and and eventually they did end up changing their position. You know it ended up being like hey we’re we’re going to, um you know we’re going to take a different view on this. And actually to this day they you know they’ve they’ve done that which is… Rich Birch — Um, and that’s like a whole there’s a whole other conversation we can have there, particularly I think in multisite churches I think there should be, man, there’s there’s lots of opportunity even if you would hold you know federal headship the you know the most senior roles for men. Even if you hold that to be true, um, man, there’s still a lot of latitude I personally think, um and and would challenge you to to think about that. And and and challenge you to to think about it from like what do you actually think about scripture. Because I think this is one of those areas where people just kind of take they just swallow what’s been given to them. They haven’t really thought about it. They haven’t they haven’t processed it. And you could end up having a lower view of scripture. You just are like I’m just kind of taking what’s come to me; I haven’t never actually wrestled with it. Rich Birch — So that you know that was pretty dramatic, and the thing I love about that is there’s a lot of incredible women who are serving in that church today who are, you know, doing, you know… And that that woman that I told you about that’s like the most creative person on their team, she serves on their senior leadership team today. They’re you know, doing incredible, you know, incredible things and the church is way better for it. Like it’s like the church is moving forward and reaching more people. Rich Birch — Um, so yeah, that’d be a few of attention intentional things. But to be honest, I actually think although that was a little bit dramatic and that was with, you know, kind of advocating with guys, I actually find the the kind of like both silent like um, opening doors like, hey why don’t you can you come and speak at this thing? Or like can you be a part of this? Or can I serve the food instead of you? And the like trying to be encouraging along the way I think actually has more impact. I think actually just saying to people, no no like it’s going to be it’s going to be great. You can do this, you’ve you’ve got this. So I don’t know – there’ll be a few things. Kadi Cole — Oh I love both of those stories. And there is something to be said for people who champion against the systems or ah, you know, take on women being paid less for the same work. Or whatever it is in your context that you see some things a little ah inequitable or could use some championship that those systems and structures do open doors and have long term effects. But I do want to agree and highlight just that ah affirmation to women, that what you’re doing really matters, or you know your stuff, or you’re good at this – you should keep doing this. Kadi Cole — Ah, we talk a lot about the sticky floor – I think we talked about that on the podcast. It’s kind of those thoughts and ideas women have in their head that sort of keep them from having confidence or keep them from going for leadership opportunities. And if you want to listen to that podcast, we’ll put it in the show notes. (Um you see how I delegated that to you on that.) Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good – I love it. Kadi Cole — Yeah. Rich Birch — Well and that’s true though because you know and I and I’ll say I don’t know that I’ve said this publicly. I can’t remember if I said this on the episode with you. But like and I’ve said it to a number of ah female leaders who I’ve had on the podcast. When we first started the podcast 746 episodes ago, Beth, who is like this only happens because she works on it. She’s amazing. Um her and I I was like what I want to do, is I want to have every other episode be 1 female, 1 male, 1 female, 1 male. And and what I want to do is not I want to have female leaders, and not talk about the fact that they’re female leaders. Like just talk about the amazing work that they’re doing. Kadi Cole — Oh I Love that. Rich Birch — And so I think we got 5 or 6 episodes in, like and we ran out of women. Kadi Cole — Yeah. Rich Birch — Like I was like, I can’t find I can’t find enough. And so you know that’s like super heartbreaking to me. Um, and but interestingly, so over the years we’ve you know we we probably pursue like of the at those 750, call at episodes, like we’ve probably pursued 700 of those like we mostly go and find people. And if we ask 10 guys to be on the podcast, 9 out of 10 will say yes. If I ask 10 women, it’s probably 7 or 6 will say will say yes. Ah if and then um women who express um concern after, like ask to either hear the episode or… because obviously I don’t want I want people this is not I’m not like some hard hitting I’m not trying it’s not gotcha journalism. I want people to walk away feeling great about it. And so I’ll say that, hey just let me know. You know, there’s probably it’s it might be 10x the number of women who express some sort of concern about the content to men. And so I um in my little world I want to do what I can to try to turn that around. So I’m even this woman I was telling about earlier today, I’m like I had the same conversation with her. And I’m like please can you send me ah women leaders because I we want to feature them more. Um, so but I’ve… that to me has been a real stark example where because it’s like statistically true, and I’ve been in all those conversations. I can I can tell you that. And that there’s a part of that that frankly, like really bums me out. Like I’m like, oh, that’s that’s a wide swath of the Christian world. Rich Birch — Women leaders particularly who are feeling like not great about their own leadership. Or or or maybe it’s the other way around; maybe guys are like just oblivious. They all think they’re experts. I don’t know what it is. Like it’s some… there’s there’s there’s definitely a gender difference there – that my experience has been that there’s a gender difference. Um and uh man, I’d love to turn that around and make that different for the next generation. I would love to create – I’m a Gen Xer born in 1974 the bottom of the bust, lowest birth rate in the twentieth century. And so most of what I’ve been doing in my ministry is taking stuff from the boomers and giving it to, you know, millennials or Gen Z. And man I would I would really hope for women coming after us that this would be like it’s just a non-issue. That like in 10 years we they would listen to this and be like, man, those people were so silly back then. I really hope that happens. Kadi Cole — That would be great. I actually think that’s going to happen. I believe that. I think and one of the keys is is what you’re talking about. It’s helping the women leaders who are doing it now ah think about themselves from a more truthful perspective. So ah, part of this mindset is that high capacity female leaders are perfectionists, and we want it to be great. And we know that there’s very few opportunities for us. This is actually research that shows up for any minority. And so we put extra pressure on ourselves. We don’t want to do anything that’s going to like embarrass us, or embarrass you, or disappoint someone. So our standards are much higher than what most guys know that they can get away with. Kadi Cole — And so when you help me know, hey what you did there was excellent. Like I might go, was it good enough? And you’re like that was actually an A. And I’m thinking, if I could just get a C. Rich Birch — Right. Kadi Cole — And so every time a male leader, especially a godly leader, right? A spiritual authority person, a pastor, speaks truth to me about me, it changes my own view of myself. The biblical example of this that I talk about a lot is Esther and Mordecai. You know Esther is positioned by God to have this huge influence. And when it comes time, she second guesses herself. She’s like, I’m not the person for the job, and everyone else knows she is. She can’t see it. And it takes a Mordecai to step in and say, listen who knows but you have been put in this position for such a time as this. I see God’s hand on you. I’ve seen him position you. This is exactly why you’re here. Don’t back down; lean in. Kadi Cole — And as women who grow up in circumstances, sometimes very similar to Esther, we can’t see that for ourselves. And so thank you for doing that. And I just want to encourage everyone out there, men and women, any sort of leader, you know, the more encouragement, the more affirmation, the more we can identify and call out greatness in people, it really does help them see themselves better and opens more opportunities for their future from from just who they are. Rich Birch — Yeah I would, say so this um one of the things I do in my life is I um help run this ah overnight kids camp. It’s like this great curveball in this environment, people are like what? It’s like a whole other conversation. But it’s it’s great. It’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s the it’s the place that gave me my first kind of leadership um opportunity. Kadi Cole — Amazing. Rich Birch — And um and so I’m happy to give back to that. It’s an interesting piece of the puzzle. One of the things that I’ve done there is I pretty regularly with the guys whenever we have like a chance to do, you know, like we’re maybe just with the guy leaders is I’ll ask the question, I’ll say you know at some point you’re going to realize that you’re you’re the most powerful person in the room. (It’s classic Andy Stanley.) You’re the you know you’re the most powerful person in the room. Yeah, that’s going to happen in your life. And the question is, what are you going to do with it? How are you going to use that moment – to serve yourself, or are you going to use that moment to serve others? And um, you know, I I want to be counted as a leader who used that to serve other people, right? That that we like hey I think that’s what Jesus demands of us. I think and you know this is a part of a broader spectrum. We could be talking or a broader conversation around you know I’m a um I’m a white male. You know with has had lots of privilege in his life. There’s lots of things that when I look over the history of my life just doesn’t make sense. It’s like well I think it’s because it’s just who I was, right? And I, you know, have the same conversation, you know, 10 years ago had similar revelation with my black friends, where I, you know, had someone challenge me around said, hey you know sit down with a black friend and ask him ah to tell you about when you know their dad or their parents told them about what to how to interact with cops. Have that conversation. And I’m like what are you talking about? That’s crazy. And so talked with a friend of mine, had this conversation over lunch. I said listen this is going to be a little uncomfortable; I’m so sorry. But I I am trying to learn and grow. Rich Birch — And this this individual I would say came from a very similar background as mine like I would say like like they grew up in the suburbs, they’re you know all of that stuff. And their experience interacting with the cops was different than mine [inaudible] experience. And so now when I if I get pulled over, and hasn’t happened a lot in the last ten years, but when I do get pulled over by cops, I take my wallet out, I take turn the cars off, I put the keys on the on the counter in front of me. I do all of that stuff that my black friend does because I’m like I shouldn’t have to… he shouldn’t have to think about that. Like he shouldn’t that shouldn’t have to be in his his brain. Rich Birch — And so you know I think this is a part of a, you know as a part of a whole thing that I you know I think there’s a personal journey. But I think it’s it should be a journey in general I think as Christ’s followers, as leaders, who also happen to be in this case, white and male, are trying to figure out how do we use our power? Kadi Cole — Right. Rich Birch — How do we use that to help other people? Or you know because it’s because a bunch of it’s been given to us. It’s actually got nothing to do with me. It’s not that I’m not great. Kadi Cole — Yeah, we’re well we’re blessed to be a blessing, right? Rich Birch — Yeah. Kadi Cole — Like we’re supposed to be conduits of those things. And so when we recognize what we’ve been given, we are more empowered to be able to give it away, and multiply that for the kingdom. Rich Birch — Love it. Kadi Cole — So okay as we wrap up here, one last question. I’d love to know what piece of advice you’d like to give to the guys who are listening around this topic? And what one piece of advice would you like to give to women, female leaders who are listening? Rich Birch — Um, well I would say to guys. In order, it’s unfortunate, but to lead within the ah evangelical church which most of the people who listen would call themselves at least be “small e” evangelical. This area is going to require you to have some awkward conversations. Like it doesn’t if it’s not happening, if there’s not a dialogue already taking place around these issues, you probably you need to raise it. You need to raise your hand and say, hey, like can can we talk about this? Like there’s because this is a part of the world that we’re in. Like this is um and and it probably requires us as guys to pick up that ball and and run with it. Um, that we can um, get the ball rolling in a way that’s different in the same way that that guy Darrell for me was like oh that was like a paradigm shifter because he’s he stepped out and like. That’s a bit awkward, right? To say to explain to someone, hey I I don’t want you to have to serve this meal all the time because I don’t always want there to look like women are people who just serve meals. That’s like an awkward thing to say, right? It’s like because you’re like well I don’t think of you like that. That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t actually think that’s who you are. Like you can get all caught up in that. But I think we have to probably um, be you know we we have to take the lead and and do something here to to lead some awkward conversations. It’s probably going to take that. Rich Birch — And then I think to women, I don’t know. Man, like there’s just so many incredible women who lead in the church who are doing amazing things. And um, you know, this past fall my wife and I were we got a chance to travel to um HTB out in London and was a great experience. And um, you know my there was multiple times where people had words of knowledge kind of prophecy over her. And they—which I don’t know what you think about all that stuff, but that’s fine, just go with me here for a minute, friends—and multiple of them pointed in the same direction. It was like you have a voice; you should use it. You know, you have a voice. And I’d say I’d say to women like like you have so much to offer. Kadi Cole — Yes. Rich Birch — Like I look at the churches that have women empowered in them and I’m like those are such life-giving places where where just so many good things are happening. And um, you know it’s going to take you like stepping up in a weird sort of way to like um for that to for all the good things that you have to offer for those to happen. And I wish that wasn’t the case; I wish just it was I wish every church was just the place that kind of welcomed you. But in the same way that guys are going to have to have awkward conversations, like you’re going to have to take advantage of opportunity that comes your way. Like you’re you’re going to have to um, you know, to stick your neck out a little bit. And um and say yes when someone asks you to be on their podcast. Um, you look you’re you’re gonna have to you’re gonna have to do that. Um, because because it’s about modeling for the next generation. So like on that story but my my wife, there’s a young woman who’s um on our staff at church and she’s she’s in her early 20s and she’s just starting out. And our church is very um empowering to women. Um, but she’s been saying to her like, no, like don’t don’t feel stuck and limited. Don’t you know don’t feel like this is the box you’ve got to run in. You know the sky’s the limit. The church needs you; we need you to step in. And so um, you know I think we we have to get beyond all the just like the Billy Graham rule and all that stuff like there’s so many… you know we’ve got to get to the place where we’re like, how do we find a way for both genders to be fully alive and fully leveraging who we are to reach the people who, you know, God’s put in our path. So those would be a few things I would say. Kadi Cole — I love it. Well and that’s the goal. And we need we need men at the leadership table. We need women at the leadership table. The goal is not to um, not the goal is it for the future to be female. The goal is for the future to be together. That’s what we’re really trying to do, and we both have to show up and say yes in order to do that. So, Rich, thank you so much for your ah vulnerability, and your authenticity, and just speaking from your heart, and being open for a you know crazy idea from me um, ah to be able to have this conversation. I hope it really blesses people and encourages people to continue to lean into this topic. And ah, we both have resources on this subject so if people want to learn more please reach out to us. And thanks so much. I just really appreciate your championing women and your role in the kingdom. Rich Birch — Yeah, turning the tables back around on you, Kadi, I how can people get in touch with you, because I know there are church leaders that are listening in that are saying, man, we need to we probably need to do some work in this area. We need to but think about this a little bit. Give us a frame of what that looks like. They’re almost 3 quarters of an hour in at this point. Give us a framework on ah you know how can you help churches think through these issues. What does that typically look like, how do you engage, and where can people get in touch with you? Kadi Cole — Yeah, so I did write a book specifically for church leaders on this called “Developing Female Leaders”. You can get it on Amazon or Audible. And then my website kadicole.com spelled k-a-d-i-c-o-l-e-dot-com. I’ve got all sorts of resources and downloads. I coach people, I do consulting for churches, I speak at a lot of churches. Um and would love to engage you if you want to move forward on this topic, whether it’s with your elder board, or your staff, or your congregation on a weekend. Um I’m very passionate about it and want to really help churches, you know, make the most of who God is brought to their congregation. Rich Birch — Thanks so much, Kadi, appreciate you, appreciate your ministry. Thanks so much for ah for interviewing me today. It was great. Thanks so much for being here. Kadi Cole — Thank you, Rich.

