unSeminary Podcast

In this deep dive episode of the unSeminary podcast, we explore Jenni Field’s insightful book Nobody Believes You: Become a Leader People Will Follow. This conversation delves into practical strategies and timeless leadership principles tailored especially for those guiding teams in a church context. Field’s book offers a fresh perspective on becoming a credible leader that people genuinely want to follow. Here’s a look at some key takeaways from the episode: The Credibility Conundrum Many leaders struggle with what Jenni Field calls the “credibility conundrum”—doing all the right things but still failing to earn the trust and buy-in of their teams. This issue is especially pronounced in church environments, where leaders face high expectations and complex dynamics. It’s not just about authenticity but about blending several core leadership practices to connect and lead effectively. The Eight Practices of Credible Leadership Jenni Field outlines eight essential practices that leaders must embody to build credibility: Empathy: Understanding and valuing the diverse experiences of your team members. Field emphasizes the importance of recognizing others’ experiences as truthful, even if they differ from your own. Trustworthiness: Built on honesty, reliability, and transparency. Especially in church leadership, trust is foundational, and it’s eroded when leaders become overly focused on external tasks at the expense of their team. Vision: Clearly communicate the ‘why’ behind your plans. Field highlights the power of storytelling and visual imagery in casting a vision that resonates and motivates the team. Support: Balancing guidance with autonomy. Creating an environment of psychological safety allows team members to share ideas, admit mistakes, and feel valued. Vulnerability: Being real without oversharing. Vulnerability is about acknowledging your limitations and showing your humanity, which fosters a culture of authenticity and openness. Likeability: It’s not about being everyone’s friend but about being approachable and having a sense of humor. Field stresses the importance of creating an environment where people enjoy working together while still respecting the leader. Integrity: The cornerstone of credible leadership. Integrity involves aligning your actions with your values and being consistent, even in challenging situations. It’s about being transparent, accountable, and building a foundation of trust. Capability: Demonstrating competence without needing to be the expert in everything. Effective leaders know when to delegate, seek outside expertise, and focus on continuous learning and growth. Applying the Principles in Church Leadership The conversation emphasizes how these practices are interconnected. For church leaders, embodying these qualities not only builds effective teams but also reflects Christ-like leadership. Integrity, in particular, is highlighted as the foundation upon which all other practices are built. Without trust, no amount of empathy, vision, or support can truly connect with the team. Practical Takeaways for Leaders It’s a Journey, Not a Destination: Leadership is a continuous process of growth. Focus on blending these eight practices authentically into your unique context. Seek Support and Accountability: Don’t be afraid to ask for help, whether from a mentor, colleague, or therapist. Building a network of support is crucial for sustainable leadership. Prioritize Self-Care: Leading a church can be demanding. Set healthy boundaries and take time for rest and renewal, recognizing that you can’t pour from an empty cup. Reflecting Christ in Leadership Ultimately, this episode encourages leaders to see these practices as strategies for effective leadership and ways to reflect Christ in their roles. By building on the foundation of integrity and continually seeking to grow in empathy, trustworthiness, and vision, church leaders can foster a culture where their teams thrive, and their ministries flourish. Want to dive deeper? Check out Jenni Field’s book Nobody Believes You: Become a Leader People Will Follow here to explore these principles further.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re talking with Andrew Hopper, the founding and lead pastor of Mercy Hill Church in North Carolina. Andrew has also started Breaking Barriers, which provides pastors and churches with biblical strategies to help them grow in order to go. Are you curious about how to effectively grow your church while maintaining a strong focus on discipleship and outreach? Don’t miss this insightful discussion as Andrew reveals the correlation between invite culture, discipleship and sending members out on mission. Plus discover how the multisite model is the best tool you can use for leadership development at your church. Connect crowds to mission. // Andrew observed a clear ratio in his church’s data correlating the number of sent ones, baptisms, and first-time guests, which he believes is consistent in churches focused on both evangelism and sending. Over ten years, his church saw approximately 150 individuals committed to long-term missions, 1,500 baptisms, and 15,000 first-time guests, aligning in a 10:1 ratio at each level. This means that for every one sent one, there were ten baptisms, and for each baptism, there were ten first-time guests. Focus on the lead measure. // Effective church growth relies on focusing on the lead measure rather than the lag measure. This approach helps connect the church’s larger attendance numbers to its mission goals, showing how initial engagement leads to disciples being sent out. Crowd-based evangelism. // Based on the examples shown throughout the New Testament, Mercy Hill Church believes that most life change happens when there is a preacher in front of a crowd. While both one-on-one encounters and larger gatherings can lead to conversions, the latter is more effective in reaching larger number and so the congregation is encouraged to invite friends. Andrew believes that when congregants see the church service as the most impactful time for both evangelism and discipleship, they are more likely to embrace inviting others, making the process of reaching new people feel natural and significant. Multisite and church planting. // Andrew argues that the multisite model complements church planting rather than competing with it. In multisite contexts, there is a continuous need to cultivate new leaders for multiplying groups, services, and campuses, which naturally prepares individuals for the challenge of church planting. At Mercy Hill most leaders who have joined their church plants come from the satellite campuses rather than the main broadcast campus. These members have already shown commitment to the mission by adjusting their lives, and this willingness to adapt primes them to take the larger step of moving to a new area to support a church plant. Develop communicators. // The multisite model allows the pastors on your team to grow and do more preaching than they’d get the chance to do at just one location. Mercy Hill has had numerous leaders—27 in the past year alone—preach, demonstrating that multisite structures can facilitate the growth of multiple communicators. To develop other teachers, church leaders should create opportunities for different leaders to preach and lead services, which can be done through multiple services and campuses. Breaking growth barriers. // Breaking Barriers helps churches break through barriers that hinder mission success. It celebrates church growth and doesn’t disconnect it from going after the lead measure. Visit their website to listen to their podcast, check out events and connect with other like-minded leaders. Follow what’s happening at Mercy Hill Church and visit Breaking Barriers for resources that will help your church grow to go. NEXT STEPS // Unlock the Power of Public Proclamation! Dive deeper into the Book of Acts with our Preachers in Front of a Crowd: A 16-Day Study on the Power of Public Proclamation in the Expansion of God’s Work. Inspired by Andrew Hopper’s insights on the unSeminary podcast, this guide is designed for church leaders and communicators looking to explore how public preaching has transformed lives and built the early church. Each day includes scripture, practical reflections, and thought-provoking questions to help you uncover the timeless power of sharing the gospel boldly. Download today and discover how you can grow more, so you can send more! 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 Your church is doing really well right now, and your leadership team is looking for solutions to keep momentum going! It could be time to start a new location. Maybe you have hesitated in the past few years, but you know it’s time to step out in faith again and launch that next location. Portable Church has assembled a bundle of resources to help you leverage your growing momentum into a new location by sending a part of your congregation back to their neighborhood on Mission. This bundle of resources will give you a step-by-step plan to launch that new or next location, and a 5 minute readiness tool that will help you know your church is ready to do it! Click here to watch the free webinar “Launch a New Location in 150 Days or Less” and grab the bundle of resources for your church! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, Rich here from unSeminary. So glad that you decided to tune in. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. You know, sometimes I get a chance to talk to people that I’ve interacted with in real life and today’s one of those days. Super excited to have Andrew Hopper with us. He is, if you don’t know Andrew, first of all, you should know him. He’s the founding and lead pastor of a great church ah in North Carolina called Mercy Hill Church. They’re they’re constantly on the one of the fastest growing churches list in the in the country. They’re really a gospel-centered church. They have five locations. Rich Birch — This is an incredible church because they’re not only growing in North Carolina, but they’re encouraging church planting ah in a bunch of different places. And he’s recently started, or in the last little bit, has launched ah Breaking Barriers, which is is on mission to guide churches to lead with biblical strategies to help churches grow ah so that ultimately they can go. So Andrew, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here. Andrew Hopper — Thanks, man. Excited to be here, man. We’ve ah we’ve really learned a lot from you and gotten some of our foundational stuff from you around growth years and years ago. So this is fun, man. Rich Birch — Yeah, nice to get a chance to connect. Well, why don’t you fill in the picture there a little bit. Give me the Mercy Hill story, the Andrew story, fill out the picture a little bit. Andrew Hopper — Yeah, we planted Mercy Hill in 2012. We had a chance to be fortunate enough, I got mentored in a great church in Raleigh during North Carolina. They’re called the Summit Church so um people might know Pastor JD Greer. So he’s probably 10 years ahead of me. So it was a really good relationship there, just being mentored by him. And and then I was a campus pastor there at that church. And so, man, I love the multi-site model. I think it’s probably the best leadership development tool that I’ve ever seen in churches and obviously it was benefited by that. So um you know I got a chance to learn Andrew Hopper — And and then we moved here in 2012 to plant a brand new church, an autonomous church. We have a team of 30 young professionals that came with us, um you know 10 graduating college students, and they they turned down job offers all over the country… Rich Birch — That’s amazing. Andrew Hopper — …to come and landscape and paint houses and and that kind of thing. We had about 20 others that ah quit jobs and moved over here. And and um yeah, we about an hour and a half from Raleigh Durham. And man, it’s it’s been awesome. We’ve been here, we’ve been at it for 12 years. There was never just some big flash in the pan. There was a couple of moments where God just kind of, you know, really brought brought some kind of unique growth. But but generally speaking, it’s just sort of been added to their number uh, month by month, almost, you know, for the last 12 years. Andrew Hopper — And, um, we started planting churches in 2019. So we were, we partnered with church churches forever, you know, just giving money and and people, but we actually moved from partner planting to parent planting in 2019. And so we have five, um, five little duckling church plants from Halifax, all the way down to Tampa. And and then we we’re multi-site also. We have a five we have ah six campuses, five locations. One of them is an Español campus. So that gives you a little bit of picture of of maybe who we are. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fantastic. One of the things when I think about your church is sometimes people lodge the unfair criticism against growing churches. They say, ah, they’re just all about fluff. They’re all just, you know, they’re they’re they’re just about gimmicks. It’s about doing things that will just, you know, get in the door. But, you know, then there’s no real depth there. They’re not gospel centered. And and to be honest, you and your church come to mind all the time when I think about that. Rich Birch — Because I’m like, no, man, like, a church like Mercy Hill is is doing a good job holding up the message of Jesus ah while at the same time really growing rapidly, and then and then also ah helping churches, you know, up and down, you know, all over the place, which is pretty amazing. Rich Birch — But what do you say? I’m sure people have lodged that kind of complaint against you as well. Like, hey, isn’t it just all like, why are you so obsessed with seeing churches grow? Why why do you keep talking about that? Andrew Hopper — Yeah, I’ve, you know, I’m 40 years old. So I’ve I’ve realized there is a generation that has wrestled with this before us, right? Rich Birch — Yes. Andrew Hopper — And it’s, um you know, I pendulum swing. I understand that, you know, I think, I think, you know, the 80s, 90s, you had a lot of church growth stuff. Before that as well. And, the you know, with Peter Wagner and different, different guys. I’ve I’ve gotten back into some of the original you know, literature they had. It was no different. I mean, it was exact same stuff. You have a ah ah brand a brand of Christianity when they think of evangelism, they think of, you know, ah the Ethiopian eunuch. And you have another brand of evangelism that when they think of evangelism, they think of the 3000 at Pentecost. Rich Birch — Yes. Andrew Hopper — Why people are wired in different ways like that, I don’t know. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — Generally speaking, I don’t mean to take a shot here. I don’t think the people that are wired for the crowds take much of a shot at the people that are wired for one-on-one, but I do see it the other way, big time. Rich Birch — Yeah, I know. I think that’s true. Andrew Hopper — You know, I don’t know why. I’m like, man, if you got the gift of evangelism and you’re a soul winner, I love that. I have no problem. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — I love seeing people get saved on a college campus, one-on-one evangelism. But you know, that’s just not, that’s not where most of it’s going to happen. And, um, and so I don’t know why it’s that way. Andrew Hopper — So anyway, I’ve taken, yeah, I’ve taken some, we’ve taken some shots like that, but I just, man, I don’t really care that much. I mean, I think for us, uh, sending is, is the ultimate goal. And we see that as a big fruit of discipleship. And so, uh, we’ve sent just under 200 of our members out long-term that’s two years or more… Rich Birch — Wow. Andrew Hopper — …ah either with a church plant or with um a you know with international missions. We want to share the gospel, baptize people, we get them in groups. We feel like if they jump in the stream, they’re going to move in the river. And um as long as we’re getting to see that output side of people you know continue to be sent out, then I’m not going to be too concerned with your shallow or whatever, you know? Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That’s good. Well, so there obviously there’s like a mindset shift there. It’s like, hey, we got to get our head around, you know, that that we want to see both of these things happening. We want to be um reaching people in our community. And that I love that, you know, when you said there that going is really an outcome of discipleship, that that that really should be ultimately kind of the aim. Rich Birch — What does that actually practically look like for Mercy Hill? Like 200 people is is a lot. I know that just rolled off your tongue like it’s not a big deal, but like that’s a big deal. That’s a lot of people to go long-term somewhere else. I know that’s how your church started, but how do how do you continue that? That feels like the kind of thing the first generation does and it doesn’t get passed on to other people. Andrew Hopper — Yeah, yeah, totally, man. I get that. I mean, I think for us, we’ve just sort of rejected the either you’re a missional sending church or you’re a big evangelism church. um And we talk about all of them all the time. I mean, we talk about it all the time. So I will like, we’re, we’re, we’re in a new, we’re about to be in a new facility at some point here in the next couple of months and, um, triple the seating size. It’s 80,000 square feet. It’s, it’s everything that the anti-church growth movement hates. Okay. And, and it’s like, I mean, it’s… Rich Birch — You got lights, you got smoke, you got projected screens, all that. Andrew Hopper — Yeah. Oh man, we got it all. Huge lobby, you know, 70 foot ceilings or whatever. Rich Birch — Yeah. Andrew Hopper — I mean, you know, it’s it’s like you walk in this building and people are going to be like, well, you are who we thought you were, you know? Rich Birch — Yes. Andrew Hopper — But what we’re going to do is, like I was talking about last night, we have sermon, we have, you know, service on Thursday night. I was talking about it last night. I will never talk about that building and the evangelism that we can see in it without connecting it to church planting and campus multiplication and and sending missionaries. Rich Birch — That’s good. Andrew Hopper — I mean, our church had the most, we’ve we’ve multiple times the largest sending agency in the country, the International Mission Board, we’ve had multiple times now where our church had the most people. And they they do you know they do like a like three or four times a year, they do kind of a class that goes through and then they get mobilized. And we’ve had a couple times now where we have the most most people there from any church in the country. And I will I will always connect that to seats, to crowds to I will never let that… So I mean what we want to do is bifurcate that every discipleship conference or or church thing you go to nowadays… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s true. Andrew Hopper — …it is a giant wedge that they’re trying to push between church growth is is a different category than discipleship and we’re not we don’t care about church growth, all we care about is depth and discipleship. And we just say, well, I think the ultimate fruit of discipleship is sending. So if we can keep sending you know connected where we never talk about crowd seats, new sermon series without talking about the fruit of it may be one day being these kids that are in these families that are getting saved. They’re going to go out and they’re going to be, you know, some of our missionaries one day or whatever. So we just try hard to keep that stuff together. You know, I’ve tried…oh, go ahead. Rich Birch — No, you go ahead and go ahead. You go and finish. Andrew Hopper — I’m trying to teach our church. So we came, we got to the 10 year anniversary of our church. Okay. And I knew, I knew the numbers were going to be very close, something like this. I didn’t know how exactly they were, but I knew it was something like this. um And and I bet I bet if you go test this against a bunch of sending churches that are serious about um evangelism and they’re serious about sending, you’re gonna see this to be true. Andrew Hopper — I went in and I said, okay, what’s going on in our church? And this was two years ago. We said, okay, we’ve seen about 150 sent ones. And I’m talking about two years or more. This is not like going on a mission trip or six months or something, okay? Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — And then I said, okay, we’ve seen 150 sent ones. Guess what? We had seen 1500 baptisms. Rich Birch — Oh interesting. Andrew Hopper — Okay. And then I was like, I was like, I know what this is going to be. Guess how many first time guests we had? 15,000. Rich Birch — Wow. 15,000. Oh, wow. Andrew Hopper — And so it was 10 to one, 10 to one. And so I’ve taught our church like, Hey guys… Rich Birch — Fascinating. Andrew Hopper — …if you want to get one sent one, you got to see 10 baptisms. If you want to get one baptism, you got to see 10 first time guests. But the big connection that I think that the anti-church growth movement, um, you know, really just wants to reject um is that you don’t focus on the lag, you focus on the lead. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Andrew Hopper — I mean, that’s the kind of leadership 101, man, you focus on the lead measure. Rich Birch — Yes. Andrew Hopper — The lead measure for us is every time we see 100 people come to that first time guest head, I’m like, dude, down the road, there’s gonna be one set one that goes out. Rich Birch — Dude, that’s amazing. Andrew Hopper — And if I can keep that, if I can keep that tight, then I think it it helps people connect the crowds to the mission and and that kind of stuff. Rich Birch — Dude, I I have I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make that connection before. What a fresh ah connection. I think it’s, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about the top end of the funnel, a lot of time about that piece of the equation. But I love that, that idea of, hey, what is the ratio connection ultimately between those? Rich Birch — Let’s talk a little bit about that. how how What is God using at your church at that kind of top end? Why is it that people are arriving? What is the you know what are some of the things that you’re seeing to be able to, frankly see a bunch of guests come in an environment where ultimately you’re asking people to take steps that are… Andrew Hopper — Yeah. Rich Birch — …you know, go live somewhere else or, you know, a bunch of years. What’s that look like? Andrew Hopper — That’s exactly right. Well, I mean, it’s, you know, we did, we did see this modeled incredibly well at The Summit. The summit… Rich Birch — Yeah, for sure. Andrew Hopper — …is a, I mean, Pastor JD said, I mean, they, they can be a punching bag for, you know, everything that the anti-church growth movement thinks. But at the end of the day, they have more missionaries on the field than any other Baptist church in the country. It’s 40,000 Baptist churches. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — So it’s like, we got the see very up close. You don’t divorce these things… Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — …you know, the, the weekend stuff, and the sending stuff, and discipleship stuff, it doesn’t it all has to go together. So we we saw that. I would say for us… so I’m grateful for that. I would say for us, man, ah I and I know this gets into La La Land a little bit for people, but I really I really believe it’s philosophy and it’s how you think about stuff. Andrew Hopper — Like our church um you know, we our our church buys into, and you you helped us with this years ago, our church buys into the concept that, and this is where you’re gonna get comments put on your on your podcast here. I think they buy into most life change happens when there’s a crowd and the preacher. Andrew Hopper — And because of that, inviter evangelism is not demonized. And it’s it’s like, man, we want, you know, we try to equip, you know, in every way we can, we talk about it. And we don’t, you know, we don’t, we don’t downplay. We don’t do the normal Christian thing now, in my circle. And and all circles not like this, okay? Rich Birch — Yep. Andrew Hopper — The circle I’m in is like this, the Baptist world… Rich Birch — Yeah. Andrew Hopper — …um where, you know, the one-on-one evangelism story over years that happens in a coffee shop is so high elevated above… Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — …the student who comes to Christ in a crowd at a youth camp. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — And we just don’t do that. We’re like, man, I don’t, I’ll put those two right together. Rich Birch — Yeah. Andrew Hopper — I’m glad and And also what we have no problem doing, and our people know this, is I’m like, hey, people can get saved in one-on-one encounters, and they can get saved in you know where there’s a preacher in a crowd. But don’t kid yourself to think they’re both equally as effective in terms of numbers. Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Yes. Andrew Hopper — 99.9% of everybody that got saved in the book of Acts, it happened when there was a crowd and a preacher. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — That’s just facts. Rich Birch — Right. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Hopper — I mean, I’ve gone through at our breaking barriers conference, I literally went through every single time that people were baptized or whatever. And it’s like almost every one of them, there is a crowd and there’s somebody preaching the gospel. Rich Birch — That’s good. Andrew Hopper — Now the crowd might be 10 people, it might be 3000 people. but that And so I’m like, hey, that is just, it’s just what it is, man. And our um… Rich Birch — Right. Right. Right. Andrew Hopper — And in our church, we have no problem saying the most effective hour for both evangelism and discipleship during the week is is the church service. Rich Birch — Yep. Yeah, that’s good. Andrew Hopper — If our people believe that, they don’t you know they really believe that, then suddenly I think inviting their friend to come is not second class… Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — …and they’re not getting graded because they’re not a one-on-one evangelist, soul winner all the time. Rich Birch — Yep. Andrew Hopper — I want our people to be able to share the gospel, and I think many of them can, especially the ones that are gifted. Rich Birch — Yep. Andrew Hopper — But you know I think that that’s probably… And so then, man, from there it all just kind of flows, man. Rich Birch — Yes, love it. Andrew Hopper — Then then then we’re like, once once your people are bought into inviting, um, you know, then we do all the stuff everybody else does kind of, we do… Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Hopper — …but we just, we just don’t [inaudible] about it. You know…Rich Birch — Yeah. I love it. Dude, I love that. Yeah. And I’m doing a totally steal that because, you know, when people ask me that question, I go right to the pragmatic. Because people will go after me on the church growth stuff. And I mostly don’t engage, but sometimes I’ll engage when it’s a friend or somebody and I’ll be like, Hey, well, let’s talk about it. Rich Birch — And and I go to the like, listen, I, cause they’ll be like, yeah, but shouldn’t we really be teaching people evangelism? And I’m like, yes. And I I give my my EE qualifications. I’m like listen when I was in high school I did Evangelism Explosion. I’ve knocked on a lot of doors, hey if you were to die tonight what, you know? I’ve done that. But what I do know is not everyone will do that. Not everyone will that that is such a high bar. And do I wish everyone will do that? Uh yeah, I do. I wish everyone would have that kind of conversation. But actually, what I what I do know is, man, if I can move a bunch of people in our church to take the step towards just inviting someone, that’s like the first step towards evangelism. It’s like the first step in that ah direction. Rich Birch — But I am going to rip off the crowd in a preacher, look at the book of Acts. That is a great, that’s so good. Andrew Hopper — It’s crazy. I mean they got, Rich, they have like, you know, the the thing that is so elevated is three years of relationship finally won them over at a coffee shop, sharing the gospel. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — And I’m like, hey that never happened in the Bible one time ever. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Dude, that’s so good. Andrew Hopper — Nobody ever nobody ever in the book of Acts did pre evangelism. So there’s no pre-evangelism, there’s evangelism, even the one-on-one encounters. It’s like, hey, they happened within 20 minutes or two hours, or but it was never like… Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah. Andrew Hopper — …we’re gonna go make a friend for a year so we can share the gospel with them one day. Rich Birch — Yeah, dude, that’s good. Andrew Hopper — You know and ah you know I just think we’ve got to kind of try to stick to the text a little more. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so pivoting in a slightly different direction. Help me understand how you think about and another, what I see as a false dichotomy. So I’m going to set this up a little bit as a devil’s advocate, but I don’t actually have the energy behind this that I’m going to express. Multisite versus church planting. Like one of them is better than the other. Like, you know, that you one of them is efficient. The other is a resource hog. Rich Birch — How do you guys think about that? Because you’re doing both. You’re actively engaged in both of these. You seem firmly committed to both. How do you talk about that? How do you think about that as a leader? Andrew Hopper — Well, one one leads to the other and that’s that’s what people don’t understand. They look at them as if they’re in competition. What they don’t understand is almost every really awesome church planting network that is actually planting churches, not affiliating a million churches, they are born out of, guess what, multi-site churches. Rich Birch — Right, right.Andrew Hopper — So, you know, I mean, just go down the list. Fellowship, you know, Fellowship Associates… Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Highlands, whatever. Andrew Hopper — …Acts 29, Seacoast, Summit, Summit. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep. Andrew Hopper — Okay, well, what is it about the multi-site model then that produces so much church planting? It’s the the radical commitment to leadership development. Rich Birch — That’s good.Andrew Hopper — When you when you multiply anything, you need more leaders. And so what happens is you end up with, you know, if you wanna multiply a group, you gotta have another leader. You wanna multiply a service, you gotta have more serve teams. You gotta multiply a campus. Now you gotta have elders and leaders. It’s just that next step of of going to church plants. Andrew Hopper — So we, for example, man, we um we’ve sent out 124 of those almost 200 that have gone to domestic church plants. We have five, okay? The the ah overwhelming majority of that 124 do not come from our, “broadcast campus”. Rich Birch — Oh, interesting. Andrew Hopper — They all come from satellite. Rich Birch — That’s an interesting insight. Interesting insight.Andrew Hopper — They all come from the, so the “satellite campuses”. And the reason is, it’s very strategic. The reason is that they have already said yes to moving their life for the mission once. Rich Birch — That’s good. Andrew Hopper — They’ve already said, you know what, convenience wise, I like going there. I like seeing him live. I like being at the big thing. But you know what? I live in this community. I’m going to plant my life here. Andrew Hopper — And what what people keep doing is, you know, the way churches get planted are when people ultimately say yes to something that is very uncomfortable. Well, they’ve already said yes to moving to group. If they’ve already said yes to moving to service time, you know, we’re very strategic. Hey, you need to go to Thursday night instead of Sunday to make room for the mission. I don’t wanna go to Thursday night. I know, but you need to go. Now now go to the campus. Now by the time we plant a church, we’re like, hey, you know, it’s like, well, okay, I can go move somewhere else. Andrew Hopper — So I think that for us, um I think multi-site church, and it’s a tool for me, man. If I saw a better tool, I’d throw it down and pick something else up tomorrow. I’m not philosophically committed to it. Rich Birch — Right. Yep. Andrew Hopper — I do believe it’s the best leadership development tool I’ve ever seen. And, you know, I know this is not exactly what you asked me, but most multi-site critiques, are listen, they’re not just wrong, they are exactly backwards, okay? So what people will say about multi-site? Well, it’s just a celebration of one leader, you know? I mean, one one guy up there. Rich Birch — Yeah that’s not true. Andrew Hopper — Do you know how many guys preached in our church last year? 27. Rich Birch — Right, right. Andrew Hopper — You know why? Because we’re multi-site. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — You know, that’s why people get in that plant church. It’s not about, I mean, it’s not about one leader. Rich Birch — Yeah. Andrew Hopper — It’s about the ability to, I mean, you tell me what’s more about the leader. Let’s build a huge building where 10,000 people crowd in and hear you on the stage live versus planting little things all around. Like I could go on and on. But you know, so some of that stuff is really just kind of, they’re potshots that don’t hold a lot of weight.It’s not church planting or campus-ing. It is one that leads to the other. Andrew Hopper — And the last thing I would say about it, Rich, is I think what people say is, well, if our church grows, we’ll plant a church. It takes 10 years to develop a church planter. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — And I know that. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — We’re we’re about to plant our first church in Greensboro ah that we’ve that we’ve planted we’ve planted campuses in our town, obviously. But we’re about to plant our first church in our town. Nico’s gonna go plant this church. We met him when he was 19 years old on a college campus. He’s 29. It takes 10 years. Rich Birch — Right. Wow. Andrew Hopper — you know? Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — And and when you go, the most people I’ve ever seen go on a church planting team is like 40, you know?Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — It’s very, you could plant a campus in six months and 500 people go. My point is, church planting is not a viable option for a real growth problem. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — Okay. I mean, it’s just not. It’s a different category. You’re talking about apples and oranges. Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Andrew Hopper — And so, man, we love multi-site because we think that we think it helps us get to more church plants, and raising up pastors and preachers. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. I kind of related to that. Talk to me about the video teaching, because that’s the other kind of kind of criticism that comes up. So statistically, the more the larger a multisite, this is just true, statistically larger a multisite church is, and the more campuses they have, the more that video teaching is a part of what they do. That’s just universally true um like from a from like an industry point of view, or from like a movement point of view. Rich Birch — And so sometimes people will lodge against the multisite movement. They’ll say like, well, it’s it’s all about whoever’s on video, which we all know is not true. But talk to me through how you how you think about that and developing communicators and how does all that fit together? Andrew Hopper — Well, I think that, I think that, I mean, I just would reject the premise that something inherently about video is more, um is more celebratory of the lead, whoever the lead communicator is. I mean, like when people say that they’re like, hey, you got five campuses and four of them are on video. That’s like a big celebration of you. I’m like, well, our church is 3000 people. I mean, we could just build a three or 4000 seat auditorium in the old days. Would that be less celebratory of me? Rich Birch — Right. Right. Yes. Yes. Andrew Hopper — You know, and what if we build a 5,000 person building, and we pack them all in and they all are there. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper —We’re all 5,000 eyeballs are on me on the stage. Rich Birch — Yeah. Andrew Hopper — I’m the only one on the stage. Like so kind of analytically, like I’m just like, man, I just that doesn’t really make, like in my head, that don’t make a lot of sense. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andrew Hopper — I don’t think something inherently about the video um you know is more celebratory or not. So then to me, it’s a pragmatic issue, a consecrated pragmatism type issue. And the issue is… Rich Birch — Yeah. Andrew Hopper — You know, man, you can, you know, there’s a reason why multi-site has taken off. It is so much easier to develop smaller venues. It’s cheaper, it’s easier, and it’s more strategic because of where you can put them. And so to me, that’s, it’s just more of a pragmatic issue. And but I do, but I do, I will say this, man, there is no doubt that the raising up of communicators happens at an exponential clip in multi-site churches compared to a single site church. Um, you know, and I don’t, I mean, I got, I got friends that are really committed to the single site thing and committed to live preaching and that’s fine. Rich Birch — Yep. Andrew Hopper — Like I’m not, they can do whatever they want. Rich Birch — Yep, yep. Andrew Hopper — I mean, they’re, they’re getting after it. I’m getting after it. Um, but you can’t, you can’t deny that the, ah you know, the preaching opportunities are multiply. I mean, you got one single site and the guy preaches 40 times a year. That’s only 12 opportunities. Rich Birch — Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, for sure. Andrew Hopper — You got five different sites. You have 60 opportunities in that same time. Rich Birch — Yep, yep. Andrew Hopper — And that’s just what we’ve experienced. I mean, I think that why we have so many guys that can preach, why guys, this is my story. I’m 24 years old. I’m getting a preach to five, 700 people, 24, 25 years old. The only reason for that was because of how many services and how many campuses we were having. And I feel like it was really beneficial for me. Rich Birch — Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Andrew Hopper — You know so I think the leadership development is such a big deal. Rich Birch — Well, a hundred percent. And and there’s that there’s the whole context on multisite that not only were you preaching, but you were doing that in a team context that was giving you feedback, that they loved you enough to not just be like, well, do whatever you want, Andrew. Or, you know, or some nice person at the end of the service was like, that was great. It was like, well, yeah, there was a lot of that that was great, but here’s some stuff you could do to get better, which in a lot of churches, that just doesn’t happen. But that’s naturally built into the multisite system because there’s like some standards there around, Hey, we need to be, in your case, you know, when you were at Summit, it needs to be kind of fit our thing. It needs to be a part of who we, you know, we are. Yeah. I love that. Rich Birch — We did a study last year… Andrew Hopper — And I see, yeah… Rich Birch — Yeah. Go ahead. Andrew Hopper — Go ahead, go ahead. Rich Birch — I was going to say, we did a study last year of, ah so we have this, this group, we do this private coaching group called Church Growth Incubator, and it looks at, you know, invite culture stuff. And we do research on fast growing churches, firsthand research. And one of the things I was actually shocked when I was working with an associate who was helping us with this, and we were actually looking at a different issue. Rich Birch — We were looking at, um, some stuff around teaching, but this person said, you know, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of these churches have a lot of different people that are on stage on Sunday morning in their main campus over a year. And he said, I just happened to look at a couple of them. And I noticed it was like more than a dozen people on their main stage preaching in a in a given year. Rich Birch — And I was like, that seems really high. And then we went and actually looked. We looked at 30 churches who they, who is actually preaching on the main stage at these locations. And the average for 2023 in 30 of the fastest growing churches was like 11.2 individual different communicators on the main stage. Rich Birch — Now, obviously there’s a lead communicator who’s there a lot, but there’s a lot of other people that are rotating through. Again, think about then all that development that’s happening. And these are the largest, most influential churches in the country. Andrew Hopper — Yeah, I totally agree with that I mean and and I think another thing is for the discipleship model, because people people naturally say, well, hey, that’s fine. Well what you’re saying is great. Well, then do it all the time, you know, don’t do any video. Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Andrew Hopper — And what I would say is, again, this is a pragmatic issue, but it’s um it’s it’s twofold. Number one, we love to develop, but let’s don’t let’s don’t kid ourselves. If somebody’s got their 10,000 hours in, it’s a different level of communication. Okay. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Andrew Hopper — So, you know, we want to develop, but when you, when you say, Hey, we’re going to have seven of these churches and they’re all going to be preaching live… Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — …there’s a…you know, you can end up with some real sort of… The other thing I would say is, um, you know, we, we are a group model. We have a group model that is sermon-based. And so, you know, the idea of having seven different communicators and then people from different campuses that co-pollinate, you know, cross pollinate with groups, that doesn’t work. And so, you know, cause we do a lecture lab. So we’re going to go talk about this during the week. Rich Birch — Yep. Yeah. Andrew Hopper — So we need that sermon to be pretty streamlined. And one of the most effective ways to streamline it is to just do all the same sermon and do it on video. Rich Birch — Yeah, dude, so good. Well, so you’ve, you’ve launched a podcast, a conference, one day, that kind of stuff called ah Breaking Barriers. You can check this out at breakinggrowthbarriers.com. Tell us about this. Why, why did you do this? What does this got to do? What’s the heart behind this? Talk, talk to us about this. Andrew Hopper — So I um I I just have a real burden and and God has put a kind of a fire in my belly. Number one, I really believe that to whom much is given, much is required. Rich Birch — So good. Andrew Hopper — And I feel like our church has grown and we’ve we’ve we’ve seen some cool stuff and we want to try to and we have been poured into unbelievably. And I’ve I’ve been in a situation to to receive such good coaching and stuff like that. I want to try to multiply that. Andrew Hopper — But the the heart of it, really, man, is that that we are we really believe that a lot of the church non-success that we’re seeing and the plateauing and all that kind of stuff is by our own design. And I think that you know what you believe about success is probably the greatest determiner of whether or not you’re ever going to have it. And trying to help free people from these sort of anti-church growth you know kind of chains that they’re in. Andrew Hopper — I mean this this is my world okay and I know this is I know your podcast goes out every you know a lot of different worlds. But it is regularly reported in the Baptist world that between 70 and 80 percent of Baptist churches are plateaued or declining. Okay? Well we have this is what’s crazy to me, rich. We have figured out how to simultaneously mourn decline without celebrating growth. I… Rich Birch — Dude, that’s a great insight! Andrew Hopper — You know what I mean? We will say, the church is dying, the church is dying. And then someone says, hey, man, my church is growing. And we’re like, oh, we’re cynical about that. And I mean, it’s it’s just kind of crazy. Rich Birch — Dude, that’s so true. Andrew Hopper — And so Breaking Barriers is ah fundamentally all about trying to make some shifts in the way we talk. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — We want to celebrate church growth. And the way we want to do it is what I was saying earlier. We don’t disconnect it from growing. And I’m sorry, from going. So our our tagline is churches can grow without going, but they can’t go without growing. Andrew Hopper — And so we just try every time we talk about a sent story, we want to talk about a growth story, and we just want to put those things together. Then what the, what the podcasts, what the, um, the one day things we’re doing, you’re coming to do one of our one days – we’re really grateful for that. It’s going to be great. Andrew Hopper — Um, and then, uh, certainly our conference is all about saying, okay, if that’s true, that, that going after the lead measure is, is something we should do, need to do, be excited about we need to speak more positively about the lead measure of people coming in the door. I’m talking to icky stuff, man. Website views, first-time guests, raising money, like all that. Andrew Hopper — Okay. Then um then, yeah, we’re gonna we need to be talking about that stuff positively. Then then we need to equip people for it, which you do a lot of, you know. We want to equip people for it very practically. So like on our podcast, I mean we’ll have three podcasts in a row that are just all about the pragmatics around how to go to two services… Rich Birch — Right. Yep. Andrew Hopper — …for example, you know Rich Birch — Love it. Yep. Andrew Hopper — …or, you know, just all that. I mean, just super practical in the weeds. And it’s gotten some traction, man. I think it’s cool. I think a lot of, um a lot of you know, lead church, like leaders in churches are are are are learning from it stuff. So we’re excited about that. Rich Birch — Yeah, I really would I’d strongly encourage you to drop by breakinggrowthbarriers.com. The podcast is is great. I love your guys um affect like great conversations, engaging to listen to, ah really fantastic. And so I would strongly, ah you know, endorse you you guys, you really should, ah you know, follow along. Rich Birch — And and Andrew, I really appreciate your your candor, I appreciate your passion for this stuff. I appreciate how God’s using you. And I think you do have a unique voice ah in the in the church landscape. Multiple things I was writing down today. I’m like, man, that’s just so good, so fresh. So is there anything else you want to say just before we wrap up today’s episode? Andrew Hopper — Nah, man, I appreciate it. I hope people will go and check it out. I just think people have got to sort of get freed up to run hard because if you have a divided heart, you will always stop short. You know? If you feel internally a little bit of slime and ickiness around some of the real practical matters, you will not chase them as hard as you as really what’s needed to see some movement happen. And so um, yeah, that’s it, man. Excited for what you guys are doing and looking forward to the one day event. Rich Birch — Nice, that’s great. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them online? Andrew Hopper — Yeah. So, um, my, my primary outlet is just, uh, you know, you can go to, you can follow me on Instagram. Um, but our, our, our church stuff in terms of this Breaking Barriers stuff. Yeah. You said it breakinggrowthbarriers.com. We have an Instagram Breaking Barriers, Instagram, Andrew Hopper — Um, and, uh, really that website is pretty good. I mean, it’s always just about the next thing. We also have a private Facebook group that you have to have come and sort of be buying into what we’re doing to get in. Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Andrew Hopper — And that, that, that Facebook group is awesome because it’s like, it is just so dripping with pragmatism. I love it. Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. Andrew Hopper — You know, it’s just like, man, it’s just, how are you guys doing this? How are you doing this? And it’s not just us. I mean, it’s everybody just kind of firing off and people are putting stuff in chat. Rich Birch — Right. So good. Andrew Hopper — And so that’s a really cool thing to jump into if you’re into this stuff as well. Rich Birch — So good. Appreciate you, Andrew. Thanks for leading today. Andrew Hopper — All right, thanks, man.