What larger trends are impacting churches across the country? The landscape of our culture continues to shift & evolve. Growing churches respond to those changes and find ways to thrive. Learn from the latest insights on trends and how those impact you and your team. Don’t miss this special podcast episode as we hear from three Executive Pastors in the trenches who are making a difference today: Jeremy Peterson is an Executive Pastor at One Church in New Hampshire and Vermont with 20+ years of experience. He loves helping churches and teams break through barriers, and enjoys reading, running, and college football. Lisa Penberthy is a church leader and consultant with 20 years of experience and an M.Div and MBA in nonprofit management. She was an Executive Pastor of Operations at San Diego Rock Church. She’s passionate about stewarding people’s calling and church resources. Brandon Beard is a church leader with 30 years of experience and is an expert in church growth, ministry structures, and leadership development. He currently serves as Executive Pastor of Campus Ministry at Compass Christian Church in Colleyville, TX, helps churches navigate the future and experience exponential growth, and loves working in Uganda and cheering for Seattle sports teams. We’re talking about their outlook and their current strategy for 2023. Communicate why giving matters. // It’s not uncommon for churches that went debt-free during covid to now see giving drop 30-40%. Whether you’re going after a particular vision during a capital campaign or going debt free, after you celebrate, it’s important to continue the conversation. Make sure to thank your givers and help them understand why giving matters. Connect the dots for them so they can see how they are helping to move the mission forward. Clear entry points for service. // While churches have gotten people back into the seats, we are still struggling to get volunteers to return and serve. A whole new group of people joined our churches in the last year, and people who are new have to learn what it means to serve. If you have a discipleship program, the first step is to help people find an entry point, whether they have made a decision for Christ or are haring about him for the first time. Make that process really easy for them and help them get engaged with opportunities as they move forward in their relationship with Jesus. Listen to your team. // Slow down and listen to your staff team to really know where they are at. Listen to some younger people on your staff and learn from them. Set aside short-term thinking and start dreaming about where the church wants to be in five or ten years. Support your lead pastor. // Covid has taken its toll on most lead pastors; it’s time for executive pastors to lead up. Be sensitive to your lead pastor’s exhaustion; give them some care and time off for the sake of their mental health. Everyone needs to be honest about where they are right now. Business or friends. // It may be harder to develop a relationship with the lead pastor. You need to know if your lead pastor wants to be friends, or wants to do business. You can do both, but know which is priority.  Take notice of how involved the lead pastor really wants to be in different aspects of the church. Remember that trust with your lead pastor is built over time. Find the needs of the community. // Figure out who you are as a church and what is the need in your community. If something isn’t working to reach your community, make the necessary changes. Engagement is the new way to measure attendance. XP Summit. // XP Summit is an opportunity for executive pastors to connect with one another. It allows you to sit down with others and talk about the challenges you’ve all been going through, plus get the coaching you need. For $50 off the XP Summit in Dallas on May 16 & 17, 2023 use the discount code unseminary, which can be applied until February 15. Learn more at www.xpsummit.org. 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: CDF Capital Since 1953, CDF Capital has helped Christians and churches embrace their part in this story by providing the 3 kinds of capital every congregation needs for growth—Financial Capital, Leadership Capital, and Spiritual Capital. At CDF Capital, we care about each of these components. When a church is properly resourced financially, spiritually, and in leadership, lives are transformed. Sign-up to learn more about CDF Capital and how we can help your church grow. Receive a 50% discount on a monthly subscription to the CDF Capital Subscribe & Save Bundle.

Thanks for joining us for the unSeminary podcast. I’m talking with Frank Bealer, the co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Phase Family Centers as well as Chief of Staff at Local Church.  Is your church considering a multi-use strategy? Does it seem overwhelming as you think about how to get started and all that you need to learn? Listen in as Frank shares how to get the resources and coaching you need while mitigating the distractions that can come with multi-use. Preschool, parents, and events. // Phase Family Centers were started with a desire to help churches both fund their ministry and engage communities differently. The idea was broken down into three boxes: preschool, parents, and events. Frank, along with Reggie Joiner, worked on figuring out how to structure a multi-use strategy that was really intentional about coming alongside churches for the purposes of improved stewardship and community engagement. Uniquely suited. // Churches are uniquely suited to help meet the needs of the community around us. It could be something such as offering preschool, which is one of the crises in America right now. Churches already have the facilities and the posture needed to help address the childcare crisis, and permeate the operations of a preschool with warmth, safety, care, kindness. Do a site and market analysis. // Rather than assuming that preschool or event space is the thing needed in your community, first do a site and market analysis like any other business would. What are the actual needs in your unique community? Determine what is the business plan, what is the strategy, and what are the end goals. Mitigate the distraction. // Any extra program or ministry you do is a distraction from something. It’s important to mitigate that distraction when you get involved with multi-use. Hire a manager who is a good culture fit with your church and also has experience for the business you are adding (ex. preschool, coffee shop, event center, etc.) Then instead of using Google to figure out your manuals and policies, partner with Phase Family Centers to put together the resources you need. You get to run the operation but you’re not alone in figuring things out. When the manager is having a hard time, they can call Phase for help instead of distracting the church’s executive leadership team with their questions. Have a marketing plan. // Preschool is a proven business. Events are a proven business. However, don’t assume that people will show up as soon as you open just because you’re a church. It’s important to have a marketing plan and budget as you seek to serve and meet the needs of the broader community. Phase helps anywhere on the multi-use journey. // Phase will work with churches who know where they want to go as well as those who are stuck figuring out where to begin. The Phase Family Center website provides more information about working together, and starts by exploring questions with you. Then a call with someone at Phase will unpack your ideas, dreams, and what may be your barriers.   You can learn more about teaming up with Phase at www.phase.center/partners, plus find Frank on social media @fbealer. 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: Leadership Pathway If you are trying to find, develop and keep young leaders on your team look no further than Leadership Pathway. They have worked with hundreds of churches, and have interviewed thousands of candidates over the past several years. They are offering a new ebook about five of the core competencies that are at the heart of the leadership development process with every church that they partner with…just go to leadershippathway.org/unseminary to pick up this free resource. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Super excited for today’s conversation – longtime friend Frank Bealer with us. He’s the co-founder and Chief Growth Officer family or Phase Family Centers, and he’s also the Chief of Staff at Local Church. He’s he’s fantastic leader; he’s the kind of person you should be tracking with him. Frank was at one point the Family Pastor at a little church called Elevation there in North Carolina—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them before, friends—ah before he moved over and has joined or really launched Phase Family Centers. He he’s also is really which faith family, if you’re not familiar, or Phase Family if you’re not familiar with them are really a leader in this whole multi-use strategy that we really should be thinking about. And so I wanted to get him on and he agreed to come on. Frank, so glad you’re here. Welcome to the show. Frank Bealer — Man, I’m glad to be here. And as always, Rich, I’m always learning from you and listening to podcasts and other great leaders that are out there. So thank you for facilitating this and being so generous with your time to drive these conversations because I know they’re making me better. Rich Birch — Oh thanks so much. I really appreciate that, Frank. But why don’t we fill it the picture a little bit. What did I miss there on the Frank Bealer story? What what do we want to make sure people know about about you? Frank Bealer — Oh gosh. Um, yeah so business guy turned pastor, serving at Elevation full time. Felt led to figure out a way… what I was wrestling with is, Elevation was, at the time we were at I don’t know 17 campuses or something like that 12 to 17 during that journey of campuses. Um, attendance was up, giving was up, small group attendance was up, volunteer participation was up, frequency of attendance was going down. So I was trying to crack the code of how do we engage families different. I saw the children’s ministry data. I was trying to figure it out from both Sundays and during the week. Frank Bealer — At the same time. A good friend of mine, Reggie Joiner, who created helped launch North Point Community Church with Andy Stanley and created Orange curriculum, was wrestling with an idea of how do we help churches fund their ministry and engage communities differently. So he drew three boxes on a piece of paper that would ultimately be Phase Family Center. He called it Preschool, Parents, and Events. And it was his way of going, Ok can we do a multi-use strategy but be really intentional about it to where we really come alongside of churches to leverage that multi-use for both improved stewardship and greater community engagement. Frank Bealer — And so fast track. Um, you know that was happened by a mutual friend of ours, Rich, Carey Nieuwhof, you know my best friend, Carey. Carey made the connection with ah me and Reggie. At that point I was a speaker dude for Reggie. Ah, but then we realized that we were wrestling with some very similar things that honestly church leaders across America and across the world have been wrestling with. And we’ve just kind of got our unique take on it at Phase. Rich Birch — Love it. So kind of ah, pull apart Phase a little bit – tell us a bit more about it. What is the, you know, how do you attack those 3 issues, those 3 areas of engagement? What does that actually look like for folks that maybe are un ah unaware of Phase and what you do. Frank Bealer — Sure. So at our first location we worked with a site developer, bought thirteen acres, eight acres buildable, about million dollars an acre. I mean expensive land where somebody would want to have a church, but it’s cost prohibitive. Great location. Um, and what we did here was we’re the operator. We’re the master tenant. And we run a preschool, coworking/coffee shop and events. And oh, by the way, there are a couple churches that use the space on the weekends. They pay nominal lease payment or part of the lease payment, but most of the facility, this 62,000 square foot facility, is paid for by the business operations that we run. We carry that. Frank Bealer — While we’re in the process of building this building, Mark Batterson up in DC said, hey, ended up with this city block; God’s doing some really cool stuff. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — There’s a child care crisis in DC; we’re trying to figure out how to do this. We don’t want to do it alone. Can we partner together? So up there we helped renovate their children’s ministry space. It’s used by the church on Sundays and during the week we operate a preschool. Frank Bealer — Well all this is happening, and then covid hits. So I end up in the 62,000 square foot building, sitting here by myself, waiting on the world to reopen. The thing that didn’t change were churches were still calling, wanting to figure out multi-use and what a Phase Partnership could look like. And I guess I should point out Phase – PHAC that phrase comes from the idea of parenting idea of us saying this negative statement, it’s just a phase. Rich Birch — Right, right. Frank Bealer — Like it’s like we just got to get through this, right? And get on to next thing. Well our idea is it’s just a phase; don’t miss it. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — You’re never going to get these moments back. Some of the things that drive you crazy, like that baby not sleeping us means that baby’s not going to sleep on your chest anymore and you’re going to have those special moments, right? So we’re just trying to help parents leverage those moments. So Phase, while I’m sitting here by myself. Um, I’m trying to figure out how I can help more churches because at the pace I was going, I could do 3 to 5 a year… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — …where we’re the operator and we’re dropping in churches and or partnering with churches in some way. And yet the demand and inquiries was way higher than that. Rich Birch — Sure. Frank Bealer — So we’re trying to figure out what to do. And so I had created a licensing idea to share our resources and and concepts and things that we’re learning and things we had spent lots of money on, trying to figure out. Well during that I gathered my investors together to give them a financial update due to covid and when we’re going to reopen, and then share this licensing idea. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — And one of the guys that was on the call is the Chief Innovation Officer for Chick-Fil-A. Rich Birch — Right. Yes. Frank Bealer — And as I present my licensing idea he says, Frank, that’s a really good idea. Congratulations. You just invented franchising. And we all had a good laugh of like, okay and I’ve never done franchising. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — And the idea of Phase, ah called Phase Partners, the idea of us franchising and partnering with churches to help with the operations, and help give them wisdom, but it be in their business, but not letting them do it alone was born out of that. Rich Birch — Love it. Frank Bealer — And so now we have a franchise disclosure document and we’re now helping churches execute on a multi-use strategy. Rich Birch — Okay, I love this. And friends I want to dive in on this. The thing I love about Frank is was tons I love about you, but the one thing I love about you one of the things I love about you is, you know, you’re trying to solve real world problems. You’re helping real churches, you know, with real things. And here you are providing a great solution for something that I think a lot of us have wondered about, which is, hey we’ve got this facility. And I’ve even heard of, in fact, I know of churches I’ve coached who have spent real cash like actual money like tons of money on space that they envision for multi-use, but then doesn’t actually get used in that manner. Because of they miss this operational in between. They missed this like, hey we’re not sure exactly… how do we do this? How do we how do we run this stuff? Rich Birch — But let’s take a step back and convince me that I should even be thinking about that. Like I, you know, isn’t like having a daycare, or running an event center, or you know opening up a coffee shop, isn’t that just a distraction to what we’re supposed to do as a church? Isn’t that, you know, it doesn’t that reduce our flexibility? Doesn’t it don’t we become slaves to somebody who’s running a totally different kind of operation? Help us understand how those fit together; how does a multi ah -use strategy actually help push us forward? Frank Bealer — Yeah, so yeah, those are all complexities that we have to navigate, right? And so let’s rewind a little bit. A few decades ago churches all across America ah we’re doing some kind of multi-use strategy and many of them were doing something that was somewhat lackluster in performance. Rich Birch — Sure. Frank Bealer — It wasn’t ah experiencing the evangelism they thought it was. It wasn’t discipling the number of kids they thought it was. Um, there was not a good, healthy, symbiotic relationship. And so it’s us and them, and the preschool took my crayons, and… Rich Birch — Yes. Frank Bealer — …we couldn’t find this, and they broke this table, and it became very adversarial. Rich Birch — Yep. Frank Bealer — So then you have a crew like Andy Stanley and a lot of people that are going, we’re doing too much stuff in a mediocre way; let’s get back to the thing that matters most. Let’s present the gospel clearly; let’s do a really good job on Sundays. Rich Birch — Yep. Frank Bealer — Well I don’t disagree with any of that. That was it was a response that I felt like overall our nation needed to do. We needed to shore things up and get back to some excellence and some expectations and quality in what we offer. It’s not enough to just have good facilities. That’s not a strategy. I have a building; let’s do stuff with it. That’s not a strategy. And so… Rich Birch — Yes. Frank Bealer — …there was this kind of reining in. Well now what we’re seeing is there’s a whole funding conversation of like there’s a necessity to this. But let’s put that aside for a second because that’s not really what you were addressing. You were talking to, how do we share space; this is distraction from what we’re supposed to be doing. This relationally what does this look like? Frank Bealer — Well we know in our nation here in America that top 10 priorities among every presidential candidate and thought leader in our nation, child care is a huge issue. Rich Birch — So true. Frank Bealer — So specifically, preschool, it is a childcare crisis in our nation. And the church is uniquely positioned to meet that need. We always want to be able to meet needs in the community. Now here’s where I would push back. Rich Birch — What why is the church uniquely unique… Why is the church uniquely suited for that need? Frank Bealer — Great question. Because we have the facilities already. Okay, which is a huge deal. Rich Birch — Okay. Frank Bealer — We we have the facilities already and we have the posture that’s needed to help fix our childcare crisis. We need warmth, safety, care, kindness – that needs to permeate the operations of a preschool. And oftentimes that isn’t present. It’s cold. It’s sterile. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Frank Bealer — It’s people that are just taking a check. Um, it just doesn’t have the warmth and extension of family that people long for. So what you have in our nation is everybody is saying we have to increase the quality of care, and decrease the cost. I don’t know how to do that. Rich Birch — Right. How do you do that? Yeah. Frank Bealer — The church can actually help do that. We could figure that out. But here’s our problem. Okay, if I go back to all the church that say it’s a distraction. We finally stopped doing it; people hated us because we stopped doing our preschool. Or we no longer open our event center up for other things and people are mad at us in the community, and look what we did. Well I always like to go back to, what was your business plan, what was your strategy, and what were your end goals with your preschool operations, or your event business, or your coffee shop? What was the win, and was it realistic? Frank Bealer — It’s interesting to me, Rich, that people that talk multi-use oftentimes in the church space talk about it from the lens of saying, hey we have children’s space; we should do a preschool. That’s that’s not at all what you should do. Rich Birch — Right, right. Frank Bealer — What we should do is do a site and market analysis, like you would for any other business across America, and go should we open a preschool? Anecdotally somebody has said that they had a hard time finding childcare in my community. Rich Birch — Right. Yes. Frank Bealer — But what’s the real need? Is it low income families can’t find affordable quality care? Is that there’s simply not enough license spots available for children? Well that determines your business model. In fact, many churches and preschools should have a licensed preschool so they can operate with government subsidies and serve low income families. But they don’t go in with that level of strategy. So… Rich Birch — Right, right. Frank Bealer — …so I say okay, so there’s this opportunity to engage the community. This need is real. But is it the church’s responsibility? Is it a distraction? (To go back to what you said.) And the answer is absolutely. It is a distraction. Rich Birch — Love it. Frank Bealer — So what we want to do is how do we mitigate the distraction? Rich Birch — Sure. Frank Bealer — Any extra program or ministry you do is a distraction from something. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Like I mean that’s a true statement like it’s not like as long as we split ourselves, that takes more responsibility. Here’s what I believe is the flaw in the multi-use strategy, okay? For across America, okay? Current multi-use strategy, visionary leader plus building facility. Add a manager. Someone who has managed a preschool before, managed a coffee shop—not owned—managed a coffee shop, managed an events business, plus Google. That is the equation for multi-use success in America. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — And it’s ah if we don’t have a handbook, we’ll Google one, find and replace the words. Now we have a handbook. Rich Birch — Right, right. Frank Bealer — If we need a policy on diaper changing, well Google one on the internet. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — What Phase is trying to do differently is go, well yeah when you do that you’re going to kind of find all these cracks along the way where it’s not cohesive, and there’s going be these flaws and when Google doesn’t give the answer you’ve got to go to your executive leadership team. And now it’s a distraction. So what we’re proposing is a visionary leader with a building, hire your manager. That’s your person. Find the right person that’s a good culture fit. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — And instead of using Google, use Phase. Let us provide your [inaudible] and your manuals, and your resources… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — … and let us figure out how to lock all the iPads in all the classrooms… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — …so inappropriate videos aren’t shown to children… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — …and like all those little nuanced things. How to do background checks properly that are different than church background checks. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Let us come alongside and help you. It is your business unit. You benefit from the upside of the profits and what’s what’s there. You get to run the operation, but you’re not alone. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — So therefore the manager when they’re having a hard time their first phone call is to Phase instead of to the executive leadership team of the church. We think that mitigates distraction and becomes a game changer to go, we can have better stewardship, engage our community better, but mitigate distractions. Rich Birch — Love it. So we know we had Mark DeYmaz a couple weeks ago on the podcast, and one of the things that we kind of briefly touched on was how the legal structure of these things all hang together. And you know you’re talk you’re talking about the church owning a business, you know, that’s obviously ultimately trying to generate revenue that would, you know, plow back into the church. Talk us through what you see as best practice on that side, the kind of structure. Obviously there’s a ton there. This is not legal advice. We’re not, you know, we’re not, you know, we don’t provide any of that. But give us a kind of the the back of the napkin; help us get our heads around that piece, you know, as we’re thinking about how this structure is. Because the because the issue again with my pessimist voice on, the issue is, man, who controls this thing? What if it goes sideways? You know, what, you know… I’m I’m a pastor; I’m nervous about kids in our kids ministry and they come for a week an hour a week let alone 8 hours a day five days a week, you know. Frank Bealer — Yeah. Rich Birch — Talk us through that. What’s that look like? Frank Bealer — So at the end of the day most churches that we work with across America will have a… Rich Birch — Yep. Frank Bealer — …an a wholly owned subsidiary, an LLC, a for-profit entitity that’s owned underneath the nonprofit. Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — Common board that’s influencing that and guiding that. And that’ll generate some taxes… Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — …on a part of your facility. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — It’s no big deal if it’s in the proforma. You just build it in the financial model. And it either makes sense to do it or not. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — But we don’t have to be worried about that. That’s one of the things that’s unique in multi-use strategy. I rarely see, when I talk to a church has been thinking multi-use, a quality business plan and proforma. There’s a lot of assumptions. It’s not very detailed. And I’m sitting there going, Ok maybe it generates some taxes. No big deal; put it in the proforma. It either works or it doesn’t work. Rich Birch — Right, right. Frank Bealer — Um, the same with your insurance. We have a standard at Phase that has all these additional coverages that we think you should have for a daycare that aren’t required by state, but help mitigate that exposure for the church. The way you do your additional insurance, all that, we spell all that out for you. Frank Bealer — That makes the policy cost more money. That’s fine. But does it work in the financial model or not? One of the big things I’ll say about distraction, Rich—this will be helpful – that proforma—one of the biggest tensions between a preschool or weekday school program and a church is the “us and them” nature of sharing the space. Specifically… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Churches on Sunday morning receiving their space in a condition other than how they expected. Rich Birch — Sure. Yes. Frank Bealer — And vice versa Monday morning 6am preschool teachers start rolling in, and it’s other than what they expected. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Our solution in this world—I do not understand this, Rich; this is crazy to me. Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — Our solution has been, well let’s give good checklists to volunteers at church on Sunday to hand it over on Monday morning. And then on Friday afternoon, after a really long week, let’s give our teachers our preschool teachers that are making 15, 16 bucks an hour a checklist of other things they have to do after all the kids leave to make the church happy. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — That creates an us and them response, right? Rich Birch — Right. Yes. Frank Bealer — Easiest solution ever, Rich, $250 to $300 a week, in your proforma… Rich Birch — Yep. Frank Bealer — …you hire an outside cleaning service that also moves the furniture. Rich Birch — Right. Resets everything. Right. Frank Bealer — Now if there’s a problem, there’s an outside accountability that nobody’s mad at each other. We’re not asking volunteers. We’re not asking teachers to work harder because they’re affiliated with the Church. We eliminate all that. And it either, once again, works in the proforma or not. And so we build our business plan, not overly optimistic, open a preschool at 50% occupancy and ramp up to 87% occupancy. Those are clear benchmarks and goal. We can know this and know that that doesn’t create a lot of capital burn on the front end. And then we can generate some great revenue for ministry. Do whatever you want to with it, okay? Um, it all either works in the proformo or it doesn’t. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — And that’s the thing that I get really excited about. Preschool is a proven business. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Events… proven business. Coworking, debatably, a proven business. So we can take the good assumptions out of the church space. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Well, we’re a church. As soon as we open it everybody’s just going to show up. No, no, no. Let’s have a marketing budget. Let’s have a plan. And if people choose to enroll or engage because of your credibility, let’s let that be a blessing… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — …not the business strategy. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — We’re going to build it and they’re going to come? No no, no. Let’s build it so they don’t know who we are. Can we build a sustainable business that serves and meets a need in the community, choosing whether or not to use faith-based curriculum and what guidelines you’re going to put around events, around the facility, and what you’ll allow and not allow in your facility. That’s fine. Put those guidelines in place. This is a very… Rich, I think we’ve overcomplicated it. Rich Birch — Right. Sure. Frank Bealer — And that’s why it becomes a distraction and burden because we we downplay some of the complexities and don’t build a plan for those. Rich Birch — Sure. Now if you’re if I’m a church that’s sitting here thinking, Yeah, okay, maybe we do need to think more clearly on the multi-use side. I feel like you’ve you’ve hit a few buttons, even in my leadership. I’m like, gosh, I feel like we’ve done the thing where it’s like, hey let’s just roll out a coffee shop. People just come in because it’s going to because you know they like us. Rich Birch — Um, there’s those three kind of different types of businesses you’ve talked about, whether it be a daycare, an events business, or you know a coworking/coffee kind of thing. What is your recommended route between, you know, the kind of starting point for a church? What should they consider? Which is the best of those models to start with – ah you can’t start with all three obviously. But if you were saying, hey wait a minute; maybe you can. I don’t know. Talk us through that. What should I be what should we be thinking about if we’re like, okay, we we should we do want to take some steps in this direction. Frank Bealer — Yeah. Rich Birch — Maybe even with Phase. Frank Bealer — The from a profitability and a financial just just how the numbers work, depending on your location, events can be good. Depending on your locations, preschool could be good. Those can go along at the same time, or separately. Because they impact different people, different sides of the building. They really are two different business models. Candidly, if you get preschool right, the EBITDAR—okay to get technical for a second—so earnings before interest, taxes, all that stuff, and rent. So your number that you produce, you can be in the 25/30% of revenue for a preschool operation… Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Right. Frank Bealer — …if you do it the right way. And that’s an industry benchmark. That’s not overly optimistic. If you’re doing $2,000,000 in in tuition a year, that’s that’s a really big number to fund ministry. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Frank Bealer — Like and that’s very attainable. This can be done pre-rent and you choose to do you pay yourself rent, or fund church planning initiatives. You can do whatever you want to with the money. That’s your call. Um, so from a preschool from an impact in the community, it has the greatest financial impact for the church and impact in the community to open a preschool. Candidly. It just if the need is there, genuinely there, and I believe that you should do a site and market analysis to determine what the real need is there, and we’re happy to help with that. Um, so that’s one. Events is just easier, ok, to do. Overall if you’re in the right location to do that… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Um, as Mark has said on your podcast. You got to price it the right way and structure it the right way. But I’ll tell you the biggest problem with events is even if they build a pricing structure (a church builds it), they dabble in events. And so maybe it generates a few thousand dollars per per month. Just to give you perspective, at Phase Alpharetta. Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, been there. I know I feel exactly what you’re talking about there. Frank Bealer — Okay. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Frank Bealer — At Phase Alpharetta, 500 seat auditorium, okay. Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — Outside of Sunday, because we have no revenue on Sunday – that’s a church. Outside of Thursday nights because the church is doing worship programming. So I can’t do anything. We run a business over there. We have a sales manager, and like they get along, and they know the church, the partners, no problems. We run a business; it generates about $60,000 a month in revenue. Six. Zero. Rich Birch — Wow. Frank Bealer — $60,000 a month. Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. Frank Bealer — And that’s on average. Just plug… Rich Birch — With 500 sq feet? Frank Bealer — 500 seat auditorium… Rich Birch — Right. Wow. Frank Bealer — …burning through like in… Now there’s expenses for cleaning services and things like that. But there’s a eye open. What I want to do with that number is not go, wow I can make $60,000. Maybe you can’t; depends on your location. All kinds of things. But here’s what I’m saying. There’s a different in opening a business and running it like a business unit. Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — And therefore you have marketing, and you go to trade shows, and you’re engaging with the community different, and the rotary and stuff like that. That’s different than we are now providing a clear pricing structure for our events for when people call us. Rich Birch — Yes. Frank Bealer — And that’ll be a few thousand dollars maybe a month. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — So it’s very different approach. Rich Birch — Yeah I could see that. And I’ve been there. Totally get what you’re saying. You know it’s that difference between our our building is available for rent, and we’re running an events business. That’s two totally separate approaches, right? It’s like if someone calls us, sure we’ll rent you. It’s like you can rent a space in the library at in town. But the library is not set up to rent their space there. It’s not what they’re thinking about. There isn’t someone that wakes up every day. Frank Bealer — Great example. Rich Birch — Well maybe maybe in your town, not in my town. You know they’re they’re, you know, they’re not thinking about that all day long. That’s ah that’s interesting. Yeah and I could see that on the daycare. You know there’s a recurring revenue side of that, right, that you are… you know, those kids they need to be cared for every day over for years you know and obviously there is you know they eventually age out. But then there’s more kids that come up, you know, underneath all that. That’s interesting. Rich Birch — Now if there let’s say I’m a church out there today and I feel like, hey we’ve we’re already running one of these things, or maybe all of them. We’re doing all of this. And I’m like, this is not going well; like this is painful. Um, we’ve done the, you know, maybe they was a little too close to home when you said the manager and a Google search. They were like oh gosh, that’s what we did. Um is that the kind of church you’d work with – a church that’s already engaged that they’re like we’ve got to redo all this; we’ve got to rebuild this thing. Talk us about talk talk to us about that. Frank Bealer — Absolutely. So we will do both. So what Phase does the way it works, simple. So think of ah if you’re not familiar franchising, if you want to franchise a McDonald’s, something else, you pay an upfront fee that comes with training and marketing and things like that, and then a percentage of revenue for your ongoing support, basically. Um. Rich Birch — Yep, yep. Frank Bealer — We are currently in conversations with right now my my database list of active churches that are we’re in dialogue and working through this is we have 239 churches that are currently working with us in some stage of, I’ve got questions; I need help. Maybe they haven’t spent a dollar. Frank Bealer — There’s 39 that have spent money and are working that direction toward, help us figure this out; help us improve our business model, ask the right questions. We don’t know; we’re not preschool experts. We’re not event experts. We don’t know what we don’t know. But they’re resonating with what we’re saying. Phase will work with both. We think that there’s a tremendous opportunity for churches that have had a preschool and it’s ended up at 62% occupancy, and it never quite had the impact they want, and they can’t figure out why they can’t get more. Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — Or they’re full and losing money and they can’t figure that out either because that was never part of the plan, and now the donations to the church and tithes are now funding the preschool ministry, but it’s not a that that wasn’t the plan. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Yeah. Frank Bealer — It’s not like we’re meaning to do that. And so I think there’s a coaching element to this and just a way that Phase can serve where there’s gonna be some people that we just share some of our resources with. We’ll give you our handbook; that’s fine if you want it. Like I’ll give it to you; I don’t I’m not gonna charge for that. But there’s some that need they need ongoing support. I’ll tell you here’s how they got there, Rich. Most of the time when you talk about a church that like, yeah, we’ve ended up with this kind of mediocre “not where we thought it was going to be” performance. And we don’t know what to do because we have a great space. We have a good location. We have a big church. Why isn’t this working? Usually what it is is they started with one manager that was somebody that was known and trusted, and somebody they really related with and it was safe, and they understood the vision and culture, and they were really solid. They were confident in that hire. Well then that higher retires, or moves on, or changes. And then we get a new hire. The problem is we don’t know how to train that person. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — Our senior leadership team isn’t an expert in preschool or events business; it’s not what they do. And so now what ends up happening is this senior leadership team ah gets a handful of straws and somebody draws a short straw, and they now oversee that area of ministry. And and so suddenly they’re like I guess I’ll Google some stuff and figure out, how do we fill our school? How do we get better teachers? How do we do training? Rich Birch — Yeah. Frank Bealer — And it’s just kind of pushed by the wind. And it’s really what whatever comes top of the Google search is how we’re training. And then we know in church or anything that we’re doing, right, we’ve got to get better and have a strategic approach to improving and constantly maintaining. Rich Birch — Absolutely. Frank Bealer — You you teach this; it’s what unSeminary podcast is. It’s all the things you didn’t learn that you need to know. Rich Birch — Sure, sure, sure, sure. Frank Bealer — And yet nobody’s raised their hand going, hey, you needed to know this for preschool. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — I’m sorry you they didn’t tell you. And the first person they just knew it because they were awesome, and they just loved the church. And and honestly they weren’t great but they went so above and beyond, they took care of any flaws in your system. When they have somebody working a 9 to 5 job… Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — …that’s not going above and beyond and serving your church, and you’re starting to see all the cracks, it’s not an indictment on anybody. It’s just we never put the infrastructure in place. So what Phase is trying to do is if you ever read the book “E-Myth” or “E-Myth Revisited”, it’s that idea of we’ve got all the systems, all the opps. Their first phone call is to us and we’re like, oh we already have that, and let us help you. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — And there’s very few circumstances, we believe, where the church leadership is having to get involved to make decisions about how to operate a preschool or an events business, if that makes sense. Rich Birch — Right, right. Absolutely. Well this is, you know, fascinating. You know as we kind of come to you know to land here, as we kind of look to the you know the end of the conversation um, if I was a church and I’m interested, I’m like okay you’ve convinced me enough that I’d least need to think about some next steps. What would be some of those next steps. How do we, you know, take kind of some initial steps to kind of get to know you guys better. Maybe start this conversation. Obviously it’s a significant conversation. You’re talking about upfront money. Talking about signing contracts – all that. No one’s going to do that in ah in a whim, but what would be some of those first steps that I could take if I’m if I’m intrigued today. Frank Bealer — Yeah, so ah, we have a landing page phase.center/partners. Um, we’re continuing adding more and more information on that site. Um I logged in today and it was down. I had to call somebody be like ah our a hub spot I disconnected something, but it’ll be fine by the time this airs. Um. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. Frank Bealer — …phase.center/partners – um, ah you go there, visit that. That’ll have good information. It’ll the information on there is designed to spark more questions, okay? Well how do they do curriculum? Can we do it as a nonprofit license center, or do we have to be for-profit? The answer depends on your state – just different rules like that. Frank Bealer — And then we schedule a call and we jump on, one of our team members jumps on with your senior leadership team, maybe a couple elders or trustees or whatever, and we just dream for 45 minutes. Let’s just talk. Let’s talk about what’s working, what’s not working, what you see. What are the barriers and opportunities? And then build a plan for next steps. Frank Bealer — More often than not what we find is that if they don’t currently have a multi-use strategy, it’s really really simple. They’re dabbling with it. They don’t really know where to begin, but it’s logical. So they feel like they should be having a conversation; they don’t know where to begin. For more often than not the very first thing that someone should do for an event or preschool operation, coffee shop too I just don’t not have a lot of knowledge around, that um is a site and market analysis. Rich Birch — Right. Frank Bealer — They need someone that’s an industry expert in that space to tell us what are opportunities and what our challenges are in opening a preschool in our space, or opening an events business, so that we’re then informed for our next step in conversation. What are the things that are going to make our space great? What aren’t? And so there’s very natural next steps. We’re happy to have a conversation; we’re not gonna charge anything for it. And we may land on, yeah, we don’t think you should do this, or maybe you should pivot. Or have you ever thought about something, you know, very different than what you’re thinking now. Frank Bealer — But here’s the thing, time and time again when we talk multi-use rarely ever am I getting a hard: no, we don’t want to ever have this conversation. I’m getting a: we’ve had some bad experience in the past but we feel like we should revisit it. Or no, we’re in a season where we definitely need to have a conversation, we just don’t know where to start. That’s the two conversation. There’ve been great leaders like Mark that have inspired church leaders across the nation that they need to do something with it. It’s just a little overwhelming. Rich Birch — Yes. Frank Bealer — And so what Phase is trying to do is provide a bunch of those answers to make it a little less overwhelming, if that makes sense. Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. Well and I think I think that’s a really clear um analogy. I think you know we want to partner with someone who had this is different than running a church. This is you know you I think sometimes as senior leaders, particularly competent senior leaders, you know we have to know where our expertise ends. Like we’re we’re good at a certain number of things and some of that relates to what we’re talking about here. But there’s a whole other school of thought and a whole other, you know, domains of expertise that you need to bring to bear to run a great preschool, run you know an events business, run coffee or you know coworking, all that. So um, I really appreciate this. This has been a great conversation. If people want to track with you, ah, we got it we gave them that web address. We’ll put that in the show notes. So if you if you forgot what that was, or you’re driving, whatever you can come back and check that out. Anywhere else we want people to get in touch with you if they’re you know if they want to track with you, Frank? And then any last words you have to say before we wrap up today’s conversation? Frank Bealer — You know, just on social media. I’m fbealer – I’m always posting about thoughts and things we’re learning, and reposting other people that are speaking into this space. So I think that’ll be helpful. Um, but yeah going to that Phase Partners page, that’s the way to do it. Um, because that they’ll get to connect with me or whatever and we’ll share ideas and… And we’re going to have a road show this fall. We’ll be traveling around the country… Rich Birch — Love it. Frank Bealer — …doing one day sessions around. We’re called the Multi-use Strategy Summit. We’re hosting one in Alpharetta in February, right about the time that this is airing. But we’re gonna have more this fall. We’re actually traveling and going to other places so churches can come – more convenient to them. And just spark a conversation for one day. Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Well, friends, I would encourage you, Frank is a trusted leader the kind of person you should reach out to. And if you’re even if you’re in the kind of area of like this might be the kind of thing 6 months or 36 months from now that we could be even thinking about, I would encourage you to track along with them. Drop by that website. Follow him on social media. It would be a great thing for you. Thanks again, Frank – appreciate you being here today and cheering for you. Love everything that you’re doing at Phase. Thank you. Frank Bealer — Thanks Rich! We love you too.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. I’m talking with Lance Burch from Reality Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He often explores and identifies current cultural phenomena and then tries to find a way to connect them to biblical truth. Listen in as Lance shares how to pay attention to the questions the culture around us is asking while presenting ancient truths in a novel way. Do what Jesus did. // Our churches can be way too predictable, which can hold us back from what God calls us to do. By contrast, Jesus was never predictable; his stories often had surprise endings yet communicated truth in a way that resonated with the culture. If we are to be like Jesus, then we need to do things the way he did. Look at things in a new way. // One of Reality Church’s core values is surprise. Adding even small elements of surprise, such as a prop during a sermon or spontaneous baptisms in a service, keeps things from being too predictable. One way the church incorporated this value on New Year’s Day was by changing the seating to be in a circle and sharing stories of God’s faithfulness. Holding to the truth. // While digging into scripture and singing truth to each other will always be core, Reality Church looks for novel ways to present these ancient truths. The goal isn’t to change the truth of scripture, but rather to have the church experience it in a new way. Be clear to your listeners. // When writing messages and engaging culture, Reality Church is careful to stay true to the Bible by using a framework that asks: Is this accurate? Is it clear? They want to stay true to the scriptures while also creating a bridge to listeners in their cultural context. How are your listeners interpreting their entire world? What “language” do they speak? What questions are they asking? One way to tap into this is by paying attention to the questions that popular music and entertainment are asking. Connecting with the culture. // One of the elements of surprise that Reality Church has used is rewriting popular songs to create parodies that can be used for teaching moments and to convey a certain idea from scripture. These songs are fun and really accessible, plus serve as a great invite tool on “big days” like Christmas. A couple of songs from the last few years include We Don’t Talk About Rudolph, which is a parody of Encanto’s We Don’t Talk About Bruno, and also a parody of a song from Hamilton. Be clear that it’s a parody. // Creating parodies are legal under fair use, however make it evident that your work is a parody and that you’re not trying to appear as if the music or other content is your original work. It’s not legal to claim that the music or media is yours, so do reference the original work that you’re making the parody from. You can learn more about Reality Church at reality.church and you can see their parody videos on YouTube at Reality Church Omaha. 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: CDF Capital Since 1953, CDF Capital has helped Christians and churches embrace their part in this story by providing the 3 kinds of capital every congregation needs for growth—Financial Capital, Leadership Capital, and Spiritual Capital. At CDF Capital, we care about each of these components. When a church is properly resourced financially, spiritually, and in leadership, lives are transformed. Sign-up to learn more about CDF Capital and how we can help your church grow. Receive a 50% discount on a monthly subscription to the CDF Capital Subscribe & Save Bundle. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in. Listen I’m really excited for my conversation today with my friend and brother from another mother, Lance Burch. Now he spells his last name differently, probably the right way. Actually surprisingly when people spell my name wrong, they spell it the way he spells it. You have to look on your player to see how to spell it the right way. From Reality Church in Omaha, Nebraska – fantastic church. He really is I think one of the most gifted people in the country around looking and identifying kind of cultural phenomena, things that are out there, and then trying to find a way to connect that to biblical truth; obviously the goal is ultimately to point people back. Um, Reality’s a fantastic church. And Omaha, I don’t know there’s like a concentration of just amazing people in Omaha and so I’m so glad to have you on the show, Lance. But thanks for being here today. What did I miss? Build that picture a little bit. Tell us a bit about Reality. Lance Burch — Well okay, Reality is something that we we call an entry level church. It’s something that we came on when somebody left our church. And and I think on the way out the door said you guys are an entry level church. And at first I was like what!? And I got super super kind of mad about it. And then I sat back in my chair and I thought you know, ah like of course we are. Rich Birch — Yeah, don’t we want to be? Lance Burch — Yeah. I’m so glad that Jesus is an entry level savior. Lance Burch — That there wasn’t some sort of hoops or something that I had to jump through, that he finished the work. And so we’re trying to we’re trying to make that really clear. That ah, we don’t want to be cool. We don’t want to be um, like ah kind of out there, or we’re we’re “better than” at all because we’re not, and I’m not cool. But we do want to be really clear and we do want to make it clear that we’re listening to culture. That’s an important thing. Rich Birch — This is… Lance Burch — Ah one more thing about the Omaha churches. Rich Birch — Yup. Yeah. Lance Burch —You could not be more correct. This is a great place to do ministry. I’m a part of ah a network called Within Reach and the pastors here ah just a great place to move the Kingdom forward. Rich Birch — Yeah. It it is is fantastic. Like I I am consistently amazed I bump into all kinds of great people from Omaha, and I yeah I just think it’s so so fun. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Such a great great community. So so friends I need to let you in on kind of tear down the third wall of the pretend radio show that we run here called the podcast. And um, you know Lance and I have connected a number number of times over the year. Lance Burch — Yeah, yeah. Rich Birch — I’ve been to Reality, we’ve talked multisite, ah, count him as a friend, and he and I have had kind of a bubbling conversation in the background over the years around a number of things that recently I was like, listen, I just want to get you on the show and have this conversation in front of everybody so that you can benefit from it. Um, and so you’re going to hear that kind of unfold out here in in front of us and one of the things. You’ve talked about predictability and why this is it’s like the scourge of predictability. Our churches are just can be way too predictable. Why is that a problem? Why is predictability a problem, like big “P” Problem for the gospel, holding us back from what God’s calling us to do? Lance Burch — Well one of the the big “P” Problem here is that Jesus wasn’t predictable. And we are called to be, you know, with a body of Christ, we’re the hands and feet of Jesus and we’re also you know to develop the mind of Christ. Now ah he told the rich young ruler to sell everything. He didn’t tell Zach he didn’t tell Zacchaeus to sell everything. He said I’m coming to your house; come down out of that tree. He didn’t tell the woman at the well to sell everything. He didn’t tell Nicodemus, you know? Ah it was just like, you got to be born again, Nicodemus. Why? Because Nicodemus was building his world around how he was born, his his heritage. That rich young ruler was building his world around his stuff. And this woman at the well was building her world around like relationships, and you know the next person. Lance Burch — I think since Jesus knows that we’re individual, ah when he when he comes on the scene, I think he comes to us that way. And if he said the same thing over and over again, then maybe we’d be right to do that. But he didn’t. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — He’s he’s ah surprising in the way that he teaches, and the the authority that he takes in the way that he’s listening, and the illustrations that he uses. Almost all of his stories had a surprise ending. So that’s the big problem, if we are are saying we’re following this guy, we’re following Jesus, then we ought to do it the way that he did. Rich Birch — Love that. So okay, so what does that look like? So I would say the thing when I when we first when I first kind of heard you talk a little bit about that, I was like oh I would say that does um that’s my experience of your ministry is your… my experience of reality is that you’re predictably unpredictable. Like there’s I I know that there’s you guys do things that kind of capture people’s imagination. Ah in ah in a good way. So what does that actually look like for your church? Like what be some of the ways that you’ve tried to lead out of that as a you know as the lead pastor? Lance Burch — Yeah, you know it’s one of our values. It’s one of our core values. It’s surprise. That… it’s at the end of… it’s the last one: surprise. And the way it shows up is, well like New Year’s day we changed the seating in here to be in the round. Um I didn’t I didn’t talk that day. We just had stories and worship. And really when people we just told them something was going to happen. It’s incredibly powerful to have stories. It’s incredibly powerful to just to see each other for once and kind of use that day. Lance Burch — Ah, the deal is that we don’t want people to show up, and number one, we don’t want it to feel like chaos. Of course there are going to be some things that we’re gonna do um, we’re gonna go to the scripture. We’re gonna we’re gonna sing truth to each other. But the novelty and the way the perspective the new angle on the same ancient truth is kind of what we want them to experience. So that um so it’s kind of like when you when you see something um and then you see it from a slightly different angle and it it changes the way you view it. We want to somehow do that with… We don’t change scripture. We don’t change the ancient truths. We don’t change what Jesus said, but we say to them what if you were looking at like this, what would that mean? So that we hope that we get emails and maybe lobby talk that says you know I did I knew that, but I never really thought of it that way. And… Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. So I’m not I’m not a preacher. Folks that have followed the podcast know that’s not what I do. That’s not my primary thing. But one of I but I have a deep respect for that, and I had deep respect for that function within the church, and love to kind of help create cultures and climates that allow that to happen. And what you’re touching on one of the core problems that I that I see so clearly. For someone like yourself that has to teach every week is, we we teach from a fixed text. Like we we don’t actually want super innovative ideas, like we don’t actually want things to be so different. You know, we and so because it’s a fixed text. Ultimately there are only so many words that we’re going to bring people back to. There’s one message, one core of Christ. Lance Burch — Right. Rich Birch — Actually don’t want the most innovative teacher ever to preach at me because it’s like I don’t actually want something new. I want I need scripture to be I need the teaching to be based in scripture. But so pull that apart. How do you as a communicator… Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — …how do you flirt with that line? What does that look like? How do we do that? How do we how do we give people a new angle but don’t step into heresy? Lance Burch — Right. Yeah, the other day we we preached a sermon, and and our bottom line statement, the the sticky statement was: if it’s new, it’s probably not true. You know… Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — …if somebody’s if somebody’s coming on the scene and I got a new revelation. No the we learn the the truths of christianity at a deeper level, but we don’t learn new truths. Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — So um, the way we pick that apart is well first of all I’ve got a team… Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Lance Burch — …that helps me construct the series and does a pretty cool eval. And I have this framework that asks: is this accurate? Is it is it clear? Is it passionate, delivered with passion? That came from me from my kind of mentor and ministry Joe Duke at LifePoint in in ah Reisterstown, Maryland. He has this framework and I use it. And so we really do look at the accuracy of what we’re talking about. It’s if that’s not there, then that’s an F immediately. I mean you you failed at your one job to make these truths really clear and to lean into scripture. Um at the same time, ah, while you’re being accurate, you’ve got to be clear. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — And now what clarity means in any given cultural context is this bridge between this always true thing, absolutely true thing and how they’re interpreting their entire world. Like, what language do they speak? Um, what what questions are they asking? And you don’t know the questions that a culture is asking unless you know what their music is saying. You can’t. Rich Birch — Right, right. Right, right, right. Lance Burch — Nobody asks questions like music. Rich Birch — Right Lance Burch — I mean movies do, um TV shows do, I guess in a little little sense. But man the music of any given culture… Rich Birch — Yeah. Lance Burch — …will tell you what do people are what are they really craving, what do they what do they want. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — So that gap, that that there’s the gap – clarity to accuracy. Rich Birch — Okay, I love that. Now. So there’s people that are listening in who are probably thinking wait a second I’ve heard some of this before; this this is that sneaky old attractional church. You’re just trying to entertain people. You’re just a carnival barker. I know that’s not your heart. Obviously I know that’s you know that’s not who you are, ah but how does that fit out in your mind? And then well and I’d love to get into a specific tactic; I want to push you on a specific thing that I’ve seen you do. Lance Burch — Yeah, yeah. Rich Birch — But kind of at a philosophical level, what’s entertainment? What… yeah we don’t want to entertain people, do we? Lance Burch — Absolutely we do. Um, we absolutely want to entertain people. Jesus did this. Um Jesus, I know that I’m we’re not, the pastor is not Jesus and even the church itself is not going to perfectly embody who Jesus was. However, Jesus used creative stories, illustrations, and why? Why? He could have, you know what? He could have just given propositional truths about God. But you know he didn’t. And the reason he didn’t is because he loved the people in the crowd. Lance Burch — He could say things that they couldn’t understand but they’d be absolutely true. And he could walk away from that, and he could say I gave him the truth; they didn’t do anything with it. But you know what he did instead? He said here’s these people made out of dirt and I’m going to try to communicate incredible truths that they can’t comprehend. But how can I do it? Let me talk about a farmer. Let me talk about some vineyard workers. Let me talk about a tower that fell on some dudes. Let me ah you know even current events. Lance Burch — So if Jesus did that, um, what what in the world would a pastor want to do with standing up on a platform, saying if you don’t understand me then that just means I’m doing the right thing. That doesn’t make any that doesn’t make any sense to me. Rich Birch — Right, right. Lance Burch — Um, but you know to your argument about the attractional thing, did the American Church um, spend too much money or or too much energy in putting on a show? Now there’s a difference for me between entertainment and a show. Rich Birch — Yes, Yes, yeah. Lance Burch — Entertainment to me means to entertain someone means to hold their attention. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — Jesus did that consistently. Rich Birch — Yep. Lance Burch — Jesus never put on a show. In fact, he he rejected that when it was a a temptation in the wilderness. I’m not gonna put on it… Rich Birch — Yep. Lance Burch — …I’m not here to put on a show. But when I show up and when my truths are are proclaimed, they are attractional. They are. The only thing that’s really not attraction about christianity is the is um, is the sacrifice that it requires to to be like Jesus. The the teaching and the truths, they are attractional, and we don’t need to make church um, what’s the word. Ah you know we we don’t want to you know repel people from church. When when they show up I think every pastor’s glad. You know? Rich Birch — Right, right. Yeah, yeah, totally. Well… Lance Burch — I hope I’ve answered that. Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s good. I think it’s you know that’s a good ah, you mean the other context, I’ve said listen I’m proudly have come from and that is my background is kind of the attractional church movement. And I and yeah have there been excesses like in any movement? Absolutely. Ah, but I think at its core I would agree with you that at the end of the day, I look at so much of Jesus’s teaching was attempting to grab people’s attention to get their engagement, and then ultimately to move some you know closer along obviously to move everyone. But you know that you need to do that and that if you call that entertainment or attractction, that’s fine with me. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Okay, so I want to talk about a specific tactic that you do at your church. So for so in my brain I was like, oh I I think for the last number of years Reality has been doing these um like parody songs at like Christmas, and other kind of special times during the year. And then I poked you on it I’m like oh there’s like a deep well here. Oh my goodness this is like decades of work that Lance has been doing. Talk to us about this particular tactic. Kind of describe it first. How have you used these kind of parody songs as a part of your you know, big days. A part of you know, kind of the communications you do as a church. Lance Burch — You know I went to Creative Church Conference at Fellowship in… Rich Birch — Nice. Lance Burch — …in Dallas. Rich Birch — Yep. Lance Burch — And I was young in ministry um, and well not not not terribly, but I saw a new tactic. And in their student ministry, this guy was rewriting songs. Um and I was trying to change a culture in Student Ministry at LifePoint that was kind of a toxic kind of cutting people down. So I said, why don’t we take this idea of rewriting songs and make it about an individual. So we called it the comfy chair song. Lance Burch — And we had kids nominate a kid. They would I would say, Okay, what’s their favorite song? They would tell me their favorite song, and then I would say, would just tell me about them. And they would give me a page of stuff about this person – their quirks, their what they love to eat or what they, you know, what they love to do, or what they were good at. And I just would by a specific set of criteria, syllables and vowel shapings, rewrite that song for them. They would sit in the comfy chair, listen to the song, and then kids would line up at the microphone and say nice things about him. And it changed the culture. Rich Birch — Ah, that’s so cool. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love that. Lance Burch — So so it got me into this heck I was doing that like 50 times a year, you know. Rich Birch — Right, right. Lance Burch — So I wrote a ton of them. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — And it it got me to where I was I was pretty good at it, like I could count count the syllables, even the you know the emphasis needs to be the same. And so so I had a lot of fun at it. Lance Burch — And out there at Saddleback, another guy was doing that – one of their youth workers. And he did a couple of videos that I emulated. And now we we found out that the kids were just they loved it. And I thought I wonder if it would work in the church setting. And you know, Weird Al made a career out of this; I’m nowhere near Weird Al status but ah, but he made a career out of it. And while it’s cheesy, it’s also fun and accessible. And so we we started we did Queen, we did that one one time for Christmas Eve, we did of course the Hamilton thing. And this past year we did We Don’t Talk About Rudolph and it… Rich Birch — Yes. So good. So you just breezed over those. Take just slow down and give us a bit of those like you did Queen and like talk through that what you’ve done the last couple years just to give a sense. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — We’re going to put links in the show notes, friends; this really is going to be a bit of an incomplete podcast until you go and watch some of these things. So. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — We’re going to try to describe this. It’s hard to describe in, you know, 30 seconds but kind of talk us through what some of those look like. Lance Burch — Well ah, the Queen thing was Bohemian Rhapsody, and I remember one of the lines was like ah drama at Christmas time, instead of “Mama”, you know? Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — And ah we we took it through that whole kind of chaos of Christmas, like things are going on and then kids are up, and so it’s kind of a chaotic scene. And then and then I think we ended with Christmas really matters at Reality. Chris… Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Love it. Yes. Lance Burch — The Hamilton thing happened during covid, you know. Rich Birch — Yep. Lance Burch — We had a church member who actually had a barn. That we we didn’t do this on our platform at all; we had a church member that had a barn. Rich Birch — Oh, I wondered where you shot that. Lance Burch — Oh my goodness. And we had just hired a guy who had a connection to Midwest Light and Sound; they came in and they lit it on to emulate the Hamilton lighting. Ah, got a choreographer in there. We thought let’s do something special for covid; everybody’s at home. We were doing a Christmas eve video. And I thought baby born in Bethlehem / Alexander Hamilton – same syllables. Rich Birch — Ah, love it. Love it. Lance Burch — So we just we wrote it. We wrote it based on that and I loved every minute of that one. Rich Birch — Love it. Okay, so now the the thing and then this year you did Ah We Don’t Talk About Rudolph which is kind of like a retelling of the Rudolph story, but to the “Encanto” you know that We Don’t Talk About Bruno… Lance Burch — Yeah, yeah. Rich Birch — …ah, which which was funny. It was you know I and I’ve joked about this on you know Facebook and stuff I’m like these these have become required viewing for me when it comes up in my feed, does not matter what I’m doing I you know. I apologize, clients, if I’m doing work for you, or I stop and I’m like okay I have to watch these because they’re they’re so well done; they’re so creative. Talk to me about song selection. So I was saying to you this before we got on, I don’t know and I find particularly the last couple of years—the Hamilton one, the Rudolph one, but even the Queen one like you seem to be able to tap the zeitgeist you you. You talked about this a little bit, the music, ah you talked about this, it’s like the questions that are being asked by music are the questions of a generation or questions of a culture. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Ah unpack that a little bit. How do you how do you find these songs? How do you find… I feel like I’m pretty connected culturally, but I’m like you just seem to nail it like that is the song that is like perfect for what we’re talking about. Lance Burch — Yeah, well we we start talking about it, and we um I mean we have a good team of people that are that are really looking around and and kind of thinking about it. What’s weird is old music is new again because of playlist and things like that or it shows up in a movie. Um, and there’s usually one when we land on it it’s like like what you said, of course. Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Lance Burch — Of course it’s this one. and we haven’t of course we we haven’t landed on this next year’s. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — But when when it happens, it’s just this it cuts across the culture. Rich Birch — Yep. Lance Burch — Um I felt a ah little bit of pull toward the Encanto. We adopted two girls from Columbia; the movies about Columbia. Rich Birch — Okay, okay. That would do it. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — What what were some of the ones that were in the running for this year – do you remember some of the other ones? I’m trying to catch like what is the… Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — I’m trying to unpack what is kind of… I’m trying to get inside your brain. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — What is the what are some of the other ones that were thinking of there? Lance Burch — Well one of the other one was from Encanto. It’s the pressure song about… Rich Birch — Yep yep. Lance Burch — …can you imagine a family on Christmas Eve who has the family coming over. They haven’t they haven’t completed the the menu; they haven’t bought all their gifts. That just that kind of tick tick tick pressure thing… Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Lance Burch — …which would have been a good one, but we opted against it. We we always choose like there’s always a pop song in there somewhere, like a Meghan Trainor – something that’s you know, vocally sort of interesting. Um and you know Wednesday right now if we were going to do it like say today. Um I think we would probably and this might I don’t know what how people feel about this… Rich Birch — Who knows? Yeah, yeah. Lance Burch — But ah, but the Wednesday phenomena. Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — Why why is that popular, you know? Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Yes. Lance Burch — I think it’s because a lot of people feel like Wednesday, like kind of kind of out there, a little quirky. If people knew the real me they wouldn’t like me. And now I’m going to now I’m going to pretend like I don’t care. Or maybe Wednesday’s being for real. I don’t know. Lance Burch — But that’s the idea. We try to figure out what is what cuts across all of the the lines. And we don’t always hit. Maybe some people didn’t even know We Don’t Talk About Bruno but… Rich Birch — Yeah I don’t… yeah, that’s if you were, had anyone who’s anywhere near any, you know, childhood age of at all, you knew that song. You continue to know that song. It’s one of those that that’s out there. Rich Birch — Ah, you know I think the other so the other interesting piece of this for me, as someone on the outside looking in, so pull back a little bit from a strategy point of view. Friends that are listening in, these big days—Christmas, Easter, maybe Mother’s Day—you have 3 or 4 days during the year where two things happen, and you’ve heard me say this before, friends. Two things happen. One, your people are more likely to invite their friends, and two their friends are more likely to attend. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Now when their friends come, they are thinking—and this brings us back to the predictability thing—they have a framework of what church is. And then Lance and his team rolls out We Don’t Talk About Rudolph and, man, their expectations are shifted. They’re like, this is different. You know over the years I used to love, I would say the same thing, I used to love when we would people would say in New Jersey particularly I loved we would get like ah somebody would kind of greet us on the way out and they would say, man mass has really changed a lot since I was a kid. And I’m like yes, okay, we are we’ve hit it, right? We’re close to where we’re trying to get to. but these days are important for us to put extra effort into. They’re important for us because we are going to have extra people in the you know in the room that are not don’t necessarily attend church. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Um, so talk to me about how that fits into that part of your strategy, the kind of like hey we want to do, put extra effort – like this is disproportionate amount of work. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — You’re thinking about, you heard it, friends. I don’t know if you heard that roll by. He’s already thinking about next year’s Christmas. It’s in… somewhere there’s like a little there’s a bucket open that currently Wednesday’s in, and eventually something else will eventually – it might be Wednesday by next fall. We’ll we’ll kind of click in and then you guys will do something. Tell me how that strategically fits into your kind of when it comes to reaching unchurched people or the friends of the people we’re trying to attend our church. Lance Burch — Yeah I want our people to have an easy invite. When we we usually promote this like we want it to be a surprise. Rich Birch — Yeah. Lance Burch — We don’t tell everybody what the song’s going to be. We might throw a little hint out there. But we so but we let them know that there’s going to be something… Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — …that is going to surprise their friends, and it gives them the easy invite. One thing that you hit on, we do do a lot of work on this. And so I tell our team, and I think this is super important, that if the product looks fantastic and everybody’s ticked off at each other at the end, then we failed. There’s the product goal, and then there’s this process goal. We made a real big goal this year to say let’s have fun the entire time. Let’s laugh… Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. Lance Burch — …and not get not get kind of angsty about this, because if we do we’re going off track. And it was fun the whole time. One of the things one of the deliverables about the parody song is that it’s fun for our team, and it’s fun for the volunteers that are a part of it. They get to be in on the secret and they invite, you know, ah a lot of people because they know they’re going to be in it. This year… can I can I mention somebody? Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Totally. Lance Burch — We we had this girl – um, eighth grader. Her name is Addison, and Addison played our new reindeer in town. And she could… our new elf and she couldn’t wait to meet Rudolph. Maybe you didn’t see the skit before the song, but it’s not on the video. But Addison improvved in front of a group of adults, and she was phenomenal. It was that’s another good side of this. Just let people use their gifts. There are people gifted at singing and dancing and lighting and sound, and I don’t think God wants us to just use those gifts. He does want us to use them in the community. But it’s another way for us to praise to to use ah skillfully use the things that he’s given us, the gifts that he’s given us. And Addison did that in such a great way. So it was cool to see an eighth grader be a part of it too. Rich Birch — That’s so cool. I love that. The the process again, friends, I know this is like it’s like a half step. Ah when I, folk, I’m going to we’re going to email out on this one and I’m going to send the links ahead of time and say hey you should watch these before you come because it’ll it’ll give you a little more context. If you’re already mid midstream, you got to go watch them. But the the interesting thing on, or another part of this this puzzle, is I’ve heard people push back. In fact, on one of my posts about this I had someone pushed back on the legal side of this. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — So for the people who are thinking about this thing, talk is talk to us about parody. Why is parody okay. Lance Burch — Yeah, yeah. Rich Birch — Ah talk that through from a legal point. Because it’s like Disney is a major company that you’re you, you know, you’re using their, you know, their music. Lance Burch — Yeah, exactly. And there was a church that did something ah that they used the name Alexander Hamilton; they did a full length thing… Rich Birch — Yeah, yep. Lance Burch — …and it was called Scamilton in social media. It was really wrong. I mean they they tweaked the story a little bit, used a lot of the lyrics. Parody songs are completely legal. Parody songs are what they call fair use. It’s what Weird Al made his ah lifestyle on. It is a protected form of speech and it’s great. I mean I think that we ought to be able to parody things. It’s what Babylon Bee does. It’s what ah ah, in in and in a news format. And ah, what the Wittenburg Door did. Rich Birch — You know, like yeah Saturday Night Live. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — Like there’s like there’s tons of, you know, there’s tons of parody. The the trick I think from and I listen obviously I’m not a lawyer, I don’t play one on the internet, but my understanding of the line on parody is it needs to be self-evident that it’s parody. That you’re not trying to ah, you know, trying to put yourself off as you know it’s like it it needs to be tongue in cheek. It needs to be like, hey this is you know this is a parody. Um, that’s that’s the line ultimately that you’re um, you know, going to follow. And so some of that you could I’ve seen some churches do these where, which I can’t remember whether you guys do this or not, they literally will sit put like on YouTube it’ll it’ll say like parody song… Lance Burch — We do. Rich Birch — …like we’re being as explicit as that so that it’s, you know, super obvious. Yeah. Lance Burch — Yeah we put that on there. I mean I don’t, but whoever is smarter than me puts that stuff on there. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s so good. Okay I love this. Well let’s bring this back to predictability. When you think about predictability, the thing that’s interesting here, friends, that I want to pick apart is the thing that’s predictable in this case is, which is important for inviting, is that you’re going to do something special. That’s that’s Predictable. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — You’re going to make that happen. The thing that’s not predictable is what you’re going to do. Ah, how does this how is this permeated… so this obviously is on your big days. How any other examples of how this kind of thinking has permeated other aspects of your ministry throughout the year? Other just examples that we could kind of as we go to and close this thing down. Lance Burch — Yeah I think every week um, since surprise is one of our values, every week we want to bring in surprise. And that could be mild; I mean it could be just the use of a prop. Um, we had another surprise on Christmas Eve which was we were doing a candle lighting service and there was there was a canister on the stage and it had the candle. We always lit from the front. But I said, you know, in the context of the last few years darkness is a really good context to to see the light, you know? Lance Burch — And we get distracted with all it and then I walk over to this thing you couldn’t even see a candle was there and I lit my candle from it and every candle was lit from that. A very mild surprise… Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — …but it’s just different. And I think the deal is we don’t have to spend bucks on this. In fact, creativity I think keeps you from throwing money at stuff. And we don’t need to just invest. We can’t we can’t outsplash Hollywood or Nashville or any of the studios. What we can do is we can use the gifts that God gave us, and on a weekly basis um use a prop or bring somebody up or um, you know, tell the Gospel in ah in ah in an engaging way. Or we do spontaneous baptisms at our church… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Lance Burch — …where we you might you might have shown up, you didn’t know that you were going to get baptized, but you just heard the gospel. We got everything you need. And and hearing that story is a surprise. I mean heck every time Jesus interacts with somebody, ah, they don’t know we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Rich Birch — Yes, yes, yes. Lance Burch — Only he does. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — And that’s that’s really cool. So that’s why I like coming in on Sunday and sometimes it’s Jesus that is doing the surprising and not us. Rich Birch — So Good. This is this is great. Kind of final topic of of conversation and I hope our relationship can sustain this. One of the things I find fascinating about your leadership as a leader you seem to like to have fun with your people. Like you you know like I’ve seen you like a part of these parody videos, you know friends, again, you got to watch these things. It’s not like this is like a group of people doing them and then Lance is standing off stage, clapping. Oh isn’t that great. Like I’ve seen you do all kinds of funny things that are, you know, great, engaging, um, you know you know surprising ah. And I think there would be a lot of pastors that would look at that and say, yeah I’m not doing that. There’s no way. I would love for that to happen on my church, but like I’m not dressing up in the giant um… or the the the head to toe um, ah jack-o-lantern suit I remember seeing you in once. I was like what?! Like talk to me about that. What is you have this fun playful side… Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — …that I think is super endearing from a from a leadership point of view. I think people want to follow people like that, but talk to me about that. Lance Burch — Yeah. Rich Birch — What’s what’s what’s that all about? Lance Burch — Yeah, that it might not be everybody. I grew up kind of in theater; I did comedy for a while. Um, ah, quick throwaway I’ve got this cover band called Silly Joel where we do we go out and we play Billy Joel things. I love karaoke. So part of this is just kind of personality. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — However, let me encourage people who wouldn’t maybe be drawn to this. Nobody nobody comes in here thinking the pastor is gonna do something like that no matter what my personality is. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Lance Burch — So when they see that, all the sudden this inaccessible guy with barriers, and I could never be like that guy. If we if we choose to say, I’m gonna act silly. And they might think, well I think I could approach him; he just wore a pumpkin suit in front of me. Um then I think that could be a good thing. Rich Birch — Yes. Lance Burch — So I would encourage, you know, stretch a little bit. You don’t have to do everything, but um, surprise your crowd with your willingness to to maybe step. We’re asking them all the time to step outside of their comfort zone. Rich Birch — Right. Lance Burch — We’re asking them all the time to do stuff that maybe stretches them a little bit. And so I’d say to leaders, don’t be afraid to act silly; it’s it’s it’s vulnerable, it’s authentic. And we all act silly anyway, sometimes when people aren’t watching. So use that, if you can, to to gain access to, you know, just to somebody’s attention. Rich Birch — Yeah, so good. Well, love it, friends. So good. We know you know that the human mind is a predictability engine. We just ah, you know we we watch patterns – pattern pattern pattern pattern pattern. And then when we can change that pattern when we can do something that’s out of pattern, in this case, you don’t expect the pastor to be in whatever – the the Hamilton play, the you know the orange suit that you know, whatever um that that that causes them literally your brain leans in on that and is like oh that’s different. Something is different about this organization. Well, Lance, I’ve really appreciated your friendship. I appreciate this conversation today. I appreciate you being on. Any final words, and and where do we want to send people if they want to track with you, with the church, that sort of thing. Lance Burch — Sure. I guess my final word was it’s really easy to be like the guy on the platform or the or the guy, you know. I have an amazing team. The team at Reality Church, my staff, the people that support me. I’m only good at like two things; I can’t even keep a calendar. There’s so there’s so many things that people do for me. So um I just I don’t want to let this thing go without saying ah ah, it’s a privilege to to be able to be here. Lance Burch — Though the last thing um if people want to see what we do Reality Church Omaha on YouTube, if you search, but you’re gonna have the links anyway. Reality.church is our website. Um, and um I think we’re gonna be out there ah eventually with a podcast called Things I Used to Think which is hopefully… Rich Birch — Love it. Lance Burch — Yeah, it’s just basically we start out with some things that um, you know, we used to think. Like I used to think if there was a car following me while I was walking home from my friend’s house that they were going to shoot me. You know there’s all sorts of things that just live in our head and and I think it teaches us something… Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Lance Burch — …when we we talk about the things we so look for that. But reality.church is our website, and we’re on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and all the socials as well. Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Appreciate you, sir. Thanks for being on here. Thanks for for sharing with us today. Lance Burch — Yeah, thank you, Rich. I appreciate it so much.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to be talking with Mark DeYmaz, who planted Mosaic Church in Arkansas and is co-founder of Mosaix Global Network. We’re nearly a quarter of our way through the 21st century and yet some churches are still operating on models from the 1960s. In spite of good intentions and a lot of activity, many pastors are merely managing the decline of their churches. Listen in as Mark talks about the 20th century metrics we need to stop chasing and where we need to shift our focus. Works over words. // In order for the church to continue to move forward, we need to be thoughtful about the time we’re living in. We are in a Matthew 5:16 century – one where the works of churches impact unbelievers more powerfully than words. Whereas the 20th century was about explanation, the 21st century is about demonstration and getting out into the community rather than staying behind closed doors. Play for influence. // In the 20th century churches played for size; in the 21st century churches need to play for influence. Influence is not tied to size, but rather to diversity. The greater your church’s diversity, both in terms of the structures and the demographics, the greater your influence will be in your community. People in a smaller, more multi-ethnic church can go into a larger swath of the community with the messaging of Christ compared to a larger homogenous church. Multiple streams of income. // In the 20th century churches were funded by tithes and offerings, but in the 21st century we need to look at multiple streams of income. This doesn’t mean we get rid of tithes and offerings. Rather we revisit what good stewardship looks like according to Jesus’ teachings. Consider the parable of the talents; the wicked, lazy servant is the one who did nothing with his assets. Our assets are people, money and facilities – how are we stewarding them to fund the mission of the church? Look at the buried assets. // So many things in today’s world have changed the way that younger generations are giving to the church and how much the church is receiving. Churches should take a look at their buried assets in order to release the economic engine to make money to both pay their bills and provide for their ministry. This includes connections that your people have to others and how you can aggregate money quickly. Rent your facilities. // Even pre-pandemic, most church facilities sat empty from Monday to Saturday. That’s not good stewardship. The simplest way to earn income is to rent your facilities. Get a commercial realtor to come into the church and tell you how much unused areas of your church would be worth in the commercial market. Monetize existing services. // Another option for earning money is to monetize existing services. One example might be using the coffee shop in the church to cover your costs as well as fund ministry. You may not have enough in tithes and offerings to cover expenses in the coffee shop. However by charging for something like coffee and breakfast biscuits, you can cover your costs as well as generate income to provide for ministry and outreach. Earn through business for God’s work. // You can also start a for-profit LLC under your nonprofit. Create a business and hire employees, provide services, or sell items. Some of the profits earned by the business can then help to fund ministry at your church. Create a sister nonprofit under your church to handle outreach ministry in the community. Through the separate nonprofit, pursue grants and donations from local, state, federal, and outside entities. Follow the law to keep tax exempt status. // You will keep your tax exempt status as long as you follow the laws. The money you make from the services you offer has to go back into the church. You also have to pay taxes on the property and business just as any other business would in your area. You can find out more about Mosaix and the services they offer at www.mosaix.info. Plus, pick up The Coming Revolution in Church Economics: Why Tithes and Offerings Are No Longer Enough, and What You Can Do about It and Mark’s other books online wherever books are sold. 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: Chemistry Staffing One of the things that they never teach you in seminary is when to move on from your current church. Over the last couple of years, we have been having a TON of conversations about this with pastors all over the United States. Of all the ministry decisions you make, leaving your position will be the toughest. Download this two-in-one resource that walks you through the decision-making process. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in. I’m really excited for today’s conversation; we’ve got Mark DeYmaz with us. He is an incredible leader from central Arkansas. In 2001 him and his wife ah, founded Mosaic Church, which is a thriving multi-ethnic ah church in an economically diverse community doing all kinds of great things. Today he serves not only as a directional leader of Mosaic, but is also a champion of a movement of churches really that are trying to be ah, multi-ethnic, make a difference all across literally the world, Mosaic Global Network. So super honored to have Mark with us. Mark, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here today. Mark DeYmaz — Yeah, Rich. Thanks so much for having me. Rich Birch — Why don’t we start with kind of fill out the picture. What did I miss there about your background? You know, kind of give people a sense of Mosaic; tell us a little bit more of the story. Mark DeYmaz — Yeah I’d be glad to I served as a Student Ministries pastor in predominantly white evangelical churches for 18 years coming right out of college at 22 years of age. And the final eight years of those 18 brought me to the city of Little Rock to a wonderful church. At the time in 1993 that church was 2000 people; eight years later it was 5000. My youth group of 7th through 12th graders went from 150 to 600. I was in the top 2% of paid youth pastors in America. I’m living the dream this amazing church I had 500 kids ah you know in small groups, 250 volunteers, 9 full-time staff, built a 3.5 million dollar student center. Again, so I’m living the dream, right? Rich Birch — Yep. Mark DeYmaz — And one day in the late 90s I looked around this otherwise amazing church and realized the only people of color were janitors. That was 1997, and that began to bother me. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — I didn’t know at the time why that bothered me but it began to bother me. And that took me on into a journey into the new testament doing my own exegesis so to speak, throwing out what I’d been taught in seminary. I had a master’s in exegetical theology at the time, now my doctorate, my DMin in exegetic theology. And so I began to wonder about the things I’d been taught in the new testament or about the nature of the church. Was it, in fact, segregated? Jews, that is Jewish Believers, went to Jewish churches, Gentile believers to Gentile churches. Was the homogeneous unit principle as we had learned it—um, the way to plant, grow, and develop a church quickly is to focus on a single people group—was that beyond pragmatic, was it, in fact, biblical? Mark DeYmaz — And so I did my own homework, so to speak. By the late 90s I I realized that every church in the new testament was a multiethnic church – men and women, Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor. As we say at Mosaic today, walking, working, worshiping God together as one. And so once that biblical vision and mandate got in my belly, I determined of course ah with a calling from the Lord to stay in Little Rock, to leave that church, to go to the urban center of Little Rock in the summer of 2001 with what Christianity Today would call three years later a big dream in Little Rock – could in fact, men and women of diverse ethnic and economic background walk, work, worship, God together as one? Could they will themselves to do that in order to advance a credible witness of God’s love for all people, not just some. Mark DeYmaz — Here in the city of Little Rock, the neighborhood we went to 30% poverty, 66% of kids without dads in the home, highest violent crime in the city; determined to lean into Matthew 5:16. You know I believe this is a Matthew 5:16 century. In the Twentieth century you can get away using words to reach people for Christ. Today it’s all about works. He said not let them hear your good words, but let them see your good works, and this is what will shine a light on who God is and how much he loves. Hope for all, not just some. Mark DeYmaz — So in 2001 after 18 years in the multi… ah I’m sorry in the ah homogenous evangelical ah, predominantly white churches, I came to the inner city, started Mosaic—a church for all people not just some people, multiethnic, economically diverse. And within several years my friend my good friend, Dr. George, the African-American sociologist today at Baylor University, we had connected, we met and we realized that if God was showing me and, and him from a sociological standpoint, that churches ought to be multi-ethic for the sake of the gospel, surely he must be showing others around this country and the world. Mark DeYmaz — And so we pulled together about 30 people in November of 2004 to consider this in Dallas, Texas. That led to the establishment of Mosaix Global Network and the mission and vision of Mosaix for now almost 20 years is to help pastors and ministry organizations build healthy multi-ethnic and economically diverse, socially just, culturally intelligent, and financially sustainable churches. So I serve as the directional leader of my own church—now we’re 10 years old at Mosaic—but I also serve as the co-founder and the CEO of Mosaix Global Network. Rich Birch — Love it. One of the things you talked about there I found super intriguing which I know is a part of what you’ve been wrestling with, you talked about how in the Twentieth century churches grew based on the word – on, you know, on you know, speaking, ideas. And then in the Twenty-first century, you know, churches are growing based on works, action, getting people out of their seats, into the street, making a difference actually in their community. Are there any other of those kind of dynamics that you’ve seen as we kind of, you know, pivot from one century to another. You know I was just thinking, gosh, we’re we’re a quarter of our way into ah, the Twenty-first century and we’re still some of us are still living on models from the 1960s. What would be some of those other changes that we need to be thinking about as church leaders? Mark DeYmaz — Yeah, you know, Rich. That’s a great question. I’ve addressed that for some time and this past year put that in writing in one of the chapters in a book called “Red Skies” published by 100 M the missional community. It’s a compilation book of Alan Hirsch, myself, Deb Hirsch, many others. But in my chapter on economics, I talk about that very thing. And the way I frame that is most pastors in America today, in spite of good intentions, all their activity, etc they are merely managing decline. They are merely managing the decline of their churches. And if you… and of course all the statistics show us that ah, attendance down, giving down, etc, etc. Ah, people’s interest in the church, the pipeline professional ministry leaders, the lack of strong student ministry today providing young people that are fired up to to be Christ-centered folks as well as going to ministry – all those statistics, if you will, show us we’re just managing decline. And if you understand that then, I asked myself several years ago, if that’s true, if you accept that premise, why is that? And the way I framed it in the book, the way I speak about it is that we are still chasing Twentieth century metrics. So the scoreboard, the dashboard is still all lit up by Twentieth century metrics, right? But as you rightly mentioned we’re nearly 25 years into the Twenty-first century and the metrics are still twentieth century. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s crazy. Mark DeYmaz — So what are those metrics if we’re going to in fact, disrupt and reinvent for the Twenty-first century? You know the [inaudible] understood their times and knew what was right in that moment for Israel to do. We have to be thoughtful about our times to know what is the best course forward, and it is certainly not a return to the Twentieth century metrics. So, all that’s to say yes the twentieth century, the way people came to Christ, is you shared, you brought Billy Graham to your city. He clearly explained the gospel, you shared the 4 spiritual laws, clear explanation of the gospel. You gave people Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, More than a Carpenter. Later Lee Stroble, The Case for Christ. And all of this is explanatory. Rich Birch — Yep. Mark DeYmaz — So in a simple way You can say the twentieth century wasn’t ah the the difference is explanation versus today demonstration. Again, Matthew 5:16 – we’re going to have to lead with the kindness, meeting felt needs, empathizing, entering into people’s stories, and meeting those needs first at the bridge of humanity before we’ll ever get people to consider across the bridge of Christ’s divinity. Mark DeYmaz — Another one is size versus influence. In the Twentieth century you played for size; in Twenty-first century you better be playing for influence. And influence is not tied to size as it was in the Twentieth century. As I mentioned, I was a part of a thriving church of 5000 white, Republican, suburban upper class, professional people. And in a city like Little Rock… Rich Birch — Yeah. Mark DeYmaz — …when I was there I thought, boy we have a lot of influence in the city. But when I left that to start Mosaic I realized the Democrats hated that church. People of color didn’t even know that church existed. On and on I could go. And so I realized that yes, it’s a lot of bodies, but they are only getting out on a Sunday and infiltrating, if you will, 1 or 2 slices of a 15 or 20 slice demographic pie. Mark DeYmaz — So the point is, the greater your diversity, both structurally in terms of ah the the structures of your church and the demographics of your church, the greater your influence is going to be in a community. Because I can have 300 people of ah 30 different nations and economic diversity in all different types of backgrounds culturally. And when they get out on a Sunday morning, both Republican, Democrat, etc, ah black, white, rich, poor, and when they get out, they go into a larger swath of the city with the messaging of the Christ and the messaging of the church. And you could argue which church has more influence in a city. I’d rather play with 100 healthy, diverse people the way I’m describing than 1000 all-white, all-black, all-asian, and I’ll prove to you my influence is 10 times my size. So size versus influence – the greater your diversity, the greater your influence in the city. Mark DeYmaz — Of course Twentieth century homogenous ah homogeneity Twenty-first multi-ethnicity, right? Twentieth sustaining innovation, Twenty-first disruptive innovation. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — So all of those are just a quick highlight of some of the the things we discuss. And one of the big ones I know you want to talk about today… Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. Mark DeYmaz — …is in the Twentieth century tithes and offerings… Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — …and in the Twenty-first multiple streams of income. Tithes and… Rich Birch — Okay, so yeah, yeah. Mark DeYmaz — In the Twenty-first century it’s no longer enough to not only sustain your ministry but to advance it in a healthy way. Rich Birch — Okay, so this is to me this one, so there’s first of all, friends, you need to be following Mark ah, if you’re not already. There’s so much that you’re unpacking there that I’m I’m like amen, amen, amen. I remember, like I so ironically I spent a lot of time thinking about church growth and I think I only had one it was like literally one class in one course in school that was on church growth. And it was all on the homogeneous unit model, which which now looking back on it I’m like I’m that’s like sin at its core. Which is crazy, you know, all these years later. Like I’m like and it was just taught as like this is just the assumptive way. But now, man, if you pursue that model, you are yeah your church is just not going to impact at all. So love that. Um, but I would love to dig in on this financial piece. I heard you say this and I’m like I think Mark’s gone off the deep end. He’s being crazy. Obviously tongue-in-cheek – don’t think that. Tithes and offerings – isn’t that the core of how we’re supposed to fund our church? Convince me otherwise. Mark DeYmaz — Yeah again Twentieth versus Twenty-first century understanding um at the core… and let me just quickly pivot and say the homogeneous unit principle is biblical insofar it’s applied for evangelism, discipleship, and leadership development. Rich Birch — Sure. Mark DeYmaz — But once you cross the line to plant, grow, or develop a local church. There’s no biblical license, freedom, or mandate to target a single people group to plant a church. The church is to be for all people wherever possible and certainly in the United States, it’s very possible across a wide swath of this country. Having said that, back to sustainable economics. Mark DeYmaz — When in the twentieth century again tithes and offerings, Twenty-first multiple streams of income. What am I really talking about? Good stewardship. In the American Church… so let me just start with a biblical framework. The reason why you need to not and when I say move away from tithes and offerings, I don’t mean get rid of tithes and offerings and not not not encouraging generosity. Of course we’re gonna keep doing all that. And that too is biblical. However, we’ve got to do some other things because that in and of itself in the Twenty-first will not be enough like the Twentieth, right? Mark DeYmaz — So from a biblical standpoint, and I have written a book The Coming Revolution in Church Economics as well as a book called Disruption – it’s into all of this. But very quickly, think about it from a biblical perspective and a sociological perspective, and I’ll just throw in a couple on each. So in the American Church, and again Twentieth century metrics, the way most pastors understand the term stewardship is three ways. One to manage what God has given us. You know, God has given us this building, these assets. There’s a hole in the wall. There’s a pothole in the street. We need to fix it. We need to maintain and manage the resources God has given us. It means recording accurately the the gifts, the tithes, and offerings that you receive. We got to record that accurately, and number three we’ve got to clearly communicate to our donors how we’re spending that money. Mark DeYmaz — And those are the three ways in which stewardship is defined in the American Church. Now I believe all of those things are part of good stewardship. However, if we’re very ah technical or exegetically sound, that’s not how Jesus defined stewardship. Jesus said, and he taught us in the parable, right? You gave me five – here’s your five, and I made you five. You gave me two – here’s your two, and I made you two. Well done, good and faithful steward. Mark DeYmaz — One guy, as I like to say, sat on his asset, right? Rich Birch — I love it. Love it. Mark DeYmaz — One guy sat on his asset and and he sat on this asset and he’s called the wicked, lazy slave, or or servant, steward if you want. And what what does that mean? He says I was afraid. I didn’t want to lose it. So he he led with fear not by informed faith as the other two. And what does Christ say? Take away the one asset from the guy and give it to the people that know what to do with it. Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark DeYmaz — And that is happening all over this country. In terms of Jesus overturned the money changer – what about that? You know, we’re not supposed to touch money. Has nothing to do with fair or benevolent profit. It was all about unjust economics. They were upcharging people for the exchange rate of a Roman coin to a Jewish half shekel. They were marking up the turtle doves so to speak for the survey or for the sacrifice beyond what the poor could otherwise afford. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — It was all about unjust economics. So biblically, we need to think deeper about these matters. And then from a sociological standpoint, easy to make the case right? Tithes and offerings completely and consistently dropping. But more than that from a secular standpoint, you’ve got generational shifts and attitudes and approaches to giving. Nearly 80% of all giving to the American Church as of several years ago is given by people born before 1964. Rich Birch — Wow. Mark DeYmaz — And doesn’t mean that younger people don’t have money; they just they don’t trust institutions. They believe that their volunteerism and/or their endorsement of the church or the products, the service of the church is equated with their giving, where if you’re older like me at 61 years old you see those as a both/and not an either/or. So there’s generational [inaudible] there’s some attitudes and approaches to giving. Mark DeYmaz — The rise of dual income households – that’s gone from where in 1960 about 20% of US households had dual incomes, just to live a middle class life today it’s almost 80%. Rich Birch — Right, right. Mark DeYmaz — And it’s not [inaudible] that have all this extra money. It takes at least two income streams if not more in the American household just to live a generally middle class life today due to wealth inequality income gaps, the inflation the highest it’s been, ah, you know middle class wealth is the lowest it’s been since 1940. So there’s all these factors sociologically, but the mindset of the church continues to be as if the single paycheck of a tithe and offering will help the church, if you will, live a middle class life. Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — So remember 80% or so of households in the 60s – the the old Ozzie and Harriet thing, right? Rich Birch — Yep. Mark DeYmaz — Theoretically dad went to work, mom stayed home with the kids, got involved the PTA. That one paycheck from dad’s work allowed that family to have a house, have a car, etc. Those days are long gone. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — And they’re never coming back so we’re going to have… So the practice of church economics is is to leverage the assets of your church in pursuit of good stewardship. What are those assets? People, money, and facilities. Not just the people you have but the connections to others they have. Not just the money you may or may not have, but your ability to aggregate money quickly. Mark DeYmaz — Ah, your facilities – most facilities even pre-pandemic sit empty from Monday to Saturday. That’s buried assets. Money in your bank account. That’s buried assets. People. So the point is we’ve got to turn on the spigot, if you will, to release the economic engine and assets of the church. Again, not to go out and make tons of money like as as if it was capitalism, and run amok or we’re in it for a profit. But no, if we keep giving everything away, we’re not gonna be here in five years. It’s the church that owns [inaudible] and I walk in I say well how much do you charge these groups coming in? Oh no, we just let them do it. Just let them come in for free. It’s our ministry. Well who’s… the toilet paper, the water bill, the electric bill, etc. Rich Birch — Yep. Mark DeYmaz — You see what I’m saying? That’s not good stewardship. I know the heart is right. But that is not good head stewardship… Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — And you don’t have to and I tell, like using that as an example. You don’t just charge the cost of it, but you don’t charge top dollar. Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — Somewhere in between so you’re covering your costs. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — You’re making a little something, but not an exorbitant fee to be benevolent. And the point is when I have the when I’m generating income from ah a profitable standpoint, when I’ve got the tithes and offerings, and the other leg of this by the way, Rich. We talk about three legs of a stool, like offense, defense, special teams – the tithes and offerings starting a for a nonprofit sister organization to your church whereby you can chase local, state, federal grant funding go beyond what your church can otherwise do. And of course as I just lean into in this example of a gym, the for profit side where we’re leveraging assets to generate ah ROI and the aggregate of tithes and offerings, your grants and donations both from local, state, federal as well as outside entities, other churches, [inaudible]… Rich Birch — Yeah, foundation stuff. Yeah, yeah. Mark DeYmaz — …with the ah ROI pursuit of for profit entities, that aggregate is how you’re not only going to survive but sustain, become stable, and thrive going forward in the Twenty-first century. Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. So good. Now I’m wondering so you you started to get into a couple practical pieces there. I like that three-legged stool piece. I think we have clarity on you know that kind of the the normal church leg of this, you know, the stool. Talk us through a little bit of that um, particularly that that the profit side, that – you gave us the example of the gym. Um, give us some other examples of the kinds of things that either you’re doing or you’ve seen other churches do that like oh that’s an innovative way to to try to generate some income um as a church. Mark DeYmaz — Yeah, so just let me be clear. The gym example is yes, that’s an example, but I use that to help us free our minds and think with a different mentality. So again, the mentality is we’re giving this away; we’re doing ministry. But you’re not going to be here in five years if you don’t change that mindset. So that’s what that example was about. Um, again, three-legged stool, we’re talking about the third leg – your special teams, if you will, your for-profit ROI side where you’re leveraging assets, generating income. On that side let’s just break it down and think think about it like this… By the way, let me say, Mark DeYmaz — the simplest way for a church to generate income is to rent its facilities. Rich Birch — Right, right. Mark DeYmaz — That is the simplest way, the cleanest way; rent your facilities. If you’re going to rent facilities, as many churches do, I’m not the first person to suggest rent your facilities… Rich Birch — Right, right. Mark DeYmaz — …or what have you, but but what has happened heretofore is people see it as nice, not necessary. Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. Mark DeYmaz — Okay, isn’t it nice you have this preschool. Isn’t it nice that we rent our parking lot for this and we pick up a little income. That’s a nice mentality. Today it’s necessary. So in other words, it’s part of a comprehensive strategy that heretofore has not been developed that I put forth in Disruption, Coming Revolution in Church Economics. So with that in mind, again, the simplest way to make money is to rent your facilities. And the way to do that is to get a commercial realtor to come into a certain area of your church, empty classrooms that keep you converted converted to nonprofit centers, counseling offices, law law offices – all kinds of things. They’re sitting there dormant. Get a commercial realtor to come into your church and say on the commercial market, this area would be worth this amount of money. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — So I’ll just use an example. These 5 classrooms, this 3000 square feet would be worth $5000 on the commercial market. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz —Okay, we’re not in it for top dollar again. We’ve got a strategy of the the tithes and offerings, grants and donations, and now the for-profits. So we don’t have to make top dollar, but I can’t give it away for free, as we said, so I might rent that space for $2000 or $3000, which which has an impact on the people I’m renting it to. In other words, it’s lowering their overhead… Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — …so they can offer their goods and services at lower prices to the community. We call that benevolent ownership. I I as a church, we make something. Small business – we take pressure off of them in terms of their overhead, and they pass on that savings to the community. So everybody wins in that scenario. So the simplest way is to leverage your facilities. Mark DeYmaz — Here’s another example of that. We talk about monetizing existing services. So put that ah, ah you know under the the renters space benevolent ownership. This other aspect would be monetized existing services. There’s already things churches are doing and paying to do in terms of the space they built, the people they employ, the equipment they have. They’re already doing that, well monetize that. That’s like low hanging fruit. Mark DeYmaz — Here’s a perfect example: many churches, most have some type of a coffee shop or coffee area, right? And they’re giving free coffee away every Sunday morning. When you think about that, who’s paying for that free coffee? Tithes and offerings in most cases, right? So somebody decides we’re going to take $2000 a month out of tithes and offerings; that’s $24,000 a year. We’re going to let that walk out our front door in the form of free coffee, and with with hospitality hoping somehow not only are blessing people, but hopefully that some of these people will like our church someday so much that they come and they start giving. Okay. But what does $24,000 a year take away from actual ministry? Rich Birch — That’s a good question. Mark DeYmaz — I might be able to hire a part-time uni-tasker or part-time some… I might be able to fund the entire VBS… Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — …and go to whole different levels with $24,000. So I’ve got this space; I want to give away free coffee. Mark DeYmaz — But you partner here with business people who know how to monetize that space in a benevolent way. So we did this at our church prior to the pandemic. We we had built out our coffee area. I went to ah to Sam’s Club. I buy a microwave. I buy a little tin foil. I buy Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits with cheese for $.95 a biscuit. Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — You wrap them up and heat them up. You sell them for $2 on Sunday. McDonald’s sells them across the street for $3.50 so I’m already $1.50 under… Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — …what you get based on the same thing across the street. The people start buying the biscuits, and let’s just say that the the mark is 2000 a month, all I have to do is sell 2000 biscuits a month to make $2000 to cover the free coffee and recoup… Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — …$2000 a month in my tithes and offerings to put to direct ministry. We don’t think like that. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — Nobody taught us to think like that in seminary… Rich Birch — No, no. That’s so true. Mark DeYmaz — …but again business people know how to do this. So your job as a pastor, you don’t have to be the one to do this. You have to understand the strategy, again as I lay out in my books—Disruption, Coming Revolution of Church Economics—and then empower people to to put this thing together. So that’s an example… Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Mark DeYmaz — …of monetizing existing services, right? So benevolent ownership of your facility, monetizing existing services, and the last thing is you can—actually most pastors, again, don’t know this—um, you can start for-profit LLCs under your nonprofit. Um and and in other words, real for… real business. So for instance, you might go out and and get two capital partners, and so we want to, you know, we’re always printing these t-shirts; we’re gonna create a t-shirt printing company right here. And we’re gonna move it into the church. We’ll provide the space. We’ll buy the equipment, etc, etc. That’ll be our investment. You get these two other investors; they put money in. And all of a sudden you’re hiring your high school kids, your college kids, you’re providing jobs, you’re doing this marketing, and you’re never paying for t-shirts again. And anything you’re giving [inaudible] selling to your church, you’re making profit. Mark DeYmaz — How much money do you pay for janitor service in your church? What if you repurpose those funds to actually start a janitor company that employs people, etc, get a couple of capital investors. Now you’ve got a business. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — Everybody gets a third of profit. The janitor company is doing so, you know, goes out gets contracts, and the net that that company makes beyond the employee costs and all the things, salaries, the net pays for your janitor coverage every year. So that company’s cleaning your church but the way you’re they’re being paid is through the net profit… Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — …of the work they do outside the church. And again you recover significant dollars to repurpose to ministry. Rich Birch — So good. Mark DeYmaz — So benevolent ownership, monetizing existing services, and starting new businesses whether under the nonprofit formally as an LLC or not. And that leads to a question, Rich, I know you’ve probably already anticipated; I’ll just roll into it. Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — What about my tax-exempt status? Rich Birch — Sure. Mark DeYmaz — And most pastors are afraid if we get into these things we’re going to lose our tax exempt status. And that is not true if you play by the rules. And there’s really just simple rules to play by. Number one, um that when you, let’s take a coffee shop, for example – if if I am making money as a church if our church is making money through that coffee shop through the year of course you report that on your taxes as unrelated business income. But let’s say that’s generating a profit and we we made $10,000 this year, $20,000 – whatever it is. That money, the $20,000 net profit that we receive as a church needs to go back into the budget of the general church. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — I can’t say, hey $20,000 – awesome. Hey our 5 board members, everybody gets a $4000 bonus, right? Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark DeYmaz — You can’t do that, right? Rich Birch — No. Mark DeYmaz — That violates a law; you’d lose your tax exempt status. Rich Birch — Yeah. Mark DeYmaz — The other thing is you have to pay taxes on that property and or that business just like any other business or coffee shop would in your city, state or in the country. You cannot leverage your nonprofit status to try to avoid paying property taxes, or what have you. Mark DeYmaz — So in our case, for instance, after 15 years we were able to purchase an abandoned 100,000 square foot Kmart, and for the past 8 or 9 years we’ve rented 44,000 square foot to a suburban fitness club that moved into the inner city and took that deal. Now they’re they that off what we make off them is right now I can’t do the math quickly in my head, but probably I’m going to say 40% or 35% of our mortgage is paid just by that one contract. Rich Birch — That’s great. Wow. That’s fantastic. Mark DeYmaz — Okay, not only that but 6000 people from the community belong because our price to them is so low they can lower the prices to people for this quality help, you know, physical fitness and all that, and and so all the community joined at $10 a month, no contract. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — And that has an impact on the health and wellbeing, the emotional psyche of a community that today’s 24% at or below poverty. Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Mark DeYmaz — So all of that is in the books and again we could talk all day about it. But as fast as I can talk and give you an overview, that’s what’s going on. Rich Birch — Yeah you you yeah yeah, you anticipated the question there. I was wondering a bit about the if if you could give an overview a little bit about how the legal structure works. But I think you gave some clarity there. Is there anything else on that for for the pessimists in the room that are like, listen we just can’t do this. This is too risky. Ah, you answered it well there, but is there any other kind of because I know it’s actually pretty straightforward. There’s a number of churches that are doing this, but you know is there anything else we need to think about that on the structure side how those three entities kind of interact with each other? Mark DeYmaz — Yeah, well again, you you mentioned fear if you’re not doing this because you’re afraid, you’re no different than the guy in the bible burying the asset. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — You as a pastor may not understand this. You may not understand; you gotta we we walk by faith not by sight. Now there’s a fine line between faith and foolishness… Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — …and what that means is, pastor, I’m looking you in the eyes so to speak right now, you don’t have to do all this. Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — You just have to understand it from a theological… Rich Birch — Yeah. Mark DeYmaz — …sociological pragmatic standpoint, and then go out and empower the people who share your heart… Rich Birch — Yep. Mark DeYmaz — …share your vision, share your theology, and let them take these things and run with it for the glory of God. Rich Birch — Yeah. Love it. Mark DeYmaz — And now the the last thing I’d say is say what else to add. So picture if you will those of you who are listening, picture a football team and draw it in your head as a three-legged stool. There’s offense on one leg, defense on one leg, special teams on the other. Each team has its own players, its own metrics, its own coaches, its own game plan. Ah, and to win the game, you’ve got to have all three teams functioning at a very high level and minimizing the state, or you don’t win. Most churches only play have an offense, if you will – let’s call that the spiritual game. That’s that’s most churches. Some social game and very few the financial game like we’re talking about. Rich Birch — Yeah. Mark DeYmaz — So what we’ve got to do in the Twenty-first century is a move away from a single dimensional game to playing a three-dimensional game. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — And and of course the spiritual is already happening. And in terms of and all we need to do the adjustment there is to make sure our churches are moving and leaning in towards the increasing diversity of our society – Revelation 7 on earth to become the embassies in which diverse ambassadors walk and reach the world for the gospel. So there’s innovation there, but on the economic side that’s tithes and offerings. The third leg we’ve already talked about, right? So that’s going to generate for profit ah ROI whether that’s done formally under as an LLC or just as unrelated business income to your nonprofit. Mark DeYmaz — But the second leg, let me just throw this in there, and answer your question. The second leg I just kind of threw out. What you want to do is create a nonprofit – not many nonprofits, one nonprofit. Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. That’s good. Mark DeYmaz — That nonprofit is going to have multiple programs within it. Cause most ah, people might approach like I don’t know let’s say they have a heart for foster care. So they start a nonprofit for foster care, or maybe it’s ESL class in immigration. We start an ESL or I’m sorry a nonprofit for that. But when you do that you end up with 8 nonprofits, 8 boards, 8 tax returns, 8 [inaudible] – it’s inefficient Rich Birch — Oh gosh. Yeah yeah, yeah, super inefficient. Yeah yeah, yeah, super inefficient. Mark DeYmaz — So what you want to do is create one nonprofit. By the way you don’t want it across town. You want it under your roof so that you’re sharing expenses across the board. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — There’s ways the church aggregates that. And this nonprofit—think about it as two sisters in the same house or the defense to the offense—and it’s led by social justice types: compassionate, kind, merciful people. People that go to school for an MSW for instance. Ah that so the first leg is your pastors. The second leg is your MSW types. Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — Your third leg is your business people… Rich Birch — Love it. Powerful. Mark DeYmaz — …and that’s who [inaudible] right? Now the… Rich Birch — That would be incredible. Mark DeYmaz — Right. So the executive director types of your nonprofit, they build out the multiple programs that are meeting and servicing the needs of the community. And again on the economic side where do you get money? You get money by chasing local state and federal grants which are available for these works in ways that they wouldn’t be available if those works were organized under your church. Rich Birch — Sure. Mark DeYmaz — So practically what you do is you start with any compassion, mercy and justice work going on in your church, form the nonprofit, and shift those things out from under the oversight of the church, under the oversight of the nonprofit board before you add. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — And then you look for money outside. And what happens it’s not just local, state, and federal grants. That’s grants. But donations means there’s there’s Christians in your community, individuals that go to other churches that don’t have a distribution program but they have a passion for food insecurity. And they will donate money not to Mosaic Church, but to the nonprofit Vine & Village. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — Churches will send their money and their people to serve in those programs. You know, churches typically don’t write a check to other churches, right? But they’ll write a check they’ll write your nonprofit a check because and they’ll send people to work. I’ll give you one quick example. Mark DeYmaz — We have in our city a private Christian school called Episcopal, started by the episcopal diocese, very wealthy school, whatever. And they send, every week, about 6 to 10 of their students in the entire high school (9th through 12th grade)… Rich Birch — Wow. Mark DeYmaz — …they send 6 to 10 kids to work in our food distribution program on Tuesdays between 10:30 and 1:30. And they’ve already gone through the entire high school once; now they’re doing it again. And this is partnership for us, right? But they wouldn’t do that if it was Mosaic Church, right? But they do it because it’s a nonprofit. And I’ll just end with this, right now I invite your listeners to pray. But um, for fifteen months we have chased a $3.5 million dollar grant from the state of Arkansas… Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — And nonprofit was awarded that grant, and it’s down to one vote of a congressional committee in the state of Arkansas that has to vote. Rich Birch — Wow. Mark DeYmaz — And but we’ve already passed 9 out of the 10 tests… Rich Birch — Wow. Mark DeYmaz —…and we’re just [inaudible] 10 tests. But that would be $3.5 million dollars to our nonprofit. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. Mark DeYmaz — And I and when I met with the State Comptroller fifteen months ago and I sat down to discuss this this work, the first question he asked me was, now is this a church? That’s what he said. Now is this a church? Rich Birch — Interesting. Mark DeYmaz — And I said no, it’s a it’s a 501c3 community development corporation that’s a separate nonprofit. And he said it’s hard to give away money. And what he meant was… Rich Birch — Wow. Mark DeYmaz — …if you were a church, you might as well walk out now because you’re not getting a penny. Rich Birch — Right, right. Mark DeYmaz — But because you’re structured as a nonprofit and essentially we have a letter, we’ve been awarded three and a half million pending… Rich Birch — That’s amazing. Mark DeYmaz — …the vote ah the the final vote of a congressional committee. Rich Birch — This one one next step. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. This has been incredible, Mark. I really appreciate you leaning in on this and you know so clear and so passionate. I appreciate you coming back and pushing us. I’m hoping listeners as you’re listening in today ah, you’re thinking, hey man we should take a step on this. And I think a now real practical next step is I would love people to go and pick up a copy of your book. It’s just simply called The Coming Revolution in Church Economics: Why (what we’ve been talking about) Why Tithes and Offerings Are No Longer Enough and What You Can Do About It. People can pick that up at Amazon; is there anywhere else we want to send them to pick up copies of this? Personally what I think this would be a great thing to do, friends, you’re looking for you know your next staff training thing. Buy copies of this book. Buy 10 copies of this book for your entire staff. Read it together and then talk about, hey what what changes should we make? How does this affect the way we’re doing what we’re doing. But where else we want to send people if they want to pick up copies of this book? Mark DeYmaz — Well, you know I mean I’m pretty simple guy. You already mentioned Amazon. Anywhere where books are sold, Barnes and Nobles, wherever. Rich Birch — Sure. Mark DeYmaz — I’m sure Baker, my publisher, would love for you to go to their website and buy it. Rich Birch — Sure, sure. Mark DeYmaz — But to your greater point, yes, this is what people are doing. They’re buying a copy… Rich Birch — Yes. Mark DeYmaz — …for every one of their elders, every one of their staff… Rich Birch — Yep. Mark DeYmaz — …and they’re walking it through, and reading it through because frankly in that book I also talked about the entirety of the three-legged stool. Rich Birch — Right. Mark DeYmaz — But but more than that it’s beyond the economics of the all, it’s really about freeing your mind. In fact, there’s an entire chapter called Free your Mind. Rich Birch — Yes, love it. Mark DeYmaz — And and even if you your thing wasn’t economics, it will drive you to think differently, and ultimately about the Twenty-first century. Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Appreciate you, Mark. Thank you so much for your leadership. Thanks for your encouragement today. Where do we want to send people online if we want them to track with you or with the church or with Mosaix Global, or where do we want to send them? Mark DeYmaz — Yeah, the best way and and that’s what we do and I appreciate bringing it up – mosaix.info m o s a i x dot info – we are literally helping churches, organizations—my next call in 15 minutes as was a very large global organization—but again Mosaix has products and services, people to help you build healthy multi-ethnic, socially just, culturally intelligent, financially sustainable churches. That’s what we do day in and day out. Rich Birch — Love it. Mark DeYmaz — And and it’s kind of like you just pick one – hey we want to work on our economics, or we want to work on our cultural intelligence, or we’re looking to hire diverse staff. So we have different departments, if you will, that will help you with any one of these angles or aspects you’re looking to move your church forward into the Twenty-first century and move away from Twentieth century metrics. Rich Birch — So good. Mark DeYmaz — Again to be healthy, not only survive and be sustainable ultimately sustainable for the sake of the gospel going forward in the century. Rich Birch — So good. Appreciate you, sir. Thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show and all encouragement to you. I look forward to hearing about that donation coming in from ah you know the gift. That’s so good. Mark DeYmaz — Yeah, you will pray with us. Thanks so much for having me, Rich. Rich Birch — Take care, brother.