Welcome to the unSeminary podcast! This week we have with us Justyn Smith, Executive Kids Pastor at Cornerstone Church in Arizona and a story catalyst at Plain Joe. What does an effective children’s ministry look like? What does kids’ ministry at your church look like when you put yourself in the shoes of a child, or their parents? Tune in as Justyn shares how to transform your kids’ ministry into a thriving ministry that serves the families at your church with vision and intentionality. Challenges in ministry. // Kids’ ministry is an interesting place in today’s church because of growing challenges that church leaders are facing. Navigating societal divisions and strong political opinions, changes in technology that have affected both ministry and parenting, and a lack of clear vision or understanding of what effective kids’ ministry looks like lead to a reactive approach. Questions to ask. // Effective children’s ministry is about much more than simply the curriculum or administrative duties. What does it look like when you put yourself in the shoes of a child at your church. What does it look like when you put yourself in the shoes of a mom or a dad? What could that partnership look like? What questions are parents asking when they drop their child off and they pick their child up? All of these things help shape and inform what an effective children’s ministry should look like at your church. Engage with parents. // Meeting a practical need is a part of what makes an effective kids’ ministry. Strike up a conversation with a visiting parent, asking them to observe and provide honest feedback on their child’s drop-off experience. Reach out to long-time attenders and inquire if kids’ ministry is partnering well with them and meeting the needs of their children. Organize roundtable discussions with parents to gather their thoughts and experiences. Opening yourself up to honest feedback can help shape the direction of the ministry. Listen to children. // You can put yourself in a child’s shoes by literally bringing yourself down to their level. Justyn suggests getting on your knees and walking through your kids’ experience. Observe what you see, hear and feel. Engage with children to understand their preferences and interests. Ask kids what they enjoy and what would draw their friends to the church. This feedback can help shape programming and events that resonate with the target audience. Justyn believes that using “hooks” to attract kids is acceptable as long as there is substance behind those efforts. The ministry should remain focused on effective discipleship while creating engaging and memorable experiences for children. Welcome neurodiversity. // Children’s ministries need to be inclusive of diverse learning abilities and styles. This trend is not going away and churches must be proactive in creating environments that welcome all children. Your church doesn’t need to do everything, but every church can do something. Begin where you can and develop a long-term plan. Engage with families who have children affected by special needs and have open conversations about how to make the ministry more accessible. Invest in kids’ ministry. // Many churches are beginning to recognize the importance of investing in children’s ministry, moving away from the notion that it is a lesser priority. Executive pastors need to conduct an honest assessment of their funding priorities. If children’s ministry is consistently underfunded compared to other ministries, it can lead to unrealistic expectations for performance. Investing appropriately in children’s ministry is essential for its success. Email Justyn with any questions and find him on social media @pastorjustyn. He also invites listeners to download this interview with Theron Skees from his book, Kidmin, Trust and Pixie Dust: Unlocking the Magic of Children’s Ministry. NEXT STEPS // Is Your Children’s Ministry Thriving?  Whether you’re a seasoned children’s pastor or just getting started, it’s essential to regularly assess the health of your ministry. Is your volunteer team engaged? Are kids excited to return each week? Are parents feeling connected? Download our Children’s Ministry Health Assessment Checklist and take a deep dive into key areas like volunteer engagement, parent involvement, spiritual growth, and more! This practical tool will help you identify strengths and opportunities for growth, setting your ministry on a path to long-term success.  Get the checklist today and build a thriving, impactful children’s ministry! 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! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Super excited for you to listen in today. You know, I’ve said in other environments that I think some of the most creative people in the local church are kids’ ministry people. They just do incredible things. And today we’ve got not just a kids’ ministry person, but really a person who’s an expert in this whole area. Rich Birch — We’ve got Justyn Smith with smith with with us. He really carries a couple different hats. One, he’s a story catalyst at Plain Joe. This is Storyland Studio. Plain Joe partners with churches, nonprofits, faith-based organizations, and educational places to create unbelievable ah strategic, digital, and spatial stories that ultimately lift the spirit. We’ve had a number of folks from Storyland on in the past. We just love these guys. They do such a good job. But he is also the Executive Kids Pastor at Cornerstone Church in Chandler, Arizona. So not only is he an expert, he’s also a practitioner. Super glad to have you on the show today, Justyn – welcome. Justyn Smith — Rich, thank you so much. It’s an honor to be here. I mean that, and I’m looking forward to our conversation for sure. Rich Birch — Yeah, why don’t you fill in the picture a little bit? Tell me a little bit about ah what the last couple decades of kids’ ministry has looked like and, ah you know, before you joined Storyland, but but talk to us about kind of your background and and all that. Justyn Smith — Yeah, so for sure. Well, one, I mean, I’ve I’ve been married for over 24 years. I’ve got seven children myself. Rich Birch — Wow. Justyn Smith — So all the way from young adults, all the way to ah five years old. Rich Birch — Love it. Justyn Smith — So I feel like I have a children’s and student ministry built into my own home, which is which is phenomenal. Ask them, we’ve experimented on them many times, which has been fun. And we’ve been all over the country. So we’ve been ah in places like Las Vegas, Southern California, Minneapolis, Tampa Bay, in Phoenix, Seattle. I’m just all over the U.S. ah ministering in churches in all those places, really been in next-gen ministries.Justyn Smith — So I’ve been serving the church either in children’s ministry, student ministry, ah both, parenting, all those types of things. So I’ve got but really over 22 years of experience ah working with ah churches from start-up churches to mega churches of 10,000 people. So I feel like I’ve just I’ve just been blessed to have just a a broad ah stroke of just what what church looks like across the board. And ah one thing I’ve learned over the years is no matter if you’re a startup and you have a budget of whatever you made working your other job… Rich Birch — Yeah, so true. Justyn Smith — …cause because there is no budget. Or whether you’ve got, ah I mean, $1.5 million dollars to play with a year, ah Ministry is not about is not all all about the money. It’s not about all about the resources. It’s really about your heart, your calling… Rich Birch — That’s good. Justyn Smith — …ah and ah all all those intangibles. Although let’s admit those tangibles do help a lot, which I’m sure we’ll get into a little bit today. But it really starts with some of those intangibles. Justyn Smith — And ah kids’ ministry is I think it’s it’s it’s an an interesting place today ah specifically because there’s this tension of ah, one, just our culture. Our culture is is a little bit, if you’ve paid attention to any sort of news lately, I mean, it’s it’s out there, right? I’s ah no matter where you land on ah the political spectrum, societal spectrum or whatnot, there’s definitely um ah some division, there’s definitely some strong opinions. And so that’s made children’s ministry ah maybe a little bit challenging, more challenging than it has been in the past. Justyn Smith — Technology has has has made it interesting. There’s been a lot of positives with technology, but with it has also brought a lot of ah a lot of negatives. And so how do how do you maneuver through that? That’s impacted kids’ ministry, parenting, and everything across the board. So I’m I’m sure we can dive into a lot of things, but those are just a few of the things that that come to mind ah come up to mind. Justyn Smith — But ah real quick, it is um it’s thriving today, though. It’s it’s ah It’s a lot of fun. Rich Birch — So true. Justyn Smith — Kids’ Ministry was in a position, I think, years ago where ah didn’t feel very valued. Maybe it felt valued, spoken from a lead pastor or leaders from the stage, ah but wasn’t really resourced well, ah didn’t really have high quality leaders. Although the church would say, we want to give them our best, ah rarely would give them their best. We’re starting to see all that change where churches are are really seeing the value. Like no when we say we want to give them our best, we really want to give them our best. Rich Birch — That’s good. Justyn Smith — So sorry, that’s a long answer to probably your short question, but…Rich Birch — No, no, no, that’s good. No, no, I love it. I love your perspective. And I kind of want to take advantage of the fact that you do see, you know, wide swath, like you say, the kind of the entire, for lack of a better word, industry and um really want to camp on that and understand, you know, what’s happening across the country. And maybe let’s talk a little bit more about the challenge. Rich Birch — What would be like, if you think about a common challenge that, you know, kids’ ministry pastors, children’s pastors are encountering today um or faced with, what would what would be a challenge or or two that would kind of bubble to the surface for them? Justyn Smith — I think something that I like to challenge children’s pastors with is ah really I mean why do you why do you do what you do, at the end of the day? Like hat does an effective children’s ministry look like? I think when you talk to maybe some children’s pastors of some well-established, ah we’ll call them, you know, maybe larger churches, ah they seem to have, you know, um I don’t want to say they’re ducks in a row, but they definitely seem to have to have an order and an expectation that’s different from 95% of the churches out there. Justyn Smith — Because because most churches in America, they’re they’re they’re rather small and um and I think some churches out there, it’s, you know, they’re they’re desperate looking for someone to lead ah children’s ministries. So what it looks like is a pastor walking through the lobby and seeing maybe a… Rich Birch — Hey, you! Justyn Smith — Yeah, really. It’s like, Hey, you’re breathing. Hey, you’ve got kids. And they assume, Hey, you’re not doing anything. And Hey, would you do this? And some people that just the goodness of their heart, maybe an obligation or whatnot, they’re like, yeah, we’ll give it a try. And, um, two years later, they find themselves still in it. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — But with that comes, I mean, they they didn’t really go into it with vision. They didn’t really go into it with expectations or or or or ah education or or any of that kind of stuff. They went in there to really kind of fill a need. And I think that’s that’s a lot of churches that are out there. And I’m not saying that’s not a ah bad place to start, but because of that, some people don’t know, like, where do I go from there? And so what happens is like, what does an effective children’s ministry look like? Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — They don’t really know because all they’re trying to do is they’re trying to hang on from week to week. they They know that, hey, we’ve got to prepare for Sunday. And really in a lot of churches, then we got to prepare for Wednesday. And really every three days or so you’re you’re preparing um a lesson, and and and trying to find volunteers, and ah do special events outside of that, and maybe a child care moment. And there’s so much going on that what is effective ministry looks like? And so I I like to start there is is to kind of if we can slow people down, ah take take a few days, and and let let’s talk about what what it looks like. Justyn Smith — It’s not just about the curriculum. It’s not just about administrative duties. It’s not just about all all those things. Those things are important. But what does it look like when you put yourself in the shoes of ah a kid? What would it look like if you put yourself in the shoes of of a mom and dad and what that partnership could look like? Or what it looks like when ah they drop their child off and they pick their child up? And and have you asked yourself the questions, you know, what are mom and dad asking them when when they get picked up? All these all these little things I think would help shape and inform what an effective children’s ministry could and should look like. Justyn Smith — And and I think that obviously I something that’s great about—sorry—the the children’s ministry community is I think they’re very ah collaborative. And um I don’t want to and want to pick on other ministries in the church, but I think there’s some who are maybe a little more competitive. Rich Birch — Okay. Justyn Smith — In in this space, I would say there’s there’s a there’s ah massive willingness to collaborate. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — And you’d be shocked if you reached out to people and just said, hey, could I have some time? Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — And and they’ll give you your time, and and help you and not not charge you or or make you do something crazy. So I encourage people, you know reach out to other ah children’s ministries that you feel like are doing a a good and effective job. But put yourself in the shoes of of parents. I mean, have the conversation with your pastor on on their expectations, and and and and figure out, like especially putting yourself in the shoes of parents. Because they don’t sometimes know um the questions to even ask or or what to do. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — And so so when you do that, I think that you can you can meet a real practical need, ah which is a part of what makes an effective kids ministry, meeting a real practical need… Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — …not just the spiritual growth, which also is, you know, huge priority. Rich Birch — Yeah, incredibly important. But I, yeah, I totally agree on the, you know, people are, you’d be amazed how many people will answer your questions or be willing to talk. That’s actually really the core of what started even our podcast. Justyn Smith — It’s awesome. Rich Birch — Like, you know, you’d be amazed. People people are willing to to help each other, which is amazing. But ah you you talked about, I’d love to kind of zero in on one thing you talked about. You talked about the fact that um you’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of kids and adults, parents, that that are dropping their kids off. Give us a few ways that we could do that. I think that’s a good insight. How do we, because we can always see our thing just from our perspective. We see what we do from our vantage point, um which is one vantage point, but it’s not it’s not obviously the entire picture. Justyn Smith — Yeah, so, I mean, a couple of really practical things ah is, one, is you can literally ask a parent—I’ve done this a couple times, and you’ve got to be pretty confident, I think, in ah maybe a visitor or whatnot. I’ve literally done this with with with a visitor. I’ve struck up a conversation in the lobby, and I was like, I literally said, hey, I know this is going to sound really strange, but as you drop your child off and you go through our kids’ ministry, would you just take note of what that experience is like for you? Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Justyn Smith — Uh, I, really I just, and I really, I had no background with them. I had no, I didn’t know what they would say. I didn’t even know if they were saved, to be quite honest. And, but I just, I just felt like I wanted to do that. And one, because I knew I was going to get a very real, raw ah answers, and I wasn’t going to get someone who’s kind of hopped from church to church, or who grew up in the church and gave me some churchiness and and be you know a little too kind. I wanted something real and and honest, and they did that. Justyn Smith — But if that’s too far out there for you, I think it’s just literally just just ask ask a parent who attends your church, “How is the experience like ah for you?” And and you know maybe just do like a little roundtable. Bring you know four or five you know parents, ah take them out for coffee or just just come into one of your kid’s spaces and and just talk for 60 minutes. Maybe there’s ah maybe there is someone who’s who’s somewhat new to the church. you know maybe they’ve been coming for six months. That’s enough time for them to remember their experience um there is especially their first time experience, what it’s like. Justyn Smith — But then and then don’t forget about the parents who have been attending for a long time. They have a lot of they have a lot to say. And they probably [inaudible] the backbone of your church and I think sometimes we might forget about them. Because they start to blend into to the background. Rich Birch — Right, right. Justyn Smith — Bring them in. Hey, you’ve been attending here for 5 years, 10 years or or whatever. ah Do you feel like we really partner with you? Do you feel like we are meeting the needs… Rich Birch — That’s good. Justyn Smith — …of of of your children? I mean, just ask the questions. It puts you in a vulnerable in a vulnerable spot, but that’s okay. We’re leaders. And leaders need to put ourselves in in that spot and be humble enough to say, hey, we’re missing the mark here and we want to do better. Rich Birch — Yeah. Justyn Smith — Or we ah or we’re we’re doing a great job and we just want to keep building upon it and and and and doing better. And then I think when you put yourself in the in in a kids’ shoes, you can literally do this. You can literally get on your knees and you can walk through your kids experience and what do they see, what do they feel, what do they i mean what is that like for them literally, physically on that level? Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Justyn Smith — And then two, ask ask the kids. You know I think it’s sometimes funny, we’re always racking our brains around, man, what would be a fun thing to do for kids? What would be ah ah what would they want to do? You literally talk to them every single week… Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.Justyn Smith — …um sometimes twice a week. And so i would I would take time and say, hey, what do you guys think would be fun? What would be what what would be something that we could do that would draw your your friends to our church? I’m not against hooks at all, as long as there’s substance behind the hook. If it’s only hook and facade, we’re not being effective. But if you’re using that hook to get people into your church, to expose them to effective discipleship, I think that’s a win. Justyn Smith — And so um ask them. They they they know and they’ll come up with some maybe absurd things, but they’re going to come up with the answers because it’s the things they like to do. And then it’s our job as leaders, okay, how can we take what what they want to do and and and and make that work and and brainstorm that with creative people in your church. And so, yeah. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. It’s funny you say on the oh yeah to get on your knees, we did a training thing a while ago, probably a month ago, and they were handing out like, it was like a guest services thing in our church. And so we had like all these random different kind of personas that we were supposed to play. And so I was with someone, was paired with someone, and that was exactly what it was supposed to be. It was like a parent and child. And they were trying to check their kid in. And it was like a slightly different check-in situation. Justyn Smith — Sure. Rich Birch — And so I got on my knees and walked through ah you know with the with the person that was supposed to be my parent. And it was it was fun. And a part of what you know my takeaway from it was like, yeah, man, the kids are standing there a long time… Justyn Smith — Yeah. Rich Birch — …waiting for their parents to do some sort of administrative thing. And I said the exact same thing. I’m like can we put something fun here like what can we do something, you know give them something or have I don’t know candy or something… Justyn Smith — That’s brilliant. Yeah. Rich Birch — …in this environment um that I wouldn’t have thought of if I wasn’t and obviously my knees were hurting too. So I was like, oh man. But yeah, I love that. Put put them in their in your shoes. Ask lots of questions. Participate in the experience. that’s ah you know That’s so great. Rich Birch — Can you think of a time from your leadership where your perspective has been changed by maybe talking to kids or talking to parents, engaging, um that it’s actually changed a bit of what you’ve done? Justyn Smith — Yeah, I would I would say, I mean, to your point of, of you know, you put you were on your knees and and and walking through that. We’ve done that exercise, and and we found out that, yeah, we wanted to put something in the kid’s hands. And so we would have a welcome, like a little welcome bag ah with, you know, had our had our logo on it and had a couple things in it. So had ah had a first time button, had a little thing they could fidget with. And so literally as mom and dad are are completing you know, the the short form for check-in, they were able to ah fidget with some things. Justyn Smith — But not only that, but we also tried to make it personal where we have a someone there who’s giving the kids attention. And so mom and dad can focus on, you know, typing the stuff in, writing the stuff in, however, however you would do that. And we’d have someone asking kids questions, hey, what school what school to go to? Hey, what’s your favorite part of, you know, and just um and just really kind of engaging them. And then what that did for mom and dad, it kind of gave them a sense of, oh, man, these people really do care… Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — …about our children. They’re giving them attention and really kind of on on their level. And so I i think it it it just built some trust in right away, which I think is really important, especially if you’re a first-time guest. You’re leaving your kids. I don’t know this organization. I don’t know this church. Rich Birch — Right. Who are these people? Justyn Smith — Are you guys a cult? Are you like what are you? Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Justyn Smith — And I’m just giving you my kids. And so it’s important that trust right off the bat. So that helped with that. And I think like yeah with a with mom and dad, um, some of the things that we’ve we’ve changed is, you know, we found out that, you know, handouts on a weekly basis, they don’t like those. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — And some of the churches, I’ve been in some churches and they do value those. But I’ve been in some, they’re like these end up… we don’t do anything with them. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, you know, we’re spending so much time and thought and effort, uh… Rich Birch — Right. Producing this stuff. Yep. Justyn Smith — …producing this stuff and and you’re not using them. But we do it because, because I think it’s effective. Because it’s what I like to do. And I’m like and like, I’m not here for me. I’m here to serve, to serve Jesus. I’m here to serve you. And, um, if I’m not being effective, if I’m wasting these resources, that’s ridiculous. Justyn Smith — So then we went to, um you know ah you know, we did like a seven week series, so we just produced something that we made available for at the beginning of the series. And and that’s it. Rich Birch — Here it is. Right. Right. Justyn Smith — And and that kind of went with it. And and parents appreciate that. They’re like, oh, hey, it felt bite-sized enough where where they could get into it. Justyn Smith — And then we just moved some stuff to social media. So if some people still wanted a a weekly connection or questions, prompts, et cetera, they could still get that on a weekly basis. But in a not not wasting resources and things like that. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yes, exactly. When all the time we spent printing all that stuff, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense for sure. Rich Birch — So let’s let’s roll out a scenario. Let’s say I’m an executive pastor, church of 1,500 people, and you know I I really like our kids’ people. They’re good folks. But like I just have a sense that we’re not you know keeping up. That it’s like It feels like we’re like it’s like the same as it was 10 years ago. Like obviously, there’s new kids, new leaders, all that, but but it just feels like maybe we’re not um you know learning, growing. What advice would you give to me as an executive pastor as I’m working with my team to try to help them um stay current. Because I’m not an expert in it. It’s not my this isn’t my area. Justyn Smith — Right. Rich Birch — But I it’s it’s a hunch. So what should I be thinking about? How do I explore that kind of hunch? What what what kind of advice could I be, you know, could I give to the kids, ministry people in my church? Justyn Smith — Yeah, I mean, I think I think the first thing I mean the first thing I would do is I would be reflective as an executive pastor. So is this a is this a specific ministry challenge that you’re having, or is it an overall church challenge that you’re having? Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Justyn Smith — So I think it’s easy sometimes for us to sit in a chair and say, oh, hey, this could be better. Rich Birch — Yes. Justyn Smith — But then if I’m being really if I’m being honest and reflective of myself, hey, our whole church is down 20%. Or our whole church is struggling with this this this cultural thing. It’s not just the kids’ ministry. It seems like an easy target, or the student minister, or fill in the blank. It seems like an easy target. So I would i would encourage them, first, just be reflective and and make sure you’re really asking the right question. Ifif you do come to the conclusion that, hey, yeah, this children’s ministry is the lowest um hole in the bucket and and and that that’s where we’re leaking. Then, yeah, ask the tough questions. Justyn Smith — And I think what some of those questions are is, for you for an executive pastor, one, do we have do we have the right leader ah in place? And um again, just just you know how did we get this person? What’s what’s the backstory? Some executive pastors didn’t hire this person. So I mean, it’s it’s important to understand who who this person is. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — Where where are you going as a church? You know, I’ve been a part of some churches who, it’s like, there’s there’s there was nothing necessarily wrong with the children’s pastor, but the but the church made a a a dramatic shift in in their strategy and how they approach ministry in their community and reaching out. And they found out this children’s pastor who wasn’t doing a ah bad job, just didn’t have the gift mix and the capabilities to make this shift. And so um that’s a hard that’s a hard conversation um to to have, but but it’s one that’s necessary if you want, obviously, your children’s ministry or whatever to to to to get on board and go the direction you’re having. Justyn Smith — And so it could be a shift and in in leadership. If it’s someone you’re like, no, I think i think this person has it. They’ve got they’ve got the capability, they got the capability, they’ve the gifting, all that type of stuff, then um how are you resourcing this person? I mean, there’s there’s great conferences out there that you could send them to. there’s ah roundtables. I mean think I would say I as an executive ah as an executive pastor, all those things that you might be a part of, why would you not want your staff to also be a part of? Rich Birch — Right. Right. That’s good. Justyn Smith — And so um help them find a community and your kids pastor again um could have just been thrown in there, may not have the experience. Or or when ah and and and surround them, find a community of kids pastors who um who are are are big on leadership or big on spiritual disciplines and discipleship. I mean, what is it that you want for your church and and help them find that church, those people, and get them, expose them to what you are are wanting, if they don’t have that experience. Justyn Smith — Because I found that many kids’ pastors, they’re open. They just they don’t know. They feel under they just feel under-resourced, undervalued. Rich Birch — Right, right. Justyn Smith — And I think sometimes when you start to encourage, you start to show value. And some of that is is the resources you give them. It’s the um It’s the budget you give or don’t give them. All those things communicate something to them. And so ah you know that’s why I said earlier, you know, it’s one thing to say, hey, we value you. We we value Kids’ Ministry, but then they have the lowest budget ah line, you know, they have the lowest budget in the church. Rich Birch — Yes. Justyn Smith — Or or the student ministry, they’ve got you know they’ve got a full-time student pastor there, but we’ve got this part-time stay-at-home spouse that is running the Kids’ Ministry. But yet our expectation is that the Kids’ Ministry is at this level. Justyn Smith — And so it’s like, I think sometimes, and that’s where you got to take an internal and an internal inventory of of how, of your expectations and and what you’re doing in kids ministry. But but all those types of things. But I think it’s i think it’s mainly like what what helped my growth the most was me being exposed to people who um who our church wanted to emulate, who I wanted to emulate. And that just radically changed and put me on on the right trajectory. So I think that that’s a big deal. Rich Birch — Love it. Yeah, that’s good. So I want to come back to the under-resourced question in a minute. So I’m just putting a little a little pin in that. But but kind of related to this whole area, I think one of the things that’s changed a lot in the last, maybe even the last 10 years, for sure in the last 20, 25, is we’re trying to create, particularly kids ministries that really are can host a series of kids from a wide variety with a variety of learning um abilities, learning styles, neurodiversity, all that stuff. Talk to me about that both from like the volunteer team side and from you know put your Plain Joe hat on and and think about it from that perspective. What should what are some of the kind of key questions we should be thinking about when we think about that issue? Because this seems like one of those big changes over the last 10, 15 years. Justyn Smith — Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me just, yeah, let’s be honest. It’s it’s not going away. Rich Birch — No. Justyn Smith — it’s it’s it’s only It’s only expediting. And I find that you’ve got a couple churches you’ve got churches that are um they’re pretty resistant. They’re like, this is just how we do ministry. And to be honest, I’m I’m a little I’m I’m a little ah I’ll just use the word disappointed with churches who are just unwilling to um entertain the idea that that they could make some changes ah to minister, to maybe not the whole spectrum that’s out there, but but to to to some, to to what you can do. Justyn Smith — And so I have ah I have a lot of ah respect and high regard for churches who um who are also honest with themselves. They’re like, hey, we know this is a challenge, um but ah we can’t do it all, but this is what we can do right now. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — But then to maybe have a long-term plan of like, hey, how can we get there? Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — Because again, it’s it’s not it’s not going away. And some churches are just like, we’re just not going to do that. I’m just like, it’s just kind of a bummer because I feel like there’s a whole, and I feel like maybe you mentioned it, so you you might feel it as well, is there’s just a whole community out there that is just looking for a faith community… Rich Birch — Yeah. Justyn Smith — …um that will invite them in. And I think a lot of times we’re either intentionally or unintentionally unwelcoming them. And I think it’s important that that we strive to do what we but we can do. But then I hope that our churches would would get together and and and create a plan to to invite them in in the long term. So maybe, hey, ah this year we can do… you know we can you know handle this level, but maybe you know two or three years we can increase that. And I think those are positive strides. Justyn Smith — And then there’s some churches who kind of go all in and and they’re just doing a fabulous job at reaching that community. My Plain Joe had ah had on is just just being mindful of of people who um ah who are not, I guess what people say would call typical typical kids. And so when you’re designing, when you’re creating a space, when you’re creating environments, make sure that they’re ah inclusive of of all all kids of of of their abilities. I think it’s it’s it’s not as challenging as it seems to be. It’s as easy as this: it’s as easy as connecting with a family who has a child who who who’s going through that and having a conversation with them. Hey, how can we make our ministry more ah more friendly, more welcoming an environment for your child? Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s so good. I yeah I agree. Like we don’t want to get be caught asleep on this one. I think particularly as churches grow… Justyn Smith — Yeah. Rich Birch — …it it we end up in a really responsive, you know, way with this. It’s like we’re reactive because it’s like there’s families that are showing up and they are like, OK, you basically deal with my kid. And then we’re caught like, oh, I don’t know what to do. This is an area where we really should be thinking ahead… Justyn Smith — Right. Rich Birch — …getting ahead of the curve, trying to figure out, you know, there’s some studies that show somewhere between I think it’s I think it was 17 to 20% of kids in America are neurodivergent. So that’s like… Justyn Smith — Yeah. Yeah. they’re They’re saying, yeah, they’re saying, yeah, it’s it’s more than one in 10 kids are doing with something. Rich Birch — …one in five. Yeah. Yeah. Justyn Smith — And then just real quick too. And I feel like there’s a place I can just kind of be blunt ah with of my assessments is that I think sometimes we don’t do it because it takes work. Um, and and, and it, I’m, I’m just being real. It’s a, it takes a lot of work. Rich Birch — That’s true. Justyn Smith — It gets us out of our comfort zone and we don’t know.Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Justyn Smith — And so, and so let’s just, let’s just call it what it is. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a new skill. We got to learn, right? We got to lean in. Justyn Smith — And as a leader, go out there and learn it, go out there, do the research, talk to the people and do the work to meet that need. So there you go. Rich Birch — Okay, so sticking with the being blunt theme. Let’s go back to the underfunded question. So you got a bunch of executive pastor people that are listening in. And I know that they, when they hear that, and that like oh our area is underfunded, I know they’re like, yeah, like everybody’s. Like they’re trying to balance the budget, they’re like give me a break, like you know, it’s it’s all underfunded. But what what is the thing that you would say or that you wish you could say on behalf of kids’ ministry people all across the country if you had an earnest executive pastor that was sitting down and saying, Hey, like, help me understand. Are we underfunded? Are we? I know everybody wants more money. You know, they’re not going to go to their people and, you know, if you go to, I’ve never had a staff member say, you know what, I need less staff and I less need less resources. Justyn Smith — Right. Rich Birch — They’ve never said that. So um but let’s say it’s like an earnest person. They’re like, really, hey, ah help me understand, Justyn. You’re an expert in this area. What does what kind of funding percentage wise? Is there a way for me to think about that that really would be an appropriate level of funding for, you know, our church Justyn Smith — Yeah, I mean, and I think it’s like really two conversations. One, it’s to the kid’s pastor. Like don’t don’t take on a victim mentality. Rich Birch — Right. No, that’s good. Justyn Smith — Like like I would I would I don’t know if the executive pastor says that, it probably comes off differently. If I said that to peer, a children’s pastor, they’d take it better because I’ve been in that like the victim mentality, woe is me. Rich Birch — Yep. Justyn Smith — Like don’t do that. Rich Birch — Yep. Justyn Smith — You said yes to this, and and you know what you’re getting into. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — And so ah but but yeah, the the underfunded thing, I think it’s, again, it’s just having an honest assessment. So as you look at the ministries, how are they being funded? And if you have like, I’ve gotten some churches where student ministry is like, you know, 50, 60% more than kids ministry. But yet there’s this there’s this expectation that kids’ ministry is doing, you know, XYZ. And I’m like, dude… and it’s not necessarily about like, like the the like you get more, I get more. I I don’t like that per se. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — It’s just that um oftentimes you’re getting you’re getting what you’re paying for. And so if you’re paying um if you’re paying someone like, ah a low yeah, if they have a low budget, if you if they have low salary, I just often say, you get what you’re paid for. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Justyn Smith — And so I have that honest assessment. It’s hard to say; every church is different. I just say, man, what what do you value? Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — If you like you value kids, Oh, hey, your your budget’s $25,000 for ministry. Man, and and and you can make some changes to to do whatever. There’s some churches here, they’re trying to be they’re trying to minister to everyone and everything. And there’s it’s it’s a hard conversation to have, but um I get the I get the idea that, hey, woe is me, everyone wants more money. I’m I’m a very practical, I feel like very realistic, but I think that most executive pastors, if you really just reflected um on your stuff, I think I think you could figure out like if you’re underfunding it or not Rich Birch — Sure. Justyn Smith — it’s It’s challenging without knowing what the vision is, the values are… Rich Birch — Yeah. Justyn Smith — …it could be any number of things. So I know I’m not really answering the question, but. Rich Birch — Well, no, no, that’s fine. That’s good. I get it. I understand that your, you know, yeah people could reach out and ask you if they got specifics, you know, I’m sure you’d be happy to help. Justyn Smith — Yeah. Rich Birch — But it’s it because I think that’s a real issue. I do think, um you know, from my seat over the years, we’ve, you know, I’ve been such a champion for kids ministry specifically. I think it’s strategically important for the church. It’s the gospel from a big picture point of view. The gospel is one generation away from being extinct. We’ve got to invest in that. um but it But then just also from a like, I would say like a pragmatic church growth point of view, like prevailing churches invest heavily in kids ministry. Justyn Smith — Yes. Rich Birch — Like, you know, if you if you were to go visit really in kind of every stream of you know, Christian church, if you were to find the churches that that that stream considers prevailing, one of the common things that you’ll see in all of those, kind of regardless of the stream, is when you walk around their kids’ ministry or talk to their kids’ ministry people, they’re very well led… Justyn Smith — Right. Rich Birch — …they’re well-funded, there’s like energy coming off that. There’s like, wow, there’s lots of good stuff going on there. And so it’s highly unlikely that your church would become prevailing without ah without a killer kids’ ministry, I think, personally. Justyn Smith — Correct. Rich, I love you, man. That’s awesome. Yes, yes, yes. Rich Birch — Yeah, I’ll give you a hug across the across Zoom. Justyn Smith — I know, right? Rich Birch — Well, let’s you know you’ve given us a chapter of ah your book. It’s its so I want to hear a little bit about this. So first of all, I’m a Disney guy. I love Disney. So the fact that it’s just a former ah Disney Imagineer you’re talking about. But tell me about this chapter and then tell me about your book. Justyn Smith — Yeah, so the book, Kidmin, Trust and Pixie Dust. I’m a big Disney guy. And so in the Children’s Ministry world, I’ve I’ve got a few resources written on on Disney and and do a lot of that. And I know it gets it’s it’s like it goes back and forth with how people are receptive to it because Disney is always in the headlines… Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — …for whatever. But I like to if I like to focus a lot on like classic Disney, Walt Disney the person, and just the thing that he built. I think there’s no doubt that ah Walt Disney built something I’m gonna use the word magical, even though some people are allergic to that word in the church, ah but it but it really is. It’s like he he he created something that was ah brought a lot of value to families and to communities and has really was a pioneer in shaping a ah yeah entertainment today. Rich Birch — It’s true. Justyn Smith — I mean, we do what we do today in large part because of Walt Disney. And so um I think there’s a lot of things that we can take from Walt Disney and even the Disney company today and apply that to Kids’ Ministry and take the best from it. I’m not saying everything they do is great. Rich Birch — Right. Justyn Smith — Everything they do is is is replicable or or or that. But there is still a lot of ah good things that we can learn from that apply. And so this book does that. It’s Kidmin, Trust and Pixie Dust. It takes some practical ah leadership lessons and creative lessons that Walt Disney and um and and that the Disney ah teams over the years have put into place and how does that what does that look like in a kids’ ministry environment? Justyn Smith — And so and obviously, was like with my Plain Joe hat, I’m really big on environments and creating memorable experiences. I think those are super important. I think our organization does a phenomenal job at storytelling and helping churches tell their story, ah which includes, um you know, children’s ministry spaces and environments, you know, whether you’ve got 50 grand or 5 million, ah you know, we can make come to life. Justyn Smith — And this chapter specifically talks with a ex-Disney Imagineer, Theron Skees. And ah he talks about his story and just all that he he created and led throughout the years. And he’s a person of faith, ah which is amazing. Some people think, you know, there’s no way there’s Christians there, but there is um a faith community within the Disney Company. And Theron was one of them for many years. And his stories and the way he is so passionate about um about just ah the the local church and and creativity and telling the story is is um it’s it’s yeah it’s it’s it’s exciting and fun. And so I so I wanted to include this this chapter because I wanted it to inspire people to um to put their ah best into kids’ ministry. And I feel like i feel like this is a chapter that that can do that. And I hope it i hope it’s helpful for people. Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Well, I would encourage friends, listen, I back talking back to that executive pastor that we were talking about earlier, go click the link, read this chapter. And then maybe what you could do, a practical next step is why don’t you buy copies of of this book um and read it with your kids’ ministry people. Say like, hey, I you know I heard this interview. What if we spent the next couple months we read through this and then we just talked about it, all got got the copies. It’s on my budget, not yours. Don’t worry about it. And would love to talk a little bit about you know what can we do to kind of increase the, try to get a a learning environment going with with your kids’ ministry people? I think that would be a really practical. I know when I saw this book I thought man, this would be a great book to kind of um use in that kind of training environment. I think it could be a really cool tool Um, yeah, Mel McGowan, uh, from Storyland, he, he knows, uh, the path to my heart. Justyn Smith — Yeah. Rich Birch — He once hosted me at Club 33 there at Disneyland. So it was like, I feel like I’m forever indebted to Mel. So, um, which is, uh, you know, if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it friends, but, um, yeah, I appreciate the, uh, appreciate Disney for sure. Rich Birch — So, well, this has been great. What a great conversation today. Is there anything else that you want to cover just as we wrap up today? Justyn Smith — I mean, on a search, I know we’ve kind of gone over time a little bit and we talked a lot ah a lot, but I mean, I just, you know, I guess I would say, you know, I never thought that, you know, that I would have to, in kids’ ministry, be a salesman or a talent a talent seeker. And it’s just it just goes with… Rich Birch — That’s so true. Justyn Smith — …with with with ministry and and we need people to do ministry. And so that’s something that I learned along the way. And I’m just appreciative of you. I’m I’m thankful for unSeminary. I’m thankful for your ministry and what you’re doing. ah You’re helping a lot of people and it was definitely an honor to to be part of this. Rich Birch — Well, thanks so much. If people want to get in touch with you or, you know, track with, uh, you know, with Plain Joe or any of that stuff, where do we want to send them online? Justyn Smith — Yeah, I mean I mean, you can go to plainjoestudios.com. You can find me on any social media. I’m usually the you know hashtag or ah yeah ah Pastor Justyn is usually my my name on ah on everything. It’s Justyn with a Y, so J-U-S-T-Y-N. ah Pastor Justyn, so you can follow me on any of the social medias. ah Find me on ah on a yeah the the Plain Joe or Storyland website. And I would love to connect with you, have conversations, and help in any way that I can. Rich Birch — Love it. Thanks so much for being here, sir. I really appreciate your time today. Justyn Smith — Thanks, Rich.

Discover how to transform your church into an inviting community! The conversation dives into impactful teachings that resonate with members, making sermons feel like essential life support. Learn about creating memorable experiences during major events, capturing attention both online and in person. Explore engaging volunteer initiatives that foster a sense of belonging. Hear success stories from various churches that demonstrate how empathy and connection can turn guests into dedicated members, inviting others to join the journey.

Thanks for joining in for the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Will Hutcherson, a Next Gen and Student Pastor who has become increasingly passionate about finding practical ways to bring hope to kids and teens who are facing anxiety, depression, and despair. This led to him starting Curate Hope, a non-profit that focuses on suicide prevention, mental health awareness, and partnering with schools, churches, and parents to help heal despair in teens. Recent years have shown an alarming rise in mental health challenges among young people. Adolescents desperately need connection, and the church is uniquely positioned to help them take healthy next steps using practical strategies as well as spiritual tools. Tune in as Will shares his insights on how churches can come alongside youth struggling with anxiety and depression. People, places, and purposes. // Recent statistics underscore the urgency of addressing mental health issues among young people. These diagnoses are not just a medical issue, but also come from social, political, and environmental influences around us. In order for people to recover from mental health challenges, they need people, a place, and a purpose. The church can play a crucial role in providing a sense of community, belonging, and God-given purpose as people discover who God has called them to be. Conversations and connections. // The foundation for helping kids and teens through these issues is to cultivate more opportunity for conversations and connection within church settings. For decades, as a society, we’ve been trending towards less and less connection. The church needs to create more face-to-face opportunities where kids and teens feel seen. Ask yourself these questions. // Explore with your team what it might look like to create programs and environments to have more conversation spaces. What would it look like to build in more connection time in the Sunday service? How can you create more conversations? Build connection first. // Connection is like vitamins to the brain. When we feel seen on a deep level, it releases happy hormones and builds resilience. When someone is experiencing despair, hopelessness, or high anxiety, physiologically it’s more difficult for them to receive left brain logic. Instead, speak to the right brain first and meet them with heart. Help a person “emotionally exhale” before you work on reframing, focusing on the truth of scripture, and taking healthy steps towards building resilience. Student small groups. // Small groups are a core need of adolescent development. Youth need connection and creating spaces for them to have conversations with a caring adult is one of the best things for their mental health. Through student small groups, you’ll have a better chance of seeing when a mental health issue arises and helping guide adolescents through it. Coordinate youth ministry small groups to be on the same the night as adult small groups to make it easier for families. Emotions and God. // Churches can unintentionally demonize emotions. Emotions like fear and anxiety are natural human experiences and should not be viewed as indicators of being far from God or lacking faith. Instead, churches should create an environment where individuals feel safe to express their emotions and seek help without fear of judgment. Practical connection tools. // Will’s book Seen: Despair and Anxiety in Kids and Teenagers and the Power of Connection is a great tool for church leaders to read with kids and youth ministry leaders. It offers practical connection tools that are very simple to understand and will help move the brain towards healing. To learn more about Will, his books and access the resources on his website, visit willhutch.com. NEXT STEPS // Unlocking Deeper Youth Connections: Free Cheat Sheet Download Looking for practical ways to build deeper, more meaningful connections with the youth you serve? The Connection Strategies Cheat Sheet offers five powerful, actionable tools to enhance your relationship-building efforts, inspired by the latest episode of the unSeminary podcast with Will Hutcherson. Will explains how connection is “vitamins for the brain”—a necessity for emotional and mental well-being. This resource distills his expert insights into easy-to-follow strategies, like leveraging the “3-Second Rule” for engagement and using small wins to boost confidence. Download the cheat sheet now and start fostering stronger connections that support the mental health and spiritual growth of the next generation! 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! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. This is one of those conversations that ah quickly we’re gonna get into and you’re gonna be able to apply. You’re not going to be wondering, hey, this doesn’t apply to me in my ministry context. I just know ah that so many of us are wrestling with ah the issues that we’re going to be talking about today. Honored to have Will Hutcherson with us. Will has been a next gen and student pastor for over 15 years. Rich Birch — Over the past several years he has become increasingly passionate about finding practical ways to bring to hope to kids and teens who are facing increasing amounts of anxiety, depression, and despair. This led him to starting Curate Hope, a nonprofit that focuses on suicide prevention, mental health awareness, and partnering with schools, churches, and parents to help heal despair in teens. Will is also the co-author of a couple books on anxiety for kids and teens. Welcome to the show, Will. So glad you’re here. Will Hutcherson — Oh, thanks for having me, Rich. Rich Birch — This is going to be great. Tell us kind of fill out the picture. That’s, that’s the bio, but kind of give us a bit more of the will story. Will Hutcherson — Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I’ve been an next gen pastor for many years and I remember early on in my ministry, you know, kind of as youth pastors, it was really about reduced risk, you know? Help kids make good choices, right? Follow Jesus. And somewhere around the mid-2000s, mid-teens rather, around 2015, 2016, I started to notice a change that I think all of us in ministry started to notice, that there was an uptick in mental health challenges.Will Hutcherson — And I remember as a pastor feeling like I had these amazing spiritual tools. Like I knew that there’s power in Jesus name, there’s power in scripture reading. I knew that there’s there’s power in biblical community and getting people plugged into biblical community. But oftentimes I just wondered what can I do practically to help these kids and these students, and these parents, who are really facing some some challenges in regards to mental health. And so at the time, the best the best response was, you know, we’ll send them to a counselor. But even even you know nearly 10 years ago now, like we had affordability issues, we had access issues. And now post COVID, that’s increased even further. Rich Birch — A hundred percent. Will Hutcherson — And so um so that’s where the passion came from. You know oftentimes people ask me, how’d you get into mental health? Did you have a mental health challenge? And it really is ah, no, I really care about the next generation, feel called to the next generation. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — And so this is their problem, so it became my problem. Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think yeah you we were talking a little bit before we got started. This is not one of those that I think everybody that’s listening in is like, ah yes, ah we have seen this in our context. Will Hutcherson — Yeah. Rich Birch — We are wrestling with these issues. It’s not like, I don’t know what you’re you’re talking about. So let’s let’s talk about that uptick. You know, is your sense that you know this kind of uptick in mental health issues that we’re seeing in our ministries, is this is this like an actual rise, or is it that we’re more aware of it, or is it a combo of both of those things? You know, what’s what’s your sense around around that? Will Hutcherson — Yeah. That’s a great question. You know, I think sometimes leaders and parents ask that question of like, okay, we see the rise of anxiety disorders being diagnosed. Or we see the rise of depression and disorders being diagnosed. Is it just that all of a sudden it popped up, or are we just better at catching it, diagnosing it? Will Hutcherson — I would say when you look at the hard data specifically, when it comes to, ah let’s say, self-harm. We can see that non-fatal self-harm admissions to a hospital have increased drastically for ah each demographic, both for 15 to 19, but then the biggest one was actually 10 to 14 years old. Rich Birch — Wow. Will Hutcherson — Specifically for non-fatal self-harm hospital admissions, just for the 10 to 14 years old, we’re looking at 188% increase for girls. Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Will Hutcherson — And so when you look at those hard data points, you’re like, regardless of the diagnoses, we’re seeing some behaviors that didn’t exist in previous generations… Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — …that show us that there is a a challenge. Now, The other very startling statistic in the hard data is the suicide rates as well. And so, again, ah that’s not just a better diagnosis, quote unquote, that we can we can say that that really is like things that are happening. Will Hutcherson — Now, I will say here’s the ah good news. We have started to see that those statistics are getting a little bit better in the last year to 18 months. So I think we’re moving in a good direction. I think the church plays a huge part of helping communities cope. In fact, mental health professionals are recognizing that, by the way. Rich Birch — Yes. Will Hutcherson — ah Mental health professionals are recognizing, you know what? Hey, the solution is medical, but it’s not just medical. In fact, Dr. Thomas Insel, who was a former national director of mental health institute ah did it for 10 years. He, about two years ago, came out with a book and said, the problem isn’t just medical, it’s also social, um it’s political, it’s environmental. And he said this, he said, the solutions have to be medical, but also people, in order for them to recover from mental health challenges, especially severe mental health challenges, they need—listen to this—people, place, and purpose. Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Will Hutcherson — Now this is a doctor, a scientist, who’s saying the research shows in order to have long-term recovery with mental health challenges, they need people, place, and purpose. Now what institution exists in our world that gives people… Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Will Hutcherson — …people, a place where they feel safe and they belong, and a sense of purpose knowing that God created them and they’re here for a reason. Rich Birch — Interesting. Will Hutcherson — It’s the church. I believe 100% that we are uniquely designed to help move people away from mental health challenges and illnesses to exactly who God’s called them to be. But we have to recognize that there’s spiritual tools and there’s also practical tools to that. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — And I think that’s what we’re we’re moving towards. we’re we’re We’re becoming a lot wiser in our approach um than previous decades. I think, you know, the church is kind of moving along with this as well. Previous decades is kind of like we solve every problem with prayer, you know?Rich Birch — Yeah, just keep praying and it’ll be fine. Yeah, yeah. Will Hutcherson — Yeah. Just pray, pray the anxiety away. And and that prayer is good and it’s powerful, but the brain is also an organ. And so there’s practical things that we could do to, to help that organ move in a positive direction. So. Rich Birch — Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there even the question around where where did all this come from in some ways is like a head fake. It’s like, well, you know, it’s here. Will Hutcherson — Yeah. Rich Birch — And so the reality of it is we, you know, I know there’s so many leaders that are listening in today that are, um they’re like, hey, I we want to know what we can do. Like what, how can we be the kind of church that supports parents, that supports um you know young people who are wrestling with these issues? What would be some of those kind of common telltale signs of a church that is structuring their ministry in a way to help support um a ah young people that are wrestling with you know with these issues? Will Hutcherson — So, I mean, the basic foundation that I could say, and it’s gonna almost sound too cliche, so but but go with me for a minute. Rich Birch — Go with me. Yeah. Will Hutcherson — It it’s cultivating more opportunity for conversations and connection. Because the core root problem that we’ve kind of ah evolved to, because you know everyone wants to point it to social media. Like mental health crisis was caused by social media and Instagram. That that didn’t help. I mean, social media did not help, especially youth mental health. However, for decades, we’ve been kind of trending in a direction as as a society of less and less connection. And that influences the brain in a big way. So we need to create more face-to-face opportunities for people to feel seen, where they feel connection with another person. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — And so what can we do within our churches? I think, ah one, there’s some practical things that we could do, and we can get into those in a minute. But just even programmatically, what does it look like for us to create ah programs and environments, redesign our our churches to have more soft spaces and conversational spaces? Will Hutcherson — What would it look like for us to figure out how to create more ah connection time within the Sunday morning gathering, you know? I don’t know how this would work, but you know look at your neighbor and ask them this question. You know it’s like It sounds too cheesy, but like how can we create more conversations? Will Hutcherson — Because, conversations are the seeds to friendship. Every friendship starts with a conversation. And friendship really is the seed to discipleship. It’s through a trusted relationship that people are able to be discipled. And so one of our best discipleship process happens to also be very good for mental health. It’s just creating more connection where people can feel seen, where they feel that they have a place where they belong, people that they belong to, and a sense of purpose. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — And so that’s kind of a ah bigger philosophical macro side of it. But the practical side, I think it really looks like um creating trainings for ah small group leaders, for leaders on how to slow down, how to see someone. It really stems through understanding, I would say, how God has wired our brains. Will Hutcherson — So going back to that, that illustration I said, or I’m sorry, the ah analogy I said, that um our brain is an organ, right? And I was i was talking about the brain as an organ. If I were having a heart attack, my hope would be that you would say, Will, you’re having a heart attack, I’m going to pray for you and I’m going to call any ambulance, right? Rich Birch — Right. Right. Yeah. Will Hutcherson — We understand that there’s faith and action together. When it comes to the brain, I think we forget sometimes that it’s an organ of our body, and we just kind of result to, well, let’s just work on steps that you can take, or reframing your thoughts. You know, kind of almost keep it only in the head space. You know, I’m going to pray for you or focus on scripture, you know, and and it’ll go away. Will Hutcherson — And again, those are powerful things. I don’t want to minimize the power of of ah all of those things. But knowing that the brain is an organ, there are sometimes some very practical things that help the brain move in a positive direction. Connection is like vitamins to the brain. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — So when we feel seen on a deep level, it releases happy hormones. It helps build resilience. Will Hutcherson — Specifically, when we face stress and anxiety, ah cortisol floods the brain. Well, cortisol tends to increase processing on the right side of the brain, the amygdala fires off, blood flow increases on the right side of the brain, and actually decreases on the logical left side of the brain. So when somebody is experiencing despair, place of hopelessness, or they’re experiencing high anxiety, and we try to give them left brain logic, like here’s how you should think or focus on the truth of scripture, the problem is is that the left brain is actually decreased in processing, and it’s hard for them to actually even grasp it.Will Hutcherson — So it’s kind of like the, like think of like the right side and the left side of of the brain are almost like dis-paired, like detached when somebody is experiencing despair. So when we recognize that as church leaders, we could say, okay, this is a dis-paired brain or this is right brain energy that this person’s experiencing. Let me meet them first right there. Let me meet them with right brain. Will Hutcherson — As we meet them with right brain, we’re going to meet them with heart. We’re going to meet them with emotion. We’re going to help them to what Dr. Chinwé and I like to talk about a lot is emotionally exhale. That decreases the right side of the brain activity and actually increases the left side of the brain. So then you could do the work of reframing, focusing on the truth of scripture, um helping them take some healthy steps and and processes towards building resilience. Rich Birch — That’s so great. Will Hutcherson — So ah when somebody feels connection, when they feel seen, um oxytocin, yeah which is the hormone that’s resulting or responsible for emotional attachment, oxytocin is released and it can actually bring the two sides back together in reengage logical processing. So this is why when I talk about conversations, I talk about connection, it’s really the science behind how God has wired our brains of why that’s so powerful. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — It’s not just a nice little catchphrase of like, we just need more connection. No, it’s like research back. Rich Birch — Right, yes Will Hutcherson — Like we need more face to face connection to help promote healthy mental health. Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. And and you know, I think that’s what a great, I love that connection is, is like vitamins to the brain. That’s a great sticky statement. But also just a great thing for us to be thinking about framing it as we’re thinking about our own ministries, our own student ministries. And for sure, you know, I started in student ministry, have been, you know, in senior leadership for a bunch of years. And one of the things that’s changed for sure in student ministry is like, and I sound like an old man, but it was like back in my day, like it was like, it was all about like entertaining kids. It was like, and oh, we would never say it like that. We would have a lot more spiritual words to say that, but it was like, let’s put on the biggest show. Let’s get them in, you know, rows somewhere, you know, we’ll have something funny happen. Rich Birch — But for sure, we’ve seen over time that actually it seems like prevailing ministries, particularly to students, Man, there’s ah there’s a there’s a real groups undercurrent there. Like how do we get people talking with each other? What would be some of those things that particularly, maybe on the student ministry front that that we should be thinking about um, you know, adding to our ministries on the practical side? Like what what are some you know is there, are there certain habits we should have in the way we do our programming to try to increase ah you know that connection particularly with students? What would that look like? Will Hutcherson — Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that question, by the way, because I’m still surprised that despite um where student ministry has gone, that we still have quite a few churches that do not prioritize small groups within student ministry. And I just want to pause and say… Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — …if you are not doing small groups, in your student ministry, you are missing a core need of adolescent development. Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Will Hutcherson — Adolescents desperately need connection, and it’s really helpful for their mental health. Like so creating spaces for them to have conversations, intentional conversations, with a caring adult is possibly one of the best things you can do for their mental health. Because if a mental health challenge pops up, as a youth ministry, you’re going to have a better chance of recognizing it, seeing it, and being able to help guide that student towards some some healthy steps, whether that’s seeking professional help, having a conversation with their school counselor, um whatever those extra steps are. If you don’t have a ah small group ministry that is really intentional about connecting once a week, at least, with their kids, with a small group leader and students, it’s going to be really hard to to identify that. Will Hutcherson — And and you know if you’re listening to this, you’re you’re a senior leader, and you’re like, ah, but our student ministry is only like 15. Our youth pastor, it’s a small group in itself. I would I would say um, even with a ah small group of 15, you still need to have a small group ministry because you can’t track with the stories of more than maybe eight people. Rich Birch — Right, right. Will Hutcherson — And so you can’t show up at the games and it takes a lot of relational building, as we all know as pastors. It takes a lot of time to build that relational trust. And so empower leaders to be part of the ministry, create a small group ministry within your student ministry if it’s not already existing. Will Hutcherson — And I would also say, so here’s the last caveat to that, I would say in terms of student ministry, I would say um don’t necessarily put your small groups at a different time from your youth ministry programming. Rich Birch — Okay. Will Hutcherson — Put them on the same night. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — Parents are way too busy. So what often happens is we want to check the box of small group ministry and we say, well, we have student ministry at this time and then our small groups happen at all these other times. And what I’ve seen is that usually you have 10%, maybe 15% participation because they’re busy. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — They got soccer games, they got football games, they got a whole bunch of other things. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — And depending on your city, that can be really, really challenging. So, put it in the same night, the same time. Youth pastors don’t need to preach for 45 minutes, even 30 minutes, 25 minutes, and then put them in small groups. Let the preaching happen… Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson —…in the context of conversation. Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good. That’s great. I love that. Beyond kind of um the over-spiritualization, which for sure happens, right? There are churches that, you you know, we kind we kind of made the joke earlier today, right? Like, pray the anxiety away. But, you know, beyond that, because I think there’s a lot of churches that obviously understand that that’s ah a pothole that we’re you know we’re not going to fall into. But what would be some common potholes that churches fall into on this front that they’re like maybe a common mistake they make, or a common um thing that you’ve seen where you you know you’re in a church, maybe you’re visiting you’re coaching a church, and like you wince a little bit and you’re like oh I kind of wish we weren’t doing that. And you know you can be totally honest because you don’t have to be nice to people. You’re they’re just listening in now. What would be ah you know a common pothole that you’ve you’ve seen um you know churches or maybe ah you know run into um from time to time? Will Hutcherson — I mean, the one that comes to my mind is, you know, I was, I was at a conference not too long ago. And that they there was a speaker before me who was giving an altar call. And he was having, you know, people come forward and, he’s you know, he’s just praying. He’s like, we’re going to pray in Jesus name that the anxiety will be, will be gone, you know. And, and like, just kind of that, again, praying the anxiety away. Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Will Hutcherson — And, and I’m not saying that there isn’t power in prayer and there isn’t power in something being “broken off of us” you know if, I’m just saying that sometimes there’s a process of how God moves us into um that peace and stillness and the fruit of the Spirit, you know? Will Hutcherson — I think about the disciples. I’m like the disciples, they they were a mess throughout those three years, you know? Like they still had anxiety. They still were fearful. Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. Will Hutcherson — You know like there wasn’t a moment that they just believed that Jesus was the son of God and all of a sudden they didn’t face mental health challenges to a degree, you know? Now, despite those mental health challenges, they still took steps towards Jesus, right? So it’s like… Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — …it’s it’s I think just maybe even recognizing that, especially with anxiety, anxiety is like the common cold for the brain, by the way. So it’s it’s sometimes it’s a big problem. Sometimes it’s like, you know, you get a cold and sometimes it turns into a sinus infection, right? Or it turns into bronchitis.Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — So it can become more, but then sometimes anxiety is just a common cold. Like sometimes it just kind of comes and it goes away and it doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily something that needs to be “broken off of you”. It’s just something to be even aware of. Will Hutcherson — I would say the other pitfall is that churches will unintentionally, at times when we’re preaching, we will kind of, for lack of a better words, demonize emotions, where in our phrasing, in our language, um will put emotions in such a negative light that it makes people feel like, if I feel this emotion, I’m far from God.Will Hutcherson — And again, like take fear, for instance. You know, some people will say like, you know, the Bible says do not fear 360 times. Based off of what I I did with a lot of research and looking at all the instances that I could find in both Hebrew and Greek, I found the specific phrasing of do not be afraid. I think I found it 167 times throughout the scriptures. So we can look at that and say, so if we are afraid then we’re obviously not doing what God calls us to do. Will Hutcherson — But the reality is is that fear is just an emotion. And again, we were created with these emotions. It’s what we do with that fear. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — Like did Jesus feel the emotion of fear… Rich Birch —Right. Will Hutcherson — …on the cross. Possibly. Did that mean he had no faith? No. Rich Birch — Yes, right. Yes. Will Hutcherson — Did that mean he didn’t trust God? No. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Yeah. Will Hutcherson — But did he feel the emotion of fear? Sure. Rich Birch — Sure. Yep. Will Hutcherson — He felt all the emotions of humankind. So I think it’s important for us to recognize that emotions are just emotions. Rich Birch — Yep. Will Hutcherson — Like and it’s okay to acknowledge those emotions. It’s okay to let people kind of sit in them for a little bit. like Don’t be afraid to let someone just sit in the emotion for a little bit. It doesn’t mean that they’re somehow moving away from Jesus. In fact, sometimes our emotions can actually draw us a whole lot closer to Jesus. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I like that. So, um you know, well, first of all, I think that’s great kind of coaching, great, um you know, reminder, great direction for us. I was thinking specifically on that whole, you know, like, um you know, “break off the anxiety, Lord”, kind of prayer that could, you know, that, you know, and I can imagine myself saying that. Like I can imagine myself ah so I appreciate you call that out cuz I’m like yeah that’s true. I guess would you is a better way, and I realize it’s like maybe a bit weird to say it that way, but like a better way to pray in that kind of situation it’s it’s more about like, you know, Lord, give them more, more peace, more comfort, Lord, extend, you know, your goodness, restore what has been, you know, uh, you know, isn’t necessarily, I don’t know, I’m not sure what the language is to use there. Rich Birch — How would you suggest is kind of a better way for us to pray? Um, obviously we know from a theological perspective, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us and translates all that, but you know, we’re also leading in the room that we’re in and we want to, we want to ensure that we create a place where I don’t want somebody who’s in, I don’t want a student, because we’re talking particularly about student who’s in our environment today, to feel like we’ve somehow, you know, [inaudible] them, made them feel terrible um through my prayer, but I do want to show care and I do want to kind of point towards like, Hey, I would love for them to take steps in a new direction. Will Hutcherson — Yeah. Rich Birch — Is that the kind of thing, like more, more peace, maybe fruit pray through the fruit of the Spirit. You had mentioned that. Will Hutcherson — Yeah. Rich Birch — Like, Hey, love more joy, more peace, more of that kind of thing.Will Hutcherson — I think you just mentioned it. Rich Birch — Yep. Will Hutcherson — Like we want them to take healthy steps, right? Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — And so pray those prayers, like God help us to to take the healthy steps to overcoming our anxiety. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Will Hutcherson — God help us to acknowledge and know that you’re with us… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yep. Will Hutcherson — …in the midst of our anxiety or in the midst of our fear. God help us to be brave and to do the hard thing even when we’re afraid, right? Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Yeah. Will Hutcherson — Like it’s it’s the recognizing that “even when, help us do” …and move in the right direction. So it just, I think it’s a little bit more mindful… Rich Birch — Yep. Will Hutcherson — …that this is where we are and it’s okay for where we are, you know? And we don’t want whether it’s a student or someone in our church to feel like just because they have anxiety or because they’re facing fear or depression that somehow they’re disappointing God or they’re far from God. Rich Birch — Wow, that’s good. Will Hutcherson — It’s just a condition. It’s just something that they’re experiencing. And and I think the more that we can use language that helps people to recognize mental health challenges, because our brain is an organ, is just part of how our bodies sometimes get out of whack. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Will Hutcherson — And so yes, we do need the healing of the Lord, but it’s both faith and action. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Will Hutcherson — And so just like you know if I had a heart condition, we would never ever say it’s because of my lack of ah faith that I need to take… Rich Birch — Yeah. Will Hutcherson — …you know ah cholesterol or… Rich Birch — Yep. Will Hutcherson — …or high blood pressure pills, you know. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — But sometimes I think unintentionally, whether it’s within our ah you know our sermon, I don’t I don’t think it’s really within our sermons, but I think people just tend to generally equate because I’m struggling with a brain thing, it must be that I’m not, you know, close enough to God or God’s not helping me in some way. And it’s like, no, that’s not true. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — Like it’s just a condition that you’re facing and and God is very much present in the midst of that. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s so good. I appreciate that. And I know he just even in my own family. Like we, my uncle tells, he had a really ah terrible internal, um, you know, disease, condition. And he was really pressing in with the Lord asking for healing. And he ended up at a church where like the pastor, you know, they were praying for him like over a bunch of time. And then eventually the pastor literally unrolled the like, so let’s talk about the unacknowledged, the unforgiven sin in your life. Because we’ve been praying about this for a long time and it hasn’t been healed and what, you know, what it’s got to be a problem with you. And and literally my uncle like walked out of the church that day and it was decades was like, you know, because of that. And this is the kind of thing that we’re, this is the weight that we’re carrying as we engage with students, with people around these issues. We’ve got to be very careful with the language we use. Will Hutcherson — We do. We do. We got to guard and have good theology. I mean… Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s bad. …because I hear those kinds of things all the time and I’m like, what about Paul’s thorn? Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Will Hutcherson — How do you resolve that? You know? Rich Birch — Yes, yes, no, absolutely. Well, this has been good. Well I know there’s a ton we could talk about here. And I know, like I say, I know there’s lots of people that are leaning in asking questions, but I actually do want to get to a resource that I think would be really helpful for ah leaders that are listening in today. Rich Birch — You’ve written a couple of books, but one of them particular is called Seen: Despair and Anxiety in Kids and Teenagers and the Power of Connection. I bumped into this book and I thought, man, this would be great for leaders. It could be a great tool for maybe, maybe you’re a senior leader listening in and you’re like, Man, what if I should read this with my student ministry team or with my kids ministry team? We could kind of go through it together, help us try to cultivate a more you know positive environment on this front. But tell me about this book. What were you thinking when you ah put this together? Will Hutcherson — Yeah. So Dr. Chinwé and I wrote this ah specifically because of the youth mental health crisis. Rich Birch — Yep. Will Hutcherson — But these principles apply regardless of the relationship. So whether it’s a parent to a child relationship or a small group leader to a child, or even just a leader to a staff member you know, or pastor to a staff member or pastor to an adult. Because they’re connection tools and there’s really a lot of science and research behind how God wired our brains and how connection asked believe actually influences the brain towards healing, especially when they’re facing mental health challenges. Will Hutcherson — So I’ve actually had a few few senior leaders actually ask me to rewrite Seen even in the context of leadership because it’s easily applied to leadership. So… Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Will Hutcherson — Yeah, the the principles are are very simple to understand, but it’s really ah practical connection tools and how those connection tools will move the brain towards healing Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. So good. I also loved as a just as ah a sidebar—this caught my eye as an author—I love that you right up front you said a two hour read to build strong relationship with your kid or a teenager. Will Hutcherson — Yeah. Rich Birch — Which is wonderful. Like I love that. You’re calling out like, hey, you’re not going to get swamped by this book, like, which again, you know, a team member, you could give this to your team and say, hey, we’re going to read this next week. You you can find the time in the next week for us to, you know, to read that. Rich Birch — Any um you know kind of reaction or response as you’ve had this book out there you know that has been particularly encouraging? Any stories of like, oh, it’s been kind of cool how this tool has been used by you know churches or people or individuals over the years? Will Hutcherson — Yeah, I’ve been, I mean, surprised and shocked at how much um this book has helped so many parents, ah small group leaders, youth pastors. We get stories nearly every week… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Will Hutcherson — …from somebody who says, hey, this changed my parenting. Hey, this changed the way that I led. It changed the way that I connected with my kids. Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — And it’s ah you know I don’t think Seen is necessarily something that people read and it’s like, oh wow… Rich Birch — Right. Will Hutcherson — …this is like revolutionary. But I think what people enjoy about what we did is we made the neuroscience really simple. Rich Birch — That’s good. Will Hutcherson — In fact, almost almost too simple where sometimes I apologize to the smart people. I’m like, I’m sorry. Rich Birch — Yes. Will Hutcherson — I made it, you know, we made it this simple, but, um, but we wanted like the average person to be able to read it and… Let me redo that. We wanted the average person to be able to read it and read it within two hours, you know, very quickly. And ah be able to process the information and apply it to their life right away. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so great. This is fantastic. Well, just as we wrap up today’s ah episode, anything else you want to share just as we we close out today’s conversation? Will Hutcherson — No, thank you so much for what you do. Thanks for empowering leaders and helping leaders to to lead this church. Rich Birch — Appreciate that. Thanks so much, Will. If people want to track with you, ah kind of connect with your ministry, where do we want to send them online? Will Hutcherson — Yeah, you can go to willhutch.com and that’ll kind of direct you in any direction you like. We have a couple of books, like I said, that we have and then courses and you can reach out to me there. Rich Birch — Nice. Thanks so much, Will. Really appreciate you being on the show today. Thank you.

Aaron Stanski, Founder and CEO of Risepointe, shares his insights on reimagining children's ministry spaces in churches. He discusses the importance of creating engaging environments that make lasting first impressions on families. Stanski highlights balancing safety and creativity while emphasizing transparency in security measures. He explores thoughtful designs that cater to children's developmental needs, including storage and volunteer zones, and shares practical tips for enhancing spaces without major renovations.

Jeff Beachum, Multiplication Specialist and Director of Marketing at Portable Church Industries, shares insights on optimizing church growth in mobile settings. He discusses the advantages of utilizing rental spaces like schools and theaters to quickly establish a community presence. Jeff emphasizes maintaining church culture while expanding and offers strategic planning tips for transitions to portable environments. Listeners learn about the importance of effective communication, adaptability in church operations, and innovative solutions for managing worship services efficiently.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to talk with Kim Tarlton, the General Manager of Church Communications Group which helps church communicators navigate the complexities of the modern communication landscape. Many churches operate under the misconception that crises won’t happen to them. However, crises can arise from various sources, including issues in the larger community, financial scandals, or natural disasters. The key is to acknowledge the possibility of a crisis and prepare accordingly. Tune in as Kim delves into the strategic planning to effectively communicate about and manage various crises that may arise both internally and externally. Get a plan in place. // Not only do churches need to be prepared for crises, but also crisis communication with the congregation and the public. What message do you need to convey? What is your brand communicating? What are people hearing from your church? Who needs to be the one communicating? Churches need to be prepared for what God is calling them to do and preserve the message of Jesus. Acknowledge that any number of crises may occur at your church and put a plan on paper so you know what you have agreed to. Get a crisis response team. // One of the first steps in crisis preparation is forming a crisis response team. Who are your go-to people? This team should include key staff members who are integral to the church’s operations, elder board members who can provide outside oversight and guidance, and legal counsel to navigate any legal implications that may arise. Create a crisis management plan that clearly outlines who is responsible for what during a crisis and how to communicate with the congregation and handle media inquiries. Include each individual’s contact information so everything you need is readily accessible. Plan out your areas of response. // Develop good relationships with your local news groups. Invite them to events your church holds and have coffee with them. By taking time to build these relationships, you will be able to use them as a resource when you need to interact with the press during a crisis. Additionally, prepare press releases ahead of time that can be used in these situations. Levels of communications. // Many churches fail to communicate effectively during a crisis, leading to confusion and frustration among staff and volunteers. Share information first with the elders and executive leadership. Then inform the staff of the situation and how it will be handled. Finally, communicate with the congregation. This tiered approach helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and reduces the likelihood of misinformation spreading. PRAY with your crisis team. // Every crisis situation is different and it can be difficult to discern what information to share. Kim underscores that before doing anything, church leaders need to seek God for wisdom and cast all of their cares onto Christ. Use the PRAY acronym—Pause, Repeat what is true about God, Ask God and others for help, and Yield, taking time to listen to God and each other. Don’t be in crisis response mode, but rather crisis management. Get together to look at the plan. // Gather the crisis management team annually and audit the team and the plan every year. Fill empty positions if a member of the crisis response team is no longer there. Spend a couple of hours to review your plans for crisis management and make any necessary changes. NEXT STEPS // Editable Crisis Communication Manual Template for Churches Based on today’s podcast episode, here is a starting point for a basic crisis communication manual that you can use to begin preparing your church for unexpected situations. Download the editable template to customize for your specific needs. To get help from Church Communications Group in crisis management or any other aspect of church communications, visit their website at churchcommunications.com and connect with Kim there. 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 Your church is doing really well right now, and your leadership team is looking for solutions to keep momentum going! It could be time to start a new location. Maybe you have hesitated in the past few years, but you know it’s time to step out in faith again and launch that next location. Portable Church has assembled a bundle of resources to help you leverage your growing momentum into a new location by sending a part of your congregation back to their neighborhood on Mission. This bundle of resources will give you a step-by-step plan to launch that new or next location, and a 5 minute readiness tool that will help you know your church is ready to do it! Click here to watch the free webinar “Launch a New Location in 150 Days or Less” and grab the bundle of resources for your church! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary Podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Really looking forward to today’s conversation with Kim Tarlton. This is going to be a fantastic conversation if you are in your church today and you’re thinking about the future and you’re wondering, are there things I can be doing today to get ready for stuff in the future, even if it’s some stuff I don’t want to think about today, will be a great episode for you.Rich Birch — If you’re not familiar, she is the General Manager of Church Communications Group, which began really as an idea to create a space where church communicators could find support, resources, and inspiration, needed to gap navigate the complexities of the modern communication landscape. She has 26 plus years of being a creative leader in mega churches and excels in communication, strategy, and leadership. Super excited to have you. You’re a bonafide expert, Kim. Glad you’re on the show. Thanks for being here today.Kim Tarlton — Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. And and, you know, obviously not a great like exciting subject, but still being able to lean in in this way um is really is really something that like we want to do. And so thank you for inviting me into this conversation.Rich Birch — Yeah, I know it’s going to be great. So why don’t you kind of fill out the picture? You’re kind of owns a little bit of your story. Tell us a little bit more of the but Kim story, kind of fill out that a little bit before we jump in.Kim Tarlton — Yeah, so um like you said, 26 years full-time ministry, I was working in the church. And I have been, I’ve been at three mega, well, I guess they’re like giga churches now because that’s the thing. And so I’ve been a part of three churches that ah the first one that I was a part of, there’s 300 when I left there, not because of me, all because of God, but like when I left there, they were running upward of 10,000.Kim Tarlton — And so these churches and the church growth and the multi-site and all of that, being able to be a part of that for so many years, leaning in on um all areas, from production to creative ministry to stage management, and all those things as well as communications, ah God called me to the Big C church. And to allow the use of what he was giving me and training me and um leaning into me with… Rich Birch — That’s so good. Kim Tarlton — …for so many years, allowing me to take that to a bigger audience outside of these walls into multiple walls. And so um I was able to join the Missional Marketing Group of Companies, which is where the Church Communications Group is a brand under the Missional Marketing Group of Companies now. So yeah… Rich Birch — Love it.Kim Tarlton — …that’s just the the elevator version.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Love it. Well, you know, today we want to talk a little bit about crisis communication. Which um again, this is one of those episodes that I think it’s so good. It’s like leaning us forward thinking about the future. Rich Birch — And we’ve got a dog, which is great. I love dogs on the podcast.Kim Tarlton — Sorry about that. Yeah.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s all good. The um but but but first, let’s talk about like what do we mean by crisis communication? Like how do I know? Like obviously, there’s like the super extreme version that we probably can think of and we wish we never had to think of. But but but what does that look like, crisis communications? What is that?Kim Tarlton — Yeah. So, um, for us, you know, first of all, I’ll start with the fact that like, when it comes to churches, we are, we’re kind of is some, not everybody, but some of us are kind of in denial mode. And we’re kind of thinking through this lens of like, that’s not going to happen to us.Rich Birch — So true.Kim Tarlton — Um, and maybe that, that might not be something that’s happening in our church or with our pastors or our people. But the bottom line is is that like the church is actually in crisis right now. It is becoming more and more obvious. We are seeing things that have happened in the past, like years ago, coming to light now.Kim Tarlton — And so crisis is an actual thing. It’s something that we need to not be scared of. Rich Birch — Right. Kim Tarlton — But we need to be prepared for. Kim Tarlton — And so when we lean in for crisis communication, it’s saying there’s crisis management that your church needs to lean into, your staff, your pastors, everybody. But then there’s also crisis communication. And there’s that side of like, what is it that we’re saying? What is our brand like putting out there to people? What does this what are people hearing from us as a church?Kim Tarlton — And when we look at crisis, there there’s so many opportunities for crisis to happen.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — It’s not even just in our walls, right, Rich? Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — Like there’s crisis internally. There’s the church crisis. There’s community crisis. There’s there’s shootings in schools right now. There are things happening within our communities that are causing crisis and we need to manage those well.Kim Tarlton — And then there’s world crisis, you know. Like right now where I am at, I’m probably dating this a little bit, but like where I am at in Indiana, we’re fine. But Florida is looking like it’s getting hit by hurricanes.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — How do we help manage that? That is happening not here in my state or with my church, but it is happening with churches around the world, or in cities, states, regions outside of our walls. Rich Birch — Yeah.Kim Tarlton — So when looking at crisis, it’s really going, how do we manage it? But how do we communicate better? And and making sure that we are thinking through that process too… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — …to make sure that we we don’t go into it kind of stumbling through our words, not sounding right, and not not really like following after what God is calling us to do… Rich Birch — Yeah. Kim Tarlton — …and care for people. Not protect the accused, but to protect the church, to protect the all around idea of like, and not protect Jesus even, I don’t even want to say that, like protect him, but protect the message really.Rich Birch — Yeah, for sure. That’s good. Like and so you know to put a little more meat on the bones, we’re talking about like you know the the unfortunate situation, you you know. The ah report comes out that the youth pastor was having inappropriate sexual relations with a kid in the youth group. Unfortunately, friends, like these things are they’re like so common that it’s not even hard to think about what the problem is, right?Rich Birch — It could be in a situation from 10, 15 years ago. There could be a financial issue. But it also could be, like you’re saying, like maybe one of your campuses burns to the ground. Or like you know which is or you have um you know some some sort of you know problem like that that happens to your church that does nothing really, it’s not like a sin issue, it’s just something terrible has happened. Kim Tarlton — Right.Rich Birch — Like you say, shootings in in in town, that kind of thing.Rich Birch — And and so um you know we wanna be thinking, that’s kind of the frame that we wanna have as we’re as we’re thinking about these things today. But when we think about, you know, we’re sitting here today, first of all, before we get to kind of what we should be doing, why is it that, and I’m putting a little bit on the spot here…Kim Tarlton — No worries.Rich Birch — Why is it that there seems to be resistance with executive pastors, lead pastors—I say that as an executive pastor—on seeking help around communications? Like we don’t do that. I’ve said in other contexts, and maybe I’m just going to answer my own question. I’ve said in other contexts, yeah, when the church is really small, you have, you know, maybe the church planter’s doing the bookkeeping. And then eventually you pass it on to somebody else.Rich Birch — And then eventually you might have like a whole department of people, CFO, the whole thing. And like, but there’s a something with communications where I would say communications is a professional function similar to finances, but there’s like a resistance to wanting to interact with an organization like yours. Why is that?Kim Tarlton — Honestly, like, and I don’t have any, a lot of backing to this… Rich Birch — Sure. Kim Tarlton — …but what I hear is like, as soon as you bring light to something, a couple of things end up happening, right? So like I had a pastor give me this example, and this is like this is a terrible example, but I’m going to share it anyway, because it came from a pastor. He’s like, you know like when you are young and you like the girl, um but you don’t know if she likes you, and you’re kind of like unsure, but all that stuff.Kim Tarlton — And then it comes out. And all of a sudden it’s like, Well, okay, I like you. Whether she liked you or not, now she’s thinking, I like you too. Or maybe there might be something there. Kim Tarlton — And so there’s this idea of like, as soon as we start talking about it, as soon as we bring light to this, is that going to now shine like this extra spotlight on us at the church? Is this going to make it seem like we’re having that we have something that we’re looking into or that we want to hide or that we’re trying to figure out how to get our way past it. Instead of us looking at it and going, we’ are we want to prepare ourselves. We want to be prepared as a church, and we want to be prepared as a community.Kim Tarlton — Instead, we’re looking at it and we’re going, oh, that might not make me look good. So I’m going to hide. I’m going to kind of hide it in the background. And so that’s kind of one…Rich Birch — Interesting.Kim Tarlton — …probably there’s multiple reasons… Rich Birch — Right. Kim Tarlton — …but that’s one of the reasons I am hearing most from churches right now.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — Yeah.Rich Birch — Okay. So what, what can we do to be prepared for this? Like with this, is one of these things we don’t want to think about, but like insurance, we’d none of us want to pay insurance, but like, cause it’s like, where does all that money go? But this is similar. It’s like, we’ve got to be thinking ahead about these things.Kim Tarlton — Yes.Rich Birch — How could we start thinking ahead, um, for kind of a multiplicity of, of situations? Um, obviously by definition, it’s it’s a crisis so we don’t, you know, we didn’t plan for it. But what what can we be doing now?Kim Tarlton — Yeah, so um there’s there’s there’s obvious there’s levels and layers to preparing yourself. And when we talk about crisis, you know you mentioned some some of those things as well. Like there’s there’s not ah It’s not always just sexual abuse… Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — …or or something of sexual nature. I think there’s that this list that’s out there, um and if you it might be Barna Group or somebody has a list, like the top five areas that um cause crisis management to happen within a church. And sexual abuse of a minor is number one. And then I believe on that list is like zoning issues, um and personal injury. Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.Kim Tarlton — Somebody actually like getting hurt on site, property disputes. And then I think the other one is insurance issues.Kim Tarlton — But like one of the things that we’re also seeing a lot in the church right now, um and I believe um I believe I heard this from ah one of our team, um is that like what we’re seeing in church right now, too, is um there’s a high percentage of, even when it comes to the finances of the church, um embezzlement things like that are happening, and it’s happening behind closed doors. And we’re not we’re not prepared for that. We we think, okay, that we’re okay there in the finance side. And then all of a sudden it comes out and it’s like, well, maybe somebody’s been pocketing a few too many of the the giving and the tithes. Kim Tarlton — And so there’s kind of this like layers and elements of like there’s so many different things and so preparing how do we prepare for all of those things that could happen? And the first thing that I’m going to say is being prepared. Like, that’s probably just being willing to say, you know what? We are willing to, as a church, understand that anything could happen. And even if it doesn’t happen in our walls, like I was saying, there’s stuff happening in your community, happening in your world, and being prepared. How do we respond in these situations? Kim Tarlton — So number one is just actually leaning into, it’s time to be prepared. I would say every single church staff needs to come together. They bring their staff in the room and they need to say, we are willing to be prepared. And so we’re going to invest in that. And you have to look at your budget and you have to go, what does this look like financially?Kim Tarlton — It probably is going to look like your communications person, which a lot of those communications leaders are coming right out of college. They maybe have not experienced a crisis of their own. They’re not really…Rich Birch — They’re good on Instagram. Give it to them.Kim Tarlton — Exactly, exactly. Rich Birch — There’s a lot of that in the church world.Kim Tarlton — There’s a lot of that. And and and that like, as much as we need them to step in because they are our communications leaders, at the same time, they don’t know what they’re supposed to do.Rich Birch — Yeah.Kim Tarlton — They don’t know how to write a press release correctly and and all those things. And so getting them the help that can help them prepare. Bringing in the right people to help go, let’s put a plan together. And I think that’s like such a huge need, is making sure you put your plan on paper so that when something happens, we all go back to the book and we pull the book out together and we say, we know, we have agreed, this is the plan. Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — And we’ve put our team together and we’ve put our, you know this is what this is what a press release is gonna look like, and how this should feel. And this is who should be sending it and doing it. Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — I had a i had a situation come up um at a church that I was working with that we had the plan, right? Like the plan was there it was visible it was ready to go and then when crisis hit, all of a sudden the pastor went, oh i should be the voice. No, no, no we had discussed this… Rich Birch — This is why we did it Kim Tarlton — …that that you are not the voice. And so you have to make sure you plan, you put it on paper, and we all agree to it. So bringing everybody into that conversation is really important. Rich Birch — Yeah. Kim Tarlton — You don’t just have the pastors and the executive pastors do that. You bring your communications team in. You bring your family ministry team in. Because they need to know when that kid breaks their arm at camp, what do we do? Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — We need to call. Or when that kid is at camp, um I’ve had that experience. When this kid’s at camp and they’re like, hey, my parent, something’s happening at home that shouldn’t be happening at home. Rich Birch — Yeah.Kim Tarlton — You know what the wrong thing is to do is to be like, okay, yeah, let’s go home. No, no, no. I’m going to talk to your parent about that. Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — I, again, I’ve experienced it myself. We’re we’re going to talk to your parent. Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That is the wrong thing for us to do.Rich Birch — Yeah.Kim Tarlton — We need to report this.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — That is the first thing we should be doing is reporting that. Because that is an actual complaint of something that we need to lean into and deal with. And our churches are going, but I don’t want it, I don’t want it to come out. Like I don’t want us to be linked to that.Rich Birch — Right. Right.Kim Tarlton — Like I don’t want to report that. And so making sure we have a clear plan as a team, bring in the right people. If your communications team, or your executive pastor, or somebody has experience in this, make them the crisis management lead, and allow them to lean in and start start preparing your church. If not, start reaching out…Rich Birch — Yep. Yeah, that’s good.Kim Tarlton — …finding the right people to help you build this plan. You have to have a plan, or you’re just going to go into it. Kim Tarlton — But I literally, a church I was at, we found out about a crisis as we arrived to the office and the news reporters were there. Rich Birch — Wow. Kim Tarlton — And we were just like, I don’t know what to say. Rich Birch — Yeah. Kim Tarlton — Like we didn’t know who to say, you know, talk to this person or do this. We were just all like, what are you talking about? Like, I i don’t know what to say. Wait, what’s happening? What’s in the news?Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — What are you reporting on?Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good.Kim Tarlton — So prepare yourself for sure.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. I’d love to talk a little bit more about some of those things you think would be in that plan ahead of time, but I should have a personal experience with this. I for years ran a ah large Christian camp and ah literally my very first summer being in charge of the entire thing, we had a kid go missing… Kim Tarlton — Oh gosh. Rich Birch — …and it was, um yeah, it’s like the it’s like the worst case scenario. Like by definition, when people send their kids to camp…the the end of the story was very happy in the end. It was it was fine. But this this person went missing and we have this like alarm and it went off and and it went ah and we all this was thought out ahead of time. When that alarm got to a certain point it had been going for a certain amount of time, it triggered our crisis response.Rich Birch — And it’s funny how to this day, I still have this very positive visceral memory of taking the crisis manual off the wall and flipping to the page where it’s like, OK, what do I do? And and it included all what you’re talking about. It was like, here’s who you call. There was a pre-written, like, basically fill in the blank you know press release. Here’s the only people that are going to talk you know to the press. Here’s, even just simple stuff for me, like please call you know like, and I was the Executive Director, but it was like the board chair that like and it was like listed their phone numbers had that all right in front of me. Kim Tarlton — Good. Rich Birch — Because in that moment you’re like, oh my goodness, like all you’re just seeing red, right? You’re like you know and now it was thankful that it ended up in a positive situation.Kim Tarlton — Yeah.Rich Birch — But it man, if I hadn’t done that ahead of time, we would have been scrambling.Rich Birch — So what would be some of those things when you think about, okay, we’re gonna work on this ahead of time, what would be a couple of those things that we should think about that maybe are not intuitive that we should be planning ahead?Kim Tarlton — Yeah, yeah. So a few things. One is getting a crisis response team is what we would call it. And so putting together, who is your response team? Who are the people… Rich Birch — Right. Kim Tarlton — …that are going to be our go-to, right? Kim Tarlton — Um, one person from, from your church staff, absolutely. An elder, um, or the elder board, maybe. Your leadership team, your executive pastor – who are these people, these key people who are going to be the people that number one, when this happens, we call them in and we go, here’s what’s going on. What do we need to do? And let’s all start leaning into our areas.Kim Tarlton — Don’t make this just all about your staff. Do not just have your pastor, your executive pastor, and your communications person. You need to bring in some of those outside resources.Rich Birch — That’s good.Kim Tarlton — You need those key volunteer or a professional who is maybe associated with your church, um an attorney, something along those lines.Kim Tarlton — You always want to in, in most given situations that are crisis, you want to contact your attorney and get them on that team. But then also making sure that we have this, you know, a crisis management plan is super important.Kim Tarlton — So that’s the first thing. And, and I would document that, like you did. I would document that and have their names, their email address, their phone number, like what is our easy access? Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — Um, I, you know, I would even like in the day and age of cell phones and text messages, I would even build a crisis response kind of text message chain that it’s like, we’re not going to always be, this isn’t a group text where we’re sending like cat memes or anything along those lines. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. But this, this is like that group that when something happens, we basically, we have our, it’s all in, you know, all hands on deck and everybody knows where you meet up and it’s time to talk.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.Kim Tarlton — Um, and I think that’s, that’s just so key. Rich Birch — That’s good.Kim Tarlton — I would say another thing is, um, kind of, plan out um your your areas of response. So there’s there’s media response, right? And one of the things that you can start doing is—there’s so much you can do—but like one of the things I highly recommend to churches all the time is let’s start leaning into um our local news. Let’s start building that relationship. Because nothing can save you more from bad press than having a good relationship and good press. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s true. Kim Tarlton — And so if you start building that relationship now with somebody and you are inviting them, you know, every quarter come and have some coffee and let’s chitchat about the church. And we have this big event coming up and come out and see what’s going on there. When that crisis hits… Rich Birch — Yes. Kim Tarlton — …and you have that person to call and you say, hey, you know we’ve been building this relationship and I need to I need you to step aside as the journalist for just a second and help me know what questions are going to come my way and help me prepare for that.Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.Kim Tarlton — I will absolutely talk with you and I will absolutely lean in because we have this relationship, but can you help me… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — …build into what I’m about to say or or these conversations I’m about to have. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so critically important. Kim Tarlton — I would say um also preparing you know some of those press releases, like have that prepared ahead of time? Just a general note, you know, for immediate release press release. We’ve received this information or we know this information and this is ah what you need to know and how we are handling it. Being prepared in that kind of way to where you can go, let’s just say your communications director is is involved in the situation that is happening. For your leadership, your volunteers to be able to go, great, we now have a well-formatted press release. We have well-formatted email that would go out to all church. Um, we have this and it’s, it’s taken care of like, it’s already ready to go. We just fill in the gaps. What a win, right?Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.Kim Tarlton — Cause we don’t want to send out something that has spelling issues and all of that’s never fun.Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Exactly.Kim Tarlton — Um, and then I would talk, of I would like from there, I would just go through like, what are the levels of communication? Um, one of the things that I’ve seen done really wrong. And again, this is, this is churches that I’ve been at. And so, you know, I, I was there too. Um, and we didn’t handle things right all the time. Um, and it’s those levels of communication. And what we end up doing is we go, there’s a crisis. We need to tell everybody what we’re doing. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Kim Tarlton — And we need to let everybody know. And then there’s this small group of people called our staff. And then there’s other group of people, our key volunteers, and then this other group of people, our church, that all start to go, gosh, why am I finding this out when the world is finding this out?Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Yeah.Kim Tarlton — Why am I being communicated to when everybody else is being communicated to?Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s so true.Kim Tarlton — Um, and we’re not honest too. Sometimes we’re like, Hey, there was a problem and we took them off our staff list and like, everything’s going to be great. You know what? No, there’s a problem. Here’s what the problem was.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — We’re going to be honest with you. But build up that levels of where do we start? We’re going to start internally, and we’re going to make sure all the elders and all the executive leadership know. Then we’re going to make sure all the staff know what is the situation, how are we handling this. Then we’re going to build and we’re going to build those layers.Rich Birch — That’s good.Kim Tarlton — I think one of my staff members calls it something about like communicate to the egg. And so I like you know you the yolk. And then you have the like messy part of it, the egg white. Rich Birch — Yes. Yep. Kim Tarlton — And then you’ve got the frying pan, you know, you’ve got all the pieces.Rich Birch — That’s good.Kim Tarlton — And so like starting like, we have to start with the yolk and we have to build it out from there and put together our plan. I could go on and on and on, but I would definitely be leaning into um all these. And honestly, like you could you go into Chat GPT right now. Who doesn’t love Chat GPT nowadays? And you could say, Chat GPT, what are the things that I need to prepare in order to prepare my church, my organization for potential crisis? And you will get a list of things just like this… Rich Birch — Right. Kim Tarlton — …that you lean into and questions to to get answers for.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. It’s interesting that there seems to be, I think in these situations, there’s like two tendencies. There’s what you talked about, which was the like, it’s almost like an over communication.Rich Birch — It’s like, okay, you are like very quick to like, I think there’s a lot of, and and some of my best friends are lead pastors.Kim Tarlton — Yes.Rich Birch — They believe if I just get in front of people, I can solve this. Like we can stand up and just figure it out.Kim Tarlton — Right.Rich Birch — Or there’s the opposite, which is, leaders just go silent. Like something happens someone’s making accusations, they’re posting stuff online, and then we don’t say anything. And it’s almost like and in some cases they’ll even have like a like a gag order. We’re not talking about this and they believe if they just turtle, it’ll it’ll pass over. Kim Tarlton — Yeah.Rich Birch — Help us to discern, and I know every situation is different. It’s really hard to speak in generalities about this. But help us to discern when should we be thinking about, okay, we’ve got to do some kind of strategic communication here, or maybe we should just be quiet. What is too much? Again, I know, I know it’s a super nuanced question… Kim Tarlton — Yeah. Rich Birch — …but help us through that.Kim Tarlton — I’m probably not going to give you the answer that ah that you expect.Rich Birch — Yes. Sure.Kim Tarlton — Um, and for me, it’s like, one of the first things we have to do is stop and pray. Rich Birch — That’s good. Kim Tarlton — And I I do believe, like and now now I’m not one of those, like I need a new job, so I’m gonna sit on my couch and I’m gonna pray, and then God’s just gonna drop a job into my lap.Rich Birch — No, no, that’s good. Yep.Kim Tarlton — I don’t believe that at all.Rich Birch — Yep. Yep.Kim Tarlton — But I do believe that if we go to God for wisdom and we go to God for what is it that we should be doing… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Kim Tarlton — …in this situation, I believe that pastor that is maybe frustrated, that pastor that maybe is like, okay, we gotta do this, and we gotta do this, and we gotta do this, yes, we do. I want you to stop for a second and I want you to lean into prayer… Rich Birch — That’s good. Kim Tarlton — …and I want you to lean in heavy. And let’s let’s come together, this crisis management team that we’ve put together, we’re gonna come together and we’re gonna start by the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna pray. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — And Putting that prayer time in there is gonna allow you to now go, Okay, we’ve now cast all of our cares on Christ. Rich Birch — Yep. Kim Tarlton — So now now, what is it that we need to do? And we’ve calmed and we’ve relaxed ourselves and we’re going, okay, let’s think through this responsibly. Let’s think through this well. I think the the prayer acronym, there’s like a prayer acronym, it’s ah p the P-R-A-Y, so you pause, you repeat, like repeat, God is good, he’s in control, he’s got this, right? We ask, God, we ask news reporters. We ask those people that that relationship, we ask. And then we yield, right? And so making sure we’re leaning in in that way and we’re learning and we’re listening to each other and we’re not, we’re not like in that crisis response. We’re in crisis communication, crisis management… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Kim Tarlton — …not crisis response. So that’s, that’s what I would say. Stop. And just remember who who were her we’re for… Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — …like who are like this is this is all about. This is all about Jesus. And so like, let’s start there.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I love it. Yeah, I think that’s a great word ah for sure, because I think there are times where, um you know, we want to jump… by definition, leaders are biased for action kind of people. And even if that action is, we’re definitely not saying anything. But but slowing down and saying, no, like let’s let’s take this to the Lord and say, hey, what is it that you, how do we, at the end of the day, we want to see, kind of regardless of what the impact on our ministry is, we want to see the message of Jesus lifted up in this. And what is that? What? That’s hard to that’s hard to discern, right? It’s hard to know, okay, what and what is the best way to go from here?Kim Tarlton — It’s really hard to discern. And and um what it’s ah fear, it’s like fear-based, right? We we have a we, our discernment ah we have an inner fear that comes and we start to ask these questions like, you know do people really need to know what’s going on there? What you know what what’s what is this all about? Like is this is this reflection of the church, or is this a personal thing? So it’s like and then that those are all things that start to build up in us with fear. And so we start to respond wrong instead of saying, you know, I’m going to cast, ah I’m going to cast my cares on God. The fear of the Lord – that’s like, that’s the only fear that I have to deal with right now.Rich Birch — Yeah, totally.Kim Tarlton — And so, yeah, bringing it, bringing it to God is like, um, it, it helps us calm the fire, you know? Cause like, as soon as crisis hits, it’s like this flame ignites, right?Rich Birch — Right, right.Kim Tarlton — Yeah.Rich Birch — Yeah, are there any principles there around, you know that we should be thinking about? And again, I understand, friends. I’m sure there’s people are listening in like, Rich, every situation is different but, but are there some general principles for us to be thinking about? You know, should we try to do a cascading communication here? How quick do we respond? Is it generally like is, or is it asymmetrical? Like, you know, over responding has a greater risk than under responding. So you would default towards, well, maybe we’ll try to take a more measured approach. Is there, are there any principles around that that we should be thinking about in this area?Kim Tarlton — I would, ah but you know, I’m, I would, for me, being prepared… Rich Birch — Right. Sure. Sure. Kim Tarlton — …you’re going to answer those questions before they come. Okay?Rich Birch — Yep. Yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — So like, in you being prepared, you’re not gonna go into this and go, are we responding too much, or are we not responding enough? Because you’re gonna think about the situation… Rich Birch — That’s good. Yeah. Kim Tarlton — …and you need to think about every, like we talked about like property disputes. Rich Birch — Yeah. Kim Tarlton — Okay, that’s like a thing. You know, we had a ah church the within Church Communications Group that we were working with where um there wasn’t anything that happened like within the church. They they went and they did flyers on doors. And somebody was not happy that they received a flyer on their door. So they went into their social media account and posted a really ugly thing about the pastor. Not true, not at all true, but they were unhappy about this situation… Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — …so they said something about the pastor, which now all of the sudden people are like, oh, well, this church is a massive mess. Rich Birch — Yeah, wait a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.Kim Tarlton — If we’re not, we didn’t talk about like, how do we handle this, which they hadn’t. Like, you have to be able to go any situation that could happen… Rich Birch — That’s great. Kim Tarlton — …whether it is it is this, or it is that, how do we handle it? And that preparedness is going to allow you to respond the correct way. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Kim Tarlton — Now, there are things that you probably need to be doing as a church um that, like you can prepare your crisis plan, but there’s things that you need to be doing as a church on the regular that help keep you away from and help protect the church from potential crisis. I would say things like a background checks, right? There are so many churches out there that, number one, are not running background checks. Why? Because it’s expensive. Rich Birch — Crazy. That’s crazy. Yeah. Kim Tarlton — That’s the worst reason to not be running a background check.Rich Birch — 100%.Kim Tarlton — Number two, they’re only running background checks with kid people that works with kids’ ministry. Okay?Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.Kim Tarlton — That’s a problem because you now have some, you know, you now have open volunteer positions.Rich Birch — Yeah.Kim Tarlton — That’s hard. You’re you’re hiring on staff. If you’re only working with kids ministry, that’s one layer. Rich Birch — Yeah.Kim Tarlton — So I always encourage like do the background check. I know it’s expensive. but do the background check on anybody that comes into contact with people. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — And that’s like people go, whoa! Hold on!Rich Birch — No, no, no, that’s true. Kim Tarlton — So lot, now, obviously, if you’re coming into the church, that’s one thing. But if you are serving, if you are directly you know working with student ministry, kids ministry, if you are handing out flyers and um and and programs on the weekend, and you are coming in contact. There was a church that um, that reported like there was some, there was a guy just looking at women. Interestingly enough, they ran the background check and he had a background with women.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — And so it’s one of those like, you need to know who it is that you’re putting into service.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — I’m not telling you don’t have them serve. But what I’m telling you is make sure you have that background check. And make sure if you have somebody and you’re like, okay, this is somebody that maybe has had, uh, a questionable past, but we’re going to put them behind the counter doing guest services. Okay. So now you got to put a plan together with that person. We’re going to do a monthly check-in or a quarterly check-in and just see how you’re doing.Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep.Kim Tarlton — Because if you’re struggling with coming in contact with men or women or anything like that, I want you to know that I’m a safe place to talk about that. And we are not going to like, we’re not going to put you in front of the church and make you feel bad. I just want us to have an open conversation and know that I am here.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — I am here to check in on. If you are struggling with something and I know that you want to follow what God has for you. I know that. And so but if you’re struggling, I want you to know I’m a safe place for you to come to and struggle. And and that I might have to pull you out for a season. But know that I am here for you, to care for you, and to love on you. Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — And that I am a safe place. Doing those background checks, did you know like ah too, um you were supposed to, ah most churches are doing it, like if they do it, they do it with kids ministry. And then um one, they’re either not redoing the background check ever again, or they’re doing it every three to five years.Rich Birch — Right. Right. Kim Tarlton — But you’re supposed to do it every year.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — Every year.Rich Birch — Right.Kim Tarlton — These are those kinds of things that like, oh my gosh, it costs so much money. Yeah. Rich Birch — Right. Kim Tarlton — But let me tell you how much it’s going to cost you when that crisis happens.Rich Birch — No, a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Kim Tarlton — Because that…Rich Birch — And and ultimately, like I think on these things, that’s a really good good word for sure. And I’ve definitely seen that with the churches I coach, that where the standard is shifting to anybody that is in a regular volunteer position, regular by defined as it’s ah you’re on a schedule. We’re moving towards getting all those people um background checked. Kim Tarlton — Yeah. Yes. Rich Birch — Because they have a level, even if they’re never over in the kids space, they have a level of influence because they have a name tag that says staff or volunteer. And you know there’s there’s risk there. And it also, I think the other piece of this, which is like um well back to when I was running that that summer camp, this is a really kind of dark way to think about these things. But oftentimes, when we would think about this, I would put it through the lens of, OK, so when I’m standing in front of the judge down the road, because something really negative has happened in our midst, and I have to explain what got us here, I want to be able to say, I’m I feel really terrible that XYZ thing happened. But let me explain to you the layers of stuff that we did that that could have prevented it. Kim Tarlton — Absolutely.Rich Birch — And we still had an accident. We still had something terrible go wrong. But we weren’t negligent. We weren’t like we don’t have like years of email saying, we’re not affording the $25 thing for for this. Because, man, you do not want to stand in front of a judge eventually and say, well, Yeah, we it would have been an extra thousand bucks a year.Kim Tarlton — Right? Right? Rich Birch — Like, what are you talking about? Like, that just isn’t, it’s just not worth it. Kim Tarlton — No. Rich Birch — And so, yeah, that’s a good word. How how often would you encourage churches to to review the this kind of crisis communications manual? Is this like an annual thing, every couple of years? What would you suggest? Kim Tarlton — Yeah, I would suggest every year… Rich Birch — Yep. Kim Tarlton — …that our crisis management team gets together. Rich Birch — Yep. That’s good. Kim Tarlton — First of all, you need to audit the team every year. Rich Birch — Yep. Kim Tarlton — Um, let’s just say something happens within the team, or somebody leaves the church, right? You want to replace that position. Rich Birch — Yep. Kim Tarlton — You don’t want it to just be like, Oh, we’re fine. We can do it without Susie or we can do it without Rob.Rich Birch — Yep. Yeah, that’s good. Kim Tarlton — No, no, no. There was a reason they were in there. So let’s make sure we’re replacing if we, if we lose somebody we’re replacing. And then we want to look at it every year. The reason I’m saying every year, is because COVID, right? Rich Birch — Yeah. Kim Tarlton — Like, did we know COVID was coming? Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s true. Kim Tarlton — No. Rich Birch — That’s good. Kim Tarlton — Were we prepared for COVID? No. We don’t know what is coming. We don’t know what we don’t know. Rich Birch — Right. Kim Tarlton — And so us just continuing to refresh it, to keep our eyes on it, to know what is our plan and to make sure we’re building that right team. It’s it’s something, once a year, for a couple hours get together. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Kim Tarlton — That’s not that big of an ask, again, when it comes to protecting your church. Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. Yeah, good. It’s it’s again, it’s like insurance. It’s it’s preventative work. I understand every church has stuff that is crisis related in the fact of not this kind of crisis, but the like there’s always things right in front of you, but this is one of that stuff that we’ve got to push back and say, okay, let’s let’s take some time. You know we can we can invest a couple year couple hours a year, bring up the Google doc, let’s talk, let’s take a look at it. Kim Tarlton — Yes. Rich Birch — Do we need to update? What are we missing? That sort of thing. Kim Tarlton — Yes. Rich Birch — Um, this has been, this has been fantastic. A little bit depressing, Kim. We got to have you come back on and have, I don’t know, like how to make great Christmas flyers, like something very fluffy…Kim Tarlton — We can have a better conversation. Yes.Rich Birch — …next time.Kim Tarlton — Count me in. Count me in.Rich Birch — Yeah. Is there anything else you’d like to say just as we wrap up today’s episode?Kim Tarlton — No, I’m I you know I like I so ah like I said earlier, um you know I come up with a plan um and there are there are a lot of resources out there. Church Communications Group does work with churches on your crisis communication plan. There are some great great options out there and I would just encourage every church, like I can’t say that enough, encourage you to start building that plan and and reach out and find somebody that can help you dig into that plan. Rich Birch — That’s fantastic. Kim, this has been great. Yeah, I’d recommend you reach out to Church Communications, Kim, specifically. If you’re, you know, you might be listening in, maybe you’re listening to this a couple of years from now and something is happening at your church that you need some help. Kim Tarlton — Yeah. Rich Birch — You should reach out. If people want to get in touch with you or with Church Comms, how can they do that? Kim Tarlton — Yeah, you can just go to churchcommunications.com and um and right there um is all of our information. You can schedule a call. You can even just say on there, hey, I would like to talk to Kim directly and we’ll make sure that that happens. It’s a lot easier for me to give you churchcommunications.com than to try to give you my email address… Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, I get that. Kim Tarlton — …which is probably too hard to remember. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Well, I appreciate you, Kim. Thanks for being on today and thanks for all the help. Take care.

Thanks for joining us for today’s unSeminary podcast. Carey Nieuwhof has been a guiding light in the church leadership space for decades and this week we’re celebrating the ten-year anniversary of his podcast. To mark this special occasion, we’re revisiting an interview we did with him 10 years ago. Do you have things at your church that you wish would just change? Do you have people that are resisting change, pushing against what you think is God’s vision for the future of your church? Tune in for the timeless wisdom and powerful insights Carey shares on leading change in your church. Don’t expect automatic change. // Leading change is a skill, but the good news is that it’s a skill that can be learned. Leaders want change, but may expect others to buy into it before it’s been rolled out. Leaders then become frustrated when people don’t change. The reality is that people don’t automatically change and typically don’t like change. As the leader, it’s your job to show people a preferred future and to lead them there. There will be resistance. // Opposition is a normal part of leading change. Everyone who is in your church today is there because they like it as it is now. There will be alienation among some of the congregation who will think things were better before the change. One mistake a lot of leaders make is assuming that loud equals large. Often the loudest opponents are only a small part of your congregation. It’s up to you to do the math and see what percentage of your people is really pushing back against the vision you feel God has given you. This group usually doesn’t have a competing vision for a better future and it’s not worth sacrificing 90% for the 10% who are discontent. Have the humility to listen. // When you are addressing opposition, ask two questions. One, is there a biblical argument in the pushback? If there is, you do need to listen. The leader doesn’t always know best and doesn’t speak for God. Have the humility to listen but the wisdom to act on the things that will determine a better future. Is this your target? // Secondly when facing opposition, ask are these the kind of people you are going to build the future of the church on? You need to focus on who you are going to reach, not who you are going to keep. You’ll only ever hear from the people already there, not from the unchurched people you’re trying to reach. Think about the person who isn’t in the room, not just the one who is. Focus on the why. // Disagreements usually aren’t an issue of character, mission, or vision. Instead they are usually an issue of strategy. When leading change it’s critical to explain your “why” in all of your communications before talking about the “what” and the “how”. Why almost always unites while what and how almost always divide. Rolling out communication. // Communicate change in concentric circles, starting with the core team to gather input before expanding the conversation to broader circles. This approach helps build support and creates a sense of ownership among team members and congregation. Innovate and experiment. // Maintain core successes while exploring new ideas on the side. The longer you’re in leadership and the more successful you are, the more tempting it is to avoid change. An organization that loses it’s experimental and entrepreneurial side will fall off the cliff at some point. Preserve what God has built but never stop pushing yourself to innovate, experiment, and fail. To follow along with Connexus Church, visit connexuschurch.com. Explore Carey’s website and listen to his podcast at careynieuwhof.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! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Happy Thursday, everybody. Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Super excited for today’s episode. You know, my friend, Carey Nieuwhof, has been podcasting for ten years. I just want to say that unSeminary was launched before Carey’s – I remember we got started the year before and but man, his podcast has gone just meteoric. He’s become so incredibly influential, through his podcasts, through all the different things that he does. And I just want to celebrate him. Carey’s a friend of mine, personal friend, know him from the real world. We actually live in the same town. I’ve had the privilege of working for Carey and we continue to do stuff together, but I thought what would be fun to celebrate the launch of Carey’s podcast is to actually go back into the unSeminary vault from ten years ago and replay a podcast interview that we had with Carey all the way back then. Rich Birch — And I was really listening to this episode recently, and man, it just does not get old. Carey is really evergreen when it comes to content. And in this particular episode, I was talking to Carey about change, and he talks about the fact that change is a skill. He gives some great stuff around handling resistant resistance, focusing on who you want to reach, building consensus, navigating personal challenges. It really is a fantastic episode. So I thought in celebration of Carey’s ten years of podcasting, that we’d go back and look at an episode from ten years ago and you’ll catch some of the brilliance of Carey that really is timeless. Rich Birch — Carey, my hat goes off to you. You, I love that your influence continues to grow. I love that you continue to help people. For friends who are listening in, Carey’s the real deal. You should follow him. He’s a man of integrity. He’s the kind of leader that you should spend time getting to know. So for a long time listeners, you’re going to hear some retro unSeminary goodness. Our old opener, and some other fun stuff that we haven’t done in a long time. But here we are. Without any further ado, a ten-year-old interview with our friend, Carey Nieuwhof. [unSeminary Opener] Rich Birch — Hey everybody, happy Thursday. Rich Birch from the unSeminary podcast. Thank you for tuning in.  Rich Birch — Do you have things at your church that you wish would just change? Do you have people that are resisting change, that you’re just are pushing against what you think is God’s vision for the future of your church? Well, today you are in for a treat because we’ve got a special guest, Carey Nieuwhof, who I think is one of the smartest leaders in the country on the whole organizational change issue. Rich Birch — He’s got some great stuff to say. Let’s jump into the podcast and make sure you come back after the interview because I’ve got a few resources I want to share with you. Rich Birch — Alright, well welcome to the show. I’m so privileged to have Carey Nieuwhof on with us. Carey is a leader, writer, he’s a pastor, blogger, author. And I’m privileged to call him a friend. Carey Nieuwhof — Yeah, Absolutely. Rich Birch — And so thank you, Carey, for being on the show. Carey Nieuwhof — Hey, thanks for having me, Rich. I’m really excited to be here, and excited about your podcast too. Rich Birch — Thanks so much! Well, you know, Carey, you’re one of those leaders I feel like has been through a lot of change. You’ve seen a lot happen. I wonder if we could take a little bit and tell the story about the current ministry you’re at, and just a bit of your background, get people to introduce you a little bit, get to know you more. Carey Nieuwhof — Sure. Yeah, you know, change has been the one constant over the 18 years that I have been in ministry. And it’s one of those things, Rich, that never goes away. So my story, my background, is I was not one of those people who ever thought I would be in ministry. When I was 8 years old, I decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I don’t know what needs to be wrong with you at 8 years old to want to be a lawyer, but it’s true of me. Rich Birch — (laughing) Carey Nieuwhof — So, I went to law school, and it was in the middle of law school that I really like, and I’m not a really a supernatural, charismatic person, but God intervened. And even though I was a Christian, and God made it very clear to me that there was a call to ministry. And it took me a few years to discern that. I finished law school. Carey Nieuwhof — And in 1995 I came up to where I currently am, about an hour north of Toronto, in a little community called Oro, which you know, Rich. And I started with 3 small Presbyterian churches. My background was Presbyterian. We lead those churches through a significant amount of change over a decade. And then about 6 years ago, I left and we started Connexus Church. And, um that was a transition. Some of the same people but certainly not all of the same people, who were part of those Presbyterian churches went on to start Connexus, a church for unchurched people, and a North Point strategic partner. And even in that, even in the midst of that, there has been an awful lot of change in the last 6 years. So change has been the one constant, I guess. That, and Christ. Rich Birch — Yeah, exactly. Man that, ya know, I often say to people, “Carey, like I said, he’s just been through a lot.” Now what would you say, you know a lot of people who listen to this podcast are obviously leading churches of all different sizes, but I think we’re all trying to figure out how to change our churches. Right? We’re all, you know, I think as in, bred in leaders is this desire to say “Hey, we want to make things better.” Um, how have you navigated, what were some handles that you come back to, time and time again, you’ve seen, Hey, this is some of the things we have to do as leaders to kind of successfully navigate that change? Carey Nieuwhof — Well probably, and I didn’t know this right away, but I figured out over time that change is actually a skill, and leading change is actually a skill, and the good news is that it can be learned. There are principles that just work. And I think sometimes leaders find themselves in a trap where they really want change—I don’t know a single leader with his or her salt that doesn’t want change of some kind – that’s what makes us leaders—but we kind of expect other people to buy into that change before we’ve sold it, before we’ve really delivered on it. And so we’re waiting for people to change and then we get frustrated because they don’t change. And I think there is something, at first it was just instinct, that told me that that was just wrong, like people do not automatically change, and people don’t like change. And so, it’s up to you as the leader, ah, to really show people a picture of a preferred future, and to lead them there. Carey Nieuwhof — Now there are good ways to do that, and there are bad ways to do that. And you know the one question I got all the time, because our little Presbyterian churches what we did was, we started to grow, and um, we sold three historic buildings within 5 years, and we moved into an elementary school. And that elicited some opposition. Rich Birch — (laughing) Carey Nieuwhof — You give up everything that they had known for over a hundred years. I mean, these are beautiful little red brick, historic buildings, ya know “Anne of Green Gables” type churches. And they sold them and we moved into an elementary school in the name of reaching people. And then we built a two million dollar facility, and then we left it a few years later when we left the denomination to start over again in movie theaters. I mean, because we thought it would help us reach more unchurched people in a non-denominational context, and with the model of ministry that we wanted to run with. So that’s an awful lot of change, and people don’t just stand up and wildly applaud when you announce what your strategy is. Carey Nieuwhof — So we did get a lot of opposition. The question I would get, and that’s a long way of getting to this question. The questions that I always got is “Did anybody leave?” Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — And there’s a point at which, “well of course people left!” Like, what do you think? Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — Everybody who’s in your church today is there because they like it the way it is now. Rich Birch — Hmmmm. Carey Nieuwhof — That’s something every leader…like everybody that’s at Liquid Church right now, where you serve, likes the way it is now. One way or another. Maybe they may don’t like everything, but they like something about it. So if you are going to change, there is an inherent alienation that’s going to happen with everybody that’s currently a part of your tribe. It just happens, right? Rich Birch — Yeah. Yes. Carey Nieuwhof — We liked it better when Rich didn’t do podcasts. Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — Right? I mean, you have that. It happens in your tv shows where they start a new character and your’e like, well, it was so much better when they didn’t have that character. Yeah know, it’s like, people don’t like that. And so the opposition get’s intense. But what happens…Here’s one mistake that I’ll share that I think a lot of leaders make, and I had to figure out how not to make this mistake…We assume, because opponents are loud, that loud equals large, loud equals large. Carey Nieuwhof — So because your inbox is blowing up, or because your congregational meeting didn’t go very well, or because you keep getting pigeonholed after the service, “Hey, can I talk to you?” There’s fingers pointing, you just assume. And if you listen to the opponents, they will always tell you, “Everybody’s upset with this”, yeah know? “I’ve talked to everybody”. Really, you’ve talked to everybody? Ok, just checking. And so they, you just assume as a leader, loud equals large. Carey Nieuwhof — But if you actually do the math, if you actually go through it, we learned early on, we should just do the math here. Probably that loud group of your organization is probably about 10%. And in the worst days it might be 30. Maybe it’s 50. I doubt it. I don’t think it ever got to 50%… Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — …in our worst moments. Um, but they’re just loud. And so you just have to convince yourself, I have to do the math and wait a minute, am I going to sacrifice 90% of the population of our organization for the sake of 10% who are not content? And often the people who are opposed to your vision don’t actually have a competing vision for a better future. So if you ask them, so where, what do you want to do, what do you want to accomplish? They’re like, “I don’t know, it just can’t be that way.” Rich Birch — Right, right. Carey Nieuwhof — Well you can’t go back, you can’t go back. So what’s your vision for a preferred future? And often the answer is, they don’t have one. And so then really, ok, so you are going to listen to the 10% of the population that doesn’t have a clear destination, that actually isn’t going to make it better. It doesn’t mean they are bad people, they’re just not going to make it better. And you’re going to sacrifice and jettison your whole organization for the sake of that? Carey Nieuwhof — And then, if you’re involved in the church, or you’re a business and you think about, well that’s my existing customer base, those are existing users. What about all the market out there? What about, in my case, unchurched people? You’re going to let 10 people in a church of 100 control the future of 100,000 people? You’re going to let 100 people in a church of 1000 control the future of 100, 000 people? Do the math. So those are some lessons I had to learn early on, and we were fortunate enough to try to figure it out. Rich Birch — Well, Carey, this is why I love you talking about change, cause, ya know it just falls out of you. It’s like, OK, well there might have been a bit of opposition about selling three buildings and merging and all this stuff. That’s amazing. Break down to, you know, maybe a personal story, or a time you remember when there was a bit of opposition there, um maybe from a source where you didn’t anticipate it. How do you deal with that? Carey Nieuwhof — Yeah. Rich Birch — Because it’s not so much, I think for leaders that it’s like, there’s that person you don’t like. Maybe it’s just you, but there’s always people in every church where I’m like ah, I don’t really like them. Carey Nieuwhof — I’m not going to listen to them. Rich Birch — But then there’s the people that are a little closer, um, ya know, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with, you know, talk about something personal? Carey Nieuwhof — Yeah. Well let’s do two ways. Number one, in the early days, you do get a lot of opposition, you get people standing up, emailing or pigeon-holing you or whatever. We learned as an elder board to ask this question, or two questions. Number one: Is there a Biblical argument in what they’re saying? Because if there is, I need to listen. And just ’cause I’m the leader doesn’t mean I always know best, doesn’t mean I speak for God. And wisdom does come to us, sometimes, even in the face of opponents. Even with your worst opponents, there might always be a grain of truth in what they are saying, even if their motivations aren’t great. So have the humility to listen, but the wisdom to only act on the things that really are going to determine a better future. The humility to listen, but the wisdom not to act on all of it. So, is there a biblical argument to what they are saying? Carey Nieuwhof — Second question we learned to ask, and this one I still ask to this day is: Are these the kind of people we are going to build the future of the church on? Are they? And, um, in the early days, a lot of them were older, and there’s nothing wrong with older people. We have some very, very wise, older, senior adults in our congregation that we listen to. But sometimes, ya know, in our case, they were people we just couldn’t build the future of the church on. And even younger leaders, when you look at their lives, it’s like, I don’t really see a track record where you’ve accomplished a whole lot, or maybe your life, you sit in the critics chair all day long, and you say, this guy’s wrong, and that guy’s wrong. That’s just your life. You cannot build the future of the church on people like that. Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — People who are cynical, and negative and always opposed to something -you can’t build the future of the church on. Now, where it get’s tough, I remember about 10 years ago I had a letter from, and I haven’t talked about this publicly, but you asked so… Rich Birch — (laughing) Carey Nieuwhof — I got a letter from a key elder. She sent me a note and she just said, “I support you 100% and but this time I think you have gone to far.” And we were getting rid of the last of the old hymns. And I sat down with her and I mean we cried together, and I said, I just gotta disagree with you. I’ve gotta focus on who we are going to reach not who we are going to keep. And we tried to keep up our friendship, and she continued to serve in leadership. And I mean, I see her now, I don’t see her as much, our church is bigger and the whole deal. But whenever I see her, I get this huge hug and I mean, she’s well into her senior years now, but just an incredible woman. Rich Birch — Wow. Carey Nieuwhof — And sometimes I think you just have to work through that. And I think one of the reasons that people get out of sorts with wise leaders, often it’s not with your best people, it’s not a character issue, it’s not a mission issue, it’s not a vision issue. Usually it’s a strategy issue. And so sometimes if you get to the point where some of your best leaders are saying like, if I’ve got five great leaders telling me I’m wrong, I’m probably wrong. So this is not like, you just go ahead and you just blaze trails. Every once in a while you have a Moses moment where you are going across the dessert all by yourself, you’re speaking for God. But I think a lot of time leaders think they are in those moments when they are not. Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — But if you get to the point where if you’re with a leader, if you can isolate that to strategy, and I think the disagreement between this great woman and me, was a strategic disagreement. Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — And it was a lot of change at once. So when we work through the strategy, it was just one of those things where I just think that the style of music that we are going to do in the future is going to be more effective at reaching unchurched people, you can sometimes reach an agreement. Or at least you realize why you are disagreeing, at the time, and that one was tough. Actually that incident, combined with a really, really tough month, I remember it was November 2002, sent me to a counselors office for the first time ever. Rich Birch — Wow! Carey Nieuwhof — So that was very personal. Rich Birch — Ya, absolutely! Now, does she continue to be connected to the ministry today? Carey Nieuwhof — Absolutely! She was there last Sunday, will be there this Sunday, gives, serves, I mean…has a great heart. Rich Birch — Ya know Carey, I think that commends, that’s a good personal story. I think sometimes when we talk about change, right, that’s amazing. It obviously really meant a lot to her, obviously meant a lot to you, that you can come to a point of disagreement, but still not break relationship, is amazing. Carey Nieuwhof — I did a couple of her grandchildren’s weddings, you know. Rich Birch — Ah cool. Carey Nieuwhof — She had a big birthday and the family invited me, Toni, my wife and I were there last summer. I mean, you can work through those things, but I would say you just have to figure out why you are disagreeing. I know with our current leadership, we try to find people whose character runs deep and who we also have a great chemistry with personally. That often the misalignment happens, never on a mission or vision level, not in the church. We believe in Jesus, we love Jesus, He’s great, ya know we agree on that. Rich Birch — Yep. Carey Nieuwhof — The disagreement is strategic. And if you can isolate that, you will often at least understand why you disagree and sometimes find agreement even in the midst of that. Rich Birch — So now what would you say to a church leader that says, “I want to make a strategic shift this fall or early next year, and I’ve got a core group around me that agrees with that,” but they anticipate a bit of resistance. What are couple just practical tactics to start with – you know, it’s not going to be the whole thing…. Carey Nieuwhof — Right. Rich Birch — But one or two little first steps toward that change. Carey Nieuwhof — Number 1: Focus on why. I think a lot of leaders get tripped up on what and how. And so the reason…its what Simon Sinek says that people buy why you do it, not what you do. And I think that’s true. You know, every time you open your mouth as a leader you need to explain why. So lead with why. Pepper all your private and public communication, your written communication, your vision casting with why, and then talk about the what and the how. But why almost always unites, and what and how almost always divides. Carey Nieuwhof — The other thing I would talk about is, Patrick Lencioni calls it cascading communication. You can also look at it in terms of communicating in concentric circles. Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — So start with your core team where you actually get input, then go a little bit wider to your next level. So we have a level of government in our system, the North Point system, call MTR’s, Ministry Team Representatives. We’ll bounce change off them first. Like, hey, this isn’t a decision, we just want to get your input. And then when people who are close to you, and share your strategic alignment but aren’t necessarily around the table, when they get input, just like well what about this, or what about that, buy in is much higher. And then you sorta go to the crowd, you know, and then you go to the community. So start layering it. And you know what else, people love to be the first to know. If you can give them… Rich Birch — That’s so true. Carey Nieuwhof — ….an inside track and we’ve just really in the last year really ramped that up. It’s like hey, I want you to be the first to know that this is something we’re looking at. And really not keep any secrets. I think once in a while a personnel decision is something you don’t talk about, but we always say, there’s no secrets at Connexus. We’re not going to communicate this publicly yet, but you’re in the room and you can know….we’re negotiating with Cineplex Odeon on a permanent deal. You know, if you can make it public, do. And then people feel like, I’m part of this. They feel some skin in the game, some ownership, even before it get’s trotted out publicly. And when you’ve got a hundred people sitting in a Sunday service where something is announced and they already knew it, you’ve already got 100 evangelists for change. Rich Birch — Oh totally. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Anything else on this change topic? There’s a lot here. You’ve written a book on it. Anything else that you want to make sure we get in? Carey Nieuwhof — I would just say, you know the big goal, and real short, is focus on who you want to reach, not who you want to keep. And the biggest thing that I find hangs up leaders in the midst of change, is that you are only ever going to hear from the people that want you to keep them. You’re never going to hear from the people who you want to reach. Unreached people don’t randomly email you and say, hey if you did this I would come to your church. Rich Birch — Right. Carey Nieuwhof — They don’t do that. They don’t call you, they don’t text you, ya know, they’re silent. And so in the same sense that if you’re in a position of power, or influence, you need to think about how God wants you to use that power and influence and affect people who don’t have power and influence. I think when you are a church leader, or even if you are an organizational leader, you’ve got to think about the customer you haven’t reached, not just the customer you have. You gotta think about the person that isn’t in the room, not just the people who are in the room. And I think leaders that are able to maintain that focus and are able to share that focus widely in the organization are going to do the best when it comes to change, and creating a culture of change. Rich Birch — Ya, friends, if I can just reinforce what Carey is saying, he actually lives out. A part of what I appreciate about Carey, his leadership, Connexus (their church), is when you cut them, they bleed “Hey, we wanna be a church for unchurched people.” That’s what they talk about all the time. They’re obsessed with it. Which really, I think does drive, like we were talking about there, leading with the why. It becomes the conversation piece – that is the benchmark upon which they judge everything. I appreciate Carey, your leadership, not only on the change, but then also on the focus of staying clear on that mission. Carey Nieuwhof — I appreciate that Rich and you know just to encourage people, when we started to grow, most of our growth did not come from unchurched people. I’m 18 years into this. In the first decade it was probably about 30% unchurched people and 60% church growth. But that’s flipped. In the last few years, we’re 60% of our people are self-identified unchurched people. We don’t think, hey I think they are unchurched. They tell us they’re unchurched. And that’s great. And so remember that you can change something in 2 or 3 years, but it takes probably 5-7 years to transform it. And the transformation happens with change when it becomes part of who are and embedded in your culture. And so if you’re in the middle of change, don’t give up, you’re probably going to be most tempted to quit moments before your critical breakthrough. Rich Birch — Alright, I said we are coming to the end but I have one more question I want to slip in. Carey Nieuwhof — Go ahead. Rich Birch — This is, again, a bit more personal. Do you feel, as you progress along in your leadership journey, just personally, you’re more open to change and more open to risk, or less? What is your own personal dynamics on that? Carey Nieuwhof — Yeah, you know what, that’s a great question and I’m kinda in the middle of that right now. I think as you get older, and I think the longer you’re in leadership, and the more successful you become, the more change-averse you become. Particularly if something is successful, you’re really worried about wrecking it. I also think we are in the middle of a massive cultural shift. You write about it all the time, Rich, and you’re up on trends like crazy. So the way I am looking at it now, and I hope to write another book. The third book in the change trilogy will be on creating a culture of success. But the early notes on that for me at least are, maintain what you’ve got but constantly innovate and experiment. Carey Nieuwhof — You can experiment on the side, and I think an organization that loses it’s experimental entrepreneurial, let’s just preserve at all costs, you just coming close to the cliff. And it’s just only a matter of time until you fall off. So I think when you’ve got success, and you’ve got momentum, and we’re in a season of momentum right now, you want to make sure that yes, you’ve got to preserve what God has built and what you’ve accomplished, but never ever lose. So I am pushing myself to innovate and experiment and fail. But you have to fail in areas that isn’t…Sometimes you gotta fail in areas that might cost you the whole organization. But I think it’s smarter to experiment on the side. Carey Nieuwhof — And so we’re doing an social media experiment right now, and we don’t even know whether it’s going to to work. But it doesn’t cost us $50,000, it costs us $5,000. And we’re going to find out whether it works. We’re always adjusting the sails, and always playing around. And we’ll play, like we are doing something off model for a North Point Church, you know, we are not being disobedient or whatever, but we’re just trying some stuff that we’re just experimenting with. And if it doesn’t work, you just shut it down. So I think you can lose that and I think the older you get, the more successful you get, older in age but also older as an organization and the more successful, the less you will innovate and the less you will experiment.

Welcome to an Office Hours episode of the unSeminary podcast. In our Office Hours episodes I’m happy to answer your questions that you can submit via an audio file through our website. Mark Strickland is the lead pastor at Milton Bible Church in Milton, Ontario, Canada. His mid-sized church has about 300 attending on Sunday mornings, has a relational family vibe, and also ministries that connect with the community. They don’t want to stay comfortable with just filling two services and cruising along. They want to fulfill the Great Commission and expand, whether with church planting or multi-site. Mark asks: When is the right time to church plant or go multi-site? What are the best practices when considering expansion as a mid-size church? And lastly, are there any permanently mid-sized, healthy churches that are models to look at? When is the right time to multiply? // Healthy things multiply. In the ECFA New Faces of Church Planting study, one of the indicators for church multiplication is conversion growth. Take a look at the people who are coming to your church. If 51% or more of them are new people coming to know the Lord, that’s a good indicator that you should be thinking about multiplying. Start casting vision now. // What is your current vision for multiplying? You may not be ready to start a new campus or plant now, but how can you start casting that vision, even if it is a couple years down the road? Start casting vision with your elders and your team around what God’s calling you to do in the future. Don’t look just at a growth spurt but a pattern of growth over time. Ask yourself if you are seeing sustained growth from people coming to know Jesus. Are members ready to launch? // Post-COVID, the average church plant core team size is 18 and the average multi-site core team size is 45. The size and health of the launch team is critically important. Are there a healthy 45 people you could send to a community on the other side of town to launch something new? Prepare for the financial side. // Another aspect to think about is the financial side of expansion. It’s financially taxing to launch a new site or plant a church. Often church planters rely heavily on fundraising the first few years. How could you start building financial resources to gift to a church planter to help them launch strong in a couple years? Questions to ask yourself. // Not every church needs to be big, but every church needs to have a big vision for what God is calling them to do. What is the big vision that God could call your community to? What is it that He’s calling your church to that ultimately looks like the transformation of your community for the message of Jesus? If you’ve got a question that you’d love to get answered, drop by the Office Hours link to upload an audio file. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe Do you feel like your church’s facility could be preventing growth, and are you frustrated or maybe even overwhelmed at the thought of a complicated or costly building project? Are the limitations of your church building becoming obstacles in the path of expanding your ministry? Have you ever felt that your church could reach more people if only the facility was better suited to the community’s needs? Well, the team over at Risepointe has been there. As former ministry staff and church leaders, they understand how to prioritize and help lead your church to a place where the building is a ministry multiplier. Licensed all over North America, their team of architects, interior designers and project managers have the professional experience to help move YOUR mission forward. Check them out at Risepointe.com/unseminary and while you’re there get their FREE resource “10 Things to Get Right Before You Build”. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Rich Birch here. Super excited for today’s Office Hours episode. What is an Office Hours episode, Rich, you might be asking? Hey, great question. I’d be happy to answer. I’m already starting off the top talking to myself.Rich Birch — Man, this is going to be a fun episode. So Office Hours are where you go over to our website, unseminary.com, and you’ll see at the top, there’s a place where you can drop an audio file, and I would be happy to answer your question. So why don’t you do that after today’s episode. Rich Birch — Super excited to hear from Mark Strickland. Let’s listen to his question, and then I’ll come back and try to offer whatever insight I can. Let’s listen in: Pastor Mark Strickland.Mark Strickland — Hey Rich, Mark Strickland here, hope you’re keeping well. I’m currently serving as a lead pastor at Milton Bible Church in Milton, Ontario. We are a Fellowship Baptist church, word and spirit church, kind of a Bapto-costal flavor, if you will.Mark Strickland — And we are a mid-sized church. We’re about 300 butts in the seat on Sunday mornings, and over two services, we believe we could be around 400 or 500 potentially, and we probably have about 500 people who call our church home. Mark Strickland — And so the question our elders are really wrestling with right now is this: We believe that being a mid-sized church is our sweet spot. We have a great kind of tension between having kind of a relational family vibe, but also providing a lot of great ministries and programming to both our church and our community. So that’s great. Mark Strickland — But we don’t want to get comfortable filling two services and then just kind of cruising. We want to fulfill the Great Commission. We want to see churches planted in our region. And so we’re aspiring towards that end. We’re planning towards that end. Mark Strickland — And I guess some questions we’re wrestling through is like, when is the right time to church plant or go multi-site? I’d say for us as a church, we’re at 300 right now, but we could grow still probably comfortably to be 400 or 500 on a Sunday morning.Mark Strickland — And then on top of that, coming from a larger church setting of say 1,500 people, when we went multi-site, it was a bit easier to say to 50 to 100 people, hey, would you consider going to plant this new site? You didn’t really lose that many people from your congregation. Whereas being a mid-sized church, if you send 50 to 100 people to go do a church plant, then you are sending away maybe 25, 30 percent of your congregation. And that can absolutely impact many things in your current context. Mark Strickland — So yeah, we’re wrestling through, when’s the right time to church plant or go multi-site? What are best practices when considering church planting or multi-site as a mid-sized church?Mark Strickland — And then we’re also wondering, are there any permanently mid-sized 300, 600 person churches that are exemplars or models to look at of churches that have done this well that are functioning healthily, mid-sized, but also fulfilling the Great Commission in doing church planting or multi-site or something like that? So yeah, those are just questions we’re wrestling through and would love to see if you have any thoughts on that. Thank you so much. Bye now.Rich Birch — All right. Great questions from Pastor Mark. Thanks so much for leaning in and for asking this question.Rich Birch — First of all, I need to declare my conflicts of interest right up front. So Mark doesn’t know this. I don’t think Mark knows this, but I actually lived in Milton, the town that he is currently ministering in when I was a kid. That’s part of why this question caught my attention. I lived there for a couple of years when I was in grade school. And so that’s probably good and bad for this question.Rich Birch — So really Mark is asking three questions. When is the right time for a church to multiply? Then there’s really this whole question around best practices of launching out of a church of 300. And then finally, are there really any exemplars of permanently mid-size churches?Rich Birch — Well, let’s take each one of those in order. First of all, when is the right time to multiply? So Mark, if I was sitting across the table from you, I would say, listen, healthy things multiply. At the end of the day, healthy plants, healthy people, healthy organizations multiply. Healthy churches multiply.Rich Birch — I was doing a little bit of research getting ready to answer your question, and I’ll link to these in the show notes. But the ECFA study on the New Faces of Church Planting might be interesting for you to go through your team with. And often one of the indicators for multiplication is actually conversion growth.Rich Birch — So I would look at the people that are coming to your church, the kind of new folks that are coming in. And because the reason what happens there is, as a church is seeing people come, if it’s brand new people, that would ultimately say, man, you are unlocking something in your culture that’s making a difference. In fact, specifically, churches with a conversion growth rate of 51% or more. So that’s half or more of your people are coming from people coming to know the Lord. Man, that’s a good indicator that you should be thinking about multiplying. Rich Birch — I think there’s a vision gap here. I think there’s an opportunity for you. When I think about this whole idea of when is the right time to multiply, I would be asking the question around, could you be casting vision to this? I’m going to talk into both sides of my mouth. I’m kind of tipping my hand where I’m going, Mark. Rich Birch — But being permanently midsize, that’s fine. But I would say, man, the mission is still to reach more people in Milton and beyond. And so what is your current vision for multiplying? Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to reach out and say, hey, we anticipate church planting down the road. We’re not sure what that looks like. We’re not sure what that looks like or when that looks, but we believe that God’s calling to us. So how could you start casting vision even now, even if it’s a couple of years out? Rich Birch — Maybe you take your leadership team to the Exponential Conference. Now, I know the Global Conference is sold out, but the Regional Conference in Chicago this fall. Or maybe you go to California for one of those regionals. You start to try to cast vision with your elders and with your team around maybe God’s calling you to plant a church down the road. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you there. Rich Birch — So interesting, one of the patterns that we’ve seen for churches that multiply, that either church plant or do multi-site, it’s not just a growth spurt, but it really is a pattern of growth over time. So multi-site churches that launched in the pandemic still have a median launch size of 60 people, and they grew to 95 within a year.Rich Birch — So think about that. Could you send out 60 people, which I know in a church of 300 is like a real number, 20%. That would be hard to do, could be hard to do.Rich Birch — But in order to sustain that, really what you want to discern is, is our church having sustained growth over multiple years, or have we just experienced a growth spurt? Because if you’ve been able to show sustained growth, then your ability to launch either multi-site or church plants long-term will be easier. Does that make sense? Do you understand what I’m saying there? Rich Birch — So when is the right time for a church to multiply? I really think healthy things multiply. I think you should be thinking about it now. I think you should be casting vision towards it. Even if it’s up over the horizon, the diagnostic tool I would ask you to think about is, are you seeing a kind of sustained growth?Rich Birch — Or is it the kind of thing where it’s not just that we had an extra 50 people show up, and there are 50 people from because our community grew, and there are people from out of town who moved into our town, but we’re actually seeing people who’ve come to know Jesus. All of those things would lead me to the place that would say, man, we should be thinking about. So does that make sense?Rich Birch — All right. So best practice number two. Best practice for launching out of a church of 300 or so. So this one is close to my heart, and I think you expressed the actual problem or concern of multiplying out of a church of 300, and I’m just going to declare my bias right now.Rich Birch — So I’ve talked about in other locations, in other… I talk about it all the time. It’s literally every week in my email. I say, I’m on a mission now to help 100 churches grow by 1,000 people. I do think that churches should grow larger, and there’s all kinds of reasons for that. And a part of the reason is to help with this multiplication issue.Rich Birch — So I think you have rightly diagnosed that sending 100 people could be really difficult. Now, that isn’t actually the normal size. So if you look at the actual statistics of people that were sent out, it’s actually quite smaller than that post COVID. The average church plant core team size was 18. Multisite, it was 45 on the core team. But this is my issue for you.Rich Birch — What I do know on both church plants and multisite campuses is the size and health of the core team is critically important. And oftentimes, we just think about the size of that team. But the question I would ask you is the health.Rich Birch — Could you send out a healthy 45? Is there a healthy 45 people that you could send to a community to launch something new? What could that look like? Could you find a planter and go to an outlying community or to the other side of town? Is there an opportunity for you to do that? Because I think you have rightly diagnosed the issue.Rich Birch — Another piece to think about is really the financial piece. And when I think about multiplying, whether it’s multisite or church plants, one of the things we just know is that it is expensive. It’s financially taxing to either be a church planter or to launch a multisite campus. You’ve lived in that world, but it’s difficult to pull all the cash together to make it happen.Rich Birch — And I wonder if there’s an opportunity for you now to even begin to build a war chest for your 300 people to start building financial resources to gift to a church planter, to give them, instead of giving them $25,000, which is apparently the number that church planters are using, according to this study, post-COVID. What if you tried to build a war chest of $100,000 or $200,000 to give to them in a couple years to launch them strong?Rich Birch — Because one of the things I do know about church planters is one of the things they joke about is, man, the first couple of years, they become really good at fundraising because that’s what they have to do all day long. Financial is a real issue, often. So 73% of church plants become financially self-sustaining at the end of year three.Rich Birch — So if you’re thinking about planting, multiplying, you’re going to think about how do we give them enough resources to keep them sustained over those years? I would start wondering about that now. Could we start setting those resources aside and try to accelerate the financial sustainability, basically give them more cash up front and shorten that runways to the point where they could be on their own?Rich Birch — Does that make sense? Okay, then number three, are there any exemplars of permanently mid-sized churches? Rich Birch — Okay, this is the part. First two answers, you’re probably going to like me, Mark. Third answer, you’re not going to like me. So I would challenge you on this. I’m not sure that staying small is a great vision. I’m just not sure. So this is where the fact that you’re in Milton is going to be a disadvantage for this question. It’s not just a random town. Rich Birch — So I know that Milton has exploded. I was looking up some statistics between 1991 and at 2021, Milton has grown by 350%. And it continues to grow at a rapid rate. And so my question for you is if all the churches in town just stayed the same size, the influence of Jesus is a third of what it was in 1991. And if we all stand around and say, man, we believe that God’s called us to be a church of 300, 300 and no more, then we’re limiting the message of Jesus in our community.Rich Birch — God has clearly given you something. You know that. God has helped you and your leadership team to figure out how to reach your community. Why would you put a cap on that? I would love for you to cast vision. Rich Birch — Listen, I don’t think it’s about, I don’t think all churches need to be big churches. I don’t think everything needs to be a giant church. I totally understand that. But maybe you, I do think you need to have a giant vision, even if your church is not giant. So could it be that God’s calling you to plant 30 churches of 300 in the next 10 years?Rich Birch — Before Jesus, before the 2000 anniversary of the birth of the church, before 2033. Maybe there’s some big vision there. So I understand that why you don’t want to be seen as like, hey, we want our church to be a big church. But my question for you is if Milton stays on the trajectory where it is now, and your church stays at 300, and it triples again in size over, you know, the next 15 years, 20 years, man, the voice of Jesus will continue to be extinguished in your community.Rich Birch — So I would challenge you to think about what is a big vision that God could call your community to? And what is it that he’s calling your church to that ultimately looks like the transformation of your community for the message of Jesus? Rich Birch — Well, Mark, man, love you so much. Thanks so much for stepping in and leading. I love what you’re doing at Milton Bible there and excited to see the future. Rich Birch — If you’ve got a question, if you’re listening in and you’d love to get a question answered, I would love to do that for you. So just drop by unseminary.com. See at the top, you’ll see a link there. Click on it for Office Hours.Rich Birch — Thanks so much, friends. Have a great day. Take care